by James Philip
Now, their British friends would be even angrier.
Joanne’s husband pursed his lips and glanced across to his daughter-in-law, not trusting himself to speak.
Smoke was very nearly coming out of Gretchen’s ears.
The latest news about Junior, whispers that he had ‘gone native’ in his time in Scotland, had transformed a pre-planned campaign get together in the sun – a welcome change from the cold of the stomp in the north – into a council of war.
Dan Brenckmann, having imagined that his wife was through with his father’s fight for the Democrat Presidential ticket, had naively imagined the long weekend down at Mar-a-Lago would be the much-needed break Gretchen so badly needed. Granted, the battle of Washington was four-a-a-half years ago but she had been dragged, more dead than alive from the rubble in the corridors of the State Department, and there were days when the legacy of her injuries still hung over her. Right now, she needed a proper rest; a respite, and he was a little irritated that this was obviously not going to be it.
And now the thing with Junior had blown up again. Gretchen was closer to his brother than anybody else in the room; Dan, or his mother and father. It was hard to explain; that was just the way it was and Dan had accepted it from day one.
“I’ve heard nothing from Junior,” she confirmed, spitting with frustration. “That means he doesn’t want us to get involved,” she added with an exasperated moan, her arms folded tightly across her breasts.
“We can’t just sit here and do nothing, Walter?” Joanne objected plaintively.
Her husband and her second son had remained seated while their wives roamed the room.
“My dear,” Walter Brenckmann said to his wife, “we must sit here and do nothing. If we do anything else, it will just make this worse for Junior.”
“That’s not…” Gretchen bit off what she was going to say. “Apart from anything else, I’m Junior’s attorney, remember?”
“I’m sure Junior won’t have forgotten that,” Walter Brenckmann observed, aware that there had to be something else underlying his daughter-in-law’s understandable unhappiness.
The family group was alone in a first floor suite overlooking the grounds between Ocean Boulevard and the Atlantic.
Gretchen glanced to her husband, who shrugged.
“There’s something you need to know,” she prefaced uncomfortably. “It may have something to do with this, although probably not this time. Not even the people around Nixon are that dumb!”
Joanne Brenckmann’s ire had drained away in a moment, now she came to perch on the arm of her husband’s chair.
Gretchen continued to pace.
“When I warned him that you’d decided to run for President last year, Junior left it to me to pick the right time to,” she grimaced, “to, well, brief you about what happened to him just before the Battle of Washington.”
Nobody said a word.
Gretchen met Dan’s eye, took strength from the contact.
“I don’t know how relevant this is to Junior’s current problem with the Navy Department, or the Administration,” she said in qualification, “but the thing is” she hesitated, biting her bottom lip in a most un-Gretchen-like way, “that although everybody knows that around the time of the Battle of Washington, the Air Force screwed up and a couple of their so-called sand table training exercises ended up being full blown B-52 strikes on Malta and Gibraltar,” she held up a hand, “people don’t know about the planned Gibraltar strike; it never happened because the Brits saw it coming and our guys turned back.”
Gibraltar?
She saw the expressions on her mother- and father-in-law’s faces freeze.
Neither of them even tried to veil their horror.
“I knew the whole thing was supposed to be just a huge screw up,” Walter Brenckmann muttered. “I didn’t know about Gibraltar?”
“No, well…” Gretchen took a deep breath, wondering if she out to have mentioned this before, regardless of attorney-client privilege. “The really scary thing is, was, that it wasn’t just the Air Force that had a problem. Around the same time, there were at least two separate similar chain-of-command failures in the Navy. One was at Atlantic Fleet Headquarters in Norfolk. That was how the Scorpion got to be sunk by aircraft flying off the USS Enterprise and that British nuclear submarine, the Dreadnought got damaged…”
Joanne Brenckmann’s eyes were as wide as saucers.
“Walter?” She asked, dazedly.
