Edward Heath had extended his right hand.
Bobby Kennedy shook it, a broad smile beginning to form on his lips.
There was a knock on the closed door to the annexe.
Dick White, the Head of the Secret Intelligence Service entered.
“I must speak to you privately, Prime Minister.”
Chapter 41
General Curtis LeMay flicked an irritated glance at the blood spatter on his right sleeve, and involuntarily raised his hand to touch the sutures recently inserted to staunch the flow of blood from his gashed head. In the distance sporadic small arms fire broke the unnatural quietness of the great city’s streets. His eyes lifted involuntarily to the sky as two F-4 Phantoms made a low pass over the White House. Half-a-dozen Skyraiders still loitered at three thousand feet, circling above the Pentagon. As if to mock the desecration of the nation’s capital bright late afternoon wintery sunshine broke through the high clouds and the drifting smoke of battle.
Striding purposefully across the muddy west lawn LeMay caught the vile stench of napalm in the air at the same moment he heard the thrumming of the approaching Sea Kings.
Three M-60 Patton main battle tanks were parked fifty yards away. The grey steel monsters were still buttoned down. Armoured personnel carriers mounting fifty calibre machine guns formed a picket line closer in to the West Wing of the White House. The fires in the East Wing had been put out now. All things considered, the old building was relatively intact even if nobody was going to be living or working in it any time soon. Now, if he could only stop the fucking Navy starting a shooting war in the North Atlantic, they might just earn enough time to figure out what went wrong before something else blew up in their faces!
The President of the United States of America, for better or worse, his Commander-in-Chief had ordered all US Forces to back off. Curtis LeMay still hadn’t figured out which part of ‘back off’ CINCLANT hadn’t understood.
Even the Army understood that if you didn’t know which of your units was loyal and which ones were rogue you locked everything down until you could tell the difference. You didn’t get high and mighty or proud about it, you just fucking did it! Every air base in the continental United States was closed to flight operations unless he — personally — trusted the commanding officer. So what was the fucking Navy’s problem?
Hopefully, the President was on the line to CINCLANT putting the useless prick right on the chain of command and how he, CINCLANT was about to find himself cleaning latrines in New Mexico if he didn’t get his finger out of his arse and get a grip of his people.
‘What do you want me to do?’ the Commander-in-Chief Atlantic Fleet had objected angrily when LeMay had asked him what the fuck he was doing allowing the USS Enterprise to launch two Grumman S-2 Tracker anti-submarine birds each carrying two live torpedoes to ‘support the USS Scorpion’ to, and this was the truly bizarre admission, ‘harass and maintain contact’ with the British nuclear boat HMS Dreadnought. The story coming out of Norfolk was that one of the S-2s had gone after Dreadnought after ‘she manoeuvred aggressively to threaten the Scorpion’ and that subsequently, the Scorpion was missing. Not wanting to miss the fun the second S-2 had subsequently gone after the British submarine; explosions had been observed but the S-2 had no way of telling if it had made a kill because it had already exhausted its inventory of sonar buoys.
‘I want you to disengage,’ the Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had repeated, wondering if he ought to spell the operative word ‘disengage’ to Admiral Vincent Gray, the numbskull the Navy had appointed CINCLANT in January that year.
‘I can’t let my boys go up against hostiles armed with no more than a firm manner and the Navy’s best wishes!’
The mystery to LeMay was how, in the same year the Navy had put thousands of well-paid, highly qualified and rigorously trained offices on the beach, it was possible that so many high-ranking retards had remained in positions of authority?
He watched as the Attorney General and a greying man in a Navy Uniform stepped off the first Sea King. The Navy man must be Brenckmann; the guy looked like he’d just seen a ghost so somebody had to have told him about the Scorpion by now.
The Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shook his head in near disbelief and suppressed the urge to kick something or somebody. Jesus! Those arseholes at CINCLANT must have shit for brains! Maybe the British sub had taken out the Scorpion like they were claiming. Or maybe not. Fuck it! If you hunt another country’s submarine in international waters with S-2s and a pair of Skipjack boats for several days and get so close to it you could reach out and touch it — if it wasn’t under water — how did those Navy pricks think it was going to end? As for the Brits taking out the Scorpion? Curtis LeMay was reserving judgement on that one. All CINCLANT knew for sure was that the A-2s had put four homing fish in the water; it still wasn’t clear exactly why they’d done that, and once the first two fish had detonated all that was left of the USS Scorpion was a single distress buoy. HMS Dreadnought had gone deep and tried to outrun the last two homing fish. The S-2s hadn’t been able to find her again after that so the British submarine was probably down, too.
Not content with having started World War III the fucking Navy was out to start World War IV!
Curtis LeMay marched towards the first Sea King.
He walked straight past the Attorney General, who blinked at the big man as he shouldered through the crowd of Marines and Secret Service men. The Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff went directly to Walter Brenckmann and took him by the elbow.
The former Naval Attaché’s grey-green eyes fixed on LeMay’s face.
“My boy wouldn’t have wanted this to turn into the next war, sir,” Walter Brenckmann said in a steady, resolute voice.
Curtis LeMay nodded, released his hold on the other man’s arm and patted his shoulder. The Navy man had lost one kid in the October War and now it looked like he lost another because those fucking idiots at CINCLANT had screwed the pooch. Again!
“What do the Brits know?” He asked tersely.
“What we’ve told them,” the Navy man replied flatly. “But they don’t believe it and frankly, sir,” he added, grimly, “neither do I.”
The first Sea King was talking off; the next would race in within minutes carrying the British Prime Minister and his senior advisors. Overhead the sky was full of the roaring of the F-4 Phantoms riding herd on the VIP choppers as they skimmed low across the tortured city.