He had stopped reading aloud because he frankly did not, could not believe what was in front of him in stark black and white courier typeface, hot off the now relentlessly snarling teleprinters in the adjoining room.
“Reuters says that the headquarters of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet was hit by a thermobaric bomb? What the fuck is a thermobaric bomb, Kenny? Is that some kind of top secret new nuke?”
“Er, I don’t know, Ben,” confessed the White House Appointments Secretary. “Look, there’s a whole heap of crazy rumours hitting us from every angle. We need the media to be responsible about this until we’ve got a proper handle on what’s actually going on over there…”
That was more or less the line the Administration had spun the Washington press pack and disseminated to the TV networks after the Bay of Pigs Fiasco, and the catastrophe of Jack Kennedy’s first botched summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, and in retrospect time and again throughout the fortnight running up to the Cuban Missiles War.
Another sheet of printout, raggedly torn off the overheating machines in the main office was thrust under Ben Bradlee’s nose.
No, that can’t be right!
“The Brits are claiming that they shot down four B-52s, Kenny?”
“What? No! No! No!” The man at the other end of the line objected in what sounded like abject despair. “That’s impossible!”
“One of the B-52s crashed on the island of Gozo,” the Newsweek Bureau Chief continued, his incredulity morphing into a sense of despair. “The Brits claim they picked up half-a-dozen survivors from the B-52s they shot down over the sea…”
Kenny O’Donnell hesitated.
“We have to keep a lid on this, Ben!”
Bradlee guessed what was to follow.
“The President is personally asking…”
The Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek Magazine had stopped listening. If the President was still in control of the White House — forget whether he was in control of anything else — he would have been the one on the line. That neither Jack nor Bobby Kennedy was free, able or willing to work the phones to keep this thing quiet spoke volumes about the depth and immediacy of the new disaster towards which the country was sleepwalking.
No, not sleepwalking; this felt more like riding on the footplate of a runaway locomotive heading towards a cliff!
Ben Bradlee hung up and rang his wife.
“Don’t ask any questions,” he said abruptly, the way things were going there might not be time for a discussion and he could apologise for his rudeness another time. If there ever was another time; right now he put the odds on that at about sixty-forty against. “Grab the kids and get out of DC.” He and Antoinette — ‘Tony’ — his second wife had had a charmed marriage. They had met in the mid-fifties, and after divorcing their respective spouses had practically married into the Kennedy set. They had been honorary members of the Hyannis Port elite, regularly dining with Jack and Jackie, embedded as deep inside Camelot as it was possible to be without actually being recruited by the National Security Agency or being actively on the Hyannis Port staff payroll. The dream had tarnished somewhat since the October War, now it seemed it was likely to come to a fiery end at any moment. “Don’t argue, Tony. The masterminds at the Pentagon and Langley have persuaded the Spanish and the Italians to launch a proxy war against the British, and it sounds like Curtis LeMay’s finest have just Pearl Harboured the Royal Navy at Malta!”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House might not be able to join up the dots and figure out what was almost certainly likely to happen next but anybody in DC with a passing acquaintance with reality knew precisely what might happen next.
Royal Air Force V-Bombers could already be on their way to take out the East Coast cities, and, axiomatically, Washington itself. If the British attacked there would be no repeat of the October War ‘chicken shoot’ over Canada; a generation of RAF bomber crews had exercised constantly, assiduously for both conventional and nuclear war alongside their US Air Force counterparts. The Brits were not flying turbo-prop Tu-95s equipped with late 1940s electronic warfare suites, if they attacked they would be flying in state of the art modern jet bombers equipped to evade and survive the murderous aerial killing zones of the skies over Poland, the Baltic, White Russia and the Ukraine. Hell, the planned role of the British V-Bomber force in any war with the Soviets had been to ‘clear the road through the Soviet air defences’ for SAC; that was how good the RAF was!
If the Brits attacked then they would get through…
“Just grab the kids and get out of DC, okay…”
Bradlee’s wife was silent for a brief moment.
“I love you,” she said.
And the line went dead.
Chapter 34
It had rained overnight. So hard that Judy had awakened in the early hours and never managed to truly get back to sleep until Sam had crept into the bedroom sometime before daylight. It did not occur to her to ask him where he had been all night, or complain that he smelled of tobacco smoke. She did not own him and he certainly did not own her. They had what they had, their ‘relationship’ was what it was, and it did not need to be any more complicated than that. And besides, she loved it when he slid his arm under her head, and gently rested his free hand on her swollen belly in the dark, humid warmth of the bed. It was a month since they had had sex, well, properly. She was too big and he was too worried, convinced that she was ten times more delicate than she actually was. Sabrina said men were useless when it came to babies. They were useless about the whole pregnancy ‘thing’ in fact. Much to Judy’s surprise her friend had confessed that she had two, very nearly grown up children a few days ago.
‘They live with Lamar and his bitch wife, Rita, in Reno,” she had explained derisively. ‘I left when they were this high,’ she had gestured at her right hip. ‘I never wanted kids. Would you believe I was afraid Lamar would leave me if I didn’t come across? Jesus, I don’t who that woman I used to be was!’
Notwithstanding, Sabrina had got obsessively protective about Judy’s advanced pregnancy. She would not allow anybody to smoke in the same room, was forever fussing around her friend with cups of herbal tea, shrieked in horror when Judy tried to lift so much as a cushion, and berated her angrily when she attempted to pick up a broom or to move the crockery that continually piled up in the communal kitchen at the back of the old house.
Sabrina had got so worked up that she had started taking out her existential angst on Sam until Judy had taken her by the arm, led her to the sofa, sat her down and explained the way ‘I see things’.
Judy was fine with her lover hanging out most days and nights in the bars and clubs of the Sunset Strip. He was a musician, that’s what he did. Some guys were born to work nine to five, to come home and sit in front of the TV or next to the radiogram reading their paper while their wives did their best to be minor domestic deities. Sam was not that sort of guy and they were much closer in those times that they were actually together when they gave each other space in which to be the people they had been before they met, and probably would be for the rest of their lives. When they had been on the run, or trapped in the tented camp outside Vancouver last winter they had fucked a lot — physically, they could not have been more intimately close — but they had not really got to know and love each other until they had arrived in California and gotten used to the fact that they had survived.