Once he had started to ask himself who actually profited from the war. Wall Street? The bankers? The grasping politicians who filled Congress and the Senate? The men who had ordered more ships and tanks and aircraft for the Navy, the Army and the Air Force than there were men of military age in America to man? The men who filled depots all over America and with so much spare, surplus hardware that at the end of the war mothballing had become a new national sport?
It was not just the graft and the corruption which underpinned the whole system, it was the collective attitude of the ruling elite who saw no problem with the waste and the idiocy of that system. After the Second World War America had scuttled enough ships at sea, dumped enough munitions into the oceans, bulldozed enough equipment into landfills and down abandoned mineshafts weaponry and technology had been scuttled at sea, thrown down mine shafts, and broken up, or given away aircraft, tanks and ships — for which the US taxpayer had paid top dollar — to any third rate piss pot little country who was prepared to let US conglomerates operate like latter day Barbary Pirates in their lands.
Ask not what your country can do for you!
Yeah, sure…
Christie’s older brother, Frank, a lieutenant in the Marines, had been killed at Iwo Jima. His kid brother, Vernon, a corporal in the 101st Airborne had died of wounds sustained in Normandy in June 1944. Frank and Vernon’s deaths had destroyed his mother and father; they had both died young in their fifties, broken and inconsolable.
Ask what you can do for your country!
When the Soviets — the NKVD in those days — had recruited him around Christmas 1946 he had been a soft touch. Just out of uniform, guilty to have ‘hidden’ at home while his brothers had died for the greater good on foreign fields, and drinking himself into a hole ahead of going back to college under the auspices of the GI Bill, he had no longer believed in anything in particular any more.
Over about a year his handlers had channelled his rage and given him a new purpose.
He had applied to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation in California, completed his college education, become a G-man and the rest, as they say, was history…
If his handlers ever re-surfaced; which he did not think was very likely they would be as mad as Hell about his decision to remove Darlene Lefebure from the firing line. Not that he cared, he had never signed up to the cold-blooded murder of young women for no better reason than to tie up an inconvenient ‘loose end’. Besides, if his handlers wanted to make contact with him they were going to have to find him first!
The more he thought about what had happened in the last few days the more he became convinced that the leadership of the resistance had had a collective brainstorm. In attempting to stage a coup in Washington all they had achieved was to stab a sleeping tiger in the butt with a penknife. What did they think was going to happen if they did the one thing, the only thing, likely to temporarily reunite the country — well, a significant part of it — behind the Federal Government? When you awakened a sleeping tiger you were supposed to hang onto its tail; the way things looked from where he sat — as far away from the District of Columbia as a man could get and still be within the contiguous borders of the in the continental United States — all the uprising had succeeded in doing was to bring down the full crushing majesty of the power of the wounded beast upon the resistance’s heads!
One thing was clear if nothing else.
For the foreseeable future he was on his own and lying low was the only option. In a week or so he would begin to pick up the traces, assess whether it was viable to attempt to reconnect with whatever survived of his north California network. As of now he had no idea how many of his people had been swept up in the madness in the East or had fallen into the authorities hands in the course of conducting the stupid, pointless uncoordinated ‘sabotage and assassination actions’ mandated by the same fools who had sanctioned the Washington insurrection.
He heard the car squeal to a halt behind him.
Dwight Christie fought the urge to look over his shoulder. His gun was under the driver’s seat of the Lincoln. He carried on staring out across San Diego Bay towards Coronado Island. Before the October War there was talk of a bridge joining San Diego to the island — actually Coronado Island was a ten mile long sandy isthmus between the city and the Pacific — but the Cuban disaster had put an end to that sort of talk. It was a pity; a bridge would have turned Coronado Island into a suburb of San Diego, and possibly the premier money-making holiday resort of Southern California within a decade. That would have been good for everybody, sucking in investment and new blood from all over the American South West. Presently, San Diego was in the grip of a vicious economic recession, wholly dependent on the dwindling largesse of the US Navy, its population declining fast despite the influx of refugees from elsewhere in the Union. They said things were so bad that some San Diegans were heading south across the border into Mexico.
“Heck of a thing!” Sighed the tall man who had levered himself stiffly out of his beaten up Chevy and stalked unhurriedly towards the man sitting on the bench smoking his cigarette.
Dwight Christie nodded.
“Heck of a thing, Galen,” he agreed, not rising to his feet.
The newcomer joined Christie on the bench, wearily planting his trademark Sedona on his knee. His cowboy boots were scuffed and the perennial black Bolo tie with its distinctive Navajo medallion was absent. Despite the warmth of the day he was wearing a long grey coat.
“Did you know what those fucking idiots were planning?” Galen Cheney demanded with the mildly vexed weariness of a man who had been behind the wheel of a car for the best part of the last forty-eight hours.
Christie shook his head.
“No, just that something was going on. I tried to call off the ‘actions’ my people were supposed to carry out on Monday night when I realized what was happening in DC. It was too late, of course. I wouldn’t be surprised if we burned half the West Coast resistance on Monday night. The rest of us, like you and me, are basically in hiding.”
“Not me, son.”
Dwight Christie did not like Galen Cheney but sometimes liking a man was immaterial. He particularly did not like being referred to as ‘son’ by somebody who was only sixteen years his senior and whom he regarded as being just that little bit too crazy for their line of work. However, beggars could not be choosers, especially when one was fighting a war with a vastly more powerful and apparently victorious enemy.
He looked Cheney in the eye.
“I’m not your son, Galen.”
The older man shrugged.
Galen Cheney was one of those ‘rugged individuals’, or ‘dangerous madmen’ — it all depended upon one’s viewpoint — whose FBI file was as voluminous as Dwight Christie had expected it to be when he had finally got his hands on it.
‘Galen’ was not his given name. He had been christened John Herbert Cheney into a Texas City family embedded into a small close-knit fundamentalist Christian religious community, some kind of weird offshoot of the Plymouth Brethren. His father was a lay preacher, his mother a woman who ruled her brood — literally — with a rod of iron. His family was poor, dirt poor and seemed to have lived off the charity of neighbours in a three room house on Galveston Bay until they were expelled from the ‘church’ when Cheney was about nine. Cheney’s father had been accused of molesting the daughter of another member of ‘the communion’ — an eleven year old girl — and he had taken his family to New Mexico, then Arizona, Nevada and back to Texas, Fort Worth in the following years. The father sounded like some kind of archetypal whiskey preacher, or snake oil salesman or a flimflam man, depending upon one’s perspective. One of seven children — John Henry was the eldest of three boys but had two older sisters — the young ‘Galen’ had spent his teenage years being passed from pillar to post and ended up in a reformatory in Abilene. The only thing he had clung onto from those harsh childhood days was his eye for an eye, openly brutal ‘faith’. God did not just exist; He was righteous and He was always looking over Galen Cheney’s right shoulder.