Ask Not Of Your Country (Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Book 4) Read online

  James Philip’s

  ________

  Ask Not Of Your Country

  ________

  Timeline 10/27/62 USA – BOOK FOUR

  Copyright © James P. Coldham writing as James Philip 2016. All rights reserved.

  Cover concept by James Philip

  Graphic Design by Beastleigh Web Design

  Author’s Note

  ‘Ask Not of Your Country’ is Book 4 of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62 – USA.

  In the alternative timeline of the post-Cuban Missiles War the swinging sixties never happened.

  ‘Ask Not of Your Country’ is the fourth verse of the American story of Armageddon. To its friends and enemies alike the United States seems to have emerged from the October War battered, bruised but invincible. However, twenty months after the cataclysm terrible wounds remain unhealed and the nation of liberty is increasingly beset by conflict.

  What price unity when the war-ravaged states of the American North West and the Great Lakes already feel like battlegrounds in the next war? While racial tensions erupt across the South, civil war threatens to engulf the Midwest in Illinois and Wisconsin, Congress and the Administration are deadlocked, and the alliance with the British disintegrates.

  While the Red Army surges south to the Persian Gulf, in Philadelphia the Kennedy Administration turns a blind eye, intent on pandering to the most virulent strain of the ‘America First’ movement in election year.

  The survivors had honestly believed that the World had gone mad in October 1962. They had hoped and prayed that the worst was over. Now they are beginning to ask themselves how much worse things can get?

  Tragically, the answer is that things can get a lot, lot worse.

  Never was Jack Kennedy’s inaugural appeal for all Americans to ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ but to ‘ask what you can do for your country’ more apposite.

  Welcome to the fourth verse of Timeline 10/27/62 – USA Series.

  Please note: as with several earlier Timeline 10/27/62 books Ask Not of Your Country comes with a CLIFF HANGER warning!

  The books in the Timeline 10/27/62 USA Series are:

  Book 1: Aftermath

  Book 2: California Dreaming

  Book 3: The Great Society

  Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country

  Book 5: The American Dream

  (Available 27th October 2017)

  The Timeline 10/27/62 Main Series is:

  Book 1: Operation Anadyr

  Book 2: Love is Strange

  Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules

  Book 4: Red Dawn

  Book 5: The Burning Time

  Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses

  Book 7: A Line in the Sand

  Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon

  Book 9: All Along the Watchtower

  (Available 1st June 2017)

  Book 10: Crow on the Cradle

  (Available 27th October 2017)

  Timeline 10/27/62 – Australia

  Book 1: Cricket on the Beach (Available in 2017)

  Book 2: Operation Manna (Available in 2017)

  * * *

  To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it up in my own head. None of the characters in ‘Ask Not of Your Country’ – Book 4 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Series - are based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events I describe in ‘Ask Not of Your Country’ – Book 4 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Series - have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.

  The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 - USA Series’ is an alternative history of the modern world and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in some cases their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them on or after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always say in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it up in my own head.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Author’s Endnote

  Other Books by James Philip

  Ask Not of Your Country

  ‘America...goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and...her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own...she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication...’

  John Quincy Adams

  4th July 1821

  U.S. House of Representatives, Washington DC

  ‘Some day when I become a general, I want people to know that I’m serious.’

  Cadet H. Norman Schwarzkopf jnr.

  [Aged 10] in 1944

  Bordertown Military Institute, Trenton, New Jersey

  ‘History is the autobiography of a madman.’

  Alexander Herzen

  Dr Krupov, in ‘Who is to Blame?’

  A novel first published in the

  Journal Otechestvennye Zapiski [1846]

  Chapter 1

  Friday 5th June 1964

  Waukesha, Wisconsin

  The suburb of Waukesha lay astride the Fox River some seventeen miles west of Lake Michigan. On a clear night the lights of nearby Milwaukee used to light up the eastern horizon but for the last three days the smoke from the fires of the state’s largest city had lain upon it like a death shroud. From Milwaukee on the coastal plain the land rose to over seven hundred feet as it climbed towards the old spa town. Since the Second World War the elders of the County had watched the urban sprawl of the city approaching, year on year, from the relative safety of the he
ights south of Interstate 94. But now an unimaginably worse fate than being – at some stage in the future – enveloped by the suburbs of the great city was about to befall their community.

