by James Philip
Miranda had known Harvey Fleischer all her life and describing Uncle Harvey as her parents’ lawyer, was a bit like saying the Attorney General of the United States of American was just the President’s kid brother; it might be factually accurate but it grossly misrepresented the true nature of the long-term relationship. Her father and mother were the public faces, Harvey the brains behind the quarter century long partnership between the former two bit part, B-movie actors and the seemingly unassuming, bumbling lawyer.
“Hi, Uncle Harvey,” Miranda said sulkily, her gaze childishly affixed to her bare feet.
What the fuck happened to my shoes?
“You look like shit, kid!”
That was the way she felt about it, too.
Miranda’s lower lip quivered.
Harvey Fleischer put his arm around her shoulders.
“I can’t send you back to your Ma and Pa like this, sweetie,” he said in a courtroom voice that brooked no dissent. “You’ll have to come back home with me. Your Aunt Molly will look after you.”
“I don’t want to make trouble between you and...”
“I’ll tell your Pa there was a godammed curfew or something.”
There had always been an aching gap in the otherwise happy and rock-solid marriage of Harvey and Molly Fleischer. They had no children. Aunt Molly had tried for a kid several times; but something always went wrong and eventually, her Aunt and Uncle had given up trying. Basically, before it killed Molly; this Harvey had once confided one night to Miranda’s parents when he was a little more drunk than he thought he was. Miranda and her four siblings had always treated the Fleischer’s big house on Nob Hill as a second home, especially in the holidays.
Harvey Fleischer had been a college linebacker in his younger days. Never the fleetest or lithest of men he had filled out over the years, becoming a heavy footed, granite presence with an increasingly gravelly voice that tended to bestow immense gravitas upon the most trite of pronouncements. It was the best part of thirty years since Miranda’s – then future parents – had turned to Harvey to get out from under their contract with a small time Hollywood agent and begun the painful business of surgically removing them from suffocating constraints of their respective studio contracts. The rest, as they say, was history.
“What happened to you, sweetie?” Harvey Fleischer gently asked Miranda as they drove away in his Lincoln - last year’s model because he did not like to look too prosperous - down eerily deserted city streets.
“Somebody spiked my drink at a party,” Miranda lied.
“I don’t mean tonight,” the man told her. “I mean the last couple of years. Dropping out of college like that? Taking up with those weirdoes and beatniks along Haight Street. Jesus, Miranda! You’re better than that!”
If her father or mother had dared to say that she would have screamed in their faces and jumped out of the car.
“Is it true about the war?” She asked.
Harvey Fleischer was silent for several seconds.
“Yeah, maybe. Nobody knows. The people at City Hall say the President will make an announcement sometime today. Seattle got taken out, someplace up around Vancouver, too. And other places up north...”
“Seattle? Vancouver?”
“Yeah, why?”
Miranda sobbed uncontrollably.
The Limonville Brothers Strummers Band had been scheduled to play some no hope backwoods town around Vancouver tonight...
Sam Brenckmann was most likely dead and she had killed him.
Chapter 20
06:58 Hours Zulu
Sunday 28th October 1962
B-52 The Big Cigar, Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota
The bomber’s wheels kissed the tarmac and The Big Cigar rolled immaculately down the centreline of Minot Air Force Base’s four mile long main runway. The engines throttled back and the struts of the wing rider outboard undercarriage legs took the strain.
Lieutenant Nathan Zabriski would have relaxed at that moment had not the whole aircraft stunk of AVGAS. Everybody and everything in the cabin was drenched in fuel; if so much electrical equipment had not already shorted out or had had to be turned off after the Gorky air burst, the B-52 would have ignited like a Roman candle when the main coupling valve had failed at the end of the air-to-air refuelling evolution thirty-three thousand feet over the Arctic ice cap.
As the tanker and bomber had parted somewhere between fifty and a hundred gallons of AVGAS had flooded the forward crew compartment of the B-52 before the KC-135’s boom master had cut the pumps and hit the emergency de-coupling switch.
Nobody dared to move a muscle while The Big Cigar slowed.
The outer engines reversed thrust, the huge bomber shuddered.
It was way too risky to touch the brakes.
Nathan shut his eyes and waited for the aircraft to blow up.
The Big Cigar had been flying on fumes when the KC-135 tanker eventually found the B-52. With most of her instrumentation inoperative the bomber had had no alternative but to fly a standard search pattern around the point at which Nathan’s dead reckoning predicted the nearest aerial gas station ought to have been orbiting. If the tanker’s skipper had not turned on his homing beacon and his recognition lights, The Big Cigar would have crashed in the Arctic several hours ago.
And everybody on board would have been killed.
Nathan checked his watch; it showed the B-52 had been in the air eighteen hours and three minutes.
The Big Cigar had been thirty minutes short of its failsafe station when the attack order had been received. Nobody had believed that message. Nobody had wanted to believe it; not even when the authentication codes checked out.
Gorky and Dzerzhinsk as primaries.
Sverdlovsk as the secondary if ‘operational imperatives required’.
Operational imperatives!
