by James Philip
“Just to see her one more time,” Walter went on. “But I know that’s not going to happen.”
“I’m sorry,” Edna Zabriski sobbed.
“It’s not your fault, Ma’am. You must feel the same way about Nathan?”
She nodded jerkily.
At that moment the weight of the world descended crushingly on Walter Brenckmann’s shoulders.
“What wouldn’t you give to see Nathan again?” He asked dry mouthed.
“My Nathan is dead. The British murdered him.”
Walter shook his head.
“No, ma’am.”
“I don’t...”
“The British rescued him from the sea. The British treated his minor injuries, just cuts and bruises, he was very lucky,” Walter belatedly remembered to smile supportively. “Then the British placed Walter and the other survivors under the care and supervision of a former US Navy Surgeon Commander living on Malta, a lady called Margo Seiffert. The British were so concerned for the welfare of our people that they asked a local Maltese nurse to personally satisfy herself on a daily basis that our people were being treated properly. On Sunday a US Air Force aircraft flew to Malta to repatriate your son and the other American survivors. Your son stepped back onto American soil forty-eight hours ago.” Walter kept taking because that was what he had been ordered to do at this point in the ‘breaking’ Edna Zabriski. “Having been medically assessed on his return home Captain Zabriski was formally cleared to resume active service at zero eleven hundred hours yesterday.”
“You’re lying to me!”
“No, ma’am. I spoke to Nathan ten minutes before I walked into this room to satisfy myself that what I had been asked to convey to you was God’s own truth.”
Chapter 30
Wednesday 18th December 1963
Camp David, Catoctin Mountains, Maryland
“Forgive me if I don’t get up,” Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy apologised, quirking a wan smile at his guest. “They tell me it hurts so much because things are knitting back together. I don’t like to get too doped up too early in the day because there’s so much to do.”
Ben Bradlee grinned sympathetically as he bent down to shake his old friend’s hand. Walking into the cabin he had been surprised to discover the President’s younger brother alone, having assumed that there would be other Washington newsmen present.
“Who are we waiting for, Bobby?” The Chief of Newsweek’s Washington Bureau inquired in a voice strained by a week of sleep deprivation and long periods of complete, unadulterated terror. The US Navy Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King which had brought him north from DC had been fully loaded; men, women, several children and four senior military men irritated to have to share their transport with non-service interlopers packed shoulder to shoulder. The helicopter had disgorged its cargo and immediately lifted off, heading back south to collect its next load.
“Nobody right now,” the other man retorted. “Senior surviving members of the Administration are carrying out a series of frank face-to-face briefings to ensure that newsmen and opinion-leaders such as you, key Congressional and business leaders and our overseas allies know what we know. I don’t promise to be able to divulge everything, however, national security issues permitting the President has instructed me, and the other nominated ‘briefers’ to be as frank as possible in the circumstances.”
When a thing was too good to be true it probably was, too good to be true, that was. Nevertheless, Ben Bradlee sensed that the mood music had changed in the last week. How could it not have changed? Either the Administration circled its wagons or it reached out to the country; if it truly embraced the latter option then perhaps not all was lost. Besides, it was already apparent that the post-Battle of Washington Kennedy Administration was very much a Kennedy-Johnson ticket. What LBJ lacked in charisma he more than made up for in good old-fashioned political common sense, a thing which had been sadly lacking in recent months.
“How is the leg, Bobby?” Ben Bradlee inquired solicitously as he sank into the armchair his host had waved at. Damp wood spluttered and crackled in the hearth and the warmth of the fire warmed his face.
“I shouldn’t complain. We expected the Brits to be all over us making the sort of demands we couldn’t entertain in a million years over what happened in the Oval Office,” he shrugged, “but...”
“But what?”
“It’s as if they actually trust us to do the right thing with the crazy Zabriski woman!”
