Insanity!
How in God’s name did his leaders imagine the British were going to react to LBJ’s riposte to Edward Heath’s entirely factual — and in the circumstances, relatively restrained — statement of the US Government’s failures to make good its earlier promises? It was one thing for the President to suggest that the past was the past and that they should all focus on the future; another entirely to persuade the British to take whatever new promises and guarantees they received with anything more than a very large pinch of salt. For the Vice-President to suggest to the British Prime Minister he didn’t even plan to make any new promises was like waving a red flag in front of a charging bull. Especially when that suggestion didn’t remotely reflect the Administration’s actual negotiating position. Walter Brenckmann didn’t know what that position was; he just knew that playing hardball wasn’t it unless the Kennedy Brothers, LBJ, Robert McNamara, John McCone and the other surviving members of the Administration had had a collective brainstorm!
“Does your microphone broadcast to all the parties on the circuit?” Walter Brenckmann asked the NBC producer with every ounce of his professional litigator’s gravitas.
“Yes, sir,” the other man confirmed. “But anything I said over the link would go directly to air if we were broadcasting live.”
“But you’re not broadcasting live now?” Walter Brenckmann queried, trying to keep the visceral horror out of his voice. NBC hadn’t actually been broadcasting the summit live while Washington was under attack?
“Oh, no, sir. There is a speaker at the White House and another in the Conference Room…”
“Give me the microphone!” Walter Brenckmann said it in the voice he’d sometimes had to employ at sea when one of his officers had done something unbelievably stupid, or a bone-headed enlisted man had needed the crap scared out of him.
The NBC man almost jumped out of his skin.
He pulled off his clumsy headset and passed it over with both hands as fast as was humanly possible.
Holding one earpiece to his head Walter Brenckmann raised the microphone to his lips, hurriedly composing himself.
“This is Captain Walter Brenckmann,” he announced in a carefully calculated monotone. “I might not have an honours degree in international diplomacy but I can as sure as Hell tell when a divorce is turning messy, gentlemen.”
“Brenckmann?” The President queried irritably. At this point he probably put his hand over the microphone believing it would make what he said next inaudible. “Who the fuck is this guy Brenckmann?”
“Captain Walter Brenckmann, United States Navy, sir,” the Boston lawyer informed his Commander-in-Chief. “I’m the guy who warned Ambassador Westheimer, the State Department and the Navy Department that out policies were driving the British into a corner and they were likely to come out fighting. When the British identified the involvement of US personnel in the attack on Balmoral Castle in which the Queen’s husband was crippled and her youngest child killed,” he was a little surprised nobody had cut him off or told him to shut up, so he continued, “that finally crossed their red line. Premier Heath isn’t a guy you want to be pushing right now, sir.”
There was a silence.
A long, static hissing silence that dragged on for an age.
Walter Brenckmann waited for the tramp of booted feet in the corridor, the click of rifle bolts and the inrush of Marines. They were going to arrest him, right? The lunatics had taken over the asylum; therefore, shooting the messenger had got to be de rigor. Right?
“I don’t want war with the British, Captain Brenckmann,” Jack Kennedy drawled with a quiet confidence that everybody who heard it knew to be utterly false. “Right now I’d give them all the gold in Fort Knox if I thought that would buy them off.”
“Like I said, sir,” the Boston Lawyer reminded his President, “I’m no diplomat but if this was a divorce I’d be advising you against trying to buy off your estranged, er, partner. For one thing former wives, I mean, partners, don’t always like to have it known that they can be bought off. For another, I don’t think you’ve got enough treasure to pay the bill and the British already know that. The only thing you’ve got that they want, and that they really need, is friendship, sir. And grain and a few tankers full of crude oil, obviously. It isn’t like they’re asking for golden elephants. This isn’t going to cost you anything you can’t afford. Hell, we’re talking small change here. I honestly don’t see what the problem is.”
Walter Brenckmann imagined — or perhaps, he’d really heard — explosions on the line. At the White House or closer to Andrews Field? There was no way he could tell.
Still, nobody burst into the improvised studio in the Aircrew Ready Room.
“Put Bobby on the line,” the President commanded.
“I’m here, Jack.”
“Have you been listening in?”
“Yes,” the Attorney General acknowledged tersely. “I’m hearing a lot of explosions at your end…”
“General LeMay has called in Skyraiders to clear out the last terrorist enclaves in the vicinity of the White House.”
Walter Brenckmann had seen Douglas A-1 Skyraiders in action in Korea. Big single-engine aircraft capable of carrying huge mixed payloads of napalm, general purpose and cluster bombs, and air-to-ground rockets on under-wing pylons and hard-points. Some variants carried twenty-millimetre cannons and fifty calibre heavy machine guns. A single pass by on Skyraider could wipe out all life in a fifty yard wide swath of any battlefield on Earth. The idea of such aircraft being deployed in the streets of a modern city was so appalling as to be virtually beyond his comprehension.
The President was still speaking, offering reassurance to his younger brother.
“The Army and the Marines have the situation under control in Georgetown and the Embassy District, they’ve secured Capitol Hill and the White House perimeter was secured several hours ago as you know. The Marines and the National Guard are expanding that perimeter as we speak. The terrorists are trying to melt away. Only a few diehards are actually still fighting in the city, although the reports from downtown are garbled. There may still be disturbances in progress there. The fighting around the Pentagon is almost over. Arlington is a no go area because General LeMay is reluctant to order air strikes against the rebels,” Jack Kennedy corrected himself, “terrorists who’ve taken refuge in the National Cemetery. ”
Walter Brenckmann coughed. Realising that this hadn’t stopped the dominant siblings of the most disastrous United States Administration in history wasting precious time — that they didn’t have — bringing each other up to speed, the Boston lawyer ostentatiously and very loudly cleared his throat.
“Gentlemen,” he declared, paternally, “you don’t have time for this.”
The brothers would much rather have been talking to each other than the stranger who seemed intent on bringing them only bad news. Walter Brenckmann knew as much. Parties to messy divorce cases invariably opted for denial sooner or later.
“With respect,” he said, not really believing he was having to tell them this, “the Attorney General needs to go and talk to Premier Heath now.”
“Why?” Bobby Kennedy asked. There was impatience in his tone; but no malice and no suggestion that he was in any way talking down to an underling. He was curious, as if he really wanted to know what the older man knew that he didn’t. “Why, Captain Brenckmann?”