“I heard you, Bobby.” The two brothers were alone on the porch where a week ago Jack Kennedy had met Margaret Thatcher. The lady had known he was selling her down the river but she had come to Cape Cod anyway. It had been her duty to try to renew a failing alliance and to his dying day the President who had sent her home to face her enemies empty handed would wonder if he had made the second worst mistake of his life. “The situation in Wisconsin is out of control. I read General Decker’s report.”
“If we pull all those troops out of Mississippi and Alabama things will go to Hell, Jack!”
“Yes, I know.”
“You promised Doctor King… ”
“I promised Doctor King that the Federal Government would protect him and his marchers all the way to Philadelphia. I will do that. Just like when he walks up the steps of City Hall on 4th July I’ll be there waiting for him.” Jack Kennedy was rocking backwards and forwards in the old rocking chair as his brother paced restlessly.
Notwithstanding the seven-and-a-half years difference in their ages, their divergent temperaments and the fact that many men in ‘Bobby’ Kennedy’s position would have chaffed to have lived for so long in his brother’s shadow; the siblings were the heart and sinew of what remained of the fractious, dangerously dysfunctional Administration that had swept into the White House three-and-a-half years ago with such great hopes. Back in the spring of 1961 the World had seemed to be full of possibilities; now there was just the foul taste of disillusion in their mouths.
Out on Nantucket Sound a recently re-commissioned 1945-era destroyer quartered the seas, inshore two patrol boats mounting 50-caliber machine guns in their bows patrolled vigilantly. Beyond the nearby picket fence Secret Servicemen stalked, out of sight the landward perimeter of the compound was guarded by Marines.
Jackie was bringing the children back from Camp David tomorrow. At a time like this a man needed his family around him.
“Fulbright says Nasser has regained control of things in Cairo,” Jack Kennedy observed. “That’s good. If the Soviets had got their own people in power in Egypt God alone knows what would have happened next.”
Nobody in the Administration talked about the Red Army’s unstoppable progress south through Iraq to the northernmost shores of the Persian Gulf, or that the great refinery complexes — the biggest in the World — on British-held Abadan Island would soon be wrecked, or in Russian hands.
The post-Shah regime in Iran had pleaded for US support; the CIA had people ‘in country’ close to the ruling Junta, listening stations had been set up in the south and the option of sanctuary in the US had been extended to the leadership and their families. The fact that Carrier Division Seven — the mighty USS Kitty Hawk and many of the most technologically advanced warships in the world — was in the northern Indian Ocean had soothed the worst terrors of the Iranian ruling class, and for the time being prevented the Saudi Royal Family wholly casting their lot in with the British.
“CIA says the Russians may be behind the Chicago situation, Jack!” The Attorney General protested vehemently. “How do we justify sitting down with Dobrynin and Zorin when we know the bastards are stirring up a civil war in the Midwest?”
Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin had been Soviet Ambassador to the United States at the time of the October War. Valerian Alexandrovich Zorin was the man who had famously clashed with Adlai Stevenson in the Security Council of the United Nations in the lead up to the war. Both men had been held under house arrest ever since.
The President collected his thoughts.
“The CIA didn’t notice two Soviet tank armies massing on the borders of Azerbaijani Iran in the months ahead of the invasion in April,” he sighed. This was a debate he had already had with other senior Administration insiders including Bob McNamara and LBJ. The Secretary of Defense had eventually deferred to the ‘party line’ but Lyndon Johnson had told him to his face that he needed to get his ‘head out of his arse in a hurry!’
“Jack, that’s not… ”
“The CIA didn’t see the attack on Malta coming either, Bobby,” the older brother went on. “The truth is that none of us saw the Battle of Washington coming; and none of us really know what’s going on in the heads of the people we’re fighting in Illinois and Wisconsin. I should never have listened to Daley and the others back in the spring. In fact I shouldn’t have listened to anybody who said they understood what was going on in the Midwest!”
Bobby Kennedy opened his mouth to argue, thought better of it and leaned against the nearest porch balustrade. Although the gunshot wound to his left calf he had suffered during the attempt on Jack’s life in the Oval Office after the Battle of Washington in December had healed up, it still pained him sometimes.
“General Decker says purging so many National Guard units in the spring was a bad mistake,” Jack Kennedy went on. “He wants officers and men re-instated en masse with no questions asked. Even with the reserves previously allocated to the Middle East Expeditionary Force to draw on he says he doesn’t have enough men and that practically all the equipment he needs is in the wrong place. He says he can take out the TV and radio stations in rebel hands with air strikes but that won’t stop what’s going on leaking out. Not now. He’s formally asked me to authorize all measures short of ABC strikes.”
Atomic, biological and chemical weapons were off the menu.
Everything else was in play.
“Heck, Bobby,” he groaned, “we’re about to start dropping Napalm on our own people!”
Chapter 12
China Girl had once been a rich man’s plaything, a seventy-three foot brigantine rigged yacht built from Oregon spruce before the First World War. Legend had it that she had been moored off Coronado Island most summers in the roaring twenties but sometime in the fifties, thirty years after her glory days she had ended up moored, a half-forgotten hulk in Richardson Bay.
Miranda Sullivan’s brother, Gregory, had researched the history of the China Girl, and had shared the whole story with his ‘little sister’ more than once. Greg was the kind of outgoing, enthusiastic, unselfish guy who naturally assumed all other right thinking people shared the majority of his interests, fascinations and loves. Of her three ‘big brothers’ he was the sweetest by a country mile; the least driven and perhaps the only one of the four Sullivan siblings wholly lacking in personal demons.
Miranda had demons enough for both of them!
She had never really talked to anybody about the feelings she had had for Dwayne John. Everything had happened so quickly she was still coming to terms with their re-born relationship at the time of his death in Atlanta.
Her life had been fucked up a long time before she had had a drug-blurred one night stand with Dwayne on the night of the October War. They had both been in a bad place, out of their heads, and not seen each other again until he was illegally arrested in San Francisco by the FBI. She had been instrumental in getting him freed and after that things had sort of… just happened.