  Twenty-nine year old Major H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. had heard many tall – and not so tall stories – about what happened when a civilian population took things into its own hands and in a panic, fled. He had studied the campaigns of long dead generals and the minutiae of the wars of the twentieth century but never believed, not for a minute, that he would ever see the things he had seen in the last few days on American soil. The entire population of Waukesha, some thirty thousand men, women, children, the old, the infirm and babes in arms was on the move west. The roads out of town were choked with vehicles and the inevitable looting and fire-starting had begun.

  Late in the afternoon it had begun to rain again as it had done off and on for most of the last week. The summer heat had been sultry, oppressive, threatening, and now great tridents of lightning stabbed down into the fields and woods and great crashing crescendos of thunder rolled across the hills. Broken down cars and trucks and little knots of people unwilling to leave exhausted or sick loved ones behind, huddled beneath blankets and tarpaulins along the roadside. The exodus from Waukesha and the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Milwaukee had merged along Interstate 94 into an endless, cold, soaking wet procession of unrelieved misery.

  The tragedy unfolding west of Lake Michigan was of truly Biblical proportions. In its suddenness and its magnitude no other description began to paint a picture of the awfulness of what was happening in a part of America...

  However, a soldier could not afford the luxury of dwelling on the proportions of the catastrophe unfolding around him. His job was to deal with what was in front of him; to obey his orders and to do his duty.

  Soldiering was all about remembering the main thing.

  Schwarzkopf had left over half his men with his vehicles, a score of Jeeps, half-tracks and trucks, and eleven M113 armored personnel carriers to follow him to Waukesha at their best pace and gone ahead on foot with one hundred and fifteen men. He hated the idea of dividing the fighting strength of his two hundred and fifty strong company but he had been given a job to do and he was not about to get that job done sitting in a traffic jam ten miles the wrong side of town.

  Dusk was falling fast as he and his men spread out into the eerily empty centre of Waukesha.

  The town had the look and feel of an old East Coast community; hardly surprising since the area had initially been settled by New England farmers from Connecticut, Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts in the years after the end of the Black Hawk War and the opening of the Erie Canal. Those first settlers had brought with them the muscular brands of Christianity which had sustained them back East, and throughout their treks across the American north. In the nineteenth century nearby springs had enabled entrepreneurs to promote Waukesha as the ‘Saratoga of the West’. Such was the past of this place; as to what its future held nobody could tell. East and south of the state capital Madison, less than seventy miles away elements of two units, troopers from the 106th Airborne and grunts from the 3rd Marines were digging in. Meanwhile Schwarzkopf’s reinforced Reconnaissance Company ‘A’ of the 132nd Infantry Combat Group of the Wisconsin National Guard had been pushed forward to ‘find out what the Hell is going on over towards Milwaukee!’

  Schwarzkopf’s orders were specific; the refugees were not his problem and he had not been sent to Waukesha to engage ‘the enemy’ in a major engagement, his job was to access the situation and to fall back on Madison.

  Schwarzkopf and his radioman retreated beneath the colonnaded portico of the town hall to get out of the rain.

  “This is Top Dog!” Boomed the voice of Lieutenant Colonel Harvey Grabowski, Schwarzkopf’s commanding officer. “What have you got for me Little Bear?”

  There was nothing remotely ‘little’ about Norman Schwarzkopf, he was six foot three inches tall and even after a month ‘up country’ on the ‘Chicago Front’ he weighed in, athletically, at around two hundred and thirty pounds. When he picked up an M-16 assault rifle it disappeared into his paw-like hands like a toy and he hefted a sixty pound kit bag over his shoulder as if it was filled with fresh air.

  Schwarzkopf liked and respected the ‘old man’ – Grabowski was a long-time reservist knocking on sixty who had had the honor to fight with Pershing in the Argonne in 1918 and with Patton in the breakout from Normandy in 1944.

  “Everybody’s pulling out of town, sir,” he reported. “The folks coming up the hill from Milwaukee say all Hell broke loose in the city three or four days ago. It sounds medieval, sir. The story is that a lot of the rebels are religious nuts. Some of them wear red crosses on their chests. They round people up and read the Bible to them. The whole city was declared ungodly by something called the ‘High Council of the Lakes’. The refugees say that the city’s Wisconsin State National Guard battalion repelled the first attacks but then the rebels flanked its lines inland and on small boats out on the lake, and after that the local troops either surrendered or ran away. There are reports that the rebels shoot anybody they find in uniform. Cops, soldiers, even boy scouts. A couple of people have reported that armed men entered one of the hospitals and started executing patients but that can’t be right. Everybody we talk to wants to know where the Army and the Air Force is. OVER!”

