He did not see the two choppers skimming south for some seconds; two Bell UH-1 Iroquois ‘Hueys’ tracking across the ruined footprint of Texas City towards the fire burning on the plain. Nearing the blazing, smoke-shrouded family compound the helicopters separated and began to quarter the ground around the circling government cars, before edging closer, ever closer to the abandoned, burning huts and vehicles left behind.
When his father’s ‘sump’ lit off it was as if full day had broken an hour early; the flash was hurtfully dazzling and destroyed Mickey’s night vision for several seconds. The rippling, crackling, tearing sound of the explosion hit his senses. Later he watched the mushroom cloud of the detonation rising, the shockwave kicked up dust and blew it into his face like a hot wind off the desert.
The two choppers had disappeared.
Where the government cars had been circled there was only burning wreckage.
Of the compound there was nothing.
Within a hundred yards of the ‘sump’ the ground itself seemed to be on fire.
He had no pity in his heart for the men who had perished; such were the wages of sin. Nobody said God’s work was easy. Sometimes the only real test of a man’s faith was his ability to do evil in the name of his God.
It was time to go and Mickey levered himself to his feet, pausing to brush down his fatigues. The explosions and the fires would bring more government men sooner or later. He took one last look at the devastation on the other side of the city and with a sigh, he turned to return to the dead ground where he had camouflaged the Jeep.
It was as he turned away from the pillar of smoke that the bullet crashed into his torso and exited his back, the passage of the high velocity round fired from approximately a four hundred yards away was only minimally retarded by its encounter with Michael Cheney’s leanly muscled body due to the fact that it had somehow contrived to avoid contact with any part of his skeleton on entry and had disintegrated by the time it had shredded the contents of fifty percent of his chest cavity, before exiting his back in fragments causing a three inch diameter wound fouled with the wreckage of two shattered ribs.
All the young man actually felt was a massive hammer blow to his chest and then he was crumpling to his knees where for some seconds he lingered, unable to work out what had happened.
One small part of his shocked and disorientated conscious mind registered that he seemed to be kneeling in a pool of blood; although he did not immediately draw the connection between the blood and gory hole in his chest, or with his dribbling, coughing and spitting gobs of cardinal red spume from his mouth. His last memory was of the vile taste of iron as he toppled helplessly face forward onto the dirt. There he lay for about a minute, staring blindly, his body sucking air in and out of his blood-filled throat and his open chest cavity; and then his world went dark forever.
He was long dead by the time Dwight Christie cautiously approached to stand over the body. Neither he nor his companion could not afford to linger long but it paid to be sure of the kill when one was hunting a wild animal.
“We’ll carry him over to his Jeep.”
His companion, a much older man with an old-fashioned Mauser Karabiner 98 bolt-action rifle with a modern telescopic site slung over his right shoulder grunted.
“Whoever taught the young idiot field craft ought to be shot,” he observed sourly as he gazed down at the carnage wrought by the big 7.92 calibre 57 millimetre round fired from his trusty souvenir of his time in France, Belgium and Germany in 1944 and 1945.
“Like I said, his father is a religious nut,” Christie retorted wearily. “The way things are going you might well have to shoot the crazy sonofabitch one day!”
“I’ll take his legs, Dwight,” the older man suggested.
Together the two men carried and dragged the corpse back to the Jeep, which Michael Cheney had stolen from a National Guard depot in Fort Worth around the time of the Dealey Plaza fiasco. There was a half-full jerry can of petrol in the rack at the back of the vehicle and Christie emptied the contents over the body and the seats.
Christie dabbed a rag in the gasoline, lit it with a match and lobbed it into the Jeep.
There was a soft ‘woof’ and the flames erupted.
The two men did not stay to watch the fires consume the body of the young religious zealot. They briskly walked away up wind; each man silently reflecting on the hopelessness of their cause.
Chapter 62
For the second time in less than two months Lieutenant-Commander Walter Brenckmann junior found himself marching into the presence of the Chief of Naval Operations, the professional head of the United States Navy.
Back in the first week in December the holder of that exalted post had been Admiral George Whelan Anderson, the stern New York born man under whose watch America had fought and won a thermonuclear war; a war in part sparked by the ‘Beale Incident’. Admiral Anderson had survived that disaster but been a broken man by the time of his resignation in the wake of the bizarrely aggressive conduct of several senior officers of the USS Enterprise Battle Group against the Royal Navy, and the scandal of the sinking of the USS Scorpion. The true facts of this ‘scandal’ were as yet unknown to the American public but if and when those facts ever became generally know, Admiral Anderson’s reputation and that of CINCLANT — the Commander-in-Chief of the US Atlantic Fleet — would be comprehensively trashed.
Walter’s interview with Admiral Anderson had been wholly concerned with the apparent compromising of the chain of command of SUBRON15’s — Submarine Squadron 15 — Polaris missile boats. This had come to light when Commander Troy Simms of the USS Sam Houston (SSBN-609) had opened his ‘deterrent patrol’ orders and discovered to his astonishment that he was required to sail to a position off the eastern coast of Australia so as, in the event of war, to be within the missile ‘throw range’ of over ninety percent of the population of that continent. When, shortly after the Sam Houston had returned to the base of SUBRON15 at Alameda in San Francisco Bay — the cover story was she had touched bottom and needed to be dry-docked — the Squadron’s commander Admiral Jackson Braithwaite and his wife were murdered in a brutal shooting, the alarm bells had rung all the way to the Pentagon and back. Rear Admiral Bernard Clarey, in command of all US submarines in the Pacific — COMSUBPAC — had promptly flown back to California and a huge investigation had been launched into the affair in the days before the Battle of Washington. Ordered to report to the Navy Department in Washington DC Walter Brenckmann had found himself in the eye of the storm; and before he was handed on to the Navy’s gimlet-eyed inquisitors Admiral Anderson had summoned Walter to a private, sternly informal debriefing session.
Anderson had made a deep impression on the young officer. Walter had known the older man by reputation — the whole Navy knew he was among, if not the most distinguished officer of his generation — but until that day he had never encountered him in person. Anderson’s consideration for Walter’s understandable anxiety, his gravitas and paternal manner had quickly put the younger man at his ease. Walter had walked out of the interview convinced that — contrary to his suspicion that his own career was irrevocably tainted, by association, with the security breach he had reported to Admiral Clarey, effectively breaking the news to the rest of the US Navy — the buck actually stopped at the desk of the Chief of Naval Operations; and that if anybody wanted to scapegoat any of his officers it would have to be over Admiral Anderson’s dead body. Admiral Anderson had retired at the end of December and Walter hated the gathering chorus of sniping behind the great man’s back. After a life of service to the flag Anderson deserved better than for his reputation to be slowly shredded by a thousand little cuts by men mostly unfit to stand in the great man’s shadow.