When he was fourteen Cheney had shipped out on a steamer running down to Panama, and travelled the world until he was twenty. Back in Texas he had joined the Rangers, in the Second World War he had signed up for the Air Force, serving in England and Western Europe as a military policeman. Back stateside after the 1945 war he joined the Federal Marshall’s Service; a grim, humourless man he would have probably been a Marshall until he dropped but for the war. Like so many other men the October War had robbed him of the one anchor in his otherwise joyless, dutiful existence and the resistance had drawn him into its waiting arms.
The reason Galen Cheney’s FBI file was so big was that he had killed four men in the line of duty, one when he was a Texas Ranger and the others during his service as a Federal Marshall. He had also killed a man in a fist fight in England during the 1945 war. He was a violent man whom, it seemed, courted danger and never flinched when the bullets started to fly. While everybody else went to ground he stood tall and blazed away until all the bad guys were down. He would have been an all-American hero but for his overly muscular religiosity and his habit of ‘preaching’ to his superiors.
The missile launched from Cuba which had destroyed Galveston Island and South Houston had obliterated his house on Texas Avenue and with it his wife of twenty-three years, Mary, his daughter May Rose, and his youngest son, Jacob. The small Navajo medallion which he normally wore with his black Bolo tie was for Mary, whose maternal grandmother had been pure-blood Navajo.
Ever since the day of the October War Galen Cheney had been on a personal crusade of revenge.
“You heard from your boys?” Dwight Christie asked quietly. Cheney’s surviving sons; Michael and Isaac, aged respectively twenty-two and twenty had, against Christie’s ‘advice’ gone up to Bellingham, supposedly to ‘recruit’ for the resistance that autumn.
“Yeah,” the older man grunted. “I don’t rightly recall you ever having mentioned there were Ruskies in Bellingham?”
Christie contemplated parrying this.
In the end he addressed the issue head on.
“In a war my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
This made no impression on the older man. His flinty grey-blue eyes viewed Christie coldly.
“My boys say the Commies were shipping in arms to the scum running Bellingham?”
“If you say so,” the younger man offered neutrally. “Why were you in Colorado last week?” He asked before Galen Cheney could quiz him further.
“I was doing the Lord’s work.”
“Specifically?”
“Finishing unfinished business.”
Dwight Christie groaned out aloud.
“We’re not fucking executioners, Galen!”
The older man threw him a thoughtful look and then gazed out across the bay as if he had only imagined he had heard what he had just heard, and instantly put it out of his mind.
“The Washington thing changes everything,” he observed.
“Yes,” Christie retorted. “It does. Are you still onboard?”
Galen Cheney contemplated this for perhaps twenty seconds, made as if to speak, thought better of it and mulled the question for the better part of another minute.
“Yeah, I reckon me and my boys are still onboard.”
Chapter 16
Having been commissioned in October 1799 the Washington Navy Yard was the oldest shore establishment on the books of the United States Navy. Situated in the south east of the city and protected by high walls and a permanent guard company, it had emerged from the uprising relatively unscathed. A truck bomb had demolished the facade of the famous old Latrobe Gate building on the north side, desultory attempts had been made to blast a way into the complex and grenades and a handful of small calibre mortar-type rounds had gone off in the vicinity of the yard’s perimeter but otherwise, the Washington Navy Yard had been an impregnable bastion from which to mount ground and helicopter strikes against the rebels. The secure southern boundary of the Yard, the Anacostia River, had enabled Marine Corps and National Guard squads to be assembled and transported wherever needed along the Anacostia or the Potomac, and eventually after a thirty-six hour fire fight to relieve the defenders of the Pentagon, the surviving terrorists had been driven onto the heights of Arlington where presumably, scores of the scum bags were still hiding among the graves of the dead of America’s former wars. That was a desecration of hallowed ground that the Vice-President of the United States of America had vowed not to leave unpunished.
“Where the fuck is Hoover?” Lyndon Baines Johnson demanded when he stomped into the bunker conference room.
At the end of the 1945 war the Washington Navy Yard had been the biggest naval ordnance complex in the World; even after the war when its manufacturing infrastructure was renamed the US Navy Gun Factory its one hundred and twenty-six acres had at one time accommodated over a hundred and eighty separate factories and employed over twenty-five thousand people. In recent years ordnance work had been phased out; much of it transferred elsewhere or supplanted by new emerging technologies. The great mid-century armouries that had produced the guns and shells that had defeated Hitler and won the war in the Pacific, had given way to futuristic factories all over the country manufacturing circuit boards and high-tech widgets for the new generation of modern guided munitions. Progress was sometimes intrinsically cruel.
Driving through the Yard that evening the Vice-President had been reminded that the unavoidable dereliction of this great engine of his country’s former wars was symptomatic of the crisis of the hour. There had been a coup d’état — which by the grace of God rather than by anything the Administration had done had failed — and the country was on its knees, possibly as divided as it had been at any time in the ninety-eight years since the end of the Civil War.
“Director Hoover’s security convoy was delayed, sir,”
That was because the arrogant old SOB set off too fucking late!
“Thank you gentlemen for making it here at such short notice,” Johnson said pointedly to the men in the room who had struggled to their feet at his entrance. “Please sit down.”
Right now the President and General Curtis LeMay — whom Jack Kennedy had designated as the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, the least he deserved after ‘old iron pants’ had flown in at the height of the rebellion and effectively snubbed it out in less than a day — were currently otherwise occupied putting the senior officers of the not so great American Military straight on one or two key matters. The President and his Vice-President had already given John McCone, the head of the CIA the same treatment. To his credit McCone had taken it on the chin, offered his resignation and when this was peremptorily refused gone straight back to Langley to start kicking the living daylights out of the battalions of useless, overpaid shitheads who had the nerve to call themselves ‘analysts’.