In other words if Gorky and Dzerzhinsk no longer existed The Big Cigar was to fly another six hundred and thirty miles farther east across heavily defended enemy airspace – with the enemy knowing they were coming – and attack Sverdlovsk. The B-52 would have been shot down several times on the way to Gorky. Attempting to penetrate another hour-an-a-half deeper into the enemy’s air defence net would have been, well, suicidal.
The Big Cigar was rolling slowly, stopping.
The big Pratt and Whitney JT3D turbofans were spooling down, around Nathan the other crew members were unbuckling their straps. Nobody liked sitting in puddles of aviation fuel. They had actually trained for a situation like this; but it was not the same when one was actually soaked in AVGAS and every time one moved the vile liquid squelched and bubbled beneath one’s butt. The filthy stuff itched and burned where it touched flesh, the fumes stung and watered eyes, and after a while no man could suppress his gag reflexes. They had all thrown up, Nathan was lucky; he had got his face mask off first.
The B-52 lurched to a standstill.
In retrospect Nathan did not remember how he came to be staggering on the windswept, rainy concrete apron being led away from the circle of fire wagons hosing foam onto The Big Cigar’s steaming, hissing, hot engine nacelles and onto the ground all around the huge bomber.
He flung away his face mask and helmet, began to tear at his flying suit.
“Slow down, Lieutenant,” suggested a grinning black face. The other man’s eyes seemed unnaturally bright in the loom of the fire wagons’ blinking, spinning lights. “We’ll get that shit off you soon enough.”
Nathan staggered.
The black man, a Sergeant on the Pratt and Whitney JT3D maintenance crew caught him and steadied him as he began to retch uncontrollably. The retching went on long after he had emptied what little remained of his stomach’s contents onto the tarmac at his feet.
Chapter 21
05:02 Hours Mountain Standard Time (07:02 Washington DC Time)
Sunday 28th October 1962
State Capitol Building, Olympia, Washington
The Tacoma born fifty-two year old fiftee
nth Governor of the State of Washington had been the first catholic Italian-American to be elected governor west of the Mississippi.
Democrat Albert Dean Rosellini had first made his mark when in 1939 he was returned to the State Senate for the 33rd District in Seattle. He had been the youngest member of that house at the time, and risen to be Democratic majority leader in the years before he stood for the Governorship. He was a man with a reputation for breaking moulds, for getting things done and for his somewhat unpolitical decisiveness. He had started his political career as a New Deal Democrat and he had never reneged on the deal. He was a man of and who belonged to his State, he had come up the hard way – nobody had paid his ticket through law school – and he had little or no time for the airy, pie in the sky largely empty rhetoric of the elite in the other Washington, located in their ivory towers in the far away District of Columbia. He brought the energy of an immigrant’s son, a natural winning charm, and a hard-headed pragmatism to everything he touched and consequently, he tended to get things done.
That had not always gone down well with all his constituents; no matter, reforming the budget of the State, upgrading its transportation system and improving the education of its children and young adults had taken precedence over winning over every conceivable naysayer. Rosellini had been the driving force behind bringing the 1962 World’s Fair to Seattle, and vigorously championed previously stalled grand infrastructure projects like the construction of the longest floating bridge in the World, which on completion sometime in 1963 would carry State Route 250 across Lake Washington connecting Seattle to Medina. First and foremost he dreamed of ending the cycles of boom and bust that had characterised Washington State’s history. His vision was built around taking advantage of the legacy industries and skilled workers drawn to the American North West before and during the Second World War, and to employ the existing pool of skilled workers and college educated graduates – pro-rata a much higher proportion of the general population than in many other states – to attract new, technology-based companies to the American North West.
FDR’s New Deal had funded the construction of the great hydro-electric dams across the Columbia River, including the giant Grand Coulee Dam completed in 1941. The virtually limitless cheap electric power generated by those dams had drawn gold, silver, copper, lead and latterly, bauxite smelters to Tacoma. Boeing had built the bombers that helped to win the European and the Pacific wars at the biggest aircraft production plants in the World in and around Seattle. At Tacoma and across Puget Sound at Bremerton and in the deep water creeks and anchorages around it the US Navy had built, refitted and based many of the ships that had won the war in the Pacific. One hundred and eighty miles east of the State Capital at Olympia, the vast Hanford Works – where America built its atomic bombs – sat in the fastnesses of the American North West, still a secret, closed enclave. Yet while the afterglow of the great boon of the old war industries still warmed the State’s coffers and acted as a magnet – albeit a waning one – drawing young, well-educated high achievers to Washington, Albert Rosellini had always understood that if the relative prosperity of the State was to continue, it needed more than wishful thinking to make it happen.
Basically, he had to make it happen.
Which was why he was not so much afraid, as livid when he returned to the State Capitol Building in Olympia, seventy-five miles – as near as anybody could guess – from ground zero of the air burst that had torn the guts out of the city of Seattle.
The military were talking about a two to three megaton weapon.
There had not been that much visible damage south of Renton, fifteen miles out but already the roads were clogged with survivors. The National Guard was trying to maintain some kind of order but it was hopeless. Half the population of Washington State lived within the metropolitan area of Seattle and half the city no longer existed.
