The Great Society (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 3)

by James Philip

  After about an hour she finally dropped off into a fitful sleep.

  Since witnessing the shooting of the Admiral and his wife, most times when she shut her eyes she pictured the man in the navy uniform opening the trunk of the black Chrysler parked on the verge on the other side of Sequoyah Road. He had stood up with a mean-looking black pump-action shotgun in his arms. In her dreams she smelled the taint of cordite burning.

  That day she had been transfixed by the sight and sound of the man standing behind the Chrysler shooting time and time again into the back of the car. The back windscreen had shattered instantly.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  The firing went on and on until he clicked down on an empty chamber. The gunman had not looked up, or paused; he had reached into his pocket and started pressing fresh rounds into the gun as he walked around to the side of the car and begun to fire again.

  Bang! Bang! Bang!

  The front window of the Chrysler was splashed with blood.

  Darlene afterwards swore she could see gobs of blood dripping down the outside of the car, and the suggestion of a red, bloody mist briefly suspended in the air in and around the Chrysler...

  Now she smelled fire.

  And somebody was screaming.

  Chapter 3

  Monday 9th December 1963

  Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, California

  John Charles Houlihan the fifty-three year old Mayor of Oakland was beyond angry, he was spitting mad. All that evening he had been watching the surreal images and reading the frankly bizarre wires coming into City Hall about what was going on in Washington DC, and now the madness had spread to his little haven of what, these days, passed for tranquil normality.

  Stanley Mosk, the combative Attorney General of California, had departed the scene by the time Houlihan and his staffers who had been eating sandwiches and consuming copious amounts of black coffee watching and listening to the events in DC unfold, spilled irascibly out of the two Mayoral cars which had been escorted through the partially blacked out of the city by two Oakland PD motorcycle outriders.

  Houlihan approached the substantial figure of Harvey Fleischer and waved. The two men had known each other for more years than they cared to admit. The other man detached himself from a willowy tearful blond woman whom he had had been comforting. The woman looked vaguely familiar to the Mayor of Oakland.

  That would be Miranda, Ben and Margaret Sullivan’s kid. Up close the girl looked every inch her mother’s daughter; Houlihan was of an age to have been old enough to drool over Margaret Sullivan in her criminally brief heyday on the silver screen.

  “Jesus, Harvey!” He complained. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “You ask me what’s going on, John!” The broader, clumsier man retorted as he shook hands with the Mayor of Oakland.

  The two old stagers viewed each other like tired boxers who did not have their heart in the game anymore. Worse, they knew each other far too well to be intimidated, one by the other.

  Harvey Fleischer was the friend and legal brains behind Ben and Margaret Sullivan’s ever growing, always prospering real estate and TV and movie-making empire. The Mayor knew that when it came to lawyering Harvey was in a higher, very different league – he invariably drove last year’s Lincoln so people did not think he was such a fat cat - but unlike Houlihan, Harvey Fleischer had never been remotely interested in political life.

  San Francisco-born Houlihan was the son of a cop who had been raised in the Mission District. He was a graduate of the University of San Francisco and the Santa Clara University School of Law, who had gone into practice in San Francisco before he moved to Oakland in 1944. His law practice had been small time but he was a civic minded man and by 1959 he had become a city planning commissioner, appointed somewhat ironically as it turned out, to a vacant city council seat by Mayor Clifford D. Rishell in 1959. Ironically, because within a couple of years Houlihan had become the 43rd Mayor of Oakland after ousting Rishell in a positively ‘torrid’ – even by the standards of Oakland city mayoral contests – election by 53,340 to 36,423 votes.

  “What’s she doing here?” He inquired, gesturing at Miranda Sullivan.

  Harvey Fleischer rolled his eyes.

  “She was the Governor’s liaison staffer on this deal,” he grunted. “No, don’t get me started,” he added grumpily. “And before you ask me I don’t know what’s going on and frankly, I don’t give a damn. I just want to get the kid out of here. You’ve got four dead Feds in that house and the ‘witness’ they were supposed to be ‘protecting’ has disappeared. For the record we turned up way after your boys arrived.”

  John Houlihan absorbed this as he began to re-appraise the scene around him; ambulances, Oakland Police Department cruisers, flashing lights, people already pressing around and in some places through the thin cordon of cops.