  “Did you say religious nuts, Little Bear?”

  “Yes, sir. They drove into downtown Milwaukee in trucks fitted with loudspeakers quoting the Bible - the Book of Revelation - exhorting the faithful to point out the ungodly in their midst. As they advance they systematically loot and kill, and rape, they do a lot of that people say, and then they set fire to whole neighborhoods. It is almost like some medieval pogrom, sir. Over.”

  “Who are they killing?”

  “That’s the thing, sir. It seems random. When they first ran into the city’s defense line they pushed a crowd of women and children ahead of them. Sort of human shields, I suppose. I keep saying what I’m hearing sounds medieval, sir,” Schwarzkopf apologized. “The only think to compare it with in modern times may be the way the Red Army behaved in the latter stages of the forty-five war. The Soviets treated all women as spoils of war when the Red Army advanced into eastern Germany. It also puts me in mind of some of the stories that came out of DC last December. The bastards capture a district and call a halt so that they can rape all the women and young girls, kill the old folk and give teenage and fighting age men they’ve captured the choice of joining them in the raping and killing or being executed on the spot. We’ve got a bad situation out here. We’re pretty sure there’s a whole mess of rebels mixed up with the refugees coming out of the city.”

  “What does Interstate 94 look like, Little Bear?”

  “Not good, sir. There may already be fifty or sixty thousand plus displaced persons heading west. None of them have got food or water. We passed a lot of bodies on the roadsides getting here. The people who got out of Milwaukee got out in the clothes they were standing in...”

  “There’s nothing we can do for them, Little Bear,” Schwarzkopf’s commanding officer said sternly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want prisoners. Can you get me some prisoners?”

  “Roger that, sir!”

  Schwarzkopf handed back the radio handset and stepped out into the rain.

  “Everybody to me! NOW!”

  He had sent three platoons forward to act as pickets, and kept twenty-three men back as a ‘fighting reserve’. The soldiers around him were National Guardsmen but not peace time reservists; he had only brought his hardest ‘hard cases’ on this expedition to Waukesha, each man with him had been in uniform ever since the October War and Schwarzkopf had had Company ‘A’ for the last four months. The men around him were real soldiers, and although several of them were a little long in the tooth for this kind of field work; there was no substitute for their accumulated combat experience.

  Schwar
zkopf ‘s ‘hard cases’ had all seen action in Korea, and several of them in the Pacific, or Germany in the Second War; in this particular company he was the only ‘rookie’.

  “We’re moving forward until we eyeball the enemy!” He bawled as the rain began to hammer down again. Each man was already soaked, the downpour splashing off helmets. “We will join up with 1st, 2nd and 3rd platoons and form an extended picket line. If we hit major resistance or come under sustained fire we will withdraw. Top Dog wants prisoners but we’re not putting out heads in a meat grinder to get them. We’ll pull back around midnight and set up a checkpoint east of the town on Interstate 94 at dawn. We’ll roust out anybody suspicious. There are bound to be bad guys hiding in the crowds. Any questions?”

  There were several questions; his men were professionals.

  Schwarzkopf responded briskly, unhesitatingly. He made a couple of minor clarifications and checked again if everybody was on the same wavelength.

  “Good! I don’t want anybody getting shot!” This he declaimed with a predatory grin. “Let’s get to it!”

  Chapter 2

  Friday 5th June 1964

  Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office, Albuquerque, New Mexico

  Unlike his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, sixty-three year old Clyde Anderson Tolson was something of a mystery to both the public and to Washington insiders. He was a Missourian hailing from Laredo who had moved to Washington DC in 1919. Remarkably, he had worked first as a clerk and then as a confidential secretary in the offices of three successive Secretaries of War; Newton D. Baker, John W. Weeks, and Dwight F. Davis.

  In retrospect this had been an extraordinarily serendipitous insight into the workings of the Federal Government, given his later career as the sidekick and meticulous, protective right hand man and confidante of the nation’s premier gangbuster. While at the War Department Tolson had qualified to practice law at night school at George Washington University, graduating in 1927 and joining the FBI soon afterwards; since then he had – quite literally – been at Hoover’s side.