James Philip
California Dreaming
To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it up in my own head. None of the fictional characters in ‘California Dreaming’ — Book 2 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ — is based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events described in California Dreaming — Book 2 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ — have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.
The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ is an alternative history of the modern world and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in some cases their words and actions form significant and substantial parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures, would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them on or after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always say in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it up in my own head.
“The war is over. We won… Or perhaps, we all lost. Either way, I will not kick a beaten enemy when he is down…”
“Kennedy. My maiden name was Kennedy. But if it’s all right with you I’ll go with Dorfmann until they’ve stopped lynching people called Kennedy at street corners.”
Chapter 1
There was no more securely or closely guarded and monitored compartment on the Ethan Allen class Polaris missile submarine USS Sam Houston — SSBN-609 — than the ‘radio shack’. Of course, the ‘shack’ was anything but ramshackle, and the equipment crammed into every conceivable corner of the small space adjacent to the control room was so state of the art that it was likely to remained classified for decades to come.
That afternoon — already two days out from Alameda, morning, afternoon, evening, day and night had already become purely notional concepts — the senior of the boat’s two radiomen, Petty Officer 2nd Class Warren Dokes, was on duty. Dokes was a veteran twenty-one year submariner, a balding, bespectacled man who looked much older than his thirty-eight years. His service file told of a spotless, if unremarkable career that reeked of quiet competence and reliability. Absolute technical command of his specialisation was taken as read or he would never have been posted as a senior radioman on an SSBN. Dokes was unmarried, the sort of man who hung around base during periods of furlough or designated R and R; preferring to play with new kit, or to shoot the breeze with other member of the communications fraternity. The man had never registered to vote in a General Election and had not returned to his place of birth, Chattanooga, Tennessee, since being drafted into the United States Navy in September 1942. His only family was the Navy and within the Navy, his clan was the Submarine Service.
Once a Polaris boat departed harbour on a ‘deterrent cruise’ it maintained total radio silence but it listened to everything as it stealthily prowled the ocean. At scheduled intervals the boat would rise to periscope depth and skim aerials close to or just above the surface, otherwise it would trail a great long thin short-wave wire aerial astern. At sea the USS Sam Houston listened hard to every scrap of radio noise, and if the worst happened, for the nothingness that might signify that the World had come to an end.
In the October War the USS Sam Houston’s Polaris A2 missiles had fallen in and around Leningrad and Murmansk before, with nine birds flown a Soviet destroyer had driven her deep under the broken pack ice of the Barents Sea. The war had been over before she escaped. The voyage back to Norfolk, where the boat had been routinely re-armed and re-provisioned had been a miserable, numbing experience; and the equally routine rotation of the Blue crew, taking over from the Gold crew which had fought in the October War had been like a ten-day long funeral, sombrely dispiriting. As the Duke of Wellington said after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo; ‘nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ Five in every ten men in the Gold crew had been replaced since that dreadful night over a year ago but still the melancholy stalked the USS Sam Houston. How could it be otherwise? America was a nation founded on high morals — albeit sometimes poorly executed ones — and it was simply not within the American soul to take pleasure from the cataclysm.
Warren Dokes — who had transferred to the Blue Crew that summer in a service-wide expedient to ‘refresh’ jaded complements and to spread the ‘war experience gained in the recent war more evenly across the SSBN Fleet’ had been onboard the USS Sam Houston that night in the Barents Sea, and like many of the men who still served, he had buried himself in his duties as an antidote to the indefinable feeling of vague unease that dogged his waking hours like an itch he could never scratch.
Petty Officer 2nd Class Warren Dokes was scrawling notes on a pad when the door behind him opened and he sensed the presence of others in the radio shack.
He cricked his neck turning around.
Automatically, he began to rise from his chair.
“Stand easy, Warren,” Commander Troy Simms, the commanding officer of the submarine drawled.
Dokes did as he was told.
The second man who had entered the radio shack was the boat’s Master at Arms, the senior non-commissioned officer on the USS Sam Houston. Both the newcomers were wearing side arms on their right hips, forty-five automatics. Dokes was briefly disorientated; there had been no alarm, the submarine was idling through the depths with the watch at normal duty stations and all was quiet. Yet the Master at Arms had dogged the hatch shut at his back.
Troy Simms dumped his large — over-large frame for a submariner — into the chair beside Warren Dokes. The forty-two year old commander of the SSBN hailed from New London, Connecticut. His great grandfather had captained a whale ship, his grandfather and father had been Navy men through and through, and the sea ran in his family’s veins. Command of the USS Sam Houston had been, and remained the crowning pinnacle of a more than averagely accomplished career in the Navy that had started back at Annapolis in 1939. The World had changed more than once in the intervening twenty-four years and Troy Simms was horribly afraid it was about to change again. However, the one thing a man accepted when he signed up for the Submarine Service was that no matter how bad things seemed to be at the time, they could always get worse.
“I need you to send a signal to CINCSUBRON 15,” Simms explained to his senior radioman.
Warren Dokes asked himself what had happened to the Communications Officer; but refrained from asking the question aloud. The Captain was God onboard any ship; and on a submarine at sea he was God with half-a-dozen special extra godly powers.