The defenders — criminals and insurgents, inhuman beasts really — had had no shortage of firepower, or of fit fighting age men to man the barricades. ‘Fit’ as in the context of animals that had coalesced into a vicious, murderous tribe at Bellingham was a relative term. For most of the last year there had been no twentieth century medical facilities in the town — the conquerors had butchered local doctors and nurses and ransacked the local hospital for drugs early in their ‘occupation’. Tuberculosis and venereal diseases of all types were endemic in the ranks of the defenders, and by the time the final assault went in many of the foot soldiers behind the hastily thrown up barricades and berms were starving. There had been no clean water in the town for months, and nobody had bothered to bury the dead after the initial mass executions.
The napalm, rockets and cannon fire of the Marine Corps A-1 Skyraiders had had killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of men — and a few women, no doubt — before the M48s and the armoured personnel carriers had smashed through the upturned cars and trucks the rabble inside the town imagined were ‘defences’.
Dempsey had lost thirty-seven dead and eighty-nine seriously wounded. He was not interested in how many of the ‘animals’ his men had killed. Nor had he intervened when his officers reported that the infantrymen and tankers inside Bellingham were systematically ‘finishing off’ the enemy wounded.
There had been eighty-eight prisoners; including five women.
The women seemed even more depraved than the men.
Of the original pre-war population of Bellingham, over thirty thousand souls, there were no survivors. The best guess was that between five and ten thousand people had left or escaped before the town was taken over by the gangs and the drifters who came down from the mountains, and before the flood of refugees surging north from the ruins of Seattle had swamped the area. The newcomers had inflicted an increasingly barbaric, sadistically cruel regime on Bellingham and the State authorities had been powerless to do anything about it.
The problems of housing and feeding the survivors of Seattle, of ensuring that they received some bare minimum level of health provision had occupied the surviving resources of the state of Washington. Help from outside had trickled in but from the outset it was obvious the Federal Government was more concerned with the security of the massive Hanford nuclear works than with the piffling ‘little local difficulties’ of the Governor.
Bellingham and Washington State had hardly registered on the Federal Government’s ‘big picture’.
Of all the bombed cities Chicago had first call on military, medical and every other form of aide or succour, and the resources earmarked for the other northern ‘war damaged zones’ often got no further than the Windy City. Chicago’s million dead and million homeless automatically trumped Seattle’s quarter-of-a-million fatalities in the grim game of picking up the pieces of Armageddon.
Now Dempsey eyed the long line of filthy, variously bloodied prisoners with cold dispassion. The surviving ‘officers’ and ‘gang leaders’ — one woman and seven men — had been separated from the pack and taken down to Olympia for interrogation overnight. The old soldier had absolutely no compunction about what had to be done, or in the matter of how it was to be done.
The prisoners stood in a shambling, shuffling line in front of the trench bulldozed overnight. The Governor, Albert Dean Rosellini had signed the execution orders of the four women and seventy-six men in the execution line.
Given the choice the eight prisoners sent down to Olympia would almost certainly have opted to stand in the execution line this morning because the interrogators in Olympia had been specifically instructed not ‘to hold back’. Several of the members of the interrogation unit had been selected specifically because they had lost close family members or old friends in Bellingham.
One member of the team had asked Dempsey if ‘power tools’ were permitted in the ‘Interrogation Hall’.
‘Do what you have to do, son,” had been Dempsey’s dead pan reply.
The boys back in Olympia could flay the bastards alive for all he cared.
“Don’t we get one last smoke?” One of the animals in the line yelled in a quavering, shivering cackle. In the last few minutes the prisoners had been stripped naked and their rags thrown into the trench behind them. It was a bitterly cold morning.
Colin Dempsey raised the bull horn to his lips.
“My name is Colin Powell Dempsey. By the order of the Governor of the State of Washington, Commander-in-Chief of all National Guard and attached military forces.” He paused, contemplated spitting on the ground and continued: “Under the provisions of the emergency powers vested in me in an area under martial law, you have been sentenced to death for heinous crimes against humanity. May God have mercy upon your souls.” This last he barked angrily. “Because nobody else will!”
The Governor had asked Dempsey if he proposed to detail firing squads for each prisoner.
‘No, sir. That will not be necessary.’
Dempsey gathered his wind.
“KILL THEM ALL!” He bellowed with cold fury.
A storm of close range automatic weapon fire scythed down the prisoners like stalks of harvested summer wheat. Several bodies fell back into the newly excavated trench, while others writhed twitching on the ground, most just collapsed, or were blown apart and were dead before their bodies hit the mud. When the barrage of automatic fire stopped individual National Guardsmen walked up and down the line administering single head shots to complete their grisly task. The bulldozer’s engine coughed into life as a barrel of petrol was rolled close to the mass grave.
United States Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach had not batted so much as an eyelid as Dempsey had told him what was going to happen in the morning. Nor had he reacted when he had detailed the interrogation methods his men were employing with the eight prisoners, including the one woman, who were to be ‘spared’ immediate summary execution.
‘This,” he had told the messenger from DC, ‘is what happens when a Government fails to maintain the rule of law, and in abdicating its responsibilities fails in its primary duty, to protect is people.’
Katzenbach had retorted that he was in Olympia on a ‘fact finding mission’ for the President. It was not his job to justify the actions of State Governors before Congress or the Supreme Court.
Governor Rosellini had taken exception to that particular cheap shot.
Katzenbach had apologised. The man was a serious player, not a flimflam man like his boss. Mark Hatfield, the Republican Governor of Oregon and the other West Coast Governor, Pat Brown of California had both rounded on the United States Deputy Attorney General. The general tenor of the debate — more a shouting match — had been ‘what the fuck do you guys in DC think you are playing at?’
Katzenbach had stayed calm.
No, the President was not asleep at the wheel.
No, the peace dividend had not ‘neutered’ the Armed Forces.
No, Chicago was not sucking in all of the available Federal disaster relief budget just because it was — or had been before 27th October 1962 — the Kennedy family’s personal political power base.