The old soldier’s eyes bored into his face.
“So far as Bellingham is concerned,” he sighed, “the insurgents, bastards, whatever you want to call them, killed the last of the surviving civilians, all women, over a month ago as soon as they realised we had them hemmed in. Too many useless mouths to feed. They herded them out into the fields and woods outside the town and shot them. All the children and men were dead by then. I reckon it was a merciful release for the women who’d survived the last year in Bellingham.” Colin Dempsey forced a humourless smiled. “My boys didn’t take that many prisoners, Mr Katzenbach. I had a couple of the ‘officers’ we captured brought here. Perhaps, you’d like to talk to them before you go back to DC?”
Chapter 9
Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite was an unremarkable looking man who bore an uncanny resemblance to former President Harry S. Truman. He was compactly built, slightly below average height and his deeply ingrained habits of organised, careful movement and thought were ideally suited to the Submarine Service which had been his home ever since he graduated near the top of his class at Annapolis in 1935. Braithwaite had been on an old S class boat at Pearl Harbour in December 1941; by 1943 he had been promoted to Lieutenant-Commander and given his own command. The end of the 1945 war had found his boat on patrol in the Tokyo Bay. For most of the last two decades he had been one of Hyman Rickover’s — the father of the United States Navy’s nuclear undersea fleet — right hand men, and six months ago he had been appointed flag officer Commander-in-Chief of Submarine Squadron Fifteen. In Navy talk COMSUBRON Fifteen.
Rear Admiral Braithwaite looked thoughtfully over the top of his rimless reading glasses at the young officer standing stiffly to attention before his desk.
“Stand easy, son,” Braithwaite directed. The thing that struck everybody who had ever met COMSUBRON Fifteen was the calm economy with which he deported himself. He never raised his voice, he never waved his arms, he rarely smiled and yet the men under his command instinctively trusted him. The older man closed the Manila file on his blotter and gave Lieutenant Walter Brenckmann his full and undivided attention. He knew that the young officer’s father was a liaison officer in England, a pretty thankless job the way things had panned out after the October War. He knew that Brenckmann’s kid sister had been killed in the war, and that his younger brother, a lawyer, had just been appointed to the Massachusetts bar; and that he had a second brother who seemed to have gone off the radar years ago. He also knew that Brenckmann’s mother was very active in post-war local self-help groups in Cambridge, and that both she and Walter Brenckmann senior had been registered Democrats before the war although neither had been politically ‘energized’ in the years prior to, or since last year’s ‘hostilities’. Braithwaite disliked the addition of a ‘political’ sub-section to the service dockets of the officers and the senior non-commissioned men under his command but these were bad times.
History would recollect — most likely — that in late October 1962 the United States of America had won a crushing, annihilating victory over the Soviet Union, and in many respects ‘history’ would be right. However, all subsequent studies would probably show that the victory ought to have been even more total, and that many fewer Americans ought to have died. The Administration and the Pentagon had known this immediately after the October War; and ever since then the search had been on for enemies within; the traitors who had so obviously sabotaged the American war machine. The secret witch hunt was the greatest, most closely guarded secret of the age and known only to a few men. The recent death of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor — his aircraft having disappeared without a trace mid-way between Honolulu and San Diego returning from a tour of inspection in the Far East — had done little to assuage the growing conviction among the small, self-selected group of senior officers in the Navy and the Air Force that something was very rotten at the heart of the Republic. What had happened over the weekend up in Washington State left an especially bad taste in the mouth; not least because it was a gruesome warning of how easily the Union might soon start to fray and splinter.
However, for the moment Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite put his brooding premonitions to one side.
“How badly do you want to command your own boat by the time you are thirty-five, Lieutenant?”
The younger man took this in his stride.
“Very badly, sir.”
“Right now you are a two-ring hopeful with your nose just ahead of the pack, Brenckmann,” Jackson Braithwaite informed him, his gaze locked on the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s Torpedo Officer’s face. “Every commanding officer you have served under has given you A-One ratings and the last two have recommended you for Command School. I have endorsed your current Skipper’s assessment that you are qualified to advance one rank. Your promotion to Lieutenant-Commander will take effect when you report to your next duty station. On return from leave on January sixth you will report to CINCSUB at Groton to receive your interim assignment prior to joining Command Course Six-Four in March.” COMSUBRON Fifteen gave this a few seconds to sink in. “Do you have any questions?”
Lieutenant Brenckmann had not had any questions.
Braithwaite had relaxed a fraction, risen to his feet and shaken the younger man’s hand, dismissing him shortly thereafter with a stern smile.
In no part of the United States Navy was the sanctity and, for want of a better word, ‘loyalty’, to the chain of command more critical than in the two squadrons of Polaris missile boats. Once an SSBN put to sea it was effectively ‘out of control’ of the land, operating on a pre-determined set of orders — or variations on those orders — with the firing codes and targeting co-ordinates for its sixteen Polaris A1 or A2 submarine launched ballistic missiles pre-programmed. Security onboard a Polaris SSBN at sea was so tight that only half-a-dozen men in any given crew actually knew where the boat had gone during its time on patrol. Standard operating practice was that once a boat cast off on a ‘deterrent patrol’ it did not contact base again until shortly before it returned to port. Once at sea an SSBN ran quietly, listened and waited, lurking in its pre-assigned patrol ‘box’ for the call nobody in their right mind wanted to hear.
Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite shuddered inwardly every time he thought about the long, deadly dark shape of the USS Sam Houston moored alongside the seaward flank of the tender USS Hunley out in San Francisco Bay. Her captain had broken the cardinal rule, broken radio silence and queried the sealed orders he had been directed not to open until he was two days out into the Pacific.
SSBN SIX-ZERO-NINER FOR COMSUBRON ONE-FIVER-ZERO STOP RESPECTFULLY REQUEST CONFIRMATION PATROL AREA THREE-ONE SOUTH ONE-FIVE-NINER EAST MESSAGE ENDS.
The USS Sam Houston had been ordered to operate in a patrol area of approximately two thousand square miles centred on Lord Howe Island, a sparsely populated volcanic outcrop some three hundred and seventy miles east of Port Macquarie. This was insane on so many counts that COMSUBRON Fifteen hardly knew where to begin to quantify the magnitude of the obvious insanity of the orders which had somehow got into the hands of one of his captains!
Port Macquarie was a small town on the coast of New South Wales located at the mouth of the Hastings River some two hundred and forty miles north of Sydney, and some three hundred and fifty miles south of Brisbane, the capital of the Australian State of Queensland. Operating from the vicinity of the Lord Howe group of islands the Australian cities of Melbourne and Adelaide, respectively the capitals of the States of Victoria and South Australia, as well as the Australian capital, Canberra would all be several hundred miles within the maximum range envelope of the USS Sam Houston’s sixteen UGM-27 Polaris A2 submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missiles each tipped with a W-58 warhead with a designed explosive yield equivalent to over of over one million tons of TNT.