“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” he confirmed, grimly. “That was why the House ran the Scorpion Inquiry into the ground and everybody was happy to let it drop once the British rowed in behind us in January 1966.”
The older man was viewing Gretchen thoughtfully, as if he was reading her mind.
“All those people were killed on Malta because of an administrative error?” Gretchen’s mother-in-law queried, horrified.
The younger woman shook her head.
“No, it was worse than that. Sure, the Pentagon was in a bad place, what with all the Peace Dividend cuts and so many of the most experienced people getting their discharge papers. Whole departments were paralysed, the way I understand it. Ships were sitting in port with no fuel, military bases, air fields, they were abandoned overnight. It was chaos, Atlantic Fleet refused to stand down units at one point; and I think Curtis LeMay was in the middle of a big fight with a gang of congressmen because he was shutting down all the bases that he didn’t need, rather than the ones they wanted him to close. Unbelievable, anyway, you can see why JFK was so keen for the House to figure out what when wrong with Cuba at the time!”
Walter Brenckmann raised a warning eyebrow.
It was sufficient to bring Gretchen back onto message.
“But that wasn’t the thing,” she remembered. “Junior was involved, incidentally, in a second chain-of-command ‘issue’ with the Polaris Missile Force, which was one of the few parts of the Navy completely untouched by the Peace Dividend cuts and the ad hoc re-organisation of the Pentagon.”
Walter Brenckmann became aware that he was sitting forward in his chair, with the hairs on the nape of his neck standing on end, electrified with alarm.
“Junior was in the middle of it,” Gretchen explained, “him and then Commander, now Rear Admiral Troy Simms, who was the captain of the USS Sam Houston. On 15th November 1963, a day out of San Francisco, Simms had been in receipt of operational orders requiring him to position the Sam Houston off Australia and on receipt of the General War Order to nuke the cities of Queensland, the Australian Capital Territories – that’s Canberra – New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. At the time Troy Simms brought his boat back to Almeida, Junior was just off the USS Theodore Roosevelt, awaiting reassignment and he was standing OOD duties” she grimaced, “Officer of the Deck Duties, that is,” she explained, unnecessarily for her mother-in-law’s benefit, “on the submarine tender Hunley attached to SUBRON15 in San Francisco Bay, when his Squadron Commander, Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite and his wife were murdered, probably on the orders of a rogue FBI agent, Dwight Christie…”
“The guy arrested after the Wister Park Siege,” Dan Brenckmann added quietly.
“Yeah, Gretchen,” continued. “Most of that’s still classified and Junior never got to the bottom of it, even though he was the one who got to liaise with the FBI and the Oakland PD. Anyway, Troy Simms took Junior into his confidence, and together they agreed that they would both report everything they knew, separately, to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. Junior reported personally to the CNO, then Admiral Anderson, and was grilled by Naval Intelligence for a couple of days, and was told to forget everything.”
“But he talked to you before he forgot anything?” Walter Brenckmann mused, half-amused.
“Yeah, but that was a little later. I deposed him and several copies of that deposition are securely archived.”
“By the firm?”
“Yes, and elsewhere.”
Walter Br
enckmann nodded.
“I don’t understand how this is important,” Joanne confessed.
“A lot of people don’t believe all the screw-ups back in 1963 were just screw-ups, Jo,” Gretchen said softly.
“No,” Joanne’s husband added, patting her hand. “If the CIA and the FBI hadn’t been so busy spying on the President’s political opponents these last few years, they might have been looking for the traitors who took advantage of the Peace Dividend chaos to sabotage our alliances with our most important post-October 1962 ally.”
Chapter 19
Thursday 16th May, 1968
USS Enterprise (CVN-65), Subic Bay, Philippines
By the time Lieutenant Commander John McCain stumped into the squadron ready room one level below the armoured floor of the giant aircraft carrier’s hangar deck, he was hot, bothered, and as stiff and sore as Hell. On shore he might have taken a couple of codeines to take the edge off his aches and pains, and a couple of fingers of Kentucky Bourbon to help unwind. However, the US Navy’s ships were dry and he was not about to go whining to a flight surgeon because his two-year-old wounds were giving him grief. No gain without pain. As his rehab instructor had repeatedly yelled at him: ‘If it doesn’t hurt; you’re not trying hard enough!’
