Again, his President patted his Secretary of Defence’s arm.
“Old Iron Pants knows what we’re going to be talking about and that we’re not about to take any big decisions without him.”
“I’m sure General McConnell will fight the Air Force’s corner if it comes to it, sir.” Admiral David Lamar McDonald added as the President moved down the line to shake the Chief of Naval Operation’s hand.
“I’m sure he will,” Jack Kennedy agreed but his thoughts were still with Curtis LeMay and their long conversation last night over a scrambled link while he had been flying back to Philadelphia on Special Air Mission 26000, the radically modified Type VC-137 Boeing 707 that was the flagship of the growing fleet of Presidential jetliners. Curtis LeMay had not minced his words; he rarely did. He had the Air Force back in his pocket and he was relatively sanguine about the problems with the National Guard. These latter ‘problems’ were ‘containable’ by indefinitely standing down and disarming all the suspect units, sacking commanders who refused to obey lawful commands, and in a small number of cases, arresting and detaining those whose disloyalty went beyond a simple refusal to carry out orders, on grounds of ‘sedition and conduct prejudicial to good military discipline’. No, the real problem was the Navy. The Navy had probably provoked the October War and last December the Navy — leastways, elements within the Atlantic Fleet — had done their worst to start another war. LeMay was worried that foot-dragging by the Navy Department in its relocated Philadelphia headquarters was creating a new ticking time bomb. The events leading up to the loss of the USS Scorpion were still officially unresolved, the subject of an as yet to be convened Board of Enquiry. Notwithstanding the appointment of a new C-in-C Atlantic Fleet — CINCLANT — the Administration’s enemies in the House of Representatives were playing politics over the bodies of the Scorpion’s dead. LeMay had complained, with impressive and sustained vitriol, about ‘people in the Navy continuing to brief the House that the Scorpion was the victim of a sneak attack by HMS Dreadnought’. The substance of the lie was that the Administration was covering up the truth to ‘suck up to the Brits’. Basically, the Navy needed to get its act together!
The trouble was that the new Chief of Naval Operations, unquestionably able and loyal, was a mere mortal and he did not have a magic wand he could wave to make the ‘Scorpion Disaster’ go away. Moreover, he had other bigger fires to fight.
Fifty-sex year old General John Paul McConnell, Curtis LeMay’s successor as Chief of Staff or the United States Air Force was almost completely unlike his larger than life predecessor in practically every way that a rational man might imagine He was LeMay’s acting successor because once again the Honourable Members of the House of Representatives had not got their act together to hold, or to schedule confirmation hearings because they were presently too busy squabbling among themselves, fretting about their dignity and privileges, and diligently looking for new and innovative ways to frustrate the effective government of the country. Quiet, steadfast competence had characterised the career of the Arkansan born McConnell; unlike LeMay he had made few enemies, and did not as a rule inadvertently close channels of communication to anybody who might one day become his enemy. He was a ‘political’ officer in the sense that he respected where the ultimate authority lay but he was no place man, and quite capable of saying ‘no’ to anybody. When he was promoted to full general and appointed Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the United States European Command in 1962, he had slipped under the radar to leapfrog ahead of several more glamorous, but perhaps, less solid candidates. In the aftermath of the Battle of Washington, McConnell had been Curtis LeMay’s sole recommendation to replace him on his own elevation to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Previously, whoever was appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had remained the Chief of Staff of his own service; but Jack Kennedy did not want a ‘chairman’, he wanted a fully fledged ‘commander’ capable of, and authorised to, issue orders to the other chiefs of staff and had promulgated an Executive Order to this effect a week ago. Congress would do its best to shoot this arrangement down in flames but for the moment, the President was confident he had re-established a chain of command that actually worked. Today was John McConnell’s first full day in his new post as the professional head of the US Air Force.
Jack Kennedy shook the airman’s hand.
“Welcome to the majors, General McConnell.”
John McConnell’s high brow furrowed for an instant.
“I serve at my President’s pleasure, sir.”
Chapter 3
If Marija Elizabeth Calleja had still to make up her mind whether being the prospective daughter-in-law of the most powerful man in the Mediterranean was an entirely good thing; she was entirely confident that her blurted acceptance — five days ago — of the great man’s son’s proposal of marriage was a very, very good thing. The fact that by all accounts Lieutenant-Commander Peter Christopher, the twenty-seven year old son of Admiral Sir Julian Wemyss Christopher, the Commander-in-Chief of all British and Commonwealth Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations — those that had survived the travails of the last few weeks, anyway — had done his level best to get himself killed in the handful of days since she had finally met him, face to face, for the first and only time in their fourteen year courtship, had not diminished her conviction that Peter was the best thing that had ever happened to her by one single iota. In retrospect the strangest thing was that she had not actually realised she was head over heels in love with him until the October War.
Earlier that morning she and Surgeon Commander Margo Seiffert, United States Navy Reserve (Retired) had stood anonymously in the crowd in the Upper Baraka Gardens overlooking the old saluting battery as the USS Enterprise had nosed slowly into the Grand Harbour. Margo had squeezed Marija’s hand and tried to suppress a gasp of horror as the huge ship passed beneath their elevated vantage point. The drifting smoke of the saluting guns could not hide the giant aircraft carrier’s wounds; everything aft of her modernistic box like bridge superstructure was scorched and warped by the massive fires and explosions which had consumed the thirty aircraft and helicopters which had been parked on her deck at the moment the giant searing thermonuclear airburst had reached out to flail at the great ship.
The two women had leaned close one to the other.
Later they had watched the first of scores of terribly injured men loaded into lighters for the journey across the Grand Harbour to the hurriedly readied burns wards at the Royal Naval Hospital at Bighi. Several hundred terribly burned wounded were expected, survivors from the USS Long Beach and the USS Enterprise. In the three days since the strike the big carrier’s forward hangar deck had been transformed into a huge hospital but still, they said, several men died every hour from their nightmarish burns. Margo Seiffert had volunteered the services of her nursing auxiliaries to the Medical Director of RNH Bighi but had been politely rebuffed. Specialist doctors and nurses trained in the treatment and care of burns victims had begun to fly into RAF Luqa yesterday morning; no cost was being spared by the US Navy to ensure that its men got the best possible specialist treatment. Margo would have pressed the issue but none of her ‘auxiliaries’ were trained to nurse men with fifty percent or worse burns. The small boats continued to carry the desperately wounded and the dying across to Bighi all that morning and into the afternoon.