LeMay was in no mood to grant the Navy man time to catch up.
“Give me an update on what we know?”
“About an hour before sunset — Gulf time — the destroyers William V. Pratt and Dewey had shot down two aircraft approximately seventeen nautical miles north of the Kitty Hawk. At around that time the cruiser Albany launched two Bendix Talos long-range ‘beam riding’ surface-to-air missiles at other ‘incoming threats’. Simultaneously, two F-4s were engaged by air defense systems in the Abadan area, and forced to engage full reheat to escape out to sea.”
McDonald spoke calmly, unhurriedly, careful to stick to reported ‘facts’, avoiding embellishments or speculation.
“The cruiser Boston engaged the New Zealand frigate Otago — which had opened fired on the Pratt and the Dewey — with her main battery at a range of approximately fifteen miles. HMS Centaur’s other ASW escorts were on the Kharg Island side of the battle group at the beginning of the action. These two vessels — the anti-submarine frigates Palliser and Hardy — placed themselves between Carrier Division Seven and Centaur… ”
“Remind me what sort of firepower these British ships have?” LeMay demanded, badly wanting to establish more ‘context’ before he spoke to the President.
“Otago has two 4.5-inch guns. Palliser and Hardy just 40-millimetre AA guns.”
“And all our ships have five, six or eight inch guns? Lots of barrels?”
“Yes,” McDonald retorted tersely. “We think Otago had a Sea Cat surface-to-air missile launcher.”
LeMay was feeling gut sick.
“Jeez,” he groaned. He had never shirked a fair fight in his life but this was starting to sound like cold blooded murder.
“An A-4 Skyhawk was shot down; most likely by one of the Otago’s Sea Cat missiles. The Dewey and the Pratt subsequently engaged Otago until she was dead in the water. The Boston closed the range with the Centaur. Centaur,” he went on, “held her course and continued to launch aircraft until Boston scored several hits on her and at least one of Kitty Hawk’s A-6 Intruders hit her with a free fall bomb. A subsequent attack by A-4s sank Centaur approximately forty minutes into the engagement.”
McDonald hesitated.
“It seems that in the heat of battle Centaur’s ASW escorts — Palliser and Hardy — were able to close the range with the Kitty Hawk and launch an unknown number of torpedoes before they were intercepted and destroyed by gunfire from the destroyers Towers and John Paul Jones. Kitty Hawk was subsequently hit by a single torpedo on starboard side aft.”
The Chief of Naval Operations was frowning.
“What?” LeMay demanded.
“Nothing, it’s just that according to the reports I have Kitty Hawk turned away from the torpedo attack; standard operating procedure is to turn towards such an attack. A ship’s bow is inherently less vulnerable to potentially crippling damage than its stern and its rudders and propeller shafts.”
McDonald moved on quickly.
“Currently the destroyers Lawrence and Du Pont are in the process of arresting the British fleet oiler Wave Master, some miles closer inshore to Kharg Island. The oiler’s escort, a minesweeper, is unaccounted for at this time.”
“Jeez,” Lemay breathed in exasperations. “How many people were there on those British ships?”
An aide handed the CNO a sheet of paper.
“Centaur’s war complement was around fourteen hundred men. Palliser and Hardy about a hundred and twenty each. Otago, over two hundred.”
He was handed another message sheet.
“The nukes over Iraq were air bursts,” McDonald confirmed, not looking up, “north west and south west of Baghdad at ranges beyond which any damage would have resulted in the city… ”
LeMay froze.
In that split second he understood exactly what was going on in Iraq and realized that his country had just intervened in the Gulf at precisely the worst possible moment. He remembered the night of the October War; the way things had spiraled out of the control, assuming a disastrous, unstoppable momentum which had carried them all to catastrophe.
“Halt all air activity in the Persian Gulf except reconnaissance and electronic surveillance.”
“That will leave Kitty Hawk vulnerable… ”
“If the President wants to go to war with the British and the Soviets that is his prerogative; we’ve probably already started World War Four but just in case we haven’t, I don’t plan on getting the blame for it this time!”
Chapter 47
There was of course, no such thing as ‘the resistance’ and there never had been. Or if there had been, nobody had told Dwight Christie about it.
Dwight Christie had been working for the Russians — the KGB — for years but he had never come across anything that suggested that anybody in the US was capable of tying together anything remotely resembling a nationwide anti-government coalition. His FBI interrogators might have been so hung up with something called ‘Red Dawn’ that they actually believed that there was ‘a resistance’; he reckoned that the main ‘anti-Federal’ groups loosely banding together to violently oppose ‘the government’, were primarily religious or just plain criminal, or in some cases, crazies like the unholy coalition of white supremacists, nut jobs, Nazis and religious zealots who formed the core of Galen Cheney’s little sect.
But what did he know?
All he really knew about what was going on in the Midwest was what he read in the papers or heard on the radio or TV; he just assumed that nut jobs like Galen Cheney and his disciples were the sort of whackos who would be involved in the mayhem going on in Chicago, Milwaukee and Wisconsin. All that ‘end of days’ shit sounded right up their street!
Even the women in the camp seemed infected with the same poison… hate. The guys around Cheney hated everything; it was like they all wore some psychological latter-day mark of Cain. They hated blacks, Democrats, Republicans, people who did not share their literal comprehension of the Bible. They talked about ‘taking’ the ‘country back for decent folk’ but what they actually meant was going back to the good old days of burning witches. Destroying their enemies, scourging the ‘evil-doers’ from the face of the Earth was all they cared about; the useless bastards could not even feed themselves without raiding — stealing, wasn’t there something about that in the Bible? — neighboring communities. No, thieving from unbelievers was not, apparently, any kind of sin.
On the plus side these idiots seemed to have swallowed the ‘resistance’ baloney hook line and sinker. Unfortunately, it turned out they already thought they were ‘the resistance’ and they had no intention of letting the ‘other resistance’ tell them what to do.
All things considered Dwight Christie drew little or no comfort from having successfully ‘sold’ his captors on the big lie. Left to his own devices his thoughts wandered while he waited for the end.
Yes, the Soviets had stirred the pot before the October War, made it easier for a small number of the disaffected to coalesce into viable short-lived ‘subversive’ cells; but as to there being a guiding hand behind the anarchy in the Deep South, or the secessionism of the West Coast states, or the rebellion in the Midwest well, heck, initially most of that was just down to people behaving badly because the Federal Government was too weak to do anything about it. When good men — and their governments — failed to stand up to evil very bad things always happen. But that was not what the FBI had wanted to hear, and it certainly wasn’t what Galen Cheney and his crazies wanted to hear either. Telling the FBI what it wanted to hear went against the grain and it only encouraged the Agency to be even dumber.