He and his buddy from that MASH unit in Michigan, Sam Constantis had goaded each other through the initial agonies of getting mobile, restoring the first degrees of muscle tone, and re-learning the hand-eye co-ordination a five-year-old child took for granted. They had both been bust up pretty bad. That was not a problem; it was something to be proud of.
Sam’s monthly letters admitted to his ongoing struggles. He had been a Ranger, a real tough guy, not an idle Skyhawk jock like him; Sam had had to carry his world on his back, train, move, fight out in the wet, the mud, the cold and the ice and even though he accepted he would never be as fit, or as strong as he had once been, he was never going to stop fighting.
McCain figured he was not as good coping with G-forces as before he was shot down. The thing was to compensate, to be better than he used to be in other ways. He had been an average pilot – okay, the US Navy set the bar really high – but still, he had never been more than just about average, and made up for it with a bravura that had earned him reprimands for straying too close to ‘reckless’. Now, he had to be a better pilot, more precise, and avoid taking any risk that was not coolly, carefully calculated. All that pre-crash seat of the pants shit was a thing of the past. Precisely because nothing came easily to him, he was learning anew, his skills were sharpening; all this he knew, appreciated as acutely as the lingering after-effects of the multiple life-threatening injuries he had suffered in the Civil War.
He had changed in other, invisible ways, too.
He had been a twenty-nine-year-old kid the night he was shot down. Life had been a rollercoaster, and flying fast jets the best crap game in town. Unlike so many of his friends he had avoided being sent ashore in the 1963 Peace Dividend cuts; cuts that had salami sliced and diced the Navy so badly that the Kitty Hawk now lay in two shattered pieces on the bottom of the Persian Gulf. Undeniably, the name ‘McCain’ had been his friend back then; but these days, it counted for a lot less. In fact, most of the things which had ‘counted’ back in October 1962 did not amount to a mess of beans out here on the Asiatic Station. The world, the Navy and John McCain had changed, moved on.
Stripping off his flying suit, sitting awhile naked except for his skivvies on a bench while the air conditioning fans blew cold, before showering and pulling on his day uniform, he trudged topsides to lean on the rail and enjoy the sunset as the carrier glided to the north of Grande Island, overlooked to port by the tree-covered heights of Mount Silanguin. Farther along the northern shore a signal light blinked, probably at the USS Berkeley (DDG-15), the Charles F. Adams class guided missile destroyer leading the flagship into Subic Bay. As always, once the land began to close in around a ship entering port in these latitudes the sticky, vaguely fetid, stench of the jungle lay across the water in the stillness of the dusk.
VMF-211’s second-in-command had flown two separate simulated ground attack missions that day, altogether spending nearly three hours in the air.
Two more carrier landings under his belt!
That made sixteen since he had somehow, he had no idea how, nailed that first ‘comeback’ landing on HMAS Melbourne. The Australians had only allowed him do that once. Once was enough, spotting a landing, catching a wire on the Big E was a cake walk in comparison. That was not to say he had not had a couple of ‘moments’ since joining the squadron in the Philippines. A missed wire in a night landing last week had dispelled whatever complacency lingered, and a couple of days ago, a faulty dial had almost precipitated reaching for the ejector handle. His experience – he had been playing this game off and on most of his adult life – had kicked in, saved his aircraft and the likely pain and danger of splashing down in shark-infested waters.
He stared, lost in thought, at the Berkeley as she turned to starboard to line up to enter the deep-water channel to the port and the fleet moorings offshore.
