The last time Caroline had been in Phoenix it had been a quiet place, off the beaten track; yesterday night it had been like a boom town. Its population was swollen by refugees from the north and a whole new suburb was being thrown up in the desert to the east. The racing enthusiasts, street and circuit fanatics who had come to town for the big event at the weekend had obviously stayed on in droves. If the Air Force had not booked her into a Spartan downtown hotel a week in advance she would have been out on the street all night!
She reminded herself that Phoenix’s revitalization was not untypical of this part of the country. After the war money and people had relocated to the peaceful, undamaged areas of the South and South West. For all the constant barrage of bad news about the so-called ‘Deep South’, Florida, southern Texas, and most parts of Louisiana and practically everywhere west of the Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri excepted, were desperately attempting to get on with business as normal.
Remarkably, moving from east to west by the time a traveler got to California they would be hard pressed to know that there had been a global nuclear war less than two years ago. It was not that the grief and the aftermath of the war was ‘localized’ — the areas hardest hit were big by any measure — it was simply that the North American continent was so huge that the war had left over ninety percent of the nation untouched. Now Americans were doing what they had done though out their history; migrating to where the work, the wealth, and the opportunities seemed brightest. Ordinary people had carried on making rational ‘adjustments’ to cope with the new realities of the land in which they lived. Americans had always migrated to where new horizons, where employment prospects promised a better future. That was after all, the essence of the American dream. Historians and political scientists were already comparing the post-October War upheavals with those of the post-Civil War period; it was natural, profoundly human for people to want to move on, to put the disasters of the past behind them and as in the post-1865 world the recent brush with Armageddon had prompted a new exodus to ‘the West’. Down here in Arizona the tragedy of Buffalo, Galveston, Seattle, Boston and Chicago seemed an awfully long way away; and as for apparent outbreak of widespread lawlessness in Illinois and Wisconsin, or the crushing of the small scale insurrection in Bellingham, well, that might have been going on in another universe.
Of course Phoenix was hardly any kind of exemplar of what the future might hold. Its recent boom was meteoric but self-evidently fragile. Every car nut in the South West descended on the city most months and the second running of the ‘Glendale Two Hundred’ had crowned Phoenix as the new Mecca of the ‘racing craze’ that had spread like a virus across the surrounding states. The travelling circus could move on in the blink of an eye; and then what would become of Phoenix’s overnight transformation?
Caroline tentatively straightened to her full height of five feet six inches. She had snoozed and slept most of the way to Phoenix, physically spent and mentally exhausted after what she already regarded — in fondly rueful hindsight — as her three day ‘quasi-psychotic episode’ in Berkeley.
Never had she been more mindful of taking a care what one wished for!
The Air Force Lincoln had parked close to but not in the shade of the ugly concrete control tower of the former Luke Air Force Base. Caroline looked around, sighed and carefully arranged her cap on her head. She took off her Ray-bans, pocketed them and walked towards the door guarded by two sweating military policemen.
At one point the ‘track’ came within less than fifty yards of the control tower. Five, six, and then a seventh car skidded around a long, tire-burning, sliding curve. Caroline had no idea how fast the cars were speeding; seventy, eight, ninety, a hundred miles per hour because they were a blur as they slashed past. Likewise, she had no idea how they kept apart, each driver knowing intuitively that the tiniest contact might be irretrievably, fatal, ending in a tangle of metal and possibly a fire…
The cars were past, hurtling into the near distance wheel to wheel, kicking up rooster tails of smoking windblown desert dust in their wakes like old fashioned speed boats ripping up the surface of a shimmering lake.
General Curtis LeMay, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was attired in greasy once grey overalls chewing a fat half-smoked cigar on the balcony of the control tower. The fifty-seven year old legend responsible for building Strategic Air Command into the sledgehammer which had bludgeoned the Soviet Union to within an inch of annihilation on the night of the October War, was waving his fists and bawling like everybody else at the rail. Every man in the tower stank of gas and oil, of leather and scorched rubber, each face was etched with smears of grease. Every man that was, apart from the immaculately uniformed Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel and his two guardian armed MPs who had Curtis LeMay’s nuclear football chained to his left wrist.
The press called it the ‘triple key’ principle.
Only the President could order a first strike.
If the President was dead or incapacitated the ‘football’ passed to the Vice President.
If the United States was attacked and the President and the Vice President were incapacitated, or dead, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff took the so-called ‘hospital pass’.
A lot of people had been asking themselves why the US needed nuclear weapons at all; but that was before the Red Army invaded Iran and Iraq and everybody discovered that Curtis LeMay’s boys had only done half the job on the night of the war.
Caroline Konstantis stood at the back of the baying mob.
She was in no hurry; had no place she needed to be. That was not to say that right now she would not rather be lying down, or sipping a Mojito in a darkened bar than standing, slowly beginning to broil in the desert sun in the middle of nowhere with a crowd of car nuts. Notwithstanding, she made a concerted effort to concentrate her faculties on the needs of the moment because Curtis LeMay was the last man on earth she needed on her case.
To most Americans LeMay was a fire-eating, cigar-smoking, red-necked martinet who was always the first man over the top, laughing in the face of death. He was Old Iron Pants LeMay, the man who had been Bombs Away LeMay, the gung ho commander of one of the first B-24 Groups in England in 1942, the Demon to anybody who got on his wrong side, or simply the Big Cigar to his airmen. But that was not the whole story; and LeMay, like any man was the complex sum of his many parts and hugely varied life experiences.
As a psychiatrist, LeMay professionally fascinated Caroline Konstantis.
Until she actually met him she had tended to accept the conventional wisdom, and to her chagrin taken him for what he had always seemed to be. He was the man who had prognosticated that a nuclear war was in some way ‘winnable’, and that if the worst happened it was his job was to bomb the Russians ‘back to the Stone Age’. He had acted as if he was an all-American ogre and she had fallen for the act.
In the eighteen months she had been his ‘pet shrink’ she had spoken to him — or more correctly, reported to him — about a dozen times. More importantly, true to his word he had taken her calls on each of the four occasions she had urgently needed to talk to him. The Air Force had its own internal medical services, a large posse of psychiatrists like her on tap; but LeMay had realized that was not enough. Seven months ago he had asked her to focus exclusively on the 100th Bomb Group survivors of the Malta ‘disaster’, and the fliers who had been duped into attacking British ships off Cape Finisterre just before the Battle of Washington in December, it was typical LeMay.