Walter Brenckmann sighed.
“I’d give anything to have my kid sister back, Mrs Zabriski.”
The woman was crying.
“Just to see her one more time,” Walter went on. “But I know that’s not going to happen.”
“I’m sorry,” Edna Zabriski sobbed.
“It’s not your fault, Ma’am. You must feel the same way about Nathan?”
She nodded jerkily.
At that moment the weight of the world descended crushingly on Walter Brenckmann’s shoulders.
“What wouldn’t you give to see Nathan again?” He asked dry mouthed.
“My Nathan is dead. The British murdered him.”
Walter shook his head.
“No, ma’am.”
“I don’t…”
“The British rescued him from the sea. The British treated his minor injuries, just cuts and bruises, he was very lucky,” Walter belatedly remembered to smile supportively. “Then the British placed Walter and the other survivors under the care and supervision of a former US Navy Surgeon Commander living on Malta, a lady called Margo Seiffert. The British were so concerned for the welfare of our people that they asked a local Maltese nurse to personally satisfy herself on a daily basis that our people were being treated properly. On Sunday a US Air Force aircraft flew to Malta to repatriate your son and the other American survivors. Your son stepped back onto American soil forty-eight hours ago.” Walter kept taking because that was what he had been ordered to do at this point in the ‘breaking’ Edna Zabriski. “Having been medically assessed on his return home Captain Zabriski was formally cleared to resume active service at zero eleven hundred hours yesterday.”
“You’re lying to me!”
“No, ma’am. I spoke to Nathan ten minutes before I walked into this room to satisfy myself that what I had been asked to convey to you was God’s own truth.”
Chapter 30
“Forgive me if I don’t get up,” Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy apologised, quirking a wan smile at his guest. “They tell me it hurts so much because things are knitting back together. I don’t like to get too doped up too early in the day because there’s so much to do.”
Ben Bradlee grinned sympathetically as he bent down to shake his old friend’s hand. Walking into the cabin he had been surprised to discover the President’s younger brother alone, having assumed that there would be other Washington newsmen present.
“Who are we waiting for, Bobby?” The Chief of Newsweek’s Washington Bureau inquired in a voice strained by a week of sleep deprivation and long periods of complete, unadulterated terror. The US Navy Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King which had brought him north from DC had been fully loaded; men, women, several children and four senior military men irritated to have to share their transport with non-service interlopers packed shoulder to shoulder. The helicopter had disgorged its cargo and immediately lifted off, heading back south to collect its next load.
“Nobody right now,” the other man retorted. “Senior surviving members of the Administration are carrying out a series of frank face-to-face briefings to ensure that newsmen and opinion-leaders such as you, key Congressional and business leaders and our overseas allies know what we know. I don’t promise to be able to divulge everything, however, national security issues permitting the President has instructed me, and the other nominated ‘briefers’ to be as frank as possible in the circumstances.”
When a thing was too good to be true it probably was, too good to be true, that was. Nevertheless, Ben Bradlee sensed that the mood music had changed in the last week. How could it not have changed? Either the Administration circled its wagons or it reached out to the country; if it truly embraced the latter option then perhaps not all was lost. Besides, it was already apparent that the post-Battle of Washington Kennedy Administration was very much a Kennedy-Johnson ticket. What LBJ lacked in charisma he more than made up for in good old-fashioned political common sense, a thing which had been sadly lacking in recent months.
“How is the leg, Bobby?” Ben Bradlee inquired solicitously as he sank into the armchair his host had waved at. Damp wood spluttered and crackled in the hearth and the warmth of the fire warmed his face.
“I shouldn’t complain. We expected the Brits to be all over us making the sort of demands we couldn’t entertain in a million years over what happened in the Oval Office,” he shrugged, “but…”
“But what?”
“It’s as if they actually trust us to do the right thing with the crazy Zabriski woman!”
Ben Bradlee frowned. Bobby would never understand the British; he was too deeply — and complacently — inculcated with the Irish Mafia’s take on history. The so-called Kennedy clan’s Irish Mafia was still very much imbedded in the heart of the Administration. Kenny O’Donnell might have been replaced with LBJ’s man Marvin Watson at the apex of the Presidential Staff but nothing was going to change overnight, least of all lifelong attitudes and prejudices.
“Why wouldn’t they trust us, Bobby? And even if they didn’t trust us to do the right thing, whatever that is, what could they do about it? The British are just being realistic.”
“Perhaps. I wish we knew more about this Margaret Thatcher person they’ve made Prime Minister.”
“I thought we had diplomats who were paid to know about stuff like that?” Ben Bradlee parried, testing the boundaries of the Administration’s avowed commitment to being ‘frank’.
“That’s another problem. It turns out the guy we had in place over there is a complete jerk!”
Ben Bradlee and every other reputable newsman in America could have told the Administration that Loudon Baines Westheimer II, the Administrations man in England was a jerk months ago. He decided not to rub this in.
“We ought to do something about that,” he observed.
Bobby Kennedy nodded intently.
“Jack’s asked Bill Fulbright to take over at State.”
Bradlee had heard that rumour; having it confirmed instantly grabbed his attention in much the same way it would have been ‘grabbed’ if Bobby Kennedy had dug him in the ribs with a sharp stick.
“Fulbright’s already on the case,” the President’s younger brother went on. “He’s approached Walter Brenckmann to be the new ambassador of there.”
“Wasn’t Brenckmann the guy who grabbed that mad woman in the Oval Office?”
“The very same. He was our Naval Attaché in England. He was the one who pressed the alarm bell when things started going crazy in the Atlantic after Jack’s Moon speech.”
Ben Bradlee was a little wide-eyed.
When politicians said they wanted to be ‘frank’ they hardly ever meant it in his experience. Whether the politician in questions was a long-time personal friend like Bobby Kennedy or a complete stranger made no difference, because a politician was a politician. That was just the way things were and there was no profit in bemoaning the fact.
But this briefing was beginning to threaten to test the definition of the word ‘frank’ to the point of destruction.
“What about the Moon?” He asked speculatively.
“We’re going to do that.”
“Really?”
“Yes. LBJ owns the Moon Program. He’s already fired up NASA and von Braun’s Germans down in Alabama. I don’t think any of us believe it’s doable by the end of the decade but one day an American will walk on the Moon. Well, if this Administration has anything to do with it, anyways.”