The USS Berkeley…
That ship had been in practically every fight the US Navy had got into since the October War. Her skipper had brought her alongside Peter Christopher’s burning, sinking HMS Talavera off Sliema at the end of the Battle of Malta in April 1964. She had been in the thick of it off Korea in the evacuation of Eighth Army. Heck, the CO of the Eighth Army had blown out his brains in her captain’s stateroom. And now, here the Berkeley was again, attached to the Carrier Task Group of the most gung-ho of all the admirals in the Seventh Fleet.
Rear Admiral Elmo ‘Bud’ Zumwalt had got himself a reputation as a ‘DC Admiral’, a politician in uniform and that never did anybody any good in the ranks of the real blue water Navy. People said he had canvassed for this command to put that right; and if that was true, that was not a good thing either.
In any event, all that was above John McCain’s pay grade.
One way or another this was likely to be his last operational tour. He secretly doubted him body would not stand up to the brutal regimen he was maintaining, day on day, and sooner or later he was going to be busted. So, everything he planned to achieve, regardless of adversity, needed to be achieved this year and with a guy like Zumwalt in the hot seat, things were likely, sooner or later, to get interesting!
There was new mail waiting for him in the squadron mess. Like so many of the great ship’s compartments, it was really no more than a large closet, as was his shared cabin. Tonight, his ‘cabin mate’ was already spruced up for a run ashore, McCain having volunteered to stand his CIC watch that night.
Just because Enterprise was alongside a dock it did not mean she ceased to be the biggest stick in the Far Eastern Fleet. This docking was a short R and R interlude during which the carrier was scheduled to maintain a state of eight hours readiness to go to sea. Her storerooms would be refilled, about a hundred new crewmen inducted aboard and a series of war games played out in the gloomy cockpit of the Command-Information-Centre down in the bowels of the leviathan.
Having come to the Enterprise with the reputation of a legendary hell-raiser, McCain suspected he had been something of a disappointment to his new comrades, all of whom chirped at him ceaselessly about his ‘fan mail’.
He had stopped off at the mess for some chow, drank coffee and headed back to his cabin ahead of reporting to the CIC, where he was not required – playing the role of airborne attack co-ordinator – for another hour. Ignoring the first two envelopes, both of which were obviously Navy Department circulars, he recognised the familiar handwriting on the third and with a rueful smile, and an involuntary chortle of anticipation, tore open the flap.
Ironically, McCain had dreaded the ‘rehabilitation posting’ in Australia. While it had been good to catch up with his parents when the trip was first mooted, he had feared the Navy was letting him down gently before it washed him out as a naval aviator.
&n
bsp; In Australia, he had been astonished to discover how well his father – basically, a profoundly wise but crusty old sea dog who had lived and breathed the US Navy, its history and its battles his whole adult life, and had not, initially, taken to being side-lined in Canberra very well by all accounts – got on with the Christophers, who, in turn, had welcomed him in the Capital Territories as...a hugely respected uncle. Likewise, he had been mightily relieved that contrary to the rumour mill back home, his father had hardly touched a drop of hard liquor in the four weeks he had been resident in the Embassy.
‘Your father and the Governor General talk about service things all the time,’ McCain’s mother had confided to him. She too, had been dreading the diplomatic posting ‘down under’ but, like ‘the Admiral’, a lot of the time, she reported, they hardly missed ‘home’ at all. Thousands of miles away from the poisonous environment of the Pentagon and the Navy Department, finding themselves among friends, the Anglo-American special relationship was positively thriving in Canberra.
Yes, McCain’s time in Australia had been full of surprises.
While he had expected his parents to show him off, to get him out and about in public wearing his Congressional Medal of Honour; he had not expected Peter and Marija – all pretence at formality had been dropped after that first dinner at the US Embassy Residence the day after his arrival in Canberra – to treat him like a member of their family, too!
Lady Marija was, well…
It was best to say that she had one of those smiles that might have been designed to scatter his wits. Some guys would get jealous, or at least uncomfortable with that but Peter just took it in his stride as if to say: ‘Yeah, that happens a lot!’
