“What have we lost?” He asked, coldly didactic.
Carl Drinkwater frowned. He noticed for the first time that the other man was trembling with something akin to rage, his fists balled. In retrospect that was the moment he realised he did not know Max Calman at all. The man’s hooded eyes were filled with murder.
“I guess this must be kind of rough for you and Lena?” He asked gently. “What with the twins due about now?”
“For us?” Max Calman snarled. “What about all those people we’ve just killed tonight?”
Drinkwater’s hackles rose.
He had not personally killed anybody and he was not about to apologise for doing his best to save the lives of innocent Americans.
“Calm down, Max.”
Things got a little hazy after that.
Sometime later he was blinking at the conference room from beneath the level of the conference room table.
Later still he started asking himself why he was sitting on the floor staring at the blood on his hands; and why somewhere nearby there was a lot of very loud shouting and scuffling?
Chapter 13
The Betancourt family’s summer ‘weekend’ retreat — as befitted a country hideaway where senior Democrats all the way back to FDR’s time had secretly met in conclave to foment forthcoming plots and coups — was a large, much modernised old six bedroom colonial style house dating from the middle of the last century.
Gretchen and her chaperone were greeted on the front porch by a large, fierce looking matronly woman of indeterminate late middle years whose stern visage momentarily dissolved into maternal pleasure to welcome Gretchen, and instantly reverted to suspicious severity as she eyed Dan Brenckmann.
“All the TV stations are down,” the older woman reported to Gretchen. “We’ve been trying to find out what is going on by listening to the radio but the signal keeps dropping out.”
Dan followed Gretchen into the lobby.
It was like walking into something out of another age. Polished boards underfoot, ancient gas light fittings now glowing with electric bulbs, big portraits in coarse oils on the walls, and the stuffed head of what Dan assumed was an Elk, was just one of a dozen mounted animal heads on the wall. In places the low oaken frames of the house might easily have brained a taller man if he stood up too quickly.
A grey haired man in slippers and a blue cardigan emerged into the pool of light inside the door. He viewed Dan with earnest curiosity rather than the mistrust of the woman who had answered the door bell.
“This is Dan Brenckmann,” Gretchen explained perfunctorily. “Commander Brenckmann’s son,” she explained in a tone which suggested, much to Dan’s surprise, that his father was well known to both the older man and woman.
The stout woman relaxed, viewed Gretchen’s friend with something akin to watchful indulgence. Dan felt a little disorientated. He had had no idea his Pa was so well in with these people. He knew his Pa had done a lot of work for old Claude Betancourt after the 1945 war and it was this which had probably kept his modest Boston law firm from going under; but he had never suspected he might actually have visited a place like this. That suggested his Pa had once been, perhaps still was, one of Gretchen’s father’s go to guys and that put a whole new complexion on those ‘at homes’ he had tagged along to over the years in Quincy.
Gretchen went on: “Dan is my research student. We were working at Yale when the alarms went off. It seemed sensible to come out to the country until we knew what is going on.”
Although Dan did not know if he cared to be described as anybody’s researcher, he let the comment pass unremarked.
“This,” Gretchen continued, turning to the matronly presence at her shoulder, “is Mrs Nordstrom,” a gesture at the older man, “and this is Mr Nordstrom. They’ve looked after Oak Hill for my parents for as long as I can remember.” Gretchen drew herself to her full height and took command of the situation. “Until we establish what is going on I suggest we all make ourselves comfortable in the cellar.”
“Surely we will be safe all the way out here?” The old man queried respectfully.
Dan tried not to laugh. Getting hysterical was not going to help. However, the notion that anybody had ever been, or ever would be safe again, anywhere, seemed so incredible as to be surreal.
He wanted to shout out: “Which part of global nuclear war do you not understand?”
He did not say, or shout anything of the kind because he was in somebody else’s house and it would have been unspeakably rude. He had not been brought up that way and he was not about to start behaving like a jerk just because World War III had broken out.
“We only heard very garbled pieces of news on the car radio,” he said, addressing Mrs Nordstrom, whom he guessed called the shots in the Nordstrom household. “You may have a better idea than us what is actually going on.”
“They say Boston got hit bad,” the woman reported, her tone implicitly suggesting she thought that this was Boston’s fault.
Dan Brenckmann went cold inside.
“An hour ago,” Mr Nordstrom added, eager to share his wife’s thunder added, “they said Buffalo and Niagara got hit by a big one…”
Gretchen and the Nordstrom’s were suddenly looking at Dan very oddly.
Unconsciously, he put out an arm to steady himself.
Everything was spinning.
He felt like Joe Louis had just landed a haymaker in his gut.
“My Ma and Pa are in Boston,” he muttered. “And…”
He thought he was going to be sick.
His voice was that of a stranger.
“My kid sister is at college at New York State in Buffalo…”
Chapter 14
Downstairs people had been sitting around getting high and drinking themselves oblivious when the sirens had cranked up the first time. That was over four hours ago but nobody had gone home and nobody had thought of anything better to do than to carry on getting high and drinking. Some of the people at the party had always believed the World would end this way, with a big bang not a whimper, and most of the others, even the ones of a naturally less pessimistic disposition were easily persuaded that even if they were lucky enough to find deep enough holes in the ground to survive the first bombs, that radiation would get them sooner or later.
Miranda Sullivan had missed the party.
She had taken a couple of pink pills to help her sleep that afternoon, passed out on Johnny Seiffert’s bed — his huge circular red-sheeted ‘love altar’ — and slept a deep, nightmare filled drugged-induced sleep until the moment shortly after midnight that the door had crashed open, and two partially clad, frantically coupling complete strangers had stumbled into the bedroom and fallen on top of her.