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Sam lazily, for he was half asleep because it was still intolerably early in the day for his musician’s body clock, fondled his lover’s breasts. Judy was curved in all the right places and exquisitely soft and warm in all the right ways. They had fitted together pretty much perfectly, as if they had been purpose built to be each other’s ideal sexual mate and partner. Which, given how they had met and the circumstances of the last few hours, was as serendipitous as it was, well, bizarre.

“I’ve put the kettle on,” Judy murmured. “I think the voltage may be low but the whistle will blow when the water boils.”

“Cool,” he muttered. His left hand explored the delicious shallow roundness of the woman’s belly and began to slide beneath her thighs. She clamped her thighs together, giggling.

“No. I’m far too sore already.”

“Sorry.”

Again, Judy giggled. “It wasn’t as if I begged you to stop at any time.”

“This is true,” he groaned, intent on wrapping her close. “You said the power is back on?”

“Yes.”

Sam’s head still was not switched on.

“Tell me you’re not going to throw me out just because the power is back on and nobody in your street got blown up last night?” He invited his bed mate.

Judy thought this was so hugely funny she was almost convulsed with hysteria.

Sam held her tight and she squirmed around to press her face to his.

“No,” she decided fitting with giggles. “But only because you’ve got nice eyes.”

The urgent whistling of the kettle in the kitchen was the only thing that forestalled a new bout of love-making. The first couple of times had been fucking but that word had lost its currency overnight.

“If you want coffee you’ll have to come down and get it!” Judy declared, as if she had decided that unless she bent the long haired, unshaven good for nothing layabout in her bed to her will in the small things straight away, she would have no chance of reforming him in the big things later.

Even though he recognised and understood this subtext Sam obediently swung his long legs over the side of the bed and wrapped a blanket around his lean tanned, California torso. He was still not convinced that rushing to embrace the new day at such an ungodly hour was a good thing; but even a no hope loser like him recognised that although his carefree life of surfing, busking, hanging out, bumming around on tour and in bars and clubs, and drinking and sunning himself on Santa Monica beach had gone down the plughole, along with the dreams, hopes, plans and lives of all the people who had died last night, he might just have landed on his feet.

He liked Judy even more in the daylight.

Her fair, straw blond hair was wild, and although her old lady’s night dress mostly concealed her pertly busty figure; she had a smile that reached inside Sam’s head and punched all the right buttons. He had thought she was taller, in bare feet the top of her head barely came up to his chin, which was cool because her hair smelled musky…

“Thank you for last night,” she said, fluttering her green grey eyes.

“Do I get to know the rest of your name?” He inquired, grinning.

“Judith Marian Dorfmann,” she replied. “That’s my married name.” She held up her ring finger. “I’m still married, remember?”

“How could I forget?”

Judy smiled that smile.

Kennedy. My maiden name was Kennedy. But if it’s all right with you I’ll go with Dorfmann until they’ve stopped lynching people called Kennedy at street corners.”

Chapter 26

11:15 Hours Eastern Standard Time
Sunday 28th October 1962
The White House, Washington DC

Nebraskan born thirty-four year old Theodor Chalkin ‘Ted’ Sorensen had become the then Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s chief legislative aide as long ago as 1953. Since then he had become the President of the United States of America’s special counsel, advisor and de facto acknowledged chief speech writer. Riding the runaway rollercoaster of JFK’s caravan for the last decade had been an exhilarating, frightening, marvellously disconcerting and fulfilling experience for the son of the Danish American former Attorney General of Nebraska who had graduated top of his law school class before heading East to seek his destiny.

The last twenty-four hours had been a nightmare.

Ted Sorensen had not slept for two days and being in the White House as the missiles flew, the bombers climbed high in the night and the damage and strike reports filtered in had been like helplessly watching a slow motion car wreck on a global scale.

Five minutes ago he had handed the amended final script of the Emergency State of the Union Address to the President; the eight minute long speech that everybody in the Oval Office hoped above hope would signal the end of the war, and go some way to calming the worst terrors of the American people. Only then could the rescue, recovery and disaster management programs envisaged under long standing, constantly updated civil defence and emergency disaster management protocols begin to be implemented.

First things first; they had to stop the bleeding.

Ted Sorensen was one of the Administration’s quiet men, discreet and forever at the edge of the frame in any picture in which he inadvertently appeared. However, everybody knew that he was one of the few irreplaceable gears in the engine room of the White House machine. Jack Kennedy had once referred to Sorensen as his ‘intellectual blood bank’. Sorensen was the man who had crafted Kennedy’s inauguration speech, the man behind the immortal phrase ‘ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’, which had so caught the imagination of not just America but of the whole Western World. No man had done more to create the Presidential aura around JFK than the unassuming, modest lawyer now blinking at the bright television lights from behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

The broadcast was being recorded for television and radio and the full text would be issued to the wire services and news organisations as soon as the taping was completed. Thereafter, the networks would re-broadcast the President’s message every thirty minutes on the hour and half-hour.

Ahead of the first broadcast all normal national network radio and television programming had been suspended to enable the transmission of emergency information, instructions and fallout warnings to the public.

Ted Sorensen knew Jack Kennedy as well, if not better than any man in the room other than the President’s younger brother, Bobby. The Attorney General was still in shock, walking around in a daze and there was a visible lack of ‘grip’ at the top of the traumatised Administration. Camelot lay in ruins around their feet and the one man who might walk in and knock a little sense back into the woolly heads and gut-sick inner circle around the President — Lyndon Baines Johnson — was currently orbiting Baton Rouge in SAM 26000, the flagship of the Presidential fleet of jetliners. On one level the fact that the Vice-President was airborne, out of reach of a fresh Soviet counter strike, made perfect sense. On another level, unless somebody manned up very, very soon in Washington the overnight disaster would, as inevitably as night follows day, begin to threaten the severely undermined stability and the unity of the nation. Nothing was as dangerous as a vacuum of power at the very top and this morning, the Administration seemed directionless, headless.

Terrifyingly, nobody seemed to know for sure whether the Soviets were so badly hit that they were incapable of fighting on. Among the Chiefs of Staff there was a lot of reckless loose talk about the possibility the USSR was ‘playing dead’ because that was the only way it could stop the pain.