Now Schwarzkopf was relegated to a cot in a corridor of the State Capitol.
“Hey, buddy,” a familiar voice chortled ruefully. “Looks like you’ve got a ticket out of this town.”
Through the mists of fever the younger man realized his commanding officer was crouching by his cot.
“I’ll be okay in the morning… ”
“Some morning, maybe,” Brigadier Harvey Grabowski conceded grudgingly. “Just not any morning soon, Little Bear. We’ve got Navy Sea Kings incoming later tonight. I’m getting the Governor and his people out and as many wounded as the choppers will hold. You’re going out on the Governor’s aircraft.”
“Sir, I… ”
Schwarzkopf felt something on his chest.
“Don’t lose these. Dispatches from the front! Might not get anything out of here after tonight. Guard them with your life, Little Bear. Can you do that for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Schwarzkopf remembered being carried out into the night, the thrumming of rotor blades, the background crackle of light arms fire punctuated by regular heavier explosions, then being strapped down inside the darkened cabin of the helicopter.
A woman, or perhaps, a man was whimpering nearby.
There was a sharp needle prick above his thigh wound.
And after that he remembered nothing…
Chapter 50
The Attorney General walked into the room and halted, very nearly in mid-stride. Bobby Kennedy was as exhausted as everyone else — except Curtis LeMay because Old Iron Pants never got tired — but it was not the grey, leaden expressions on the faces of Administration insiders which very nearly stopped him dead in his tracks. It was his brother’s face.
Bobby had gone down to Washington yesterday afternoon after the Lincoln Memorial riots. He had visited the injured in hospital, met with and consoled his friend Martin Luther King and many of those who had lost loved ones. Seventeen marchers were known to have died, another thirty-nine were seriously injured, there were scores of walking wounded; at least twenty Washington PD personnel and Maryland State Troopers had been killed or badly hurt defending the marchers. Marines were still hunting down the murderers. The FBI was telling him that the Klan was behind the sustained attack and the subsequent sniping; disturbingly, the Marines were now reporting that prisoners claimed they had been paid by the Government to attack ‘the enemy within’.
J. Edgar Hoover had vehemently assured him that Philadelphia was tied up ‘so tight that if a bad guy farts we’ll shoot him!’ Bobby Kennedy had retorted: ‘Why the heck didn’t your people see the Washington attack coming?’
The Director of the FBI had reacted as if this was some kind of unfair, low blow. Before heading back to Philadelphia the Attorney General had spoken on the phone to Nick Katzenbach, his friend and deputy at Justice.
Nick was so wrapped up in the minutiae of the legality of the extraordinary security measures now choking the temporary capital city of the Union that he was effectively out of the loop, when it came to what was going on in the Midwest and in the Middle East. However, he had said that the reports from both these latter ‘problem areas’ seemed to be uniformly disastrous.
‘Perhaps, you’ll get the low down when you speak to Jack,’ the other man had suggested in weary exasperation.
Bobby had not been able to get the President on the line last night, or this morning before he set off for Philadelphia. In fact, getting anybody to come to the phone had become a huge problem in the last few days.
It was past noon by the time the Attorney General’s convoy had forced its way into the city, and nearly one o’clock when he got through the final White House security cordon and a Secret Service man escorted him down to the vault of the former Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank Building.
Curtis LeMay, a grey haired aide-de-camp, a one-armed veteran wearing 101st Airborne tabs, and Westy Westmoreland were the only military men in the Situation Room. Also present were the Secretary of State, J. William Fulbright, Robert McNamara from Defense, and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy. The emptiness of the room contrasted starkly with the lobby and reception area outside, which was a crush of flunkies and mid-level Administration staffers.
The President acknowledged his brother’s entrance with a raised hand.
“What’s happened?” Bobby Kennedy asked, not really wanting to know.
The mood in the room was… panicky.
It was Curtis LeMay answered his question.
“The British attacked the Kitty Hawk Battle Group south of Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs announced, pushing himself to his feet and beginning to pace like a Grizzly with grumbling ulcers. “Reports are coming in all the time but the Brits used nukes,” he vented a disgusted grunt, “and we think the Kitty Hawk is gone!”
Bobby Kennedy stared at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as if he suddenly found himself confronted by a madman with a felling axe foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog.
The President stirred.
“Bobby’s been out of town the last two days, General,” he said in a broken voice. “He won’t have heard what happened yesterday.”
The younger brother looked at his elder sibling.
Shock, fear tingled down his spine.
Jack looked like an old, dying man, hunched and diminished in his chair, lifeless and defeated.
“Jack, are you… ”
Curtis LeMay stepped between the brothers.
“Carrier Division Seven — acting in accordance with Presidential directives — attacked and destroyed the British carrier group in the Gulf around this time yesterday.” This the veteran airman barked angrily, brutally cutting across the brother’s fast waning empathetic linkage.
“We did what?”
Bobby Kennedy was starting to feel like he had walked into somebody else’s bad dream.
“Why the heck did we do that?”
The President attempted to sit up, slumped back.
“Because that was what the Navy thought I wanted,” he murmured, slurring the words. “Twelve hours ago the Russians demanded B-52 strikes against the surviving British ships in the Shatt al-Arab, British armor south of Basra and on British defensive lines on Abadan Island… ”
The Attorney General was struggling to get his head around what he was hearing.
“Did you say the Kitty Hawk was gone?” He asked LeMay, thinking he must have misunderstood what he had just been told. Everything he had just been told, or at least that was what he fervently hoped.
LeMay nodded sternly.
“Kitty Hawk, the cruiser Boston, other ships are damaged, several may be in a sinking condition.” He paused, gulped down a sharp intake of breath. “The Brits know how we fight. They know our weaknesses.”
This latter was voiced as an accusation to the room at large.
Bobby Kennedy realized belatedly that LeMay was scowling at Robert McNamara, who had removed his rimless spectacles and was cleaning the lenses with a small, dark cloth. Old Iron Pants had goaded his political master to step up to the plate.