She had wanted to mother him and ended up being his lover…
“I worry about Nathan too, sir,” Caroline muttered guiltily.
The man nodded, giving not indication that he was aware of the woman’s sudden, albeit fleeting, loss of composure. He was in a rare reflective mood, sucking his teeth and staring over her shoulder, briefly lost in thought.
“Until the war,” he guffawed ruefully, “I was planning to retire,” he hesitated, decided to continue, “I wasn’t slated to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs back then, and going racing seemed like a good idea at the time. Then the Cuban thing blew up and well… ”
Caroline Konstantis smiled a forced smile.
“Life is full of surprises, sir,” she agreed.
Chapter 14
The Wisconsin State Capitol was the tallest building in the city. It sat astride at the south western portion of the Madison Isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, west of the Yahara River which cut the isthmus in the north east to link the two lakes.
A great two hundred and eighty-four feet high dome sat atop the fifth state capitol, the third to have stood on the modern site.
The first capitol was a wood-frame house in Belmont lacking any modern amenities in which the state’s founding fathers had congregated, and after forty-two days of deliberation had designated that town as the temporary capital of the then Wisconsin Territory, and Madison as the prospective location of the permanent new capitol. Thereupon, the state’s founders had decamped to Burlington, Iowa — the home of the second ‘Wisconsin’ capitol — until such time as Madison was ready to accommodate a state legislature.
The third capitol was erected on the site of the current building; a small oak and stone frontier building with a price tag of around $60,000. This was superseded by the construction between 1859 and 1869 of a building reminiscent of the US Capitol in Washington, which was further extended by the addition of two wings in 1882 and a cost of over $900,000.
It happened that a large part of this — the fourth — capitol was burned down on the night of 26th February 1904; some five weeks after the wise and sagacious men of the state legislature had voted to save money by the nifty expedient of cancelling the capitol’s fire insurance. Fire fighters had come from as far away as Milwaukee, to no avail because when the flames died down only the north wing of the fourth Wisconsin State Capitol had remained standing.
Notwithstanding that it was no longer a frontier state, Wisconsin had responded to this disaster with true ‘frontier grit’. The present magnificent capitol had defiantly arisen from the ashes of the old building between 1906 and 1917 at a cost of $7,250,000. Constructed from over forty different types of stone quarried in six countries — the outer cladding of the capitol was Bethel white granite from Vermont ensuring that the dome became and remained, the largest granite dome in the World — it was designed to be a statement that the wealth of the state depended upon its trade with the globe and the rest of the US via the Great Lakes. Internally, the capitol’s floors, walls and columns used marble from Tennessee, Missouri, Vermont, Georgia, New York, and Maryland; and granite and limestone from Minnesota and Illinois. Marble had been imported from as far away as France, Italy, Greece, Algeria and Germany. Granted that construction might have been phased over a decade but no cost had been spared in the materials worked into Madison’s greatest monument.
The State Capitol accommodated the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Office of the Governor and both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature; and since a week ago, the forward Headquarters of the 32nd Infantry Division — only the leading elements of the unit, presently being thrown together outside Minneapolis had reached Madison thus far — under the command of forty-five year old Major General William Bradford Rosson.
Rosson’s predecessor, Brigadier Jacob Sinclair, a competent, fifty-four year-old whom he had briefly served under in Sicily in 1943, had been badly injured when the Jeep he was travelling in had overturned a week ago; and when Rosson had arrived in Madison he had had no idea things were so bad. Not that it had taken him overlong to form a detailed tactical appreciation of situation. The shit had not so much hit the fan in front of Madison as hit it, gone through it and splattered everywhere around the city out to a radius of at least fifty miles either side of it.
Thus, when he rose to his feet as Governor John Whitcombe Reynolds and his senior staffers walked into the cramped situation room he saluted the newcomer with weary gravitas.
“Why has the evacuation been halted?” The Governor of Wisconsin demanded, seething with impotent anger.
Fifty-three year old Reynolds had been his state’s Attorney General before running for governor. Born in Green Bay he had returned home from four years war service to study philosophy and law, later holding a position as a director of the US Office of Price Stabilization, and serving as US Commissioner for the District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Reynolds was a very well connected Democrat, a senior man whose calls members of the Kennedy Administration invariably took. He and Rosson’s predecessor, Jake Sinclair had worked together tolerably well but unlike his predecessor, Rosson did not have the time or the inclination to waste stroking the Governor’s ego.
Rosson had won a Distinguished Service Medal for velour at Anzio. He was one of those soldiers who just looked soldiery all the time, whether at rest, at play or on the parade ground. His battledress fatigues became him and he exuded a stocky teak hardness.
“Overnight we lost contact with our ‘tripwire’ pickets at Janesville and Fort Atkinson,” the soldier explained tersely. “That means the rebels have cut Interstate 90 to the south of us. A company of the 101st Airborne is keeping Interstate 90 open north of the city at Deforest, but we cannot discount the possibility that the highway may already have been cut farther north… ”
“You must keep those roads open, General.”
Bill Rosson was in no mood to take orders from a civilian who had ignored his repeated blandishments to prepare the civilian population of the state capital for evacuation until, tragically, it was too late. Perhaps, thirty to forty percent of the people of Madison had left under their own steam; the rest of the citizenry would have to stay for the duration.
The soldier shook his head.
“Route 14 doesn’t go anywhere and I don’t have any transport to spare for civilian traffic. Route 18 is now reserved for military use. Sooner or later the enemy will envelope Madison; I need to get as many supplies, food stuffs, medicines, and most of all, bullets, into the defended perimeter before that happens.”
“Why aren’t you doing anything to re-open the corridor to the north?”
Rosson took a deep breath and counted.
One thousand and one.
One thousand and two.
One thousand and three.
Madison was going to become a battleground and the idiot standing in front of him had done everything he could to ensure that tens of thousands of civilians would be trapped within it. Those civilians represented thousands of useless mouths that Rosson had no way of feeding; men, women and children who would have to fend for themselves in the coming days because Governor Reynolds had refused to take any of the hard decisions that had needed to be taken in the last week.
The evidence accumulating from the ongoing interrogations of captured rebels — not to mention the insane ranting of men who claimed to be ‘members of the Supreme Governate of the Great Lakes’ broadcast on local FM radio channels — left little doubt as to the nature of the storm beginning to lap around the city’s defenses.