  “Feds?” He asked, eyes narrowing.

  “This was some kind of FBI safe house,” Harvey Fleischer explained.

  Miranda Sullivan joined their circle.

  “Mr Mayor,” she nodded to Houlihan. She had recovered a little of her normal composure and was looking around with the same calm, thoughtful eyes as the two men. “We came here tonight to serve a warrant on the FBI to release a Miss Darlene Lefebure into our custody. She had been held at this place and denied due process for several days after witnessing the shooting of Rear Admiral Braithwaite and his wife.”

  Houlihan scowled. The Oakland PD had hardly covered itself in glory in its initial investigation of the killings in Sequoyah County; he had breathed a quiet sigh of relief when it had seemed as if the US Navy’s Special Investigation Branch and the California Office of the FBI had, in effect, assumed responsibility for the investigation. He had no illusions that his guys were in any way up to or in any way equal to the challenge of untangling gangland type homicides wrapped up in, apparently, unquantifiable ‘national security issues’.

  “What’s the Governor’s beef on this one?” The Mayor of Oakland demanded of the young woman.

  “That’s complicated, sir,” Miranda Sullivan admitted guardedly.

  Harvey Fleischer stepped into the breach.

  “The Navy Liaison Officer out of Alameda approached the Governor’s Office in Sacramento to expedite get access to Miss Lefebure,” he explained, knowing that Houlihan already knew this. “That was at about the same time it came to the attention of the Governor’s Office that FBI agents,” he jerked a thumb across the Bay, “were playing fast and loose with the civil rights of bona fide members of the NAACP, and were unlawfully detaining a visitor to San Francisco who happens to be in the employ of Dr King in Atlanta...”

  It was John Houlihan’s turn to roll his eyes.

  “The Governor asked me to make Mayor Christopher in San Francisco aware of the situation,” Miranda put in helpfully. “However, there was a complication.”

  “You don’t say!” The Mayor of Oakland groaned.

  “It became known to us that the man in FBI custody in San Francisco, a Mr Dwayne John, was a former associate to Miss Lefebure.”

  “Has this John guy gone missing, too?”

  “No, sir.”

  Harvey Fleischer realized he needed to get to a phone and ring his wife, Molly. Dwayne John was staying a couple of nights at their Nob Hill house while discussions continued as to how best to keep him out of the hands of the FBI, and to safely transport him back into Dr King’s fold in Georgia.

  Given what had happened here in Berkeley he was suddenly uneasy.

  He knew he was worrying about nothing.

  Being idiotically irrational, in fact.

  But every day in every way the World just kept getting crazier...

  Chapter 4

  Tuesday 10th December 1963

  The Pentagon, Washington DC

  General David Monroe Shoup the 22nd Commandant of the United States Marine Corps moved between the sharpshooters he had ordered in position on the roof a little over an hour ago, and peered cautiously
over the edge. The sight that greeted the fifty-eight year old veteran was like something out of Dante’s Inferno; and briefly, it shook the battle-scarred veteran of Tarawa to the core.

  It was just after midnight and Washington was burning.

  Great buildings were on fire all across the city, and sparkling, writhing crimson streaks seared across the winter night as tracers scattered in the darkness. New detonations and muzzle flashes ignited through the smoke wreathing Foggy Bottom, the grounds of the White House and the Capitol Building to the north and the north-east of his vantage point on top of the Pentagon. Several hours after the insurgency announced itself with the huge blooms of perhaps as many as a dozen gas tankers and lorries packed with explosives, each halted and detonated before one or other bastion of American civilization - the Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, or the State Department on C Street North West, or foreign embassies or prestigious hotels, under bridges within the city and on the bridges over the Potomac and the Anacostia Rivers – the fighting and what was becoming widespread rioting was still getting worse.

  Every now and then a mortar crashed down onto the Pentagon or into the five acre inner courtyard of the complex. Despite the huge size and proximity of the target mortar bombs regularly landed ‘long’ between the Pentagon and the Potomac.

  This at least told the old soldier a little bit about his enemy.

  Amateurs and crazies!