Ben Bradlee frowned. Bobby would never understand the British; he was too deeply – and complacently – inculcated with the Irish Mafia’s take on history. The so-called Kennedy clan’s Irish Mafia was still very much imbedded in the heart of the Administration. Kenny O’Donnell might have been replaced with LBJ’s man Marvin Watson at the apex of the Presidential Staff but nothing was going to change overnight, least of all lifelong attitudes and prejudices.
“Why wouldn’t they trust us, Bobby? And even if they didn’t trust us to do the right thing, whatever that is, what could they do about it? The British are just being realistic.”
“Perhaps. I wish we knew more about this Margaret Thatcher person they’ve made Prime Minister.”
“I thought we had diplomats who were paid to know about stuff like that?” Ben Bradlee parried, testing the boundaries of the Administration’s avowed commitment to being ‘frank’.
“That’s another problem. It turns out the guy we had in place over there is a complete jerk!”
Ben Bradlee and every other reputable newsman in America could have told the Administration that Loudon Baines Westheimer II, the Administrations man in England was a jerk months ago. He decided not to rub this in.
“We ought to do something about that,” he observed.
Bobby Kennedy nodded intently.
“Jack’s asked Bill Fulbright to take over at State.”
Bradlee had heard that rumour; having it confirmed instantly grabbed his attention in much the same way it would have been ‘grabbed’ if Bobby Kennedy had dug him in the ribs with a sharp stick.
“Fulbright’s already on the case,” the President’s younger brother went on. “He’s approached Walter Brenckmann to be the new ambassador of there.”
“Wasn’t Brenckmann the guy who grabbed that mad woman in the Oval Office?”
“The very same. He was our Naval Attaché in England. He was the one who pressed the alarm bell when things started going crazy in the Atlantic after Jack’s Moon speech.”
Ben Bradlee was a little wide-eyed.
When politicians said they wanted to be ‘frank’ they hardly ever meant it in his experience. Whether the politician in questions was a long-time personal friend like Bobby Kennedy or a complete stranger made no difference, because a politician was a politician. That was just the way things were and there was no profit in bemoaning the fact.
But this briefing was beginning to threaten to test the definition of the word ‘frank’ to the point of destruction.
“What about the Moon?” He asked speculatively.
“We’re going to do that.”
“Really?”
“Yes. LBJ owns the Moon Program. He’s already fired up NASA and von Braun’s Germans down in Alabama. I don’t think any of us believe it’s doable by the end of the decade but one day an American will walk on the Moon. Well, if this Administration has anything to do with it, anyways.”
A statement of policy; albeit one with an entirely reasonable caveat attached. Ben Bradlee hardly knew what to think!
Seizing the opportunity, Bobby Kennedy changed the subject.
“I spoke to you before the Battle of Washington about a conspiracy aimed at the heart of the Republic. The Administration has now been fully appraised of all the intelligence available to the British by Sir Dick White, the Director General of MI6. The President and senior members of the Cabinet were briefed personally by Sir Dick. We now believe that an organisation called Red Dawn – a stay behind KGB terroristic network firs
t created in Stalin’s time – may have had a significant involvement in compromising the chain of command of the US Armed Forces at home and overseas, and in fomenting a coup d’état in DC. The British believe that Red Dawn may have been behind widespread civil unrest and guerrilla-type terrorist attacks on targets in the United Kingdom and the Mediterranean immediately after the October War, and remains active in the Mediterranean at this time. The British speculate that any surviving Soviet or Warsaw Pact military assets in Europe, Russia, the Middle East and elsewhere in the World, for example those engaged in supporting insurgencies in Sub-Saharan Africa, specifically in Namibia and Mozambique may be swept up by Red Dawn, if indeed they have not already been incorporated into that ‘movement’.
Ben Bradlee was fascinated and a little shocked; neither of which he betrayed to his friend.
“That’s a big claim. Convince me.”
