“You might make it big,” Judy teased him softly.
The man chuckled, gently patted her belly.
“I’ll settle for making it big as in someday being able to afford to put junior here,” he retorted, “through college if the World still exists by the time he gets there.”
Judy giggled.
“Have a little faith, sweetheart,” she smiled fondly, “the World will still be here; it’s just people who’ve got the problem!”
Chapter 21
Lieutenant Walter Brenckmann tried not to let the dissonances of the morning’s visit to Berkeley blur his judgement. He had a report to write and a mountain of paperwork that made War and Peace look like an abridged novella. There was a firm rat-a-tat knock at his open office door.
“Come!” He directed absently, looking up only as an afterthought. Recognising the man who walked into the room he jumped to his feet and mad a grab for his cap.
Commander Troy Simms, the skipper of the Gold crew of the USS Sam Houston (SSBN-609) seemed pleased to have caught the junior officer unawares. He was a big man for a submariner, six feet tall and built like the college wide receiver he had been twenty years ago. His blond hair was thinner, his face more lined but he was one of those men who had never really shrugged off his younger self’s mischievous streak. He enjoyed the momentary unease of the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s former Torpedo Officer without dwelling on it overlong.
Walter straightened respectfully.
“Relax, Lieutenant,” the older man grunted, shutting the office door at his back. “Is the real story about Admiral Braithwaite and his wife as bad as scuttlebutt says it is?”
Walter Brenckmann did not know Simms very well, by reputation he was a gung ho, no nonsense commanding officer who was extremely good at his job and destined for higher command sooner rather than later.
“I am not really that involved in the FBI or the likely SIB investigation, sir,” he apologised, “but I spoke to the only witness of the killing earlier today and it was a,” he shrugged, “brutal thing. The Admiral and Mrs Braithwaite were both shot multiple times at very close range with a twenty gauge shotgun.”
Commander Simms had perched on the corner of a desk and indicated for Walter to do likewise.
“When was the last time Rear Admiral Braithwaite communicated personally with COMSUBPAC?”
Walter Brenckmann raised an eyebrow.
Where was this interview going?
As a matter of course he had checked Braithwaite’s diary for the last week and his personal communications log for the same period. He had also spoken to members of the command staff, ostensibly to verify the accuracy of the diary entries and the communications records.
“Last Friday, sir. I believe Rear Admiral Braithwaite spoke at length with Rear Admiral Clarey at Pearl Harbour at least once a week.”
The post October War reorganisation of the Polaris SSBN fleet — and the decision not to base SUBRON Fifteen at Guam — had been implemented so rapidly that the command structure of the United States Pacific Fleet had yet to catch up with the changed strategic and tactical realities. As the reorganisation went forward the Rear Admiral commanding SUBRON Fifteen had found himself subordinate to the Commander, Submarine Forces, US Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii, another Rear Admiral, fifty-one year old Iowan-born Bernard Ambrose Clarey, like Braithwaite a World War II veteran submariner. Clarey had been promoted Rear Admiral in July 1958, four months after Braithwaite, making him junior to his new subordinate at Alameda. Only the fact that the two men had been firm friends for over two decades, and Clarey’s meticulously professional courtesy and diplomacy had made the situation tolerable for either man.
“Nothing since then?” Commander Simms demanded.
“Not that I am aware of, sir.”
The older officer’s stare was suddenly hard.
“For your ears only the story about the Sam Houston accidentally touching bottom is baloney,” he said quietly.
For a moment Walter Brenckmann stared at the skipper of the USS Sam Houston like a rabbit trapped in the headlamps of an onrushing truck.
“I turned the boat around,” Troy Simms went on, affecting the air of a man discussing a minor technical defect, “and brought her home at Admiral Braithwaite’s command shortly after I opened my Command Pack forty-eight hours out at sea.”
Walter Brenckmann did not need to be a mind reader to know that what he was about to be told was going to be frightening, and that it might also be devastatingly injurious to both his continuing welfare and to his career prospects.
He remained silent.
Command Troy Simms respected that. When next he spoke it was as one brother submariner to another.
“My operations orders required the Sam Houston to operate in a patrol area centred on Lord Howe Island.”
Walter Brenckmann felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck.
His eyes must have briefly been as large as saucers.
The Lord Howe Islands were a group of volcanic outcrops three hundred and seventy miles east of Port Macquarie. In itself this was so bizarre he hardly knew where to begin to quantify the intrinsic madness of the orders which had somehow got into the hands of the commander of the USS Sam Houston because Port Macquarie was a small coastal town at the mouth of the Hastings River some two hundred and forty miles north of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia! The specified median-point of SSBN-609’s patrol area was just four hundred and sixty miles south east of Brisbane, the capital of the Australian State of Queensland. The Australian cities of Melbourne and Adelaide, respectively the capitals of the States of Victoria and South Australia, as well as the Australian capital, Canberra would have all been several hundred miles within the maximum range envelope of the USS Sam Houston’s sixteen UGM-27 Polaris A2 submarine launched ballistic missiles, each tipped with a W-58 warhead with an explosive yield equivalent to over a megaton of Trinitrotoluene (TNT)!
Notwithstanding that the Australian Government had been so appalled by the destruction of Cuba and the subsequent ‘holocaust’ of the ‘nuclear exchange’ with the USSR; that its dissatisfaction and anger had actually made the news in the United States in the weeks after the October War, Australia was neither an enemy or any conceivable kind of military threat to the North American continent. More to the point, the USS Sam Houston had been tasked to patrol an area over four thousand miles beyond the effective range of its Polaris A2 missiles to its nearest remotely legitimate ‘war target’, Vladivostok in the Primorsky Krai region of the far east of the Soviet Union close to the Chinese border.
While Walter Brenckmann’s stunned consciousness was still trying to assimilate the implications of what he had been told, the older man went on.
“Subsequent analysis revealed that more than half my birds had been re-targeted onto Australian cities,” Commander Troy Simms rasped disgustedly.
“More than half?” The younger man queried, still in shock.
“Eleven. Two onto each of Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide and one on Newcastle.”
Walter Brenckmann was still in shock.
Lord Howe Island!