  The bastards had got lucky at the beginning of the insurgency or whatever the Hell this monumental FUBAR was. Fucked Up beyond All Repair hardly did the situation justice! The insurgents, or rebels, turncoats or whoever the Hell they were had caught the Washington PD and his Marines guarding the Pentagon on sentry duty - mainly equipped for essentially ceremonial duties - before there had been any opportunity to concentrate and co-ordinate defensive action. The attackers had driven up to the north of the building virtually unopposed and exploded three trucks - one a gas tanker - and rushed the into the complex shooting automatic weapons, hurling grenades and Molotov cocktails, killing everybody who got in the way. Every window in the Mall Terrace Facade had been blown in and extensive blast damage incurred throughout the outer ring of offices; thereafter, a rabble – probably less than three hundred in number – had infiltrated that wing of the Pentagon, rapidly fanning out in groups of three or four men to secure a ragged perimeter which commanded the lower floors and in some areas the basement areas of approximately a third of the Pentagon complex. If the intruders had been reinforced, or the men they had left guarding the northern approaches to the Pentagon had participated in the initial assault, the entire building might now be in their hands. As it was it had taken over two hours of hard fighting to temporarily ‘stabilize’ a viable internal defensive perimeter; the trouble was that if another force of insurgents attacked the building from another flank things would get really dirty. He did not have enough ‘effectives’ to mount anything other than a picket to watch over the thus far largely undamaged western side of the Pentagon.

  The old Marine would have worried about it if there had been anything he could do about it.

  Events had moved at a terrifying swift and unpredictable pace in the last day and he was desperately trying to piece together the ‘big picture’.

  Only hours ago the High Command of the United States armed forces had been wholly preoccupied with the spine-chilling intelligence that the chain of command had been comprehensively compromised; the US Air Force had been ordered to attack British ships and bases, the Atlantic Fleet had attempted to sink a Royal Navy nuclear submarine; and at least one Polaris boat had been tasked – in the event of war – to destroy Australian cities. The situation beggared belief and the whole investigative resources of the Pentagon, the FBI, the Secret Service and the National Security Agency had been in the process of descending on ‘the problem’ in the last forty-eight hours.

  It had not been lost on Shoup, General Westmoreland – the Personal Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara - or anybody else in the Flag Plot Room that the insurgents laying siege to the Pentagon had focused their assault on the quadrant of the building hosting the rapidly assembled two hundred-strong ‘task force’ charged with investigating the ‘Apparent Breaches of Command Protocols’. The offices of the APCP Task Force were currently well behind ‘enemy lines’ within an area where several large fires were known to be burning out of control.

  Any old soldier will testify that there is nothing worse than fighting a foe who knows one’s strengths, weaknesses and dispositions in detail before the battle. It was blindingly obvious that the ‘insurgents’ attacking the Pentagon – if not elsewhere in the District of Columbia - were operating on the basis of sound intelligence and with the direction of a firm, if somewhat reckless, guiding hand. This made it all the more vital for the defenders of the Pentagon to hold their ground.

  Everybody who could lay his, and in extremis her hands on a firearm was now hunkered down behind the hastily thrown up barricades within the Pentagon with orders to ‘contain and harass the insurgents’ but otherwise to hold their ground ‘at any cost’. A hastily formed under strength company of Marines reinforcements had been ferried down the Anacostia River and across the Potomac from the depot at the Washington Navy Yard in the last hour. However, other than deploying twenty sharpshooters on the roof to deny the rebels mobility in the open ground around the complex; Shoup had refused point blank to further dissipate the one available combat unit capable of undertaking offensive action.

  The Navy and the Air Force wanted him to use his Marines to reinforce the barricades!

  The Chief of Naval Operations, fifty-six year old Admiral George Whelan Anderson, had tried to pull rank on Shoup in the absence of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Earle ‘Bus’ Wheeler, whom it was assumed was still at the White House with the President.

  Shoup had dug in his heels.

