There was a helicopter waiting for Katzenbach and his small party at McChord Air Force Base as the chartered Pan Am Boeing 707 came to a halt on the rain lashed tarmac. The United States Deputy Attorney General tried not to flinch as the rain drove into his face when he emerged from the jetliner. The rain was no more radioactive than it had been before the war — give or take an incremental increase in the general background radiation level on a par with that caused by unrestricted atmospheric testing in the seventeen years before the October War, or so some scientists claimed — but some days the rain just felt wrong. Katzenbach knew he was being irrational; but the sensation of unease lingered. Perhaps, parents were intrinsically less rational about these things. He had children approaching early adolescence and often he asked himself what sort of World he and his contemporaries were bequeathing future generations.
The conference began the moment Katzenbach walked into Governor Rosellini’s meeting room in the Washington State Capitol Building. Hands were shaken warmly, and excessively civil and respectful greetings exchanged. And then the supernumeraries were asked to leave and the gloves came off with a vengeance.
“If you’ve come all the way from Washington to slap our wrists and to tell us we’ve been naughty boys,” Albert Rosellini declared bluntly, “forget it. The only way we still know the Administration exists in this state is because the IRS keeps sending letters to people who’ve been dead a year!”
Katzenbach forced a grimace as the players settled around the big oval table in the middle of the room, overhead the ceiling arched imperiously from marble-faced columns half-sunk into the cathedral thick masonry walls. A metaphor involving cathedrals was as apt in connection with this state capitol building as with the majority of such buildings across America; such buildings had been conceived and executed by the fathers of the Republic as great temples of freedom, monuments to an unreasoning, blind faith in democracy and a future that had seemed to them so full of limitless promise…
The United States Deputy Attorney General looked to Governor Brown of California. Pat Brown and Al Rosellini were broad, bespectacled men, Party stalwarts and gifted administrators who in former times had been bedrocks of the West Coast Democratic Party. They were men who attracted no undue attention in a crowd and whose steely, level stares were the outward signatures of minds calculating odds like poker players in High Noon. Both men were stony cold realists who understood exactly how the system worked and were, with no small justification, close to despairing of the Federal Government.
Texas born forty-one year old Mark Odom Hatfield, the Republican twenty-ninth Governor of Oregon, cut a slightly aloof, patrician figure sitting between his fellow West Coast Governors. Of the three, Hatfield remained something of an unknown quantity to the Deputy Attorney General. However, everything Katzenbach knew about Hatfield was impressive, not least because the man — who was of his own World War II generation — had made such a success of his life and chosen careers without any of the benefits which Katzenbach readily admitted that he had enjoyed.
Hatfield’s father had disappeared from the scene when he was a young boy and he had been raised by his mother and maternal grandmother. The family had moved to Salem, Oregon in the 1920s where his mother, Dovie, had taught junior high school. Hatfield had served in the Navy — as a landing craft officer at both Iwo Jima and Okinawa — in the 1945 war, afterwards attending Willamette University and graduating from Stanford before returning to Oregon as a professor of political science at Willamette. As long ago as 1953 he had introduced legislation in the Oregon House of Representatives banning discrimination on the basis of race or colour in public accommodation. He had become Governor of Oregon in 1959 at his first attempt, and nobody who had met him had any problem understanding why.
“You have every right to concern yourself about the possibility of a State facing insurrection resorting to extra-judicial remedies, Mr Katzenbach,” the Governor of Oregon observed. “What I think we have here is a misunderstanding — in DC, that is — of the nature and the dimensions of the problems we are beginning to face here on the West Coast.”
Katzenbach cleared his throat, glancing thoughtfully at the fifth man in the room. This last man was grey, weary but oddly distinguished in his crumpled infantry battledress. The old soldier was watching him with heavy-lidded eyes, sizing him up.
Major General Colin Powell Dempsey had won a Congressional Medal of Honour in the Ardennes leading the spearhead of Patton’s armoured breakthrough to relieve Bastogne. He had been invalided back home with the sort of wounds that normally ruled the rest of a mortal man’s life. Nevertheless, Dempsey had inveigled his way onto the Operations Staff for the planned 1946 invasion of the Japanese Home Islands and had been on his way out to the Far East when the Nagasaki bomb ended the war. Now the old warrior was fighting another kind of war. What was it Douglas MacArthur once said?
‘Old soldiers never die, they just fade away…’
MacArthur got a lot of things wrong; perhaps he had never met Colin Dempsey.
“My boys,” the first general officer in the American Army to lead troops into battle on American soil since the end of the Indian Wars sighed, “went in hard and mean at Bellingham because if they hadn’t we might not have been having this ‘conversation’ today, Mr Katzenbach.”
Albert Rosellini grunted.
“There was a fucking Soviet submarine in Bellingham harbour!”
The US Deputy Attorney General had been told that this was ‘hogwash’ by an aide.
“I am informed that the Navy is investigating that sighting…”
“It was long gone before the Navy got its thumb out of its arse,” Major General Dempsey said flatly. “Besides, the Navy has mothballed so many ships lately it probably hasn’t got enough patrol boats to secure Puget Sound, let alone the coast further north. We found Soviet infantry weapons on some of the bodies down on the Bellingham waterfront. Two of my M48s were taken out by Soviet RPG-7 rockets at close range in the street fighting. We recovered one of the launchers intact.”
The Pentagon had complacently dismissed the reported sighting of a ‘possible’ hostile submarine out of hand and attached ‘no significance to the apparent discovery of Soviet type infantry weapons in the ruins’. However, the Army had provided a small cadre of advisors to ‘put a little backbone into the National Guard formations’, and the Navy had provided a Squadron of Marine Corps A-1 Skyraiders for the ‘police operation’ in and around Bellingham, otherwise, the Pentagon had done its best to quietly wash its hands of the whole sordid affair.
“The Federal Government,” Dempsey went on, “made a very bad mistake not snuffing out the original ‘no go’ areas at the outset. Now, potentially, we’re going to have to burn out every single one if we are serious about ever being one nation again.”
Katzenbach said nothing.