No, the Administration had no plans to intervene in the internal affairs of the states of Washington, Oregon, or California.
‘Why the Hell not?’ The trio of West Coast Governors had protested.
Nicholas Katzenbach had opted to pass on that question.
The bulldozer came down the bloody execution line shovelling corpses into the mass grave. Petrol glugged and slopped over the bodies. Its grisly task accomplished the bulldozer backed away.
Colin Dempsey accepted the loaded flare gun from an aide.
“Everybody stand back!” He commanded.
One final look around as the rain began to fall again.
He aimed the gun into the middle of the trench.
Pulled the trigger.
With a series of whoofs the trench lit up like a tree line hit by a napalm strike by a pair of A-1 Skyraiders.
Chapter 14
The two cars took the corner as if in formation — the corner was hot dusty tarmac on the edge of the recently closed air base delineated, like the rest of the course only by old oil drums — with their engines roaring and their tyres screeching and squealing as they slide across the slick apron where, until three months ago a line of silvery North American F-100 Super Sabre jet interceptors belonging to the 4510th Combat Crew Training Wing had stood ready for action. There was only a small crowd today. This was a private race, one among several. It was a practice session ahead of the major event, the first ‘Glendale Two Hundred’ scheduled for the upcoming weekend. Enthusiasts, street and circuit racers had begun to arrive a few days ago, their adapted sports cars rumbling throatily down Main Street and burning up the miles of flat, straight roads around Phoenix. The local traffic cops had granted an unofficial moratorium on speeding violations on Interstate 10 and the other major arteries into and out of the city; mostly in recognition of the flock of eagerly awaited visitors anticipated to fill Phoenix’s hotels, motels, diners and otherwise down at heel malls over the next week.
There was a scintillating moment when it seemed inevitable that the two cars would touch, perhaps collide as they skidded, rubber burning, neither driver lifting his right foot so much as a millimetre off the gas. Knowing that nobody was about to ask or give quarter at the last corner before the half-mile sprint to the chequered flag the organisers had left a huge run off area but these two cars were deliberately using every inch of extra road to avoid backing off. It looked inevitable that both racers would pile into the big oil drums marking the limit of the circuit until miraculously; the turn was suddenly behind them and they were hurtling down the finishing straight, wheel to wheel, smoking, billowing desert sand in their slipstreams like speedboats ripping up the surface of a shimmering lake. On race day there would be a commentator and a master of ceremonies yelling names, car numbers and calling the watchers to order; this afternoon there were but a handful of cheering enthusiasts and camp followers and a small group of uniformed, rather uncomfortable United States Air Force staff officers including one, with a sidearm strapped to his hip, carrying a metal attaché case whose handle was cuffed to his right wrist by a short, silvery chain.
The President of the United States of America might have reserved to himself the ultimate decision on the ‘tactical use’ of nuclear weapons; but the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee had prevailed upon him to ensure that in the event of a ‘sneak attack’ — nobody could actually envisage who would launch such a ‘sneak attack’ — which ‘decapitated the Administration’, both NORAD and the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force should have the ability to independently ‘strike back’.
The officer carrying the Air Force’s ‘nuclear football’ had winced as the two red sports cars diced — literally with sudden death — on the recently abandoned airfield. Around him men were jumping up and down, heartily slapping each other’s backs.
General Curtis Emerson LeMay, the fifty-seven year old Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force clambered out of his car and embraced the much younger man who had clambered from the other racer. LeMay threw his gloves back into his car which was steaming, sizzling in the arid baking Arizona sunshine, flexing and creaking as hot metal began to cool. The air stank of gas and oil, leather and scorched rubber. For once in his rollercoaster life LeMay did not care that he had lost — by a fender’s width — to his rival; the kid was a natural racer and an old man had no right expecting to beat a kid with a fighter jock’s highly tuned reflexes and his instinctive car control. On days like this the legendary bomber commander who had been responsible for building Strategic Air Command into the great sword of democracy which had won the October War in a single night, yearned to embrace his scheduled retirement. Regardless of whether President Kennedy ran for a second term next year, it was unlikely that he or his successor would want Old Iron Pants in charge of his Air Force after the election. Not when half the country viewed LeMay as its saviour; and the other half as Lucifer’s chief lieutenant.
LeMay planned to spend his retirement racing fast cars. He had always been a car nut; and lately racing fast cars was pretty much the only thing that took his mind off the madness of the World. His proudest possession was his Allard J2, and as long ago as 1954 the Sports Car Club of America had presented him with its highest honour, the Woolf Barnato Award. In the early 1950s as the culture of street racing died out in the post-1945 suburbanisation of the great American cities, LeMay had begun to loan out disused air bases, suddenly making available long, fast tracks for the new generation of super-charged racers. It was part of the enigma of the private man behind the legend that he was as proud of his role in boosting and promoting the American auto-racing boom as he was of bombing Japan out of the Pacific War or of saving America on the night of the October War.
One or two old friends had suggested he might try his hand at politics after he left the Air Force but that notion appealed to him a lot less than the opportunity of throwing himself into the work of the Sports Car Club of America, and basically, racing until he dropped.
Or crashed one too many times…
He had warned the President, and anybody else who would listen, that the ‘peace dividend’ was ‘stupid’ and ‘premature’. Specifically, he had gone over Secretary of Defence, McNamara’s head, and said that the peace dividend was the ‘most damned fool thing’ he had ever heard of ‘in his whole life’. The trouble was that getting the credit for winning a war that had left half the Northern Hemisphere — the industrialised hemisphere — of planet Earth in ruins counted for diddly squat in a post-war environment in which big business, and several hundred members of the House of Representatives suddenly saw a once in a generation opportunity to appropriate a huge slice of the defence budget to fund their own pet projects, personal ‘special interests’ and to pay off all their old debts. It did not help that the Kennedy brothers were transfixed by the chance to buy their own personal piece of immortality with their own voters. Once the Administration had started talking about the ‘peace dividend’ it had been like blowing a hole in the Hoover Dam; no power on earth could stop the flood.
Without being able to prove it the Administration was happy to contend that the Soviet threat was, if not eliminated, then eradicated for decades to come and that therefore, ‘there was no significant extant hostile geopolitical strategic military threat to the North American continent’. Against this backdrop, Curtis LeMay had been powerless to prevent the President and his Congressional lap dogs clawing back an initial ‘peace dividend’ equivalent to over forty percent of the 1961-62 real dollar spend on defence. In budget years1964-65 to 1967-68 the planned real cut against the 1961-62 benchmark would rise by increments to sixty-five percent. Half the Navy had already gone into mothballs, the regular Army had been reduced to a skeleton of less than two hundred thousand men, and the front line war-fighting order of battle of his Air Force had now been reduced by war losses and Capitol Hill gerrymandering to less than a third of its pre-war roster. He had been forced to scrap or mothball the entire B-47 component of SAC, and to pare down the B-52 force to only 188 aircraft organised between five under-strength Bomb Groups. Four of every ten US Air Force Bases in North America had been decommissioned in the last five months, and by the spring one in three of the remaining bases would close.