by James Philip
Intuitively, Miranda knew the war must have made things many times worse even though she did not begin to understand the miniscule amount of real science on the subject that had actually filtered out into the public domain. Although the military and the Atomic Energy Commission had installed radiation monitoring stations in city parks the best advice that the Governor’s Office in Sacramento had received was along the lines of; thus far ‘only a statistically insignificant incidence of additional illness or mortality (mainly cancers) can be attributed to the direct effects of radiation sickness, or the short-term effects of exposure to fallout.’ Which was fine and dandy so far as it went but not overly reassuring because nobody could agree what the long-term effects of the increased levels of background ionizing radiation – assumed to be between two to four times higher than pre-war – which had been recorded in and around the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego in the last year actually signified. The problem was complicated by the fact that in some places the geography and topography provided natural and man-made ‘radiation traps’ where the background contamination was much higher than the state-wide average. For example, sheltered mountain valleys seemed to ‘collect fallout’ and there were indications that soil erosion piled windblown contaminated soil into drifts against and underneath houses. The trouble was that the variations between and within the most comprehensive of the provisional statistical studies was so large, that it was very hard to draw any meaningful conclusions about where it was, or was not ‘safest’ to live and work. In the words of one eminent professor of physics at Caltech: ‘we are embarking upon a millennia-long experiment; at the end of it we will know everything there is to know about the physiological, developmental, and mutational effects of living with historically – that is, historically in terms of the time Man has been on Earth – elevated levels of ionizing radiation. In a hundred years time we may be able to speculate, in a partially informed fashion, in response to the pressing questions everybody wants to know the answers to now. But we will not really know what we have done to the future of our species, or to the myriad of other species with which we share this planet, for many hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.’
It was beginning to look as if Nevil Shute might have got it right.
Maybe in a hundred, or two hundred years the World might be a dead, lifeless sphere spinning through space, lonely in its devastation for all time.
They were all still living on the beach...
Dwayne John’s voice shattered Miranda’s darkling premonitions.
“Weren’t you at Johnny Seiffert’s place that one time?” He asked, his dark handsome face a mask of embarrassment and shame.
Miranda glared at him.
If looks killed...
Chapter 30
Thursday 5th December 1963
USS Sam Houston (SSBN-609)
The Golden Gate, San Francisco Bay
The United States Navy preferred its Polaris boats to depart at night or in the fog but that winter morning as the pre-dawn twilight spread across the iron grey, freezing waters of San Francisco Bay, and the ebb tide surged between the great rust red piers of the Golden Gate, the air was unnaturally clear and visibility was pin sharp half-way to the murky horizon. A cold wind blew in off the Pacific carrying spits of rain from the high clouds folding around the hills above Sausalito.
Commander Troy Simms, his navigation officer and two lookouts crowded into the small cockpit at the rounded top of the USS Sam Houston’s great streamlined shark fin sail as the submarine shouldered towards the shadows beneath the great bridge. Half a mile ahead the Forrest Sherman class destroyer the USS John Paul Jones was passing under the Golden Gate. Normally, a small patrol boat loitered in the waters around the bridge when one of Submarine Squadron Fifteen’s SSBNs left harbour; today the Navy wanted to make a statement and to make absolutely sure that no sleepy merchantman or idiot in a sailboat impeded the USS Sam Houston’s departure.
On the surface the big submarine handled like a water-logged garbage scow. Her curved flanks were designed to slip through the depths, not to manuever in a seaway. Even in the shelter of the Bay the boat had an appreciable roll, and when she met the open sea she would pitch gently but uncomfortably for submariners accustomed to months at sea without once being aware that the boat was actually moving.
Winter’s bite was blowing into the Bay. Troy Simms and the other men on top of the sail were muffled in Arctic cold weather gear, fur-lined parkas, and thick gloves which made it hard to adjust the focus on the powerful binoculars each man held in his hands, or hung on a thick leather strap on his padded chest.
The commander of the USS Sam Houston was mightily relieved to be going back to sea. More than that he was a little surprised; having anticipated a long interregnum ashore while the Navy’s Special Investigation Branch crawled all over him, his crew and the boat.
Rear Admiral Bernard Clarey, Commander Submarine Force, United States Pacific Fleet – COMSUBPAC – had come aboard the USS Sam Houston about an hour after the USS Theodore Roosevelt had cast off on her patrol twenty-four hours ago.
‘Permission to address the crew, Skipper?’ He had asked Troy Simms, exuding a winning and confident bonhomie.
‘Permission granted, sir!’
‘My name is Bernard Clarey and I am COMSUBPAC,” the older man had declared jovially over the boat’s internal PA system. “You’ve all been through the wringer in the last few days. I won’t apologise for that. SIB has its job to do, you have your jobs to do, and I have mine to do. That’s the way it is.’
