Gretchen had no intention of allowing the interview to meander into irrelevant areas.
“A little less polemic and a lot more facts would be helpful, Mr Christie.”
He ignored her.
“You didn’t react at all when I ran the name Mulders past you,” he observed. “But Gunther. You’d already heard that name, hadn’t you?”
Gretchen looked to her husband for moral support.
He shrugged as if to say ‘what’s the harm?’
“I was working for Justice last fall. The FBI applied to Justice to get access to all the papers the Air Force held on several apparent suicides involving its personnel in Colorado, and from memory, in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Shortly afterwards I had to leave the DOJ because somebody started spreading lies about me to the DC press corps.”
“Hoover and Tolson must have thought you were out of line.”
“At the time I thought they had a beef with my boss, Nick Katzenbach.” Gretchen’s face became a mask of concentration. “But now, I don’t know.” She let that hang in the air. “You think Galen Cheney had something do with the deaths of the Mulders and Colonel Gunther?”
“Yeah. Don’t ask me to prove it though. I know he murdered a Burroughs Corporation project manager, his wife and two young children on the night of the Battle of Washington. A guy called Carl Drinkwater. He was on duty at Ent Air Force Base, the headquarters of the air defense system on the night of the October War. He was the senior civilian contractor on site. I reckon that was why he and his family were targeted. Cheney killed Carl first, then the two kids. He raped Drinkwater’s pregnant wife, then he killed her, too.”
Gretchen and Dan must have been staring slack-jawed at their client.
“I might be a traitor, a Commie stooge, whatever,” Dwight Christie remarked philosophically. “I sure as Hell don’t agree with the system and I’d like to replace the government with something fairer. But you and I can talk about it, sit down like reasonable people. That doesn’t work with guys like Galen. He’s a monster and if you’re not with him, you’re against him and he’s going to come after you.”
He began to detail the nature of the monster.
“Cheney’s a bad hombre, an extreme ‘Revelationist’ like some of the zealots who were holding out in Chicago last winter.”
Gretchen’s curiosity spiked.
Her Battle of Washington ‘clients’ spoke, albeit with varying degrees of incoherence, of a ‘day of judgment being at hand’.
She tested if Christie was talking about the same syndrome.
“But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars — they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulphur.”
Dwight Christie nodded, a ghost of a smile touching his lips.
“Revelation twenty-one verse eight,” Gretchen told him. “Several of the ring leaders of the December uprising quote it in justification of their actions; they get offended when I ask them where exactly in Revelation, or for that matter the rest of the Bible, it says they are to rape women and girls to death?”
“Galen usually quotes Genesis to justify that sort of thing,” the former G-man countered. “Something about Adam’s rib and Man’s dominion, and how it was God’s commandment that women bear the seed of man. Like I said, you can’t argue with a rabid dog; you just have to shoot it and move on. That was pretty much what I had in mind when Mr Tolson’s boys caught up with me.” The man grimaced. “But that’s not going to happen unless you talk Tolson’s boss into cutting me loose.”
Gretchen thought about this.
Turning to her husband she decided: “I think we ought to invite Mr Tolson and Mr Lovell hack into the room, darling.”
Dan weighed this, looking into his wife’s eyes.
He nodded.
Chapter 23
General Curtis LeMay was the last of the Chiefs to arrive, his departure from Camp David having been delayed by his breakfast meeting with the President over-running by approximately forty minutes. Flying into what was the biggest naval base in the World, glimpsing the rows of flat tops, cruisers and destroyers moored along the four miles of docks and piers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had seethed at the parlous state of the nation’s armed forces.
The meeting with his Commander-in-Chief had gone badly, like most politicians President Kennedy talked up the numbers without accepting any of the caveats about what those numbers actually meant in terms of war-fighting capability. Last year’s ‘peace dividend’ butchery had torn the heart out of the Army and Navy. The programs to remobilize the first eighteen disbanded regiments and the re-commissioning of the initial tranche of eighty-seven mothballed ships, was only now gathering pace.
As for the Air Force…
Just thinking about it made him want to kick something!
His front line B-52 and B-47 Bomb Wings had been cut to shreds in the October War, and forty percent of the men who had come back had since been reassigned to ground duties, or had retired from the service. After the Administration had finished salami slicing his budget appropriations for the years 1963-64, 1964-65 and 1965-66 he had had to gut the Air Force. Somehow, he had contrived to hang onto a strike force of some one hundred and fifty B-52s but the B-47 squadrons had been scrapped, and two out of every three other aircraft in service grounded. Tens of previously ‘vital’ overseas bases had been abandoned, and the lovingly, expensively acquired infrastructure to support the planet’s most formidable aerial fleet left to wither on the vine. The Administration had cut too much too fast and the damage was structural; it would take several years to undo the self-inflicted wound.
However, in comparison to the other services the Air Force had got off relatively lightly. At least Strategic Air Command was still in a condition to take on the re-born Soviet menace. New Minutemen rockets and silos became operation every week and LeMay’s B-52s — although reduced by two-thirds in number since October 1962 — were still ready to go to war at the President’s command.
With the USS Enterprise in dock — the best estimates were that it would be another fourteen to eighteen months before she was fit to go to sea again — and four other big carriers barely retrieved from the Reserve Fleet, each one several months away from re-commissioning and as much as a year away from being combat ready the Navy only had the Kitty Hawk and the Independence around which to build and operate battle groups. Moreover, while the USS Midway and the Oriskany, the latter a minimally modernized World War II Essex class carrier less than half the size of the Kitty Hawk, were about to start shaking down and working up under-strength air groups, otherwise the Navy was hopelessly over-extended.
The Independence was the flagship of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean; the Kitty Hawk had taken most of the Seventh, Pacific Fleet, to the Indian Ocean. The US Navy had virtually no meaningful presence in the Atlantic or in most of the Pacific; worse, both Carrier Division Seven in the Indian Ocean, and the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean were basically, ‘on their own’. Sixth Fleet was operating with such a reduced ‘fleet train’ that it was confined to harbor most of the time; Carrier Division Seven was operating so far from ‘safe ports’ that it was entirely dependent on ‘friendly’ or rather, formerly ‘friendly’ countries in the region for re-oiling and the re-supply of basic provisions. Set against this inauspicious backdrop it was one thing for the Chief of Naval Operations to reflect that his nuclear submarine fleet had escaped the worst of the cuts; but what use were his submarines in the Mediterranean — where the British routinely ‘marked’ US boats with an anti-submarine frigate or one of their antiquated conventional diesel-electric ‘scows’ as they made passage through the Straits of Gibraltar — or in the constricted waters of the Persian Gulf or its approaches where the water was too shallow for ‘viable’ submerged operations?