There was a pause of several seconds.
Bernard Clarey was choking on the words he needed to say.
“Affirmative, sir. I acknowledge receipt of the order and confirm that I will execute it to the best of my ability in the interests of avoiding further bloodshed.” He collected his wits. “This is the saddest day of my life, David.” Another hesitation. “God save America… ”
Chapter 53
Galen Cheney had led his small band of followers out of the forest on foot to where in a barn behind a gas station on Highway 206 Dwight Christie was hand-cuffed to a bench in one of two, truly ancient, school buses. Both vehicles were Blue Birds built in Fort Valley, Georgia. The yellow paint on the buses was flaking, chipped, peeling off and the rust underneath had eaten through the bodywork in countless places. The former FBI man was astonished when both Blue Birds’ engines eventually fired up, one on only the third attempt.
Predictably, Galen Cheney had not thought allowing him to ‘warn’ the resistance — even to pass on the information that Cheney had no plans to attempt to assassinate Dr King or anyone else in the vicinity of City Hall tomorrow afternoon — was a very good idea. The thing that surprised Christie was that having come to that decision the mad sonofabitch had not yet put a bullet in his brain.
The two busses had driven north west up Highway 206, picked up the 295 outside Trenton and headed north, then followed the Delaware Expressway south east to cross the river at Scudder Falls before heading west on twisting country side roads, eventually parking up in woods on the eastern side of a long narrow lake.
“Where are we?” Christie had asked when Dan, the military looking man who had ‘captured’ him in the Wharton Forest released his cuffs and pushed him ahead of him out of the bus.
“Peace Valley,” the other man said. “Galen said for me to watch you all the time. Any funny stuff and you get a bullet in the knee.”
Okay, a man liked to know where he stood…
“I’m on your side, you know,” Christie complained mildly.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Galen told me what you did to your FBI buddies back in Berkeley.”
Christie had counted eleven men — including Dan whose surname he had learned was ‘Weaver’ — of whom only three; Galen Cheney, his son Isaac and Dan, had actually spoken to him in the time he had been held at the Atsion Lake camp. Two of the other eight were kids, younger than Isaac, under twenty. At least three of the remaining ‘nuts’, anybody who signed up for anything Galen Cheney was involved in was a certified ‘nut job’ in Christie’s book — were older, ex-military men like Dan Weaver, each in their late twenties or early thirties.
“You were in the Solomon Islands in the Second War?” Christie asked his minder.
This drew no response.
“My brother was killed on ‘the Canal’,” he went on.
“A lot of good Joes were killed on those fucking islands,” Dan Weaver growled. “Galen said you were back home all the time?”
“I spent most of forty-three, four and five investigating crooked contractors gouging the War Department,” Christie responded quickly. “But nobody wanted to know about that. That’s why I decided to do something about it.”
“Work for the fucking Commies?”
That was predictable; most religious nuts tended to believe socialism and original sin were the same thing.
“My brothers died so that war profiteers and congressmen could get rich. I’m no fucking Red!” Actually, Dwight Christie had never considered himself remotely ‘un-American’ either. “Hell, it wasn’t so long ago that Galen was going after the same assholes I was going after!”
Weaver halted, looked to the sky in the east.
“Storm coming this way,” he observed with the quiet sagacity of a country boy chewing a straw.
The plan was to swing a canvass awning between the two busses and light a fire to cook an evening meal. Christie had noticed ‘the brethren’ were sticklers for three square meals a day and he was curious to discover how they would cope without their women cooking, fetching and carrying for them.
The answer was: dismally.
Everything that had been unloaded from the busses was inundated when the great thunder storm swept across the green Pennsylvania countryside, and most of ‘the gang’ were soaking wet by the time Galen ordered everybody back into the Blue Birds.
There would be no ‘proper’ meal tonight.
Biscuits, brackish water, a mouthful or two of hard, stale bread and a hungry night before the morrow’s great work; whatever that work was. Around Christie the other’s cleaned their weapons by candle light while Galen Cheney sat alone in the other bus, presumably communing with his God.
Each man had a couple of Second War pineapple-type grenades and either an M-1 carbine or an M-16. There were only three of these latter modern assault rifles. Isaac Cheney had two rifles, one a long barreled Mauser, the other a modified, probably very old .303-caliber Martini-Enfield. This second rifle had been a favorite sniper’s weapon right through the First War because of its accuracy and lightning fast firing mechanism. Galen Cheney had his .44 Magnum and of all things, a Second War vintage Tommy Gun.
Soon after it was fully dark Christie was hand-cuffed again to a bench seat while the whole ‘gang’ trooped obediently into Galen Cheney’s command bus.
Christie half-expected them to start singing hymns or psalms, instead they talked awhile among themselves, the lights went out and he was left alone in the darkness wishing he had taken a leak before the bastards had chained him to the seat again.
Chapter 54
The Secretary of Defense had sent his Personal Military Assistant, General William Westmoreland to ‘brief’ Lyndon Johnson at his official Walnut Street apartment at two in the morning. Until then the Vice President had been completely locked out of the loop; playing the same guessing games everybody else — and the rest of the Administration — was playing.
Walter Cronkite had broken the news of the sinking of the British light carrier HMS Centaur in the Persian Gulf yesterday evening. He had signed off with the words: ‘May God be with us. Ted Sorenson, the President’s spokesman has assured the nation that quote; the President is in control. We all pray that he is right… ’
Putting Sorenson in front of the microphones and cameras had been a bad idea. That was not what Ted was good at. The fact that he had been rolled out to take the flak was indicative of the monumental scale of the crisis.
Johnson had got straight on the phone and started trying to piece together what was really going on in the Gulf and then he had started hearing the sort of rumors that were so bad that they almost certainly had to be true.
“The President is unwell, sir,” Westmoreland had said straight away. “We need you at the White House, sir.”
‘Westy’ Westmoreland was of the new generation of senior officers who was as much a corporate executive in uniform as a hard ass in the Patton or Vinegar Joe Stilwell model. Unlike so many of his peers he was a natural communicator and got on well with practically everybody, even when he was telling them exactly what they did not want to hear.
‘We have lost control of events in the Persian Gulf,’ he told Johnson the moment the limousine door had shut and the car, convoyed by several black Lincolns full of Secret Servicemen and escorted by two Jeeps mounting 50-caliber machine guns headed south for City Hall and South Broad Street.