“The CIA are climbing all over this, obviously,” Bobby Kennedy went on, unoffended that the newsman was unwilling to take anything at face value. “The way it looks is that Red Dawn – Krasnaya Zarya, as it is properly called - was never an acknowledged apparatus of the Soviet State because in the event of a catastrophe such as a nuclear war who could say whether the Soviet State, in any meaningful sense, would survive. Red Dawn was an idea which had its roots in the Soviet retreat to Moscow in the 1941, and only became a movement in the years after World War II. It seems that several years before the October War the Soviets realized that in inculcating an unquestioning ‘will to resist’ they had created a monster. Consequently, an attempt was made to purge the leaders of the Red Dawn movement but by then it was too late because Krasnaya Zarya had already infiltrated every organ of the Soviet State. By then Red Dawn and the Soviet State had become indistinguishable. The Brits suspect that after the October War Red Dawn emerged like a vengeful Phoenix from the ashes.”
Ben Bradlee wondered if his friend was going to move on from generalities – the stock in trade of most intelligence community conspiracy theories – to specifics.
“The British have tried to translate what they know about Red Dawn into realistic predictions of what it might look like on the ground and the real threats it may pose to us both. Although the Brits do not think Red Dawn has a single guiding hand; they see plenty of evidence for ‘local’ guiding hands particularly in places less devastated by the October War. For example, they predict that in the USA Red Dawn will have coalesced into a loosely nationalistic underground movement, a ‘resistance’, if you like, capable of developing relatively complex strategies and carrying out extremely ambitious operations. Their assumption is that Red Dawn will have insinuated itself into mainstream political parties, key locations in the military-industrial complex, and particularly into local militias and extremist groups of the right, their thinking being that historically the FBI indiscriminately targets all left-leaning groups and largely leaves the red-neck, racist, anti-Semitic and other right wing coalitions to their own devices. It is inevitable in this scenario that Red Dawn will have a presence in many if not most governmental institutions, in the big labour unions and on the majority of University campuses across America. Some areas of the American state will have been hardly touched by Red Dawn; others, a minority to be sure, will have been deeply compromised. For example, National Guard formations may have been suborned, or parts of critical military command and control infrastructures perverted.”
Ben Bradlee’s hackles were rising.
“You’re telling me that while the FBI has devoted three-quarters of its resources to harassing people of color going about their lawful business that Red Dawn has been left to its own devices?”
Bobby Kennedy nodded.
“The FBI has now started talking about the possible existence of a ‘resistance’ of some kind in several states. The Army interrogators at Camp Benedict Arnold where most of the captured suspected rebels are being processed by the Army have identified several possible leaders of the coup d’état. Hardly anybody we’ve captured has alluded to anything called ‘Red Dawn’ but several prisoners have talked about an analogous ‘underground’ of which ‘the resistance’, basically the crazies who tried to overthrow the government nine days ago is the visible manifestation. We’re still in the early stages of unravelling it all. Right now we think that ‘Red Dawn’, if such a thing exists, somehow became separated, divorced from the guys – let’s call them ‘the resistance’ – involved in the fighting in DC and elsewhere. That’s why the focus has switched to rooting out anybody who might be suspect or problematic in the armed forces and the civil service. We’re pretty sure that the crazies who torched half of Washington last week weren’t the guys who sent out the orders for the Air Force to bomb British ships and bases, or who infiltrated the State Department to manipulate the Fascist government in Spain to launch a proxy war against the Brits over Gibraltar. As for the shit Admiral McDonald’s people are digging up in the Navy Department. Hell, it’s hard to know where to begin. I wish I could say we’re talking about communist subversion and fifth columnists; the trouble is I think it’s more likely we’re just dealing with imbeciles!”
He moved on without preamble.
“What have you heard about the Scorpion?”
Ben Bradlee knew the Navy had lost a nuclear boat in murky circumstances that had also involved the Royal Navy’s only nuclear-powered submarine HMS Dreadnought. He had never bought the story that Dreadnought had stalked and sunk the USS Scorpion in international waters for no particular reason. Several papers had carried lurid accusations and an old admiral had been wheeled out on the Ed Sullivan Show to demand that the British ‘come clean’.
“Do we know what actually happened?”
“Yes,” Bobby Kennedy rasped sourly. “Not from our people, obviously. The Brits have given us a full account of the circumstances in which HMS Dreadnought was attacked and partially disabled by a near miss from a homing torpedo fired by a US Navy Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine aircraft flying off the USS Enterprise. Two S-2s each launched two such torpedoes. The first salvo sank the USS Scorpion which appears to have deliberately manoeuvred so as to make it impossible for the Enterprise’s aircraft to ‘safely’ launch their fish at HMS Dreadnought. The British sub was damaged when one of the torpedoes aimed at it detonated close to its stern at the end of its attack run. HMS Dreadnought eventually limped into Gibraltar where she is currently undergoing repairs. Initially, the Brits offered to give us full access to the Dreadnought and gave permission for our investigators to speak to its captain and his senior officers. Notwithstanding, the Navy Department has refused to be part of any British ‘cover up’. When the American Consul in Gibraltar attempted to serve a subpoena...”
“Why would our guy in Gibraltar attempt to serve an illegal subpoena on British sovereign territory, Bobby?”
The President’s younger brother threw up his hands in exasperation.
“It’s academic anyway. The Brits have now refused to co-operate with any subsequent US-based investigation into the Scorpion affair.”
“You can hardly blame them.”
“No,” Bobby Kennedy agreed disgustedly. “I suppose not!”
Chapter 31
Wednesday 18th December 1963
National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland
The first few times Gretchen was in any way cognisant of her immediate environs she was horribly sleepy and nothing really made much sense. Later there was a little pain, it seemed like her body was strapped down, feebly immobile and she started hearing muffled sounds. The next stage was hurtful. Everywhere and everything hurt and she was too weak to raise a finger or even to blink an eye. This phase also passed but not the dryness in her throat, her thirst and her frustration at not knowing what was going on or what had happened to her. She had no sensation of the passage of time other than that sometimes it was brighter than others, quieter or noisier and at first she was completely unable to focus her eyes. Now and then she heard nearby voices that might have b
een talking to her. Her world was thus a myopic, baffling, painful and frightening place in which her mind only very slowly began to piece together the scattered fragments of her memory. To begin with she did not know who she was; and later she realized this ought to have been a lot more frightening than it had been at the time. Once she had re-found the name ‘Gretchen’ – the man’s voice she heard from time to time had used that name a lot and it felt familiar, she had a keystone, a foundation brick upon which to build. And so it went on over hours and days broken with the overlong darkness of unconsciousness and exhausted sleep, one building block of remembrance stacked hesitantly upon another until she stumbled upon that night at the Main State Building when her life had changed forever.
“Gretchen?” The man’s voice asked with hoarse anxiety. “Gretchen? Can you hear me?”
“Dan...”
“Oh God,” the man sighed the sort of sigh that raggedly expelled every last breath of wind from one’s lungs. “You’re back with us!”
Gretchen was far too out of it to comprehend what the big deal was about that. She felt gentle pressure on her left hand, attempted to turn her face to that side but something restrained her.
A shadow fell over her.
“Don’t try to move, Gretchen. You hurt your neck and they don’t want you moving your head for a while. They’ve got you in a sort of cage.”
“Oh, right...”
Gretchen could not figure out why the man was crying.
“How long?” She gasped almost inaudibly.
“Nine days. They brought you here about a week ago. You’re at the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda.”
“How long have you...”
“I found you soon after they brought you in.”
“You looked for me...” Gretchen lapsed back into an exhausted slumber contemplating the incontrovertible fact that somebody had travelled from the safety of faraway Boston to a battlefield to look for her. And that somebody had been Dan Brenckmann whom she had treated like a schmuck from day one.
