“Where was the initial point?”
“Thirty-eight thousand feet five miles north of the centre of Cadiz, sir.”
“Fuck!” The Chief of Staff of the Air Force spat. “My people in DC say the Brits have gun camera footage of their fighters chewing up our birds over Malta! With fucking thirty-millimetre cannons! Our birds!”
“Yes, sir.”
“You better have this place locked down so hard anybody trying to take a leak on the perimeter fence gets his dick shot off or I’ll want to know why, Slim!”
Barksdale AFB had in fact been locked down ever since the first B-52 took off three days ago.
“How’d our birds refuel in flight, Slim?”
“According to the operations order,” Babcock belatedly realised that asking his old friend to read every word of every sheaf of paper he had just liberally distributed on the desk probably wasn’t a good idea. “There were two KC-135s out of Anchorage on the way out; and two pre-positioned KC-135s out of Aviano AFB in Italy on the way back. The mission parameters assumed airspace over the Austria, Czechoslovakia and West Germany was safe…”
“Safe?” Curtis LeMay glared.
That was when there was a staccato knock at the door.
When this was ignored the banging became almost frantic.
“What?” The Chief of Staff of the Air Force bellowed like an enraged Bison with a Lacota warrior’s arrow sticking in his rump.
Lieutenant-Colonel Harvey Goldsmith, Curtis LeMay’s Communications Officer, stumbled into the room. He was a little dishevelled and he was breathless.
“General Wheeler ordered me to inform you,” the newcomer gasped, “that unless you take,” another gasp, “his call in the next five minutes he will order your arrest for…”
“Aw, shit!” Curtis LeMay groaned. “I don’t believe this!” He got up, shaking his head like a heavyweight picking himself off the canvass wondering where the haymaking left hook had just come from. “Calm down, son,” he said wearily to his Communications Officer. “Bus Wheeler ain’t going to do no such thing. Not unless he was suddenly born yesterday, and take it from me, that ain’t the case.”
It was several minutes before the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force arrived in the underground Command and Control Centre of Barksdale Air Force Base and raised the violent red scrambler handset to his head.
“If you’ve tracked me down to Louisiana just to tell me that we’ve got a problem, Bus,” he drawled laconically, “you ain’t telling me anything I don’t already know.”
General Earle ‘Bus’ Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces of the United States of America had, it seemed, been biting off and spitting out pieces of the Bakelite phone in Washington.
The public image of Curtis LeMay was of a fearless, fire-eating, cigar-smoking, red-necked martinet who was always the first man over the top, laughing in the face of the enemy. But Old Iron Pants LeMay, the man who’d been Bombs Away LeMay as the commander of one of the first B24 Groups in England in 1942, the Demon to anybody who got on his wrong side, or the Big Cigar to his airmen; was not just that man. Curtis LeMay had advanced from a lowly First Lieutenant in 1940 to a Major-General in 1945 commanding the great B-29 fleets that had ravaged the ancient cities of Japan in the last months of the World War II. In 1948 he’d commanded the United States Air Force in Europe during the Berlin Airlift. Until 1961 he’d been the commander of Strategic Air Command for a decade, the primary architect of the force that had won the October War in hours. During the Second World War his current political Chief, Robert McNamara, had been a relatively junior officer assigned to the Office of Statistical Control serving in Indian, China and the Marianas, coincidentally following Curtis LeMay from one command to the next, applying statistical analytical techniques to the operations of the Big Cigar’s bombers. LeMay and McNamara were antipathetic characters who’d never really seen eye to eye; and not surprisingly the drastic cut backs in the Air Force budget had promoted a widening rift between the two men. When LeMay had found out that McNamara had described him as ‘extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal’ he’d ignored the subsequent caveat, offered freely and generously by the Secretary of Defence that ‘he [LeMay] was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in the war’. In many ways McNamara hugely respected LeMay, not least for his inclination to lead from the front. Curtis LeMay was after all, the man who led the B24 component of the 1943 bloodbath attack on Schweinfurt and Regensburg. The problem lay in LeMay’s opinion, frequently stated — both verbally and in writing — that he believed a pre-emptive nuclear war was in some sense winnable. After the events of the night of 27th-28th October 1962 the two men could never trust each other again.
So when Curtis LeMay waited for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to compose his thoughts, he was asking himself if the repercussions over who exactly was responsible for the almost total FUBAR — as in fucked up beyond all repair — completely unfunny comedy of tragic errors they’d overseen that night thirteen months ago was finally about to consume the Big Cigar.
“The President,” Bus Wheeler said slowly, precisely, “is to make an unscheduled State of the Union Address tonight,” he forced it out with the ill-grace of a man pulling out his own teeth with a pair of rusty pliers, “in which he will announce that Chief Justice Earl Warren will lead ‘a Commission’ into the causes, conduct and the aftermath of last year’s war.”
Curtis LeMay digested the news unhurriedly, saying nothing.
“He’s also going to come clean about the B-52s the Brits shot down over Malta, Curtis.”
That wasn’t so good.
“When does that get to be a good idea, Bus?” The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force objected. “I didn’t order that. Neither did any of my people. Yeah, sure the mission orders and protocols have got my signature and command codes on them but that’s just standard operating procedure. It’s like blaming George Washington for embezzlement just because his face on a greenback!”
There was a hissing silence on the line.
“They think you’re behind the thing that happened in Scotland with the Queen of England, or whatever. That,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was close to hyperventilating in disbelief: “USAF personnel in Spain and Italy have been yanking chains, giving Franco and those shitheads in Italy the heads up that we — the United States of America — will back them up if they challenge the Brits.”
“You’re shitting me, Bus!”
“It doesn’t matter what I think, it is what they believe in the White House.”
“I’m out here trying to get a handle on this thing with the 100th Bomb Group…”
“Where have you been the last few days, Curtis?”
The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force was momentarily struck dumb by the tersely delivered interrogative. He’d actually spent most of the last fortnight racing cars in the desert. He’d always been a car nut; lately racing fast cars was pretty much the only thing that took his mind off the madness of the World and the knowledge that even here, in America, a sizable proportion of the population regarded him not as a national saviour but as a monster, a mass murderer in the same league as Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. A fortnight ago the World had been mostly peaceful, albeit broken; there had been no serious threats of the horizon so he’d gone on leave, driven a lot of old cars, and raced a few very fast new ones around a couple of recently abandoned air bases with his friends…