The Burning Time (Timeline 10/27/62 Book 5) Read online

  In the dark days that followed as the Americans had brazenly attempted to justify their aggression his heart had hardened and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had discovered, to his own astonishment, an inner moral streak he had done his best to discard back in the bad old days of Stalin. One simply did not abandon one’s friends. Whatever their faults the Soviets had liberated his country from the Nazi yoke, and given it back a limited independence of a sort that it had never previously had in all its long history. Besides, how long would his own people tolerate the Party if he severed his links to the recent Marxist-Leninist past? And in that event how long would he and his regime last? The idea of a rushed show trial and its inevitable denouement; with he, his family and his closest associates lined up against a wall for the convenience of a hurriedly assembled firing squad, had little appeal to him. So on that day after the war and in the days and weeks that followed, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had offered the hand of friendship and succour to the arrogant, imbecilic, neo-Tsarist retards who had – without consulting him – ignored his advice, his diplomatic pleading, and now started a second, and even more unnecessary, war with the British and for all he knew, the Americans.

  “You expected to be arrested?” Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej asked, nonplussed.

  Had there been a security leak?

  It was all he could do not to turn to look at his deputy.

  “Yes,” Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov said irritably. “If I was in your place that is what I would do, Comrade.”

  Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej knew the time for talking was over, that he needed to act. Now! And yet he hesitated. Was there another way? He had expected the Troika to obfuscate, to seek to placate him, to want to assure him that what had happened was some kind of aberration. Instead, the three men were looking at him as if he was something they had just scraped off the soles of their shoes.

  “What purpose would that serve?” He asked.

  If the Russians knew what awaited them, then the carefully laid plans to buy off the British and the Americans with the heads of the men who had allowed their Krasnaya Zarya surrogates to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike seventy-two hours ago, had already have failed.

  Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov chuckled so lowly and deeply that it seemed unreasonable that the walls did not vibrate in sympathy.

  The Dictator of Romania looked at him with widening eyes.

  Now he understood.

  Decency, honour, patriotism were things that he had honestly believed belonged to another era, another century. He had not suspected his erstwhile allies – let alone these three men – capable of such things. Perhaps, he had been wrong?

  What else have I been wrong about?

  “Even,” he said eventually, suspecting that all was lost, “if I presented your heads on a silver platter to that witch Thatcher and that playboy Kennedy do you really think it would make any difference?”

  Again, he looked to the telephone.

  Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin shrugged as he considered the proposition. He genuinely did not know if their heads would – as a sacrificial offering - be sufficient prevent a new and final, utterly devastating rain of thermonuclear fire from burning down the rest of Mother Russia.

  “I don’t know,” he confessed.

  Chapter 2

  Monday 10th February 1964

  Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, Philadelphia

  The Marine Corps band played ‘Hail to the Chief’ as the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America clambered stiffly out of the armoured limousine onto the chilly Philadelphia quayside. John Fitzgerald Kennedy took a moment to get his bearings. While he was doing this he waved to the jostling crowd of photographers and journalists crushed three or four deep to his left. He waved and he smiled that god-given, marvellously insouciant confident smile that had, against all the odds, allowed him to reconnect again with the American people in the frantic weeks since the Battle of Washington. Then he turned to face the reception party – several of his most trusted military commanders and a small clutch of loyal, or as LBJ called them, ‘tame’ Senators and Congressmen – awaiting him beneath the towering superstructure of the nearest of the two sleeping leviathans.

  The idea of holding the ‘council of war’ onboard one of the two Second World War battlewagons mothballed at the Philadelphia Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility, had originated from the office of the new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral David Lamar McDonald. Like many of the ‘suggestions’ that emanated from the new CNO’s office, this one was a real humdinger.

