The Chief of Naval Operations rose slowly to his feet.
“The Enterprise is operating in the Western Approaches south west of the British Isles. The USS Scorpion detected and ‘persuaded’ HMS Dreadnought to break off contact with the Battle Group several days ago. The USS Shark has since joined the Enterprise’s screen. In the event Dreadnought attempts to stalk the Enterprise a second time CINCLANT has requested permission to deter that submarine by more aggressive means, sir.”
“Sink it, you mean?”
“No, sir. Active sonar scanning, the deployment of practice depth charges and…”
“NO! NO! NO!” McNamara was on his feet. “Are you idiots trying to start another war?”
General William Childs Westmoreland, now attending the meeting as a non-contributing observer in his capacity as special military advisor to the Secretary of Defence, winced because he felt the lash of the former Ford Motor Company President’s tongue as keenly as any of his service colleagues.
The calmest man in the room was General David Monroe Shoup, the man who had gone ashore with the 2nd Marine Regiment at Tarawa in 1943. He slowly took off his glasses and placed them on the table.
“Mr Secretary,” he said quietly. Everybody looked to him. “I seriously doubt that anybody in this room is trying to start another war. None of us want that.” He leaned forward, rested his elbows on the table. “But it looks very much to me as if somebody is trying to start another war.”
Chapter 37
“What’s wrong with Dan?” Walter Brenckmann asked his mother, taking the next plate to be dried and setting to work with the dish towel with his customary attention to detail until the plate was spotlessly dry. By then his mother had rinsed the next plate.
Joanne Brenckmann handed her eldest son the plate and paused, removing her hands from the soapy water and wiping the suds on her apron. Each of her sons was completely unique in her eyes — as are all sons and daughters of all mothers — but of the three Junior was the least dreamy, most focused by a country mile. And yet even Junior had his enormous blind spots.
Walter met his mother’s arched eyebrows with a quizzical grimace.
“What?” He inquired, not knowing whether to be amused. It was one of life’s oddities that while he could stand a watch on a ballistic missile submarine responsible for the safety of the hundred and ten men on the boat, and not to put too fine a point on it, literally hold the fate of nations in his hands with almost total equanimity, nobody cut through his defences like his mother.
“Gretchen?”
“What about Gretchen?”
“Dan is stupid about her.”
“Oh, right.” Walter’s brow furrowed. Belatedly, he understood why they were talking in such low, conspiratorial tones. Dan, having returned from Washington that morning had been politely uncommunicative all afternoon and as soon as dinner was over had gone for a walk. A walk which he now realised was likely to take in at least one bar. “I wondered about that. Dan isn’t very, well, obvious about these things and Gretchen…”
“Gretchen goes doe-eyed every time you walk into the room,” Joanne sighed. Life was intrinsically unfair.
“Look, I haven’t given Gretchen any encouragement,” Walter protested, feeling like a naughty twelve year old not a highly trained and qualified submariner killing time before he went on the United States Navy’s make or break ‘Nuclear Submarine Service Command Course’.
“I know you haven’t, sweetheart,” Joanne assured him instantly.
It was Walter’s turn to give his mother a very sharp look.
Which she in turn parried with an indulgent smile.
“I almost got married twice before I met your father,” she confessed. “Your grandparents gave me a hard time. They were terrified I’d die a sad, wizened old spinster. Both my ‘near misses’ were nice men, good steady types,” she recollected of her failed suitors, “but neither of them had any spark. I couldn’t imagine what we’d talk about when we were old and for some reason that mattered. I don’t know why, I suppose I was a little flighty in those days.”
“You, flighty?”
“Yes. Then I met your father and I knew we’d always be equals.” Joanne Brenckmann stuck her hands back into the basin, feeling for the next bowl beneath the soap suds. “And I decided — after our second date — that whatever happened he wasn’t going to get away.”
Walter nodded, carried on drying crockery.
“Gretchen treats Dan like a jerk,” he observed.
“I know. It is so sad. Dan’s perfect for her but she doesn’t see it.”
“I told Gretchen that I didn’t have time for involvements. Marriage, that sort of thing,” Walter informed his mother.
“Was that why she went back early to Washington?”
“I guess,” the son shrugged.
Joanne changed the subject.
“What on earth is going on in Spain?”
Walter had no idea what was ‘going on in Spain’. He had heard the same newscasts as his mother, and the garbled reports of ‘battles’. Somebody had ‘bombed Malta’ and the networks had helpfully dug out old World War II footage to illustrate what Malta being bombed looked like. Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State had held a press conference that afternoon which ABC had broadcast live to the nation. Rusk had seemed as baffled as everybody else which was par for the course for the Administration lately. His mother and father were of the radio generation and the family TV was a small, cranky contraption. The roof top aerial needed repositioning, perhaps, he and Dan would get the ladders out and do something about that tomorrow. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Brenckmann’s remained essentially a radio age family.
Their kitchen chores completed mother and son retired to the lounge and the big, walnut-encased radiogram was turned on.
“…White House insiders have been unable to clarify the situation in the Mediterranean. When asked about the alleged involvement of American jet fighter-bombers in the attack on two Royal Navy destroyers off the north-west coast of Spain, a Pentagon spokesman characterised the suggestion as being quote ‘reckless speculation’. The British Ambassador, Sir James Sykes, visited the White House today but refused to make any comment on arrival, or when he left after meeting the President. White House Chief of Staff Kenny O’Donnell has promised that as soon as the situation has been ‘clarified’ that the President will speak to the press…”
The program went back to dance music.
On returning to Cambridge, Walter had phoned his ‘security contact number’ at Groton, Connecticut. The Navy needed to know where he was at any one time, and required advance warning if he planned to be somewhere else in the near future. He was a ‘key member’ of the Polaris Program and the Navy owned him. Listening to the newscasts he wondered how soon he would be called back to duty.
“You must have been angry being pulled off the Scorpion at such short notice, Junior?” His mother prompted, making conversation.