James Philip
The Great Society
To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it all up in my own head. None of the characters in The Great Society’ — Book 3 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series — are based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events described in The Great Society — Book 3 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series — have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.
The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series’ is an alternative history of the modern world and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in some cases their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures, would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them on or after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always say in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it up in my own head.
‘My kid sister was in Buffalo when the bomb hit. This song is called Tabatha’s Gone…’
‘General LeMay, you are authorized to use all forces at your disposal to put down the current insurrection and to restore order in this city and its environs. Show no mercy.’
Chapter 1
He sat behind the wheel of his black 1958 Lincoln and smoked a cigarette as he viewed the chaos of flashing blue and red lights three hundred yards away down the road. He knew he ought to have been long gone but something had kept him close; as if he could not move on without seeing with his own eyes the final denouement of his career in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He had picked up Jansen — the psychopathic mob hit man he had paid five thousand dollars to assassinate Rear Admiral Braithwaite and his wife in Sequoyah County — on the way back from delivering Darlene Lefebure to her squalid lodgings in Oakland. The people he worked for would criticise him for wasting time getting the young woman out of the way; but he had not signed up to the cause to murder kids who had just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and besides, after tonight it was not going to matter that she was the only witness who could identify the killer of the Admiral and his wife.
He and Jansen had walked into the safe house.
None of the others had recognized the newcomer whom Christie had ushered before him into the building.
‘Who the fuck is this guy, Christie?’
Jansen had wordlessly pulled the short-barrel Smith and Wesson Model 29 revolver out and started blasting away. At point blank range the gun’s .44 calibre rounds tore the two men in the downstairs front room to pieces.
Special Agent Richter, a forty-three year old twenty-year G-man with a wife and three teenage kids came rushing down the stairs at the sound of gunfire; Christie had shot him twice while his feet were still thudding leadenly along the first floor landing. Christie had always felt happier with the Navy Colt he had got used to during his war service in the Judge Advocate’s Department than the Smith and Wessons most agents were issued. At close range shooting hollow-point ‘hunting rounds’ the gun was every bit as lethal as Jansen’s ‘Magnum’.
‘Easy,” grunted his partner, sneering at the bodies lying on the floor at his feet.
Christie had not hesitated.
The first round from his M1911 blew away most of Jansen’s lower face. As the maimed hit man lay writhing on the ground Christie had stepped over him. A second bulled mashed his head into a scatter of yellow bone and bloody viscera. Careful not to step in the spreading pools of blood he had carefully placed his wallet and ID card in the dead man’s inside left jacket pocket; removed the wedding band off his own ring finger and slid it onto Jansen’s.
The mobster was about his age, height and weight. Co-incidentally, he and Jansen shared the same blood type — ‘O’ Positive — which would probably clinch the deal when his friends from the Bureau, no doubt under intolerable pressure from the top, identified the ‘headless’ man. The world had just gone crazy again today; nobody was going to be lingering overlong over the affair of the four dead special agents in a house thousands of miles away from the uprising on the East Coast.
Although the radio was still only reporting fighting in Washington DC he had been led to believe that there would be ‘major actions’ in New York, Philadelphia, and in Virginia and the Carolinas. The US Atlantic Fleet was going to mutiny; National Guard units from New England to the Gulf of Mexico would march on State Capitols; there would be open season on cops, government officials and buildings. By tomorrow morning America would be ablaze from the Atlantic to the Mississippi!
Christie would believe it when it happened.
All he knew right now was that he had received his orders, carried them out and was now awaiting developments. He was a relatively small cog in a machine that had been under construction for many years before the disaster of the Cuban Missiles War; a machine constantly under attack from the organisation he had worked for, the FBI, since 1946. Or rather, it had been under attack from the FBI until the October War; ever since that night a little over thirteen months ago he had spent most of his ‘work’ time attempting to undermine the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and of other wholly legal and legitimate groups associated or affiliated with the Southern Civil Rights Movement and its charismatic leader, the Reverend Martin Luther King. It was hardly any wonder that the upwelling of the post-October War ‘resistance’ had been, by and large, untroubled by the authorities in the last thirteen months and had succeeded, it seemed, in rising up in arms against a completely unsuspecting Federal government.
His people in California and Oregon had been directed to assassinate FBI and law enforcement officers — mostly at random — and to carry out sabotage ‘actions’ against power and communications targets. The generality and breadth of the commands which had come down from on high four days ago had worried Christie. The whole thing spoke of muddled thinking, of decisions arrived at in haste. The lack of a ‘big plan’ did not auger well for the success of an ‘uprising’. Any fool could see that America was divided, troubled and weakened, and hopelessly adrift on the radically changed tides of the post-war world; any fool ought also to have been able to see that the United States of America had thus far survived and self-evidently, still retained vast untapped reserves of economic, military, emotional and intellectual power. The nation was simply not yet ripe for revolution.
He twirled the tuning dial of the car radio.