  Jack Kennedy straightened, waved again and flashed a new smile at the exploding camera flashes, allowing his Vice-President time to emerge from the other side of the Presidential car and stride up to his shoulder before he stepped closer to the baying Press pack. People used to tell him that having LBJ around only ‘made sense’ because the Texan ‘made him look good’; the naturally handsome younger man with the charismatic touch and the beguiling voice, with the older, rock-solid figure covering his back. The President’s younger brother, Bobby – who had detested and mistrusted Lyndon Baines Johnson until the unifying events of recent weeks had finally sorted the men from the boys in the Administration – had been openly talking about dropping LBJ from the Presidential ticket before the Battle of Washington.

  Bobby was the angrier, more impulsive of the two Kennedy brothers.

  Sometimes, Jack Kennedy asked himself if Bobby’s righteous idealism and his willingness to pick fights that he knew in his heart he could not win, would have survived a period of active serve. He had loved his own time in the Navy – not the pain of his injuries, obviously, just everything else about those days in 1943 and 1944 in the Pacific – but the experience had tempered him in ways he doubted his brother, seven years his junior, comprehended.

  LBJ touched the President’s shoulder; the old stager was a consummate political professional. For the younger man to be able to strut his stuff with his customary panache he needed to know exactly where his Vice-President was without having to constantly turn and check. Unknowingly, the two men – separated by only eight-and-a-half years in age but before the Battle of Washington by seemingly unbridgeable differences in temperament, political outlook and upbringing – had become, overnight, the nation’s darlings, America’s favourite double act. The country’s changing mood even threatened to permeate the Byzantine internecine machinations of the House of Representatives, recently transferred to Philadelphia from battle-scarred Washington DC. Jack Kennedy had called the House of Representatives’ bluff and every day new ‘loyalists’ returned to the fold, seeking terms, hoping to limit and mitigate the ‘collateral damage’ that their previous ‘honest misjudgements’ had done to their future political careers. There was a long way to go before Congress was going to be ‘onside’ but in the last few days the spectre of a renewed nuclear war in Europe had concentrated the minds of the waverers marvellously.

  In the Presidential limousine Jack Kennedy had quipped to his Vice-President that ‘maybe we don’t get to be impeached this year’. As recently as December, the prospect of impeachment and the opportunity to lay down his burdens had seemed like a blessing in disguise. However, on this coldly crisp grey Philadelphia morning the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America was daring to believe that he did not just have a fair wind in his sails, but a raging gale. He had not felt this exhilarated since he could not remember when; maybe back in the Pacific at the wheel of his beloved PT107 with the throttles wide open? Or perhaps, on Inauguration Day in back in 1961? Mornings like this were what he had expected the Presidency to be like every morning.

  The barrage of shouted questions bounced off the smiling, debonair man whom Middle America and the poor and the dispossessed alike so desperately wanted to take anew to their hearts.

  He raised his arms to quieten the deafening babble.

  “While I am your President,” he declared, knowing he did not have to raise his voice because he was standing on the pre-prepared mar
k within feet of the two big, high gain microphones the Navy had set up for this very moment. “This great country will never again drop its military guard. The first responsibility of your President is to protect the American people. That was why on the night of the Cuban Missiles War I refused to leave my post, above ground, in the Oval Office of the White House. The American people had no real opportunity to find shelter that night; I as your President decided that I would rather die like a man than cower in a bunker.” He paused, but not long enough for the murmur of voices to become a crescendo. “My friends, we have lived through dark times and face new enemies. Our British friends and allies – our British friends and allies who have fought shoulder to shoulder with America in three World Wars, Korea and now in the Mediterranean – in the last half-century, have fought the good fight against a new and terrible enemy and suffered grievously in defence of freedom and democracy. American ships have been attacked, and hundreds of American seamen have been killed and maimed – never forget that many, many more would have died but for the heroic actions of the escorting Royal Navy vessels – and for better or worse we are now in the fight. In war nothing is certain. Nothing. But that is no reason for shirking our manifest destiny in this new post-October War epoch. While I am your President no sinew will be spared in the defence of America, or of our allies or in the fight to preserve all that is good and decent in the World.” He quirked a smile. “God bless America!”

  The President turned and walked purposefully towards the long gangway inclining upwards at a shallow angle to the amidships main deck of the USS Wisconsin, where a large welcoming party was awaiting his arrival with patient expectation.

  At the head of the gangway Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara was flanked by the tall blond fifty-seven year old Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral David McDonald.

  McDonald was one of those senior military officers who had a knack of instilling confidence in his political masters without ever being overt about it. The man breathed competence and authority. He had graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1928, and served on the battleships Mississippi and the Colorado before training as a naval aviator in the early 1930s. Afterwards his career had progressed with smooth inevitability. Before the Second World War he had been a flight instructor at Pensacola, commanded the US Navy’s Operational Training Command, during the war he had served as the Executive Officer of the carrier Essex in the Pacific, and been appointed Assistant Chief of Staff of Operations for the US Pacific Fleet. After the war he had commanded the USS Coral Sea, then one of America’s three largest fleet carriers. Before the Cuban Missiles War he had been Commander-in-Chief of the Sixth Fleet based in Naples. He was also the youngest four-star admiral in the Navy.

  Jack Kennedy preceded his Vice-President up the gangway and shook Robert McNamara’s hand warmly. Most days he still felt a little guilty leaving the former President of the Ford Motor Company to clean up the mess in Washington, while he and most of the other member of the Administration occupied themselves touring the country, or had decamped to Philadelphia. McNamara had not uttered a single word of complaint; he had just got on with the job of starting to plan the reconstruction of the capital and the reorganisation of America’s fractured military-industrial complex focussing specifically and urgently on its grievously damaged command and control system.

  “It is good to see you again face to face, Bob,” Jack Kennedy grimaced. “Did I hear it right that LeMay is snowed in at Seattle?”

  If Robert McNamara was the magician overseeing the rebuilding of the departmental structures destroyed in the Battle of Washington and repairing the technical underpinning of the nation’s defences; General Curtis LeMay, the rambunctious Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was the man who had saved the day at the height of the vicious fighting for control of the capital in December. In retrospect it was now incontrovertible that it had it not been for Curtis LeMay’s unshakable loyalty to his flag, his country, the Administration and personally – to a man he had no reason to either like or respect – to the person of the President of the United States of America, that had turned the tide and doomed the rebellion to failure. LeMay had been working around the clock ever since to ensure that he and his fellow Chiefs of Staff had command of all of the United States Military’s assets. Spurred on by the dreadful revelation that it had been four of his B-52s which had killed all those people on Malta back at the beginning of December – not to mention eradicating in the process practically every modern electronic communications system on the Maltese Archipelago and killing most of the irreplaceable British and Commonwealth specialists vital to the effective command and deployment of ships, aircraft and men in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations – LeMay was ruthlessly purging all ‘untrustworthy’ elements from the US Air Force, Navy and Army. Having raged through the senior staffs like a super-charged witch finder general, removing dozens of senior field officers whose complacency and negligence had contributed to the ‘Malta Atrocity’, and the ‘sneak attack on those Brit destroyers off Cape Finisterre’, he had set about tackling the ‘fucking idiots’ who had authorised ‘the attack on the Royal Navy nuclear submarine HMS Dreadnought in fucking international waters’, and turned his guns on the numerous State National Guard units who had stood down – instead of rallying to the flag - during the Battle for Washington and subsequently attempted to obstruct his efforts to restore the rule of law within the military.

  “The Big Cigar won’t be happy to miss this pow-wow!” The Secretary of Defence observed with impish aridity. The Battle for Washington had sparked a steely resolve in the bespectacled, mild-mannered man who had been a statistician dogging Curtis LeMay’s steps throughout the latter stages of the 1945 war, and post-World War II one of the ‘whiz kids’ who had turned around the ailing fortunes of the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s. He had come to Washington in 1961 as the Administration’s efficiency guru charged with reorganising the sprawling military empire created by the Second World War. That empire had spread its tentacles like pernicious hogweed into every corner of the US economy. By the time of the October War he had barely scratched the surface of the beast, and after it he had acquiesced with the massive ‘peace dividend’ cuts which had, in a matter of months, hobbled and hamstrung the nation’s World-wide military ‘reach’. The bloody insurrection – an attempted Red Dawn sponsored coup d’état was a better description – in December mounted by a terrifying coalition of America’s lunatic right-wing fringe, the disposed, disaffected and despairing had come perilously close to wiping out the Administration and its ability to govern. Cometh the moment, cometh the man. This was Bob McNamara’s ‘moment’. In the last two months he had been like a man reborn.

  Again, his President patted his Secretary of Defence’s arm.

  “Old Iron Pants knows what we’re going to be talking about and that we’re not about to take any big decisions without him.”

  “I’m sure General McConnell will fight the Air Force’s corner if it comes to it, sir.” Admiral David Lamar McDonald added as the President moved down the line to shake the Chief of Naval Operation’s hand.

  “I’m sure he will,” Jack Kennedy agreed but his thoughts were still with Curtis LeMay and their long conversation last night over a scrambled link while he had been flying back to Philadelphia on Special Air Mission 26000, the radically modified Type VC-137 Boeing 707 that was the flagship of the growing fleet of Presidential jetliners. Curtis LeMay had not minced his words; he rarely did. He had the Air Force back in his pocket and he was relatively sanguine about the problems with the National Guard. These latter ‘problems’ were ‘containable’ by indefinitely standing down and disarming all the suspect units, sacking commanders who refused to obey lawful commands, and in a small number of cases, arresting and detaining those whose disloyalty went beyond a simple refusal to carry out orders, on grounds of ‘sedition and conduct prejudicial to good military discipline’. No, the real problem was the Navy. The Navy had probably provoked the Oc
tober War and last December the Navy – leastways, elements within the Atlantic Fleet - had done their worst to start another war. LeMay was worried that foot-dragging by the Navy Department in its relocated Philadelphia headquarters was creating a new ticking time bomb. The events leading up to the loss of the USS Scorpion were still officially unresolved, the subject of an as yet to be convened Board of Enquiry. Notwithstanding the appointment of a new C-in-C Atlantic Fleet – CINCLANT – the Administration’s enemies in the House of Representatives were playing politics over the bodies of the Scorpion’s dead. LeMay had complained, with impressive and sustained vitriol, about ‘people in the Navy continuing to brief the House that the Scorpion was the victim of a sneak attack by HMS Dreadnought’. The substance of the lie was that the Administration was covering up the truth to ‘suck up to the Brits’. Basically, the Navy needed to get its act together!

  The trouble was that the new Chief of Naval Operations, unquestionably able and loyal, was a mere mortal and he did not have a magic wand he could wave to make the ‘Scorpion Disaster’ go away. Moreover, he had other bigger fires to fight.

  Fifty-sex year old General John Paul McConnell, Curtis LeMay’s successor as Chief of Staff or the United States Air Force was almost completely unlike his larger than life predecessor in practically every way that a rational man might imagine He was LeMay’s acting successor because once again the Honourable Members of the House of Representatives had not got their act together to hold, or to schedule confirmation hearings because they were presently too busy squabbling among themselves, fretting about their dignity and privileges, and diligently looking for new and innovative ways to frustrate the effective government of the country. Quiet, steadfast competence had characterised the career of the Arkansan born McConnell; unlike LeMay he had made few enemies, and did not as a rule inadvertently close channels of communication to anybody who might one day become his enemy. He was a ‘political’ officer in the sense that he respected where the ultimate authority lay but he was no place man, and quite capable of saying ‘no’ to anybody. When he was promoted to full general and appointed Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the United States European Command in 1962, he had slipped under the radar to leapfrog ahead of several more glamorous, but perhaps, less solid candidates. In the aftermath of the Battle of Washington, McConnell had been Curtis LeMay’s sole recommendation to replace him on his own elevation to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.