Dobrynin had been brought to City Hall to confer with President Kennedy; he did not know what to make of the Vice President’s arrival or his obvious hostility.
“Forgive me, I… ”
“President Kennedy is fighting for his life in Thomas Jefferson Hospital. He was taken ill at the White House earlier this morning. I only learned the substance of the matters under discussion by our two governments in the last few hours. You need to tell your government that I will respect the agreed provisions concerning a five-year bi-lateral non-aggression pact between our countries on condition that there is an immediate cease fire in the Persian Gulf by all parties.”
Dobrynin opened his mouth to speak, shut it again.
Lyndon Johnson was not negotiating with him he was dictating terms.
“Soviet forces in Iran and Iraq will unconditionally disengage and withdraw to the 31st Parallel.” The Vice President was leaning towards, and a little over the shorter man. The ‘treatment’ had only just begun. “That’s LATITUDE THIRTY-ONE DEGREES NORTH,” he reiterated. “Just so we understand each other. That movement needs to start happening sometime in the next four hours or I will order the Strategic Air Command B-52 wings already airborne in the region to bomb your forces, and if necessary, what’s left of your miserable fucking country back to the Stone Age!”
Dobrynin suddenly had ice in his veins, freezing his spinal cord and momentarily robbing him of the capacity to reply.
“Do we understand each other, sir?”
Chapter 56
Lord Franks put down the phone and looked to his deputy, Sir Patrick Dean and the two women in the room. His wife Barbara smiled supportively, Rachel Piotrowska frowned an unspoken question.
The chanting of the gathering crowd — already perhaps two or three thousand strong in the nearby park — battered the closed windows of the Embassy. The mood of the protestors was ugly and the taint of tear gas pervaded the whole compound. The Philadelphia PD had cleared the street at the front of the building and cordoned off the road for two hundred yards in either direction; more National Guardsmen had arrived to form a long line of rifles behind the hard-pressed riot police in the park.
“There is no fresh news from the Thomas Jefferson Hospital. President Kennedy remains gravely ill. His wife and children are flying up from Camp David and apparently, Archbishop Krol has been called to his bedside to be on hand should it become necessary to administer the last rites.”
The British Ambassador rose stiffly to his feet and walked to the window; the others gravitating to his side.
“Vice President Johnson has mandated a cease fire in the Gulf and he is prepared to back it up with whatever force is necessary. This has already been communicated directly to England and he asks that I do whatever is in my powers to persuade our government to ‘play ball’.”
He looked to the Chargé d’affaire.
“Would you please be so good as to set up a link to Oxford please, Patrick?”
The other man nodded, patted the Ambassador’s arm supportively and departed.
Down in the basement papers were being fed into two old wood-burning stoves, the smoke from the half-blocked old forgotten flues was drifting west towards the city on the light afternoon airs.
When full realization of what had happened in the Persian Gulf and the fact that the US Sixth Fleet had been surrendered into British hands without a shot being fired, America would briefly, be shocked and then monumentally enraged. Nothing was quite so corrosive to human reason than communal humiliation; there would be calls for revenge, to lash out and never had the US been more of a dangerously wounded behemoth. That even now its hamstrung military — fighting a brutal war in the Midwest, mutilated by savage budget cuts, its once great Navy smashed and interned half-way around the World — still held the balance of global nuclear terror in its mighty hands.
The British Ambassador had spoken emolliently to Lyndon Johnson, promising to work for peace but in his heart he knew that whatever bonds had once tied the old and the new World were probably fractured beyond repair in his lifetime. All that could be hoped for was that somehow, in some way the war in the Gulf could be prevented from spreading. It mattered not who had betrayed whom; less still who had fired the first shot. Thousands of British, Commonwealth and American lives had been lost in the last two days in an insane undeclared war between former allies.
The facts as to what had happened would emerge, piecemeal in the coming days and weeks; the reasons why might never be fully established.
“What is there to stop Johnson attacking us anyway?” Rachel asked quietly.
Chapter 57
Something dreadful had happened. Something dreadful on the scale of Pearl Harbor or the fall of the Philippines in the winter of 1941-42; something so bad that even before people knew what was actually going on, that it was going to scar the nation’s psyche for a generation. There had been two great naval battles in the faraway Persian Gulf, one a bloodless victory and then a second which nobody was pretending had been in any way bloodless, or any kind of victory. A day or two ago the oilfields of the cradle of civilization had seemed an awfully long way away — they could have been on a different planet for all most Americans cared or knew — but today the distant battles felt as if they had taken place in Hampton Roads. The all-pervasive unease was visceral, something one could almost touch and yet Americans were doing what they always do at times of crisis; complaining, speculating and carrying on with business as normal.
Or that at least was what the Dan and Gretchen Brenckmann had decided to do. They had VIP, ring-side tickets for the biggest game in town and no matter that any time soon the US and the USSR might be lobbing thermonuclear hand grenades at each other — most likely with the British in between the heavyweights busily dropping bombs on both sides — they were going to be at what, on any other day, had the makings of being one of the most historic events in the whole story of the Republic.
This was the day that the President of the United States signaled to the World that Abraham Lincoln’s century-old emancipation of the slaves meant that every man, woman and child in America was as free and as equal under the sight of the law as any other.
Big scaffolding stands had been erected flanking the steps of City Hall in such a way as to not obscure the line of sight down Market Street. There had been a huge debate about ‘which’ City Hall steps ought to host today’s jamboree, in the end Congress had determined that since the largest available ‘open space’ in the surrounding otherwise build up and enclosed cityscape was on the west side of the great building, that was where the crowds would be channeled and all the ‘speechifying’ would take place. Everything had been done in a frantic rush even though everybody knew that the March on Philadelphia had been due to reach the makeshift capital on Independence Day over five months ago.
‘But,’ as his wife had told Dan Brenckmann more than once in recent months, ‘what do you expect if you leave it to our lawmakers and legislators to organize anything.’