The fifty-one year old veteran of a submarine war that had raged twenty years ago in the Eastern Pacific had viewed the men around him in the control room with a proudly paternal eye as he spoke into the microphone clasped in his right hand. Radiating youthful vitality and energy, every man in the compartment understood that their Admiral would have given his eye teeth to be sailing with them on their forthcoming patrol.
COMSUBPAC’s voice and cheerful outward demeanour had betrayed no hint of the fact that he had spent most of the last week in an aircraft traversing the Pacific and the continental United States, or locked in high-level briefings and interrogations in the Pentagon getting by snatching twenty or forty minute naps when he could. The crews of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and of the USS Sam Houston had indeed been ‘through the wringer in recent days’, as would every other crew in the Polaris Fleet; twelve hours ago the seven boats at sea – excluding the Theodore Roosevelt which had already been ‘cleared’ - had been ordered to surface, report their ‘status’ and to acknowledge new ‘operational directives’.
Of course, excepting their commanding officer none of the other members of the crew of the USS Sam Houston had known that the entire SSBM fleet was in turmoil, or that Bernard Clarey was tip toeing across the eye of a storm that had rocked the Navy Department to its knees in the last forty-eight hours.
‘It is my honour to be onboard this boat to wish you all Godspeed and good hunting on your forthcoming deterrent patrol. I have complete confidence in the officers and men of the USS Sam Houston and I know that nobody on this boat will let down the Navy!’
Afterwards, COMSUBPAC had toured the submarine, shaking hands and patting backs, exchanging quips and unfailingly supportive observations as to the combat readiness of the vessel and the morale of her crew.
On the pressure casing aft of the sail at the head of the gangway he had taken Troy Simms hand, shaken it and held it as he looked the USS Sam Houston’s commanding officer in the eye.
‘The strength of our system, Troy,’ he said very softly, ‘is that when the shit hits the fan people like me know that they can always count on men like you. When people like us stop trusting each other we know we are in trouble. I hope and pray that whatever appearances to the contrary, that we in America are a long way from that day.’
COMSUBPAC had temporarily moved his flag to Alameda, where he planned to remain at least until after Jackson Braithwaite’s memo
rial service. The murdered commander of Submarine Squadron Fifteen was to be interred with full military honours at the Arlington National Cemetery in a week’s time.
Troy Simms stared down at the black water roiling down the flanks of the submarine. The boat’s single multi-bladed propeller was hardly turning because the outrushing tide was sweeping the Ethan Allen class ballistic missile submarine’s seven thousand ton deadweight out to sea like a slow moving giant cork.
The silhouette of the USS Sam Houston’s escort, the USS John Paul Jones lengthened as the long lean hunter passed into deeper, open waters beyond the Golden Gate and her captain let her – metaphorically – stretch her legs. There were no other vessels on the gloomy horizon beyond the destroyer, no other traffic visible beyond the bridge. Far astern a ferry came around the dim bulk of Alcatraz Island, battling the tide on the way across to Sausalito. It was too dark to make out the masts and superstructures of ships tied up alongside the distant harbour piers of San Francisco.
Troy Simms felt the old-fashioned nakedness of any submarine captain caught on the surface at dawn. On the surface his command was horribly vulnerable; beneath the waves she was the deadliest fighting machine ever invented by man. A part of him badly wanted to know how it was possible for him to have gone to sea three weeks ago with sealed orders no sane man would countenance and which, it seemed, no sane man had countenanced.
He had been ordered to sail to within a few hundred miles of the coast of New South Wales, Australia! Most of his Polaris A2 missiles had been programmed to hit Australian cities!
However, no matter how much he wanted to know how that could have been allowed to happen; he also understood that he had no right to know unless his superiors deemed it operationally necessary. He had accepted that because that was the way things were sometimes. His job in the Navy was to command the USS Sam Houston; not to second guess COMPUBPAC and the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, and it never occurred to him for a minute that SIB would not get to the bottom of the affair.
“We will dive the boat as soon as we clear the Golden Gate!” He rasped, taking one last look at the USS John Paul Jones, the great looming bridge, and the grey sky where in the middle distance it blended into the iron grey ocean.
Chapter 31
Thursday 5th December 1963
Department of Justice Building
950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC
United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach was in a mood to kick something, or somebody by the time his car dropped him off outside the Department of Justice Building. Most trips up to Capitol Hill seemed to have this effect on him lately. Notwithstanding that a story had been put out to the effect that the Commander-in-Chief was recuperating from a bad dose of influenza and advising that there was no cause for concern; people were beginning to ask, and they had every right to ask, very pushy questions about the President’s continuing absence and nobody at the White House was making the situation any less worrying.
Most Washington insiders suspected that, contrary to public reassurances, there was plenty of cause for concern about the President’s health and any morning now that concern was going to be splashed across the front page of the Washington Post and blaring from TV newscasts.
