“Now, that’s a thing,” the younger brother of the President of the United States agreed, in the aimless way of a man who didn’t quite know what to say. “Captain Brenckmann,” he began, thought better of it. Gathered his courage, tried again. “Captain Brenckmann, I owe you an apology.”
The bourbon burned Walter Brenckmann’s throat.
“What for?” Their country was trying to tear itself apart and was still on the brink of war with its one surviving former ally from the now distant World of the pre-Cuban Missiles Crisis disaster. It was too late for heart-searching, for apologies, for atonement. The World was what they’d made it and somebody, somewhere had to start looking to the future.
Bobby Kennedy grimaced.
“There will be no war,” he said simply. “Premier Heath and the President have signed a unilateral ‘non-aggression’ agreement. The British Foreign Secretary will remain in the US when the Premier flies home to discuss the full re-establishment of diplomatic, trade and humanitarian aid links. Once things have settled down Jack and the Premier have agreed in principle, to exchange full military missions authorised to draw up plans to rebuild our alliance. All questions relating to spheres of interest in Europe and the Mediterranean will be dealt with in due course at a summit to be convened in England in the spring. All British and American naval forces have been ordered to discontinue surveillance and all contact with each other for a period of seventy-two hours to permit new and robust contact protocols to be established between the parties.” The President’s younger brother shook his head. “I don’t know what you and Le May said to Jack but whatever it was it worked!”
The older man shrugged.
His head was still in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His son’s voice rang in his ears and the joy of recognition still suffused the relieved father. His son had been lost to him and suddenly he’d got him back. A more religious man than Walter Brenckmann would have regarded the moment when he discovered his son was alive as one of revelation and apotheosis. In truth, religious or not, it had been a sublime, and perhaps, a defining moment of his life. There might not be a God but there was reason to have faith.
He’d known that there was a chance of peace when he’d put through the call to Cambridge, having come straight from the Situation Room where he and Curtis LeMay had confronted the President.
‘Mister President,’ General Curtis LeMay, the bulldog Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told the President, ‘you have a decision to make, sir. If we’re