“Bobby,” Lyndon Baines Johnson, every inch the Texan cowboy in his cool unflappability, drawled softly. “You need to leave me alone with the President now.”
The Attorney General scowled at the older man.
“You boys might want another war but me,” the Vice-President shrugged, “I talk to voters now and then. Up close and personal, and they don’t want another war. Trust me, they want a lot of things but most of all they don’t want another war and if we carry on doing business this way that’s what we’re going to get. So you take all these other folks outside while I talk to the President.”
The tall Texan drew up a chair across the desk from his President.
Presently, the two men were alone.
“Well,” the older man said, “I told you jumping on that conspiracy shit Bobby and Dean brought back from State this afternoon was a mistake. You just told the American people you got fooled by the bad guys, Mister President. If we had some bad guys in our hands we could put them on death row but we don’t and we probably never will. The next thing that’s going to happen is Curtis fucking LeMay is going to come busting into DC like a B-52 loaded for bear because you named and shamed his fucking Air Force without giving him a heads up first. LeMay’s a son of a bitch but he’s our son of a bitch and you don’t call out a guy like him unless you’ve seen his hand and you know you’ve got the table covered.”
Jack Kennedy began to focus on the Texan.
“You finished yet, Mister Vice-President?”
“Jeez, I haven’t started yet. Who the fuck put in that shit about the Brits stopping our Embassy people coming home? And the demand to hand our POWs back before we agree to talk?”
The President held up a hand.
“That was a mistake,” he murmured, his thoughts elsewhere. “The Greeks called Straits of Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules,” the former Rhodes Scholar went on. “The Rock of Gibraltar was the northern ‘pillar’, with either Monte Hacho in Ceuta, or Jebel Musa in Morocco being the most obvious southern ‘pillar’. The Pillars of Hercules marked the end of the known work in classical times; and beyond them lay monsters...”
The Vice-President did not reply, instead he glowered at the younger man.
“That is exactly what we have become to our friends and enemies alike, Mister Vice-President,” Jack Kennedy ruminated. “Monsters.” He saw the untouched tumbler of grain whisky by his right hand and pushed it away. “We have become monsters terrified of our own shadows.” Suddenly, his eyes were clear and he was studying Lyndon Baines Johnson’s rugged face. He reached for the black handset of the telephone linked to the White House switchboard via his personal secretary in the adjoining office.
“How may I help you, sir?” Chimed the voice of Edna Zabriski, the newest of the three permanent secretaries who staffed his White House personal office twenty-four hours a day when he was in DC.
“Would you ask Secretary Rusk, Secretary McNamara and the Attorney General to return to the Oval Office please, Mrs Zabriski?”
“Yes, Mister President.”
Jack Kennedy’s lips formed an involuntary grin for an instant as he replaced the handset in its cradle. Until Edna Zabriski found her feet at the White House she’d remain the one person in Washington DC who was still in his thrall. He met his Vice-President’s stare.
“What? No home spun pearls of wisdom?”
“No, we’re way beyond that.”
“What would you do if you were sitting behind this desk?”
Lyndon Baines Johnson thought about the question.
“I’d be pissing my pants, Mister President.”
Before Jack Kennedy could answer a side door opened and Edna Zabriski ushered Dean Rusk into the Oval Office. The Secretary of State looked to the Vice-President, then the President.
“I want to talk to the British Ambassador,” the President said flatly.
Dean Rusk could be a maddeningly pedantic man: “There is no British Ambassador, Mister President. Sir James Sykes surrendered his accreditation when you refused to grant him an interview yesterday.”
Jack Kennedy wanted to bite back. He refrained. Calmly he suggested: “I don’t care how you do it, Dean. Go up to 3100 Massachusetts Avenue North and knock on the door of the British Embassy in person if you have to but bring Jim Sykes back here. Now please.”
Dean Rusk hesitated, opened his mouth as if he was going to protest, and immediately shut it. He nodded.
“As you wish,” he muttered and turned on his heel.
Robert McNamara walked into the Oval Office as the disgruntled Secretary of State departed. The Secretary of Defence stopped for a moment and watched his Cabinet colleague depart. He threw the President and Vice-President a quizzical glance.
“I expect the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sit on Curtis LeMay,” Jack Kennedy told McNamara, who pursed his lips and nodded his acknowledgement as he removed his glasses to excise a speck of dust from the right-hand lens.
“General Wheeler says LeMay wants a personal interview with ‘the Commander-in-Chief’. Bus Wheeler says LeMay went out to Barksdale as soon as he heard about the Malta,” Robert McNamara’s lips twitched into a configuration of mild distaste, “fiasco. LeMay’s staffers discovered gaps in the paper trail at the Air Force Department and at the Pentagon, so he went directly to the one place where he knew for certain he’d get his hands on the original operations orders and the sequenced coded authentication documents related to the two separate B-52 missions.”
“Two?” Jack Kennedy rasped, an icy hand clutching at his guts. He’d thought he had a handle on the situation. Now it seemed he’d been catastrophically wrong. “You said two, Bob?”
“There was a second mission involving four other B-52s targeting Gibraltar. The second mission was aborted because the Spanish Air Force failed to suppress British carrier-based air. Bus Wheeler’s got his staff crawling all over the Air Force Department and the Pentagon to ascertain whether there are any other ‘rogue operations orders’ in the system. Le May has the FBI and his own security people rounding up anybody who had anything to do with the drafting, transmission and authentication of the mission orders received at Barksdale AFB on December 3 at 22:57 hours.”
Jack Kennedy’s eyes were widening, pupils dilating.
“The Air Force got an order to carpet bomb the two key Mediterranean bases of our British ‘allies’ and nobody at the Air Force Department queried it?”
The rumble of distant thunder filtered into the Oval Office like an ill omen from the gods.
“No. The authentication codes checked out. LeMay says the CO at Barksdale wasn’t happy about it but after he placed a called to LeMay’s staff he got on with obeying his orders. He claims to have spoken to a Colonel Seedorf at the Pentagon but we have no trace of any such officer on LeMay’s staff. Two Pentagon staffers with that surname have been arrested for questioning as a precautionary measure. However, it seems that they were not involved in this matter…”
There was another clap of thunder.
Except it wasn’t thunder because everybody in the room felt the ground flinch beneath their feet and heard the blast wave rattle against the bullet proof windows of the Oval Office; within seconds Security Service men with drawn hand guns were rushing the President of the United States along the corridor and down into the subterranean Situation Room bunker complex that ever since the October War, had been partially mothballed to permit hurried and much deeper extensions to constructed.