The lights had gone out ten minutes after the first explosions from the direction of the Main State Building at Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon. About an hour ago the power had returned, albeit with variable voltage that made the few surviving light bulbs constantly flicker.
“Ben Bradlee!” He gasped, taking the handset lying almost flat on the floor of the newsroom. One of his stringers had been shot by a sniper when he put his head above the window sill about an hour ago and his body still lay in Bradlee’s office with half his head missing. “Is that you Westy?”
“Sure is, Ben,” the other man replied levelly — his tone analogous to that of a man gravely discussing the pros and cons of changing the batting order in a junior league ball game — through hissing static and regular clicks on the line. “What’s it looking like from where you are?”
“I have no idea,” the Newsweek Chief confessed. “The last time one of my guys looked out of the window he got shot.” After the initial shock of the huge explosions and the deafening clatter of gunfire in the street Ben Bradlee had forced himself to get a grip and to take stock. The building had been shot at and damaged by nearby explosions but nobody had actually targeted it. Therefore, the Newsweek Bureau was not a priority target; and life continued. A voice in the back of his head told him that Westmoreland was ringing contacts in Washington to get a handle on the situation.
That was not a good sign.
“Sorry about that. A lot of good people have got hurt tonight.”
Ben Bradlee would remember the calm reassurance of Bill Westmoreland’s demeanour every time he looked back on that terrible December night in 1963. Westy was worried but he was not panicking, just methodically working his way through the options.
“There were at least two big bombs at Justice,” he reported, collecting the garbled stories which had streamed into the Bureau that evening. “The Embassy district was hit real hard. They say the State Department is burning. I’ve heard a lot of movement out along Pennsylvania Avenue but I don’t think any of it is heavy armour. These guys have got Bazookas and fifty calibre machine guns but I don’t think they’ve got tanks. We’ve been getting reports of hit squads — maybe four, five or six men with automatic rifles — hunting down cops, pulling people out of cars and going into government buildings. The last time I risked a look I could see at least half-a-dozen Washington PD cruisers burning on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Ben Bradlee took a pause for breath and asked questions, not expecting an honest answers. “I heard the Army parked tanks on the White House lawn about an hour before all this started? Tanks and a cordon of Marines in full combat gear? Is that right?”
“Yeah,” the other man confirmed tersely. “But that was just an exercise. Nobody knew this was going happen.”
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“No. Not yet. We’ve captured a few religious weirdoes and back-woodsmen at the Pentagon. They’re the sort of guys who think people who live in cities are the Devil’s spawn and claim that God told them personally to complete his work of Revelation. This thing hit us where it would hurt the most but I’m getting the feeling that it may already running out of steam in some places. The initial assault was obviously fairly well planned and co-ordinated but what’s been going on since is just an orgy of violence and killing. You got any reports of rioting?”
“Yes. All over DC. Is it right that these bastards hit Bethesda Hospital?”
“Yeah, they tried to but the Navy — well, somebody in the Navy, anyway — had armed shore patrols on the gate when the crazies drove up. The insurgents have gone for hospitals, railway stations, and shot up metro trains. They don’t seem to want to hold ground, just to destroy property, infrastructure and to kill as many people as possible.”
“This isn’t any kind of coup d’état?” Ben Bradlee asked bluntly.
“If it is nobody’s told me about it! If it was a coup d’état you’d have thought they’d have concentrated all their forces on the White House, Capitol Hill and seized the TV and radio stations. Granted, there’s fighting around the House of Representatives but they lit off gas tankers outside the two major TV stations. We’ve got a large number of intruders in the Pentagon but we’ve got them where we want them and we’ll do something about that when we’re good and ready. Keep your head down, Ben. I’ll get somebody to ring through to you on this line every thirty minutes for updates.”
Chapter 6
Fifty-one year old Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun since July 1960 the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center — formerly Nazi Party member No. 5,738,692, and Allgemeine SS Sturmbannführer, SS membership No. 185,068 — only rarely dwelt on his childhood days in Berlin during and after the First World War, or those incredible days at Peenemunde when every week he and his people had been breaking totally new ground in applied rocket design. Back then they had been writing the rules of for the future of space exploration. Nevertheless, outside the inner circle of the trusted kameraden who like him had been spirited out of defeated Germany in 1945 under the auspices of Operation Paperclip, he almost never spoke about anything that had happened to him prior to May 1945.
The past was another country; literally so in von Braun’s case.
Fortuitously, immediately after the war nobody in America had cared much about his complicity — or otherwise — in the outrageous excesses of the regime he had served; later in the 1940s and early 1950s his new masters had grown curious, mostly idly, until, pragmatic people that they were, the launch of Sputnik had finally eradicated all doubt, scruple and conscience from the debate. After the shock of Sputnik — losing the first march in the ‘space race’ — the United States military and that part of the Washington political elite that von Braun actually considered to be in some sense ‘sentient’, had rowed in behind him and his kameraden as if he and his people were beloved prodigals joyously returned to the fold. That had been in 1958; and by then a dozen years had been lost. If the Americans had given him a free hand in 1945 he would have put a man on the Moon by now, or would at least be in the process of putting one on it soon. But no, his hosts had relegated him to the sidelines. His people had spent five years trying to get the US Army to understand the technology of the V2s it had captured in Germany in 1945; and then frittered away more years restricted to scaling up old Nazi rocket designs. True, the Jupiter booster had emerged from this period but there had been no breakthroughs, no great leaps forward and all the time the Soviets had been catching up and in some respects, overtaking American space technology. The tragedy of the situation was that he and the kameraden had already envisaged a massively scaled up multi-stage version of the V2 in 1945.
The past never really went away.
Von Braun had been born in Wirsitz in 1912, then in Prussia but now Wyrzysk in Poland. He was the second of three sons born into the minor nobility of the German Empire; his father had served as Agriculture Minister in the Reich Cabinet of the Weimar Republic, and his mother claimed distant ancestry through both her parents to a slew of medieval monarchs including Philip III of France, Valdemar I of Denmark, Robert III of Scotland, and Edward III of England but her sons had never known how seriously to take such claims.