‘You managed it in DC in December?’
“Mayor fucking Daley and his friends hadn’t tied my hands behind my back in December, sir!’ LeMay had been coldly civil, his voice grim.
Back in December Jack Kennedy — and many of those around him — had been convinced that LeMay was the man behind the attempted coup d’état in Washington. In the event it was LeMay who had ridden to the rescue of the union.
‘What can you do, General?’ He had asked the other man with thinly disguised exasperation.
‘I can order the units on the ground to fight and die to gain time, sir.’
‘And then what?’
‘If we’re lucky we only get to have a civil war in Illinois and Wisconsin, sir.’
This had been said with bland professional deference but lacked nothing in excoriating contempt. The President had disregarded the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee’s explicit advice in the spring and now they were reaping the whirlwind. The long and the short of it was that the Administration had betrayed the people of Milwaukee and all the other Illinois and Wisconsin towns which would soon fall under the evil cloak of the uprising; an uprising every inch as savage and merciless — albeit on a massively larger scale — as that which had ravaged the Capital in December. Jack Kennedy had no doubt that even as he sat, staring out of the window at the sun-blessed tarmac of Andrews Field where a Marine honor guard awaited his disembarkation, that innocent men, women and children were being driven from their homes, butchered in the streets, or were fleeing for their lives in their tens of thousands west of the Michigan coast. The fate of the women and girls who had fallen into the rebels hands in DC last year sent a shudder through his aching frame, and a red hot stab of disgust deep into what he still liked to call his conscience.
“Two bombs went off in front of the British Embassy,” Jack Kennedy said dully, looking across the table to where Ted Sorenson sat. “Most of the dead were demonstrators in the road outside the gate but there are a lot of casualties inside the compound… ”
“That’s bad, sir.”
“Premier Thatcher’s government has fallen,” the President went on, “and Ambassador Brenckmann has submitted his resignation.” At this his lips involuntarily quirked into a parody of humor. “Again.”
The oddest thing was that although his head still told him that there was everything to play for, notwithstanding the disasters in Illinois and Wisconsin in his heart he knew the game was over.
He had lost the confidence of the Chiefs of Staff; there would be no coup but in these days he needed the military at his shoulder, not standing a respectful pace adrift of the Administration.
His rift with Lyndon Johnson was irreconcilable; to LBJ talking to the Russians was one thing, reneging on the ‘Moon deal’ another but when he had been cut out of the crucial Party meetings leading to the abandonment of the spring offensive in Illinois his personal and political ‘line in the sand’ had been crossed.
The people at State promised that when Margaret Thatcher was gone there would be a ‘more amenable’ regime in England; that the British would again resume the role of an obedient client. The Lady had promised as much at Hyannis Port; perhaps, he ought to have taken her at her word and given her sufficient ammunition to fight off her enemies? Better a headstrong partner than a morally enfeebled ally; the former might fight to the death by one’s shoulder, the latter never.
The White House Head of Protocol knocked on the door and entered.
“It’s time to go, sir.”
The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America nodded and rose, like an old man, to his feet.
He knew he had made a dreadful mistake.
I ought to have made my peace with the British.
Chapter 8
Norman Schwarzkopf could not remember ever being this tired. He had been on his feet, on the move, awake for seventy-two hours straight and even his youthfully irrepressible constitution was wavering. He clambered down from the mud and dust caked Jeep and turned to watch the first of his M113 APCs jolt to a halt nearby. All the vehicles, all of his men, all of their kit and equipment, weapons and ammunition were caked in the Wisconsin mire. Either the heavens poured drenching monsoon waterfalls upon them, or a brilliant, burning, dazzling sun beat down upon the land. Off the tarmac of Interstate 94 the ground was impassably boggy for fifty to a hundred feet either side to anything but a tracked vehicle.
Schwarzkopf’s first taste of combat had been a sobering experience.
He had lost two men in the vicious fire fights which had broken out in the gently undulating fields east of Waukesha as they had fallen back to the north. Another of his men had been wounded when a man had stepped out of the trudging mass of humanity attempting to escape Milwaukee and opened fire with a pistol. Twenty miles east of Waukesha somebody had taken several pot shots at one of his M113s, rifle rounds pinging harmlessly off the monsters as their tracks ground purposefully west at a snail’s pace so as to not run down people on the road. His boys had blazed away with fifty caliber machine guns; afterwards nobody had known what they were shooting at.
Schwarzkopf made his report to his battalion commander, Lieutenant Harvey Colonel Grabowski.
“Six suspected rebels?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve done good, Little Bear!”
“Thank you, sir.”
“The Air Force is taking down all the bridges on all the roads out of Milwaukee,” Grabowski explained, taking the younger, much larger man by the arm and drawing him over to the map table. “The Corps of Engineers is blowing all the bridges this side of Waukesha.”
“There must still be thousands of refugees on the roads between Milwaukee and here, sir?”
“Yes,” Grabowski acknowledged tersely. “We believe the enemy is throwing out flying columns along every available road and track. At one level his tactics are infantile, amateurish, scattering his fighting power around like confetti. On another level, it’s exactly what we don’t want him to do. We want him to concentrate his forces and attack us so that we can destroy his fighting mass. What we do not want him to do — not least because we don’t have a feel for his real combat strength — is to get us chasing shadows in the countryside, splitting up our own forces.”
Schwarzkopf’s brow had furrowed.
If the battlefield had been the deserts of the Middle East rather than the hilly farmlands and woods of Wisconsin; he would have started making comparisons employed by Lawrence of Arabia during the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Turks by now. That was what this was; a massive regional insurgency using space and maneuver to challenge what, on the face of it, ought to have been impossible odds. Except, that was, that the forces in and around Madison amounted to no more than an under-strength infantry division rather than any kind of army, and the insurgents were potentially tens of thousands strong, sated and resupplied by the riches of a large, previously undamaged city, having plundered its food stores, fuel and munitions depots and recruited an unknowable number of new recruits.
Schwarzkopf gazed at the map.