How could those idiots in DC have allowed it to happen?
The northern horizon flickered with the immense conflagrations consuming the ruins and even as Governor Rosellini hurried inside the State Capitol Building he felt the wind veering north to south. In an hour or so the foul stench of a city burning would blow down the streets of Olympia carrying God alone knew what radioactive poisons.
Everything he had ever dreamed of now seemed like wanton hubris.
The grandeur of the building around him only heightened his sense of helplessness. Albert Rosellini’s predecessors had thought just as big, perhaps bigger than he did, but somewhat less hard-headedly. The State Capitol Building was a monument to their ambition, if not their means. The towering edifice housed the State Legislature and the Governor’s Office, and in its basement, until a few hours ago mostly forgotten, the office of Washington’s ‘Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner’.
Since that post-holder had resided in Bellevue and had not yet made an appearance at the Capitol Building he was probably, along with tens of thousands of other citizens of Bellevue, dead.
Governor Rosellini tried very hard to exude quiet confidence rather than the rage that seethed beneath his brittle outward composure. One of his aides had once joked that the State Capitol Building was ‘the biggest and best bomb shelter’ in the North West; but a couple of weeks later a surveyor’s report had landed on the Governor’s desk informing him that because the dome of the building – the mighty cupola atop its rectangular ground plan mimicking that of the Capitol Building in DC – was only secured to the rest of the structure ‘by gravity’ even a relatively small earthquake might cause the structural failure of the ‘whole building’.
It beggared belief that some idiot had been allowed to design the great dome to be the tallest self-supporting masonry ‘dome’ in the United States without explaining that he had no plans to actually attach the dome to the rest of the building! Albert Rosellini regarded the grandiose State Capitol Building as a monumental folly that belonged to an age when men confused building tall with building for the future. Of more pressing relevance tonight; the building was absolutely not a very good ‘bomb shelter’.
Arriving in the office of the Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner, the Governor took charge. He looked to his chief of staff, whom he had left knocking heads together while he had gone on his abortive tour of inspection.
However, before Rosellini’s harassed chief of staff could speak a grey-haired, stern-faced man in the combat fatigues of a Colonel in the Washington State National Guard Reserve cleared his throat and stepped forward.
“The Navy is flying over a liaison team from Bremerton sometime in the next hour, sir,” he reported. “However, I have a recent report on the air burst over Dabob Bay. There is also new information about the strike north of Bellingham and of an apparent failed strike near Hanford.”
The Governor looked to his chief of staff, who shrugged.
“Who exactly would you be, Colonel?”
“Dempsey, sir. Colin Powell Dempsey, Second Battalion 303rd Armoured Cavalry, Washington Army National Guard, sir.”
“What is the status of your unit, Colonel Dempsey?”
“Deactivated at ninety days readiness for war, sir. However, I have issued orders to activate my staff and to make the assets of 303rd Cav’s transport depots immediately available to the civil authorities.” He quirked an apologetic grimace. “Contacting reservists at this time is problematic. However, things ought to start moving at first light, sir.”
The Governor nodded.
“I have little information about the Sammanish strike,” the National Guard man admitted. “In accordance with current War Plans the Navy is co-ordinating all search, rescue and fire fighting operations on the eastern side of Puget Sound. The base at Bremerton is only lightly damaged. Nearer to the Dabob Bay air burst site the submarine base and ammunition store at Bangor appear to have been destroyed.”
The Governor listened, eying the old soldier thoughtfully.
“The strike north of the Canadian border
destroyed the conurbation of Chilliwack and the surrounding hamlets in the Fraser Valley,” Colonel Dempsey announced flatly. “The fallout from this strike was initially blown almost directly due east. Unfortunately, the wind has now shifted around to the north. I have no intelligence as to current radiation levels anywhere in Washington State. I believe that the limited number of fixed radiation monitors require manual inspection at regular intervals. With regards to Hanford,” he continued, “McChord Air Force Base issued an impact alert at twenty-fifty hours yesterday with a circular error probability indicating Hanford was the target of an incoming ICBM. McChord now believe that the incoming missile either broke up in the atmosphere, or failed to initiate and crashed short of its intended target. A debris field approximately seven miles short of the Hanford security perimeter seems the most promising place for the decontamination teams from the Hanford Works to concentrate their efforts. Search teams will be deployed at daylight.”
Governor Rosellini listened to the cool, measured tones of the old army officer and decided that he had just indentified his new Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner.
“What are your recommendations, Colonel Dempsey?”
The older man looked him in the eye.
“We can do nothing if the roads are blocked with survivors and refugees, sir. The first thing is to cordon off the most badly damaged areas. Once that has been done we can reassess the situation, and concentrate our limited resources, focussing on the areas in which we can actually do some good. Forget about Federal assistance for now. Federal assistance will come in due course but not until the Federal Government has reassessed its own priorities and taken stock of its own resources. That will take time and frankly,” Colonel Dempsey pursed his lips in grim contemplation, “we’re on our own until somebody tells us otherwise.”
He let this sink in.
“My first recommendation is that you must declare martial law, sir.”
