Dwight Christie put his hands on his hips.
He said nothing, getting used to the knowledge that he got to live a little longer.
“You didn’t come all the way out here just to tell me my son was dead and my women were lost to me forever?”
Christie shrugged.
“I didn’t know if you’d heard about Mikey. A man has a right to hear such things from,” he shrugged again, “a friend… ”
Galen Cheney shivered, lay down on his back and stared at the canvass a few feet above his face.
“Maybe,” he grunted, unimpressed.
“Okay, I came here because I was ordered to come here,” Christie confessed, stuffing his hands in his trouser pockets. “The resistance has big plans for the fourth of July,” he explained, the merest quiver in his voice. “I’m here to make sure that whatever you’ve got planned doesn’t fuck up the party!”
Chapter 39
Sixteen B-52s of the 5136th Bombardment Wing had transferred to Ellsworth Air Force Base in the last eight days. Another twelve of the huge bombers, drawn from the 100th Bomb Group had flown into Offutt Air Base in Nebraska. Ellsworth was seven hundred and fifty miles from the heartlands of Wisconsin; Offutt a little over four hundred miles, comparative short ‘hops’ for the Stratofortresses of Strategic Air Command.
“Stand easy, resume your seats!” General Curtis LeMay bellowed long before he had reached the lectern and its microphone. That morning he had visited Offutt AFB, and delivered the speech he was about to give to the men of the 5136th.
Everything might be going to Hell but nobody would guess it looking at the The Big Cigar as he strode into the briefing hall. Command, leadership was not about shouting at people it was about winning hearts and minds, and looking the part in every possible way was a big part of that.
In point of fact Curtis LeMay was actually feeling a lot sunnier than he had any right to that afternoon. George Decker had been discharged from hospital in Joliet last night and returned to duty that morning. The Chief of Staff of the Army had sounded positively bullish during their twenty minute telephone conversation while LeMay had been in the air on the way to South Dakota.
Security at all headquarters had been radically beefed up since that kid had walked into Decker’s First Army communications room and set off a twenty pound bomb in his kit bag.
WRONG PASS or NO PASS got a man — or a woman — shot on sight now anywhere near any Army or Air Force base on the Chicago Front. LeMay blamed himself for not making that rule earlier but heck, what sort of World was it when teenage kids walked up to a group of men in uniform, or got on a bus or rail coach and blew themselves up?
The wave of bombings had caught them all by surprise but his ‘shoot on suspicion’ directive had reduced First Army’s casualty rate from its peak of around a hundred a day around the time of the Joliet bombings, to single figures in just a couple of days. The trouble was it was only a matter of time before people who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time got killed; but he would worry about that some other day.
Right now he was trying to fight a war.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff waited while the one hundred and fifty men in the briefing hall settled. After the disastrous compromising of SAC’s chain of command in December LeMay and the other Chiefs had exhaustively dissected the failed system of checks and balances, tightened up and modified key components of the operational ‘fail safe command protocols’ employed by US Forces everywhere in the global ‘combat sphere’.
Some commanders had caviled at the introduction of procedures specifically designed to make sure that the US military never again committed ‘mistakes’ such as those which had resulted in the bombing of Malta by the 100th Bomb Group, and the targeting of British warships in international waters by A-4 Skyhawks of the Spanish-based 219th Strike Squadron. Inevitably, the worst effect of those ‘blue on blue’ actions had been the most insidious; now any war order issued to anybody in the Air Force was likely to be viewed with extreme suspicion and if not questioned, then automatically passed up the chain of command for final ‘clarification’. ‘Local’ or even ‘regional’ discretion in the future use of US military force had been dramatically curtailed, and operation flexibility and adaptability severely curtailed. General officers in the field and admirals at sea were now bound by the absolute letter of their orders.
The politicians had ignored LeMay’s and the other Chiefs pleas and tied up American soldiers, sailors and air men in a veritable straightjacket because that was what happened when you were terrified of a second, catastrophic breakdown in the chain of command. The result of course was predictable; an officer could now, very easily, find himself being court-martialled, drummed out of the service and conceivably, thrown in prison for the sin of using what, formerly, the entire officer corps would have regarded as exercising native ‘common sense’ in a combat situation.
Henceforward, until or unless sanity prevailed the US military would operate under a regime in which everything was so precisely locked down — in positively anal detail and at inordinate length — that every situation was pre-ordained. A man’s orders would specify in the most unambiguous language when or not to open fire. Broadly speaking the operation conditions under which an officer could give the order to ‘open fire’ were few but nonetheless set in stone, in effect pre-ordained; whereas, in most other scenarios it was expressly forbidden to ‘engage the enemy’.
Under the new regime, Admiral Clarey, for the crime of ordering his ships to steam at flank speed towards the sound of the guns to defend Malta back in April would probably have been cashiered on grounds of reckless negligence. In similar circumstances now he would have been required to have obtained a pre-engagement authority from the Secretary of the Navy before issuing such orders to the fleet.
In other words the one operation which had done something — not a lot, but something — to restore the morale and enhance the reputation of the US Navy would probably never have happened, and Malta might have been occupied by the Russians, under Secretary of Defense McNamara’s recently issued ‘Securing the Chain of Command and Integrating Command Decisions Directive’.
Westy Westmoreland, McNamara’s Military Assistant, had sought out LeMay and discussed resigning his commission; LeMay had told him to ‘stick it out’. God alone knew what kind of yes man dolt or political soldier the bespectacled former President of the Ford Motor Company would bring in to replace Westmoreland if he moved on. Westy’s position might be invidious but many had been the times lately when the Chiefs of Staff and murmured silent prayers of gratitude to some Higher Power that there was at least one good man close to McNamara in the Philadelphia Pentagon.
Westmoreland had repeatedly told his political boss and others in the Administration, that the new protocols were a recipe for disaster. Yes, the nuclear protocols had been marginally improved by the changes; but in every other area of the nation’s armory it hamstrung decision making, built in structural inflexibility and severely limited tactical responsiveness in practically any likely battlefield scenario on land, at sea or in the air.
LeMay had decided he would deal with what was in front of him.
If that got him sacked well, that was too bad.