“Aye, sir,” he acknowledged. “What coding and priority, sir?”
“PERSONAL MOST SECRET SSBN-609 TO CINCSUBRON FIFTEEN,” Troy Simms declared grimly, brandishing a slip of paper with his eight — hexadecimal — character personal code typed on it. “COMMAND CODE ALPHA.”
The senior radioman repeated this back in acknowledgement, trying very hard not to swallow so hard that he forgot to breathe.
If the Skipper wanted to send an immediate personal signal to Rear Admiral Jackson Braithwaite, the commanding officer of Submarine Squadron 15 based at Alameda on the Oakland side of Bay from San Francisco, it was not Warren Dokes’s job to ask him why. The fact that the Skipper was breaking not just standard operating procedures but practically every other rule in the Polaris boat operations manual was none of his business. It was not as if it was Petty Officer 2nd Class Warren Dokes’s Navy career that was about to go up in smoke.
Troy Simms unfolded a page torn from a notebook and placed it in front of the radioman.
Dokes blinked in confusion.
And then alarm.
His heart started racing and for a moment he was a little afraid he was going to faint.
His conscious mind registered the words and something of their meanings; but in those initial moments while he fought the unreasoning urge to panic, the language of the signal was pure gibberish. He looked at his commanding officer with wide, imploring eyes, desperately seeking reassurance.
Commander Troy Simms lips had formed a thin hard line. He flicked a glance at the Master of Arms, standing stone-faced above the two seated men guarding the door like the last Praetorian at the gates of Rome viewing the Vandal Horde surged down the Aurelian Way.
Troy Simms patted Dokes shoulder in paternal reassurance.
“No, Warren,” Simms said gently, “we’re not going south.”
The Commanding Officer of the USS Sam Houston might have added: “No, we’re not going to start World War IV today.” But he refrained, because although he was not about to fire the first shots of another war; somebody, somewhere evidently had other ideas…
Chapter 2
The old hotel had seen better days. A lot of better days, in fact. That its latest owner, thirty-seven year old Illinois born real estate developer Larry Lawrence, had called in his entire credit tab with the California Democratic Party to drag the Governor of the State across San Diego Bay for this morning press call and whistle stop tour said it all.
Edmund Gerald ‘Pat’ Brown, the thirty-second Governor of the most populous state in the Union had cavilled at the engagement when it had appeared in his diary five days ago. He had important business in San Diego and M. Larry Lawrence, notwithstanding his rock solid Party credentials, was not the kind of Democratic supporter he needed to be seen around right now. He might have beaten off Richard Nixon’s challenge in last fall’s Gubernatorial race just after the war — mainly because Nixon had completely misread the mood of the State and bad-mouthed the President during that short-lived interlude when ninety percent of all Americans still believed that, if had not been for John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s courageous actions on the night of the war they would all be dead — but if there was a re-run tomorrow he and his Party would be wiped out so comprehensively that afterwards nobody in California would even remember that there had once been a political party called ‘The Democrats’. Pat Brown had been a little relieved when the photo shoot in front of the Hotel del Coronado had been so poorly attended.
He had only agreed to the Coronado Island ‘diversion’ forty-eight hours ago because it filled a vacant slot in that day’s appointments, in between a breakfast with the outgoing Mayor of San Diego, Charles Dail, whom he had known for many years and a Veterans Rally that afternoon. Wisely in the present political climate Dail had decided not to run for a third term, and in hindsight, Governor Brown, sometimes wished he had resigned his own post last year, or he had lost to Richard Nixon. Not that he believed for a single minute that an interloper like Richard Nixon — a man with a pragmatic, if cynical grasp of national and international affairs but with remarkably little understanding of the people or the affairs of the State in which he lived — would have managed the aftermath of the October War any better than him.
Charles Dail had cautioned his old friend not ‘to be too rough on Larry Lawrence’. Things had got so bad that ‘any investment’ in the city is a ‘good investment’. In the event, despite his irritation wasting time promoting the business interests of a man whom he hardly knew, Pat Brown had actually rather enjoyed his short trip across the San Diego Bay on the Coronado Ferry. The photos taken of him on the deck of the boat would make much better press than the ones in front of the falling down old hotel, and he had enjoyed chatting amiably with several of the local hacks about the pressing need to build a bridge over the bay.
The only reason there was no bridge across San Diego Bay to the ‘island’ — actually, the hotel sat on a sandy isthmus running parallel with the mainland only accessible by ferry or a twenty mile drive south, east and then north again back up the narrow spit joining Coronado to the continental United States just north of the Mexican border — was United States Navy. The Navy was afraid that a bridge between Sand Diego and Coronado might collapse if there was a big earthquake, blocking navigation and cutting off the huge navy base located in the ‘southern’ bay from the Pacific Ocean.
The bridging of San Diego Bay was one of many big infrastructure projects that had been under weighty and very serious consideration in California before the October War. But that was then and this was now. Since the spring the Kennedy Administration had been talking up ‘the Peace Dividend’ and the massive additional funds that would eventually be made available for ‘civil projects’ by cutting back the military. The Administration was trying to sell the line that billions of dollars would be released ‘for the great task of rebuilding the bombed cities and revitalising the American economy’. It was all pure baloney from where Governor Pat Brown sat in his office in the State Capitol Building in Sacramento. From what he could tell, and from what he had heard from Washington DC insiders and business contacts, the purely ‘notional’ billions that had been allegedly ‘saved’ had thus far mostly gone in compensation to contractors whose programs had been axed, to repaying old favours, buying off special interest lobbies — including the powerful fruit and vegetable producers lobby in his own State — to bankrolling a raft of failing banks and big corporations whose overseas markets had been scourged off the face of the earth in the October War, and to underwrite the purchase of mining, drilling and commercial and industrial ‘assets’ abandoned by, or neglected by the British and other helpless European former colonial powers in sub-Saharan Africa, the far East and Australasia.
The British had been pulling out of Africa before the war, and the October War had turned that semi-orderly pull out into a shambolic flight; in the subsequent fire sale American conglomerates had fallen on the region like wolves upon the fold. Initially, the British, the French and the Portuguese had been powerless to stop the — probably — illegal cut price sequestering of many of the remaining jewels in their colonial crowns from Nigeria all the way down to Namibia. The march of the all-conquering dollar had only been halted at the northern borders of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, the two remaining bastions of White Supremacy in the African continent. In both those lands the ruling elites had already got their hands deep into the honey pot well ahead of the fleet-footed and nimble-fingered acquisition departments of the big banks, oil companies and mining consortiums; and had rejected the Kennedy Administration’s squeals of protest at their local ‘bully boy tactics’ and fundamentally ‘unhelpful’ entrenched antipathy to the ‘legitimate commercial activities of US-based companies and combines’, with undisguised contempt.