Schwarzkopf liked and respected the ‘old man’ — Grabowski was a long-time reservist knocking on sixty who had had the honor to fight with Pershing in the Argonne in 1918 and with Patton in the breakout from Normandy in 1944.
“Everybody’s pulling out of town, sir,” he reported. “The folks coming up the hill from Milwaukee say all Hell broke loose in the city three or four days ago. It sounds medieval, sir. The story is that a lot of the rebels are religious nuts. Some of them wear red crosses on their chests. They round people up and read the Bible to them. The whole city was declared ungodly by something called the ‘High Council of the Lakes’. The refugees say that the city’s Wisconsin State National Guard battalion repelled the first attacks but then the rebels flanked its lines inland and on small boats out on the lake, and after that the local troops either surrendered or ran away. There are reports that the rebels shoot anybody they find in uniform. Cops, soldiers, even boy scouts. A couple of people have reported that armed men entered one of the hospitals and started executing patients but that can’t be right. Everybody we talk to wants to know where the Army and the Air Force is. OVER!”
“Did you say religious nuts, Little Bear?”
“Yes, sir. They drove into downtown Milwaukee in trucks fitted with loudspeakers quoting the Bible — the Book of Revelation — exhorting the faithful to point out the ungodly in their midst. As they advance they systematically loot and kill, and rape, they do a lot of that people say, and then they set fire to whole neighborhoods. It is almost like some medieval pogrom, sir. Over.”
“Who are they killing?”
“That’s the thing, sir. It seems random. When they first ran into the city’s defense line they pushed a crowd of women and children ahead of them. Sort of human shields, I suppose. I keep saying what I’m hearing sounds medieval, sir,” Schwarzkopf apologized. “The only think to compare it with in modern times may be the way the Red Army behaved in the latter stages of the forty-five war. The Soviets treated all women as spoils of war when the Red Army advanced into eastern Germany. It also puts me in mind of some of the stories that came out of DC last December. The bastards capture a district and call a halt so that they can rape all the women and young girls, kill the old folk and give teenage and fighting age men they’ve captured the choice of joining them in the raping and killing or being executed on the spot. We’ve got a bad situation out here. We’re pretty sure there’s a whole mess of rebels mixed up with the refugees coming out of the city.”
“What does Interstate 94 look like, Little Bear?”
“Not good, sir. There may already be fifty or sixty thousand plus displaced persons heading west. None of them have got food or water. We passed a lot of bodies on the roadsides getting here. The people who got out of Milwaukee got out in the clothes they were standing in… ”
“There’s nothing we can do for them, Little Bear,” Schwarzkopf’s commanding officer said sternly.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want prisoners. Can you get me some prisoners?”
“Roger that, sir!”
Schwarzkopf handed back the radio handset and stepped out into the rain.
“Everybody to me! NOW!”
He had sent three platoons forward to act as pickets, and kept twenty-three men back as a ‘fighting reserve’. The soldiers around him were National Guardsmen but not peace time reservists; he had only brought his hardest ‘hard cases’ on this expedition to Waukesha, each man with him had been in uniform ever since the October War and Schwarzkopf had had Company ‘A’ for the last four months. The men around him were real soldiers, and although several of them were a little long in the tooth for this kind of field work; there was no substitute for their accumulated combat experience.
Schwarzkopf ‘s ‘hard cases’ had all seen action in Korea, and several of them in the Pacific, or Germany in the Second War; in this particular company he was the only ‘rookie’.
“We’re moving forward until we eyeball the enemy!” He bawled as the rain began to hammer down again. Each man was already soaked, the downpour splashing off helmets. “We will join up with 1st, 2nd and 3rd platoons and form an extended picket line. If we hit major resistance or come under sustained fire we will withdraw. Top Dog wants prisoners but we’re not putting out heads in a meat grinder to get them. We’ll pull back around midnight and set up a checkpoint east of the town on Interstate 94 at dawn. We’ll roust out anybody suspicious. There are bound to be bad guys hiding in the crowds. Any questions?”
There were several questions; his men were professionals.
Schwarzkopf responded briskly, unhesitatingly. He made a couple of minor clarifications and checked again if everybody was on the same wavelength.
“Good! I don’t want anybody getting shot!” This he declaimed with a predatory grin. “Let’s get to it!”
Chapter 2
Unlike his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, sixty-three year old Clyde Anderson Tolson was something of a mystery to both the public and to Washington insiders. He was a Missourian hailing from Laredo who had moved to Washington DC in 1919. Remarkably, he had worked first as a clerk and then as a confidential secretary in the offices of three successive Secretaries of War; Newton D. Baker, John W. Weeks, and Dwight F. Davis.
In retrospect this had been an extraordinarily serendipitous insight into the workings of the Federal Government, given his later career as the sidekick and meticulous, protective right hand man and confidante of the nation’s premier gangbuster. While at the War Department Tolson had qualified to practice law at night school at George Washington University, graduating in 1927 and joining the FBI soon afterwards; since then he had — quite literally — been at Hoover’s side.
The two men drove to work together, vacationed together and ate together, practically living and working in each other’s pockets. Promoted to assistant director as long ago as 1930, Tolson had been with Hoover in 1936 to arrest the back robber Alvin Karpis, and in the same year had been involved in a famous gun fight with the notorious gangster Harry Brunette. He and Hoover had thrown the dragnet over the Long Island spy ring in 1942; and for as long as anybody remembered, Tolson had been FBI Associate Director responsible for discipline, budget and administration.
“Frederick M. Miller,” Tolson intoned through clenched teeth. His lowly pitched voice was loud in the small concrete room below street level beneath the three-floor FBI Albuquerque Field Office. “Aged forty-one. He won a Purple Heart at Iwo Jima. He had a wife and two young children.”
“Fred was a good guy,” the other man in the room observed mildly.
Whereas Tolson was attired in a crisply pressed business suit, his face shaved and his thinning hair slicked back, wearing brightly buffed black shoes; his hand-cuffed companion was unshaven, tousled, his face bruised, blotched. He had not washed for several days, his shirt was grime-stained — with both dirt and his blood — he stank like a raccoon and his shoes were ruinously scuffed. He also felt like shit but Tolson was beyond caring about little things like that.
“Karl E. Richter, junior… ”
“Eric was a jerk.”
Tolson looked up with murder in his grey hooded eyes.
The other, younger man shrugged.
“Karl Eric Richter,” Tolson continued. “Aged forty-three. Twenty years unblemished service to the Bureau. He leaves a wife and three children.”
“He was hitting on a kid in the typing pool at the San Francisco Field Office,” retorted the prisoner. “He always hit on the girls fresh out of typing school.”