  While small arms fire rattled – punctuated with the regular barking of BARs (Browning Automatic Rifles), a sound familiar to any GI who had fought in Hitler’s War or in Korea - and reverberated down the corridors of the floors above their heads the two men had squared up to each other in the US Navy Flag Plot Room. Shoup, who had come to Washington the previous week to make one final plea for the preservation of the 3rd Marine Division – due to be disbanded under the increasingly insane ‘peace dividend’ cuts program on 1st January 1964 – had been appalled to discover that the Administration had virtually no ‘grip’ on anything in particular. Pentagon insiders and most likely, rogue elements from the CIA, had been complicit in attacking British forces in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, almost certainly been instrumental in provoking a Spanish-British war over Gibraltar and in the bombing the key British Mediterranean stronghold of Malta. What had appalled him even more was that it had been immediately evident that not all the Chiefs of Staff actually thought that any or all of this was disastrous news or that it was a was a real problem. As for Admiral Anderson, whom many of his peers still universally regarded as probably the outstanding naval officer of his generation, Shoup very nearly despaired. Anderson had been at the helm when the Cuban Missiles Crisis had gone wrong; when all was said and done it had been his ‘Navy people’ who had driven a Soviet submarine captain to launch a nuclear tipper torpedo at the USS Beale and lit the blue touch paper to global nuclear war. Ever since then his authority had been leeching away, drip, drip, drip, day after humiliating day; what was going on in the Atlantic – the loss of the Scorpion and the brainlessly provocative posturing of the US Navy in the Western Approaches to the British Isles - was proof positive that he had lost control of the Navy and now, in this unprecedented crisis he was no more than a straw man at the heart of the Pentagon.

  In his thirty-seven year career in the Marine Corps David Monroe Shoup had never disobeyed a direct order by a lawfully authorized superior officer; until approximately twenty minutes ago.

  The Flag Plot Room had gone dreadfully quite.

>   Even the sporadic rattle of gunfire had seemed to pause.

  Secretary of Defense McNamara had blinked myopically at the gladiators as he cleaned his glasses. Staffers and civilian aides had taken a step backward into the shadows.

  It had been then that McNamara’s ‘personal military assistant’, three-star General William Childs Westmoreland had stepped forward and cleared his throat. Like Shoup he had witnessed the fate of the ad hoc column of National Guardsmen, Washington PD troopers, and unattached servicemen thrown together and prematurely sent to relieve the beleaguered Pentagon.

  The fiery red trails of Bazooka rounds in the night, the tracers from half-a-dozen 50-calibre machine guns and close range enfilade fire from at least two anti-tank guns had decimated the ‘relief column’, scattering the survivors in less than five horribly bloody minutes. Shoup had previously demanded that the relief column ‘hang back’ until such time as his Marines were in position to ‘hit the bastards’ in a co-ordinated pincer attack; but some idiot outside the surviving Pentagon communications loop had ordered in the cavalry without first surveying the ground, without making any attempt to understand the dispositions and the weaponry of the defenders or any awareness of the timeless military imperative of concentration.

  The blunder had probably been the culmination of a lot of woolly and very wishful thinking by people who ought to have known better. In the hours before President Kennedy had made his state of the union address – in retrospect firing the starting gun for the uprising - the higher echelons of the White House and Pentagon staffs had been buzzing with what Shoup considered to be ‘dammed fool’ conspiracy theories. There was loose talk about the chain of command having been compromised by stay behind Soviet sleeper agents, that some kind of highly implausible ‘Armageddon-ready’ movement called Red Dawn – Krasnaya Zarya in Russian – was responsible for subverting American airmen and submariners to mount ‘sneak’ attacks on the British off Cape Finisterre in the Atlantic and at Malta in the Mediterranean. Suddenly, the whole disastrous FUBAR of post-October War American history was nothing to do with the traumatised paralysis of an Administration that refused to come to terms with the aftermath of that war, but some kind of bizarre tragedy of worthy good intentions – more like a criminal comedy of errors - waylaid by a dastardly communistic Red Dawn ‘enemy within’. Paranoia had reached such a pitch in the hours before the rebellion, or coup d’état – Shoup did not know or care which it was at the moment, it did not matter right now – that every armoured vehicle in the District of Columbia, scores of uniformed Washington PD officers and every off duty Secret Service agent had been bussed to the White House because certain idiots, senior members of the Administration mainly, had convinced themselves that General Curtis LeMay was about to launch a coup d’état. The level of paranoia had reached such a fever pitch that the great and good of the United States of America had somehow convinced themselves that LeMay was personally responsible for the disasters in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, was Hell-bent on stirring up war with the British and was heading back to Washington planning to march up Pennsylvania Avenue to be crowned king of the castle!