Jack Kennedy, the Vice-President and the Secretary of Defence were hurried through bare concrete rooms and dusty passageways heavy with dust and the fumes of fresh paint. Within less than a minute they had been corralled in the relative safety of the Situation Room. Secret Service Agents and Marines — still in their ceremonial guard duty uniforms but now carrying M16 automatic rifles grimly barred ever door, every corridor.
Washington DC was under attack.
Twenty feet underground beneath ten feet of reinforced concrete the drum roll of big explosions sent shivers through the bed rock to register on the stunned minds of the men and women sheltering in the White House Situation Room.
“Is there any coffee?” The President inquired, strangely relaxed now that the worst had happened. If he was to die tonight he’d die with a mug of coffee in his hands. He’d never really been that afraid of dying; he’d sat out the whole nightmare of the October War in the Oval Office despite the pleas of his family and advisors. The American people had had no opportunity to run to shelters that in most places didn’t exist, so he’d had no personal inclination to run and hide from the consequences of his actions.
It was Edna Zabriski who placed the steaming mug on the blotter before her President some minutes later. The middle-aged, matronly woman grimaced apologetically.
“I’m sorry it took so long…”
“Do you have family in DC, Mrs Zabriski?” Jack Kennedy asked gently.
“Mr Zabriski was a contractor with Boeing in Seattle,” the woman confessed shyly. “I live with my sister in Georgetown…”
The huge Boeing plant in Seattle and the giant naval base and dockyard at Bremerton had been virtually undamaged by the two megaton-sized air bursts over Dabob Bay and Sammanish, even thought the death toll in the city and the area surrounding Puget Sound had eventually topped out at around three hundred thousand, of whom approximately half had died of injuries sustained in the initial strikes.
“Did they find your husband’s body?” Jack Kennedy asked quietly.
“Yes, I was one of the lucky ones, Mister President.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.” The woman made as if to go. “No, stay with us, Mrs Zabriski,” the Commander-in-Chief directed, “this is as safe as any place in DC.”
No reports from above ground filtered down to the Situation Room for almost twenty minutes. Then the arrival of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, shouldering past the stone-faced Secret Service Agents and Marines, broke the log jam and suddenly there was far too much information.
“There have been as many as twenty major bombings in the city,” General Earle Wheeler reported with a stoic impartiality. “There are also accounts, unconfirmed, of gunmen roaming the streets killing at random.”
Trucks filled with high explosives and fuel and chemical tankers had been driven up to Government buildings and detonated without warning. Many of the buildings which had been attacked had — due to the late hour — been virtually empty; conversely, because hardly anybody was present where only small fires had been started by the initial explosions there had been nobody to stop those fires spreading out of control. Vehicles had blown up in the parking lots adjacent to the Pentagon and several dozen projectiles — thought to have been launched by an improvised trench mortar of some kind — had been fired into the Pentagon itself. The Navy Department building on Constitution Avenue was on fire, as was the State Department complex. The list was long and growing.
Bobby Kennedy ran into the Situation Room.
“Dean is dead!” He blurted. “So is one of his Secret Service guys. The Washington PD says he was right next to the truck that blew up outside the British Embassy!”
Chapter 25
Clara Pullman yawned and stretched as she walked through into the kitchen of the ancient but thoroughly modernised villa on the hills overlooking the Estuary of the River Tagus. The sprawling city of Lisbon was beginning to emerge out of the grey haze of the morning. She’d been to Lisbon many times during the 1950s and with one partner or another, walked its streets and relaxed on the waterfronts, fallen a little in love with the city, its people and with the Portuguese, whose language she’d acquired a limited but conversationally fluent familiarity.
The tall spymaster, Sir Richard — call me ‘Dick’ — White had departed before dawn leaving Arkady and herself in the ‘protection’ of three amiably formidable ‘minders’. The trio looked like soldiers out of uniform to Clara. Each man carried a Browning 9-millimetre semi-automatic pistol and each man had that hard, weathered tan that spoke of lives lived outdoors and a casual acquaintance with danger.
The Head of MI6 — the British Secret Intelligence Service — had kept Arkady going on strong black coffee and ‘pep’ pills, presumably amphetamines, most of the night. Clara hadn’t expected the debriefing to be so immediate or so intense, nor had she anticipated being in the same room with her lover while it was going on. Dick White and a second man, a sallow-faced acolyte who’d darted questions at Arkady in Russian and at Clara in French, and spoken English with a pronounced Germanic accent, had scratched notes all night long in a big, legal-size hardback notebook. He’d been introduced as ‘Max’.
‘Red Dawn,’ Arkady Pavlovich Rykov, once Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin’s personal translator, and afterwards a Colonel in the Komitet gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti — the KGB — who’d been in fact, Dick White’s ‘mole’ inside that organisation since late 1956, explained, ‘was not initiated as an apparatus of the Soviet State because in the event of a catastrophe who could say whether the state, in any meaningful sense, would survive. Red Dawn was an idea which became a movement in the years after the Great Patriotic War which ended in 1945. Because the Americans had the atomic bomb and for several years, we, the Soviet Union, did not, the annihilation of the Mother Country was a very real possibility. In such a climate of fear strange and dangerous decisions are often made in haste and later, rued at leisure. In inculcating a ‘will to resist’ in the face of utter defeat, the men in the Kremlin created a terrible monster. A monster that was so terrible and came to be regarded as being so threatening to the integrity of the Soviet State that in the years before the October War, the leaders of the Red Dawn movement were ruthlessly persecuted. Many were sent into internal exile in Siberia, or posted to closed cities, some were imprisoned and, I daresay, some were simply disappeared. In October 1959 my old mentor, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev called me to a private meeting at his dacha outside Moscow and anointed me his personal witch-finder general. By that time Red Dawn had infiltrated every organ of the Soviet State. The Red Dawn movement and the Soviet State had become indistinguishable; a war party that would never make peace with the western democracies.’
Her lover had previously told Clara that he’d been ‘turned’ by the CIA and that his KGB masters had finally caught up with him. He’d claimed his former comrades — who’d been torturing him in an Ankara basement — were killed by the first air burst over the Turkish capital shortly after they’d wearied of beating him and gone outside to get a ‘breath of fresh air’. Some hours later he’d freed himself and ended up at the United States Air Force Base Hospital at Incirlik where her flight to Beirut had been diverted when the first bombs went off that night. In reality, Arkady had been on the run from Red Dawn for several weeks before the October War, desperately attempting to contact Dick White so that he could be could ‘come in from the cold’.