That morning the White House Chief of Staff, Kenny O’Donnell, had been forced to brief senior members of the Washington press corps; the briefing had not gone well and already there were ugly rumours doing the rounds and several exasperated junior Administration staffers had broken ranks.
Katzenbach had called O’Donnell and warned him that if the President was not back in circulation within the next ‘couple of days’ the Administration was ‘in real trouble’.
Kenneth Patrick ‘Kenny’ O’Donnell, the thirty-seven year old special assistant to the President and the White House Appointment’s Secretary – he disliked the title ‘Chief of Staff’ although de facto, that was what he was – had been with the Kennedys through every political campaign and battle Jack and Bobby had ever fought. He had been Bobby Kennedy’s roommate at Harvard, and a key member of the group of advisors, the so-called ‘Irish Mafia’, who had been behind the rise and rise of Jack Kennedy’s political star. In the late fifties he had become a DC insider, working as an assistant counsel to Bobby Kennedy, at that time Chief Counsel of the Senate Labour Rackets Committee. Kenny O’Donnell had never been the same after the night of the October War, he was prematurely aged, and like many of the Administration’s insiders lately he drank much more than it was wise for a man in the public eye to drink. Moreover, in the last year he had been hung out to dry far too often by both the Kennedy brothers, which meant his credit with the DC press pack was wearing thin at exactly the time he needed to take out a new and very large credibility loan. Today’s briefing might well turn out to be his swansong.
Kenny O’Donnell had just about held the line but the days when ‘holding the line’ was good enough were long gone.
Unfortunately, this was not universally appreciated at the White House.
Katzenbach heard raised feminine voices in the ante-room to his office. He looked up as the door burst open and Gretchen Betancourt marched in, closely followed by the Deputy Attorney General’s flustered secretary.
“I tried to stop her!” The other, older woman protested.
Katzenbach sighed. Involving Claude Betancourt’s daughter in an ill-conceived attempt to distract the Washington press corps from the rapidly worsening Greek tragedy at the White House had been, on reflection, a bad mistake. Once he had figured out what was going on old man Betancourt had not seen the funny side of the ruse, either, and from the expression on Gretchen Betancourt’s face the joke had grown old for her, too.
“Miss Betancourt and I need to have a private conversation,” he decided, knowing this was one confrontation he could not put off until tomorrow. He remained behind his desk, the young woman standing before him with her arms tightly folded across her bust.
Gretchen had dressed in black for this ‘meeting’.
She had been taken for a patsy and if what it took to restore her ‘honour’ and her ‘status’ in the Department of Justice, and in polite Washington Society, was the ceremonial presentation of the United States Deputy Attorney General’s head on a silver platter to the editor of the Washington Post, it would be a price well worth paying!
Or at least that was what she thought right up until she had got to be alone with Walter Brenckmann and discovered that although he was completely indifferent to her on a boy-girl level, in every other respect he was a natural friend, and possibly, in invaluable future ally. Until then Gretchen had been prepared to go along with actually being a ‘patsy’. Incredibly, she had actually been half-flattered to be of service for the greater good of the Administration. In retrospect she now realised that she had been an idiot. The Administration she was ‘helping’ – albeit in ways she did not entirely comprehend – was the Administration which had tried to blow up the World last year!
The US Deputy Attorney General was reading the young woman’s mind.
Nicholas Katzenbach was not and had never been a Lothario of any description, let alone a womanizer in the Kennedy brothers’ pre-war league. He was a family man, a careerist, a man to whom service and duty were the keystones of his personal identity. He had felt guilty using Gretchen Betancourt to take the heat off the White House, specifically to delay the evil moment when the DC press realised that although the lights were on in the Oval Office that the President of the United States was not actually taking calls. His boss, and friend, the United States Attorney General, and the Chief of Staff at the White House had decided that for the sake of the nation the people did not need to know that the President was hors de combat, and initially he had gone along with it. He had believed that if it was publicly known that the President was too ill to do his job, then bad things might happen, both to the Administration and the country. Nonetheless, he had genuinely felt guilty about putting Gretchen Betancourt throug
h the wringer in the last few days. His problem now was that he was suddenly trying to negotiate a mutually satisfactory exit strategy from an untenable position with a woman scorned.
He held up a hand to forestall what the young woman was going to say.
“We will be civilised about this,” he said coolly. “Let’s put our cards on the table before we start making threats against each other.”
Gretchen was not convinced that was a good idea.
An hour ago she had had a horrible telephone conversation with Dan Brenckmann – the smart, good-looking man who had been the other fall guy in this farrago and basically, been her white knight from start to finish – who she had given the brush off and told to go home to Boston ‘before this thing gets any worse’. Dan had reacted with subdued, polite surprise but acquiesced because that was the sort of nice, punch-ball sort of kid he was and she had known he would react exactly that way before she picked up the phone to call him. If she was Dan Brenckmann she would never speak to herself again!
