The Governor of Washington had not heard that.
“We had to let the whole team go. There will be a few jobs left at the two plants in Seattle,” Bill Allen promised. “I don’t think we’d have got funding for that if General LeMay hadn’t door-stepped the Treasury Secretary and given the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs the treatment. The Air Force found three million bucks to mothball the production lines for eighteen months. Hopefully, when the procurement freeze ends we’ll be in a position to bid for new airframes, but,” his shoulders sagged, “we’re still going to have to let ninety-five percent of our people go.”
“When do you have to start laying off people, Bill?”
“Already started, Al. I know it’s Christmas soon but if we don’t let people go now we’ll be broke come the spring. One Helluva peace dividend!”
It was symptomatic of the slow disintegration of the Union and the increasingly sclerotic grip of the Federal Government that Al Rosellini had had to hear confirmation of the bad news from the President of the Boeing Company, rather than a representative of either the Department of Defence or another senior Cabinet member. Half wrecked during the night of the October War Seattle’s survival as a viable civil and economic entity — forget reconstruction or rebirth — had depended on the twin foundations of the great Boeing plants and the giant US Navy base at Bremerton on the opposite shore of Puget Sound. Without those two powerhouses pumping guaranteed revenues into the city and the state, there was nothing but shifting sand to build on. Boeing was closing down; Bremerton was slated to become the biggest ship graveyard on the planet, the home of the mothballed ships of the once invincible US Pacific Fleet. Bremerton would go down in US naval history as the place where the great carriers came to die. The USS Forrestal, USS Ranger, USS Constellation, USS Saratoga, USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the USS Midway were already laid up in mothballs, rotting alongside the battlewagons USS New Jersey and USS Missouri, and the last three remaining Essex class carriers from the 1945 war. The vast naval dockyards that only months ago had teemed with skilled Washingtonians were virtually empty, the men and their families rapidly dispersing to the four corners of the nation. All of this decline and the rushed de-militarization of the state’s economy had been delivered by decree from Washington DC. Washington State was a faraway place of which the men in the White House knew little and cared for not at all, and nobody in the American North-West was going to forget it in a hurry.
“Did I hear the Air Force was shutting down McChord?” Bill Allen inquired, trying not to choke with despair.
“Yeah. LeMay wants to mothball the base and keep the Air Defence Centre on line but the bean counters in DC don’t think there’s anything we need to defend ourselves against anymore. The Treasury’s argument is that the Air Force put it to the Soviets so hard they put SAC out of work!”
Bill Allen had refused the bourbon he had been offered, preferring to stick to strong black coffee. He put down his cup.
“I wonder about that sometimes,” he remarked. “The Soviets fired an awful lot of missiles at us and our friends in Europe. They sent over a lot of bombers too. Sometimes, just sometimes, I wonder how hard we really hit them.”
There was a knock at the door of the Governor’s office.
Major General Colin Dempsey walked in, stiff-legged and wearing the same ashen shroud of exhaustion as the two men who rose to greet him. Bill Allen had met the commanding officer of the Washington Combined Army and Air Force National Guard, and the State’s Emergency Disaster Management and Civil Defence Commissioner at regular intervals during the last year. The two men had worked closely together to ensure that the Boeing plants restarted and continued in production after the war.
“I’d be curious to hear your thoughts,” Bill Allen declared, “on whether the Soviets were as completely defeated as our mutual friends in Washington DC believe, General Dempsey?”
The old soldier took off his forage cap. He routinely dressed in the same combat fatigues as his men and rarely wore visible badges of rank. Although he required his men to carry side arms while in uniform, he rarely followed his own edict. Outwardly the most punctiliously military of men, he enjoyed a bantering, familial trust with his subordinates, the majority of whom would run through brick walls if he asked them to so do.
Dempsey was a stickler for the line of command; now he looked to his Commander-in-Chief for leave to answer the Boeing man’s question.
Al Rosellini nodded for his friend to carry on.
“The story coming out of the Department of Defence is that we hit eighty-seven percent of the targets we attacked, sir,” Dempsey declared, stone-faced.
Bill Allen grinned wanly.
“That wasn’t what I asked you, General?”
“I have no better after action intelligence than the people at the Pentagon,” he replied. “But from my experience war is a very messy business. I’d be astonished if we hit seventy percent of the targets that we actually knew about and subsequently attacked. If I was running a staff college exercise on the likely post-war scenario my starting assumption would be that if we thought we had hit ninety percent of our targets, that only fifty percent of those targets would actually have been completely destroyed. Thirteen months ago we might have got lucky and hit sixty percent of the targets we had discovered and accurately identified before the war. There would inevitably have been a whole mess of targets we didn’t know about and therefore, we never attacked. At the end of the day whether we won as big as the Administration thinks we did depends on how good our pre-war intelligence was, how effectively we targeted those enemy assets that we correctly identified and located in advance, and the underlying resilience of the Soviet military-industrial complex. During the forty-five war the Soviets showed immense stoicism and resilience under intolerable conditions. Any prudent after action analysis should have started from the assumption that they would perform likewise during and after the October War. Frankly, we ought to have launched a second strike against the Soviets; we did not. Therefore, it follows that there must be large uncertainties as to what Soviet war-fighting capabilities, and economic and human resources actually survived the war.”
The old soldier let his meanings sink in.
“In answer to your original question,” he grimaced, “honest to God I have no idea how big we won the war. However, given the way things are going with this ‘peace dividend’ nonsense, if General LeMay’s bombers and missiles missed thirty to forty percent of the Soviet’s war fighting capability last year,” he sighed, “then all bets are off if we have to fight another war any time soon.”
Chapter 29
Harvey Fleischer had been a little ambivalent about the wisdom of being drawn into his goddaughter’s scheme. For one he was not, and never had been, overly exercised about the Civil Rights Movement, although contrarily, he was a firm believer in everybody getting a fair shake in life, be they black, white or green. For another, picking a fight with the Federal Bureau of Investigation was never a good idea, leastways, not for an old Jewish lawyer who was doing okay, thank you. Thirdly, he was afraid Miranda was setting herself up for a fall — that she had moved out of her league — and he did not think he could bear to see her knocked down again the way she had been the morning after the night of the October War.
Another consideration was that Miranda’s mother and father, his good friends and business partners, Ben and Margaret Sullivan would probably blame him if this all went wrong. Although this last worry he could happily put aside; because Ben and Margaret would almost certainly forgive him eventually.