The man nodded, not knowing where this was going.
“Do something for me, Nathan. Please?”
The man’s eyes narrowed in confusion, his expression boyishly quizzical.
“How’s about you give yourself a break?” Caroline went on. “After what you’ve been through you were going to get angry sooner or later. I just happened to be standing in front of you when all that existential angst you’ve been bottling up for the last eighteen months exploded.”
Nathan Zabriski said nothing.
“Boom!” She added, for effect with what she hoped was a twinkle in her eyes. “All that’s happened is that I’ve got a few bruises in places I probably wouldn’t choose to have them,” Caroline went on ruefully, “and you feel shitty about it. That’s all that’s happened.”
Caroline put down her coffee mug on the floor. She reached out and took his hand, waited until her met her eye in the gloom.
“And,” she sighed, “I’m still here.”
Chapter 7
John Fitzgerald Kennedy put down the handset and stared distractedly out of the window at his left shoulder. The plan had been to get back on the re-election campaign back on track. The plan had been to rap the British over the knuckles at Hyannis Port, to underline his America First credentials in the way only an incumbent President can. The plan had been to return to DC in triumph, to tour the Pentagon and the great reconstruction works; the fanfare had been choreographed, and at dusk he was to deliver a rallying call to the nation from the steps of the Capitol Building. He was the man who had saved the United States. He was the great war leader who had vanquished his nation’s deadliest foes. He was now he was the only man to lead his people out of the slough of despond…
He had been working on that speech with Ted Sorenson as SAM 26000, the long-range Boeing VC-137 flagship jetliner of the presidential air fleet had touched down on the tarmac of Andrews Field. And then the call had come through.
There had been a brief window of the best part of twenty-four hours when he honestly believed the Cape Cod Summit had killed half-a-dozen birds with one stone, and that everything would turn out fine in the end. The British had handed over Jericho — in principle, not lock stock and barrel; that would have been too much to hope for — in exchange for the promise of economic aide down the line. It was a fair deaclass="underline" a new Marshall Plan in exchange for a cryptographic gold mine that would help to inform the peace feelers Secretary of State J. William Fulbright had been working on ever since the Red Army invaded Iran back at the beginning of April.
The President had worried if his state of the union address after the summit was overly condescending, gloating even, but all the telephone polling in the hours after the broadcast had been positive. A golden window of opportunity had unexpectedly opened, and he meant to drive a political cart and horses through it at a hundred miles an hour. He had planned to make a lasting peace with the war-weakened Soviet Union and to spend the months between now and the General Election in November thumping the America First tub; Vote JFK for peace at home and abroad!
However, at this precise moment he suddenly found himself contemplating the vagaries of law of unintended consequences. The plan had never been to stir up anti-British riots in Philadelphia. The United Kingdom Embassy in Wister Park had been bombed! Over fifty demonstrators outside the embassy compound had been killed and there had been over twenty casualties inside the embassy.
And now his soul was beset by a new, corrosive unease.
The bombing of the embassy was a sign, an omen and he was beginning to suspect that far from opening a road back to the White House in November all he3 had actually achieved, was to inadvertently release some terrible, vengeful genie out of a bottle.
Lyndon Johnson had warned him that Margaret Thatcher — no matter how politically wounded — would not simply lie down in front of the ‘fucking train’. In fact LBJ had been scornfuclass="underline" ‘You’ve met that goddammed woman; if you or Bobby tried to put your hands up her skirt she’d rip off your balls!’
Jack Kennedy and his Vice President had been falling out for several weeks by the time they had had that long-distance telephone call over a bad line just before the final President to Premier session of the Cape Code Summit. The rift had first opened when the decision was made to row back on the Moon Program, specifically the commitment to put an American on the Lunar surface before the end of the decade enabling the project to be run, and more importantly, funded, on a minimal care and maintenance level until further notice. Of course, no official announcement would be made until after the November elections. Then LBJ had got into a fight — more a bare knuckle brawl — with the Illinois-led Midwest ‘Governor’s Council’ over the handling of the ‘Chicago situation’. None of the Governors had wanted a ‘Bellingham solution’ to what they considered, for reasons best known to themselves, to be a straightforward law and order ‘problem’ in the bombed out northern districts of the Windy City. Their argument went something like: the potential for trouble to spread was too great and there had been enough bloodshed already; surely a policy of containment, blockade and ongoing negotiation was the best way to proceed? Sacking the only man who had the native gumption to crush the insurrection in Illinois quickly, if not cleanly, Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had pretty much been the final straw for Johnson.
The President had known that was a mistake at the time but unless he carried Ohio, Indiana and at least half the Midwest he was going to get buried in November. He had needed to keep the surviving Democrat caucus in those states onside…
Now northern Illinois and eastern Wisconsin were burning. Far from containing the ‘Chicago situation’ the half-way house solution of bottling up the contagion in Chicago had allowed the cancer to ferment, fester and in recent days, malignantly erupt. Thus far a Draconian news blackout had drawn a foggy veil over what had happened in Milwaukee in the last week; but sooner or later the people would learn that a second great city on Lake Michigan’s western shores had been overrun.
It was a nightmare.
Very nearly beyond credulity in fact…
A rabble of tens of thousands of ‘religious nuts’ had driven up Interstate 94 in a ten mile long convoy of cars, pickups, trucks and coaches into the middle of Milwaukee and like a deadly virus spread out and seized the whole city in less than a day. There were stories of mass summary killings, and of men, women and children being herded into buildings and burned alive, of unspeakable atrocities being carried out against women and children….
The Council of the Great Lakes…
‘If you order me to obliterate any place on earth I can do that, Mr President,’ Curtis LeMay had told him the day before the Hyannis Port ‘talks’ with the British, ‘that’s easy. I whistle up a couple of B-52 bomb wings and it happens sometime in the next twenty-four hours. But when you ask me to deal with what’s going down in Chicago and Milwaukee two months after you ordered me to go on the defensive and re-deploy sixty percent of my in theatre ground combat forces in penny parcels all around the South, I can’t deal with a popular insurgency involving ten, twenty, for all I know a hundred thousand rebels that’s spread across two states, just like that, sir.’