Won't Get Fooled Again

by James Philip

  He spoke in an unhurried, considered tone radiating stern gravitas as if summing up the case for the defence in court.

  “The ballistic problem is familiar to mathematicians, not so well known to most people. While an ICBM is in the air an accounting must be taken of the relative tangential speed of the Earth’s rotation to ensure that the warhead is delivered from one moving latitudinal point on the globe; its launch pad, to another, also moving, which it is intended to intercept. At the equator – zero degrees of latitude - the speed of rotation of the Earth is of the order of 1,040.4 miles per hour; meaning, that to correctly establish the correct tangential speed of the Earth’s rotation for Buffalo, latitude 42° 54′ 17″ North, the calculation which needed to be achieved was 1,040.4 mph × cosine (42.904722) to ensure that the R-16 ‘led’ Buffalo’s actual ground position at launch by approximately two hundred nautical miles by the time it arrived at its designated air burst height around fourteen minutes later.”

  Walter Brenckmann sighed.

  “Spare a thought, if you will, for the unfortunate and extraordinarily courageous Soviet missile technician responsible for calculating this final correction, presumably with a slide rule while standing on top of a hundred foot gantry - next to over a hundred tons of rocket fuel which had an evilly proven propensity to blow up without warning - while his or her concentration was being constantly distracted by the flash of distant, and not so distant thermonuclear air bursts at points around the horizon. I imagine the task was anything but a routine business. Only a man - or a woman, for we need to remember that many of the engineers, mathematicians, chemists and physicists who worked on the Soviet Strategic Missile Program were women, unlike in the ‘free’ West where such work was, and is still judged in some way, inappropriate, for members of the fairer sex - possessed of near-superhuman powers of concentration, not to mention nerves of steel, could have checked and re-checked, until they were absolutely confident that everything was in order before reporting that the rocket was ready in all respects for launch.”

  Walter Brenckmann allowed himself a flickering, sad half-smile.

  “I sometimes wonder if that technician ever got off that gantry. More likely, his, or her comrades would have launched the missile the moment they called down the OK. In any event, Missile 8K64/017 was the probably last inter-continental ballistic missile fired by the 33rd Guards Rocket Army before its own regional command centre outside Semipalatinsk, was destroyed by a near miss by a 3.8 megaton W39 free fall bomb dropped by a B-52.”

  Walter Brenckmann’s vision was finally blurring.

  He hoped that the rain would wash away his tears long enough to give him the opportunity to finish his prepared script.

  “It was at 00:13 hours on the morning of Sunday 28th October that a hydrogen bomb with an explosive yield equivalent to over five megatons of TNT detonated above the city, and the surrounding countryside, of Buffalo. Five megatons, that is twice the total of all the explosive power expended by all the combatants in the Second War. The entire metropolitan area of Buffalo ceased to exist in a millisecond. Within seconds Port Erie, Welland and St Catherine’s on the Canadian side of the Niagara had also ceased to exist. North of the air burst on the American shore in Tonawanda, Getzville, and Lockport; twenty-seven miles west as far as Akron, and twenty to thirty miles south to Lake View, Derby, Eden and Hamburg ninety percent of the population was dead or dying within minutes. And then the firestorms began to engulf the ruins.”

  Walter Brenckmann thought his voice would fail him.

  He looked to Joanne for strength.

  “Our eighteen-year-old daughter, the baby of our family, Tabatha,” he said, choking on the words, “died that night in Buffalo…”

  Chapter 13

  Wednesday 1st May, 1968

  HMAS Melbourne, 35 miles E of Flinders Island, Tasman Sea

  Thirty-one-year-old Lieutenant Commander John Sidney McCain III, USN, had got his first carrier landing approach for over two years all wrong. Then he had been waved off a quarter-of-a-mile out on his second, and tersely ordered to ‘figure eight’ four miles off the ship’s starboard beam; Deck Landing Officers only did that when they needed to talk to the guys around them about whether they should even let the poor schmuck responsible for the two wave-offs try again. Now, John McCain was sweating, knowing his career as a naval aviator could very well end in the next few minutes.

  Notwithstanding he was the son of one admiral and the grandson of another, or that he had a Congressional Medal of Honour, unless he caught a wire this time, he might well be through flying fast jets off this, or any other navy’s flat tops.

  Four miles ahead HMAS Melbourne was forging into a squally breeze at a steady twenty-three knots, stowing the third of the four-aircraft section of McDonell Douglas A-4E Skyhawks of Attack Squadron VA-164 below to clear the deck.

  The US Navy men in the other A-4Es were seasoned veterans who until week ago, had been flying off the USS Ticonderoga (CV-14), a heavily modified thirty-thousand-ton Essex class ship nearly twice the displacement and a couple of hundred feet longer than the flagship of the Royal Australian Navy, which looked impossibly small through the polished Perspex cockpit hood in front of his face, presently not even filling his gunsight.

  But then, if McCain truly wanted to re-enter the unique brotherhood of fast jet carrier pilots, then this was probably his last chance and knowing that, was hardening his soul as the distance to the Melbourne’s stern began to rapidly shorten.

  Everybody thought he was going to fail: well, I will show them!

  Nobody had thought he would pass out of refresher flight school at Amberley, up in the outback of Queensland.

  Nobody had believed he would so successfully refamiliarize with the latest variant of the Skyhawk.

  Hell, he had had to fight tooth and nail just to get into the air today!

  I am not going to screw this up!

  Oddly, he had no quarrel with why the US Navy, or its flight surgeons had taken it as read that given the injuries he had suffered in Michigan at the tail end of the war in the Midwest – by rights he ought to have died – he might not walk again unaided, let alone fly fast jets.

  The Skyhawk juddered unnervingly. Encountering a patch of turbulence.

  HMAS Anzac, a post-October War built general purpose frigate based on the design for the British Leander class vessels had assumed the aft ‘plane guard’ position, loitering about three-quarters of a mile off the Melbourne’s starboard quarter. HMAS Quickmatch, a reconstructed two-thousand-ton Second War anti-submarine frigate was operating ahead of the carrier, also in a plane guard role. More distantly, the Royal Navy Battle class destroyer HMS Oudenarde stood off several miles to the west acting as a radar picket controlling the air space around the Melbourne’s small flotilla.

  All of which was peripheral to John McCain as his whole world shrank down to the cockpit, his instruments and the flight deck of the smallest operational aircraft carrier on the planet.

  The Melbourne had been laid down in April 1943 and launched in 1945 as HMS Majestic, the name ship of a new class of ‘light’, fifteen-thousand-ton carriers, and sold, uncompleted to the Australians in 1947. Not actually commissioned until 1955, she had been a more than viable platform for the Second War aircraft her designers had envisaged, single-propeller machines; but by the time she came into service ten-ton jets with landing speeds half-as-fast again, or faster were the norm. Completed with a marginally angled flight deck, the Aussies had successfully operated De Havilland Sea Venoms and Sea Vixens, and Supermarine Scimitars off her; but given up attempting to replace the ship’s aging Fairy Gannet ASW and ELINT turboprop planes with the bigger, hugely more capable twin-engine Grumman A-2 Tracker type. The latter’s wingspan of seventy-two feet left too little margin for error on a ship with a beam of only eighty feet, and a couple of foolhardy test pilots apart, normal mortals refused to even try to put a Tracker down on the Melbourne.

  They said the Melbourne was a notoriously u
npopular berth in the Royal Australian Navy. The ship had been designed to operate in the Atlantic and otherwise generally temperate climes, not in the Australian tropics. Air conditioning and powerful fans had been installed over the years; to little or no effect and areas below deck often got so hot that men passed out or sections of the ship had to be closed off. Apparently, the ‘skinniest men in the RAN’ were the unfortunate denizens of the carrier’s oven-like machinery spaces. There was also a rumour that fresh water was rationed on board the ship, because the carrier’s steam catapults got number one priority for whatever fresh water was available.

  All of which made perfect sense to John McCain.

  The ship was obviously just too damned small!

  At a mile out even one of the old Essex class ships would be filling his windscreen by now; at that range the Independence or even the Midway would feel so close he could reach out and touch them. Whereas, the flight deck of the Melbourne was far too damned small to be so close…

  He was watching the mirrors.

  Now he could see the batons of the Landing Officer.

  And the landing board lights winking dully in the dazzling sunlight.

  Left wing low.

  Too high…

  On glide path…

  Right wing!

  And at literally the last second…

  Greens, three greens!

  The Skyhawk smashed into the deck.

  McCain slammed the throttle through the gate as he was hurled forward in his straps, that was standard operating procedure, sometimes you spotted a landing perfectly, sometimes you got unlucky and missed a trap – one of the tensioned wires set to catch the aircraft’s arrester hook - and needed to ‘bolt’ back into the air to avoid going over the side of the ship.

  Then, suddenly, the aircraft was stationery.

  Rocking perceptibly on her landing gear.

  He throttled back without thinking.

  There was an ungodly silence.

  He was down…

  A yellow-jacketed deck crewman was waving him forward, off the traps to position him on the Melbourne’s forward elevator.

  John McCain was in a breathless daze.

  “BRAKES!”

  “POWER DOWN!”

  The commands rasped inside his helmet.

  In a cocoon of relief and near exhaustion he obeyed unthinkingly, the drills ingrained by endless repetition, every naval aviator’s salvation. A man either had the capacity to function through thick and thin by the precise execution of muscle memory, or he did not, in which case fate soon caught up with him.

  The aircraft was descending into the hangar deck.

  Men jumped up onto the wing, steps clunked into place and the cockpit hood whirred open.

  Still in a trance, strong hands lifted McCain out of his straps and half-guided, half-carried him down to the sweaty steel deck.

  People were smacking him on the back so hard he thought he was going to sink onto his hands and knees, and for a moment, he was terrified he was going to throw up.

  Not that he had had the heart, or the appetite to eat a healthy breakfast that morning.

  Now he was remembering things, falling out of the bubble of desperate concentration which had been his only reality for the last fifty minutes since taking off from the RAAF Williams’s Port Cook airfield where he and this detached VA-164 compatriots had been getting up to speed with the RAAF and the RAN operational protocols and standard operating procedures for the last six days.

  “Give me a break, guys!” He pleaded, trying not to laugh like a madman. “I ain’t as young as I was ten minutes ago!”

  Next, he was confronted by the broad grin of Captain Thomas Bibb Hayward, whom he had encountered briefly at Amberley, and again more recently in Melbourne.

  Hayward, a forty-three-year-old naval aviator who had flown one-hundred-and-forty-six combat missions off the Essex (CV-9) and the Valley Forge (CV-45) during the first Korean War, and later become a test pilot and an instructor at the Navy Fighter Weapons School at Miramar, near San Diego. Presently, he was the United States Navy Air Co-operation Officer to the C-in-C, Her Majesty’s Royal Australian Navy. More to the point, without his approval, John McCain would never have got anywhere near an A-4 Skyhawk again.

  “I don’t know which of us is more relieved, John,” the older man chuckled ruefully. “If you’d gone over the side just now the Admiral would probably have had me keel-hauled!”

  McCain very much doubted his father, very much in exile as his country’s Ambassador in Canberra, would have done any such thing. The Navy was a hard task mistress; nothing was ever achieved without buckets of sweat and the sort of pain that made a man remember the cost. His father was a hero of the submarine war against the Japanese, a great man in whose shadow he was reconciled to walking relatively anonymously, whatever those gutless bastards back at the Pentagon said about his…problems.

  It had been a big comfort to him, when his mother had confided to him that the Admiral chaffed less these days, as if he was a little more at peace with being side-lined. It was over eighteen months since the Navy Department effectively ended his career in the Service, albeit President Nixon had awarded him his fourth star, promoting him full Admiral the day before his appointment to Canberra was announced.

  One way and another Lieutenant Commander John McCain had a hell of a lot to live up to, no son in the history of the US Navy had ever inherited the salt in his veins from a four-star father and a four-star grandfather.

  “It’s damned good to be back, sir!” He barked, coming to attention.

  Hayward shook his hand.

  “News of your singular achievement was being communicated to the Embassy in Canberra when I left the comms room to come down to meet you. I’m sure that when the message is received it will be a great relief to all the ladies you left pining in the Capital Territories!”

  John McCain felt his cheeks burning.

  That was not at all like him.

  True, right up until the night he got so badly crocked over Upper Michigan - he had got shot up and ejected at literally zero feet, getting hit a couple of times before he hit the ground, broken a dozen bones and got peppered with shrapnel before and during his rescue by British SAS and US Rangers – he had cultivated the ladies’ man thing with a rare hungry dedication, especially after the October War. Life was short and there were so many beautiful women in the world; that was a fact!

  On account of his wounds – it was a heck of a challenge to be amorous in traction, and he had been in pain, a lot of it for most of the first year of his recovery – he had led a cloistered, monkish life and much to his surprise, thereafter, once he was back on his feet, back in uniform and more or less pain free, he had taken a shine to the new man that he had become. To cut a long story short his days of loving and leaving his latest one-night conquest were over. That was just not who he was anymore. Yes, he would flirt with any unattached member of the fairer sex but one-night stands, brief flings held absolutely no attraction.

  He was better than that.

  He guessed his friend Sam Constantis, one of the Rangers who had saved his bacon that night in Michigan, and got bust up as bad as him for his troubles, had gone through a similar epiphany; although in Sam’s case he had already met the woman he wanted to marry before the Civil War. Once he got back on his feet, Sam had accepted a National Guard Commission in North Dakota, married Ellen May and they had a kid already. His wife was over ten years older but that had not mattered to him, or her.

  It sure was a mixed-up world these days!

  John McCain smiled wryly.

  He had no idea how he was ever going to explain the effect Lucy De L’Isle had had on him, or his entirely innocent, truly honourable, and it seemed unbreakable fascination with her. As to where it might lead, that also was a mystery. Possibly, only time would tell.

  Life never used to be this complicated!

  “No, sir,” he confessed ruefully. “Actually, it’s just the one, very
special, young lady.”

  Chapter 14

  Friday 3rd May, 1968

  Quincy, Massachusetts

  Everything had changed in the last week. But perhaps, the strangest thing was that everybody knew it, without beginning to understand the reasons why. It was almost as if a veil had been whipped away and that small part of the population of New England who had registered as Democrats had suddenly recanted the error of their ways.

  And seen the shape of things to come.

  This had flabbergasted most commentators, and baffled the horde of political hacks who had until the last few days been dragging round in the footsteps of the candidates trying to figure out what – if there was one at all – the story was, or was going to be in the 1968 Presidential race. Problematically, that they now knew exactly what the story was, was both unexpected, and unsettling. It was as if somebody had kicked over the table half-way through a boring, formulaic game of chess and the pieces had been put back on the board in completely different positions by two players, or in this case, three-and-a-half, who were no longer playing chess but involved in a knife fight to the death.

  Albeit conducted by two of the protagonists, with immaculate civility in stark contrast to their mutual detractors.

  Walter Cronkite, the anchor man of the CBS Evening News – whose measured tones had become the soundtrack to so many lives in the last five years - prided himself on having seen the plot thickening sooner than most, just after the revamping of the Brenckmann campaign in the wake of its New Hampshire humiliation.

  Getting face-to-face time with Ambassador Brenckmann had been a breeze back in March and early April; all that had changed in the last fortnight and when the footage from Buffalo had seared – there was no other word for it, its impact had been electric - across the networks, he had honestly not expected to get another one-on-one that afternoon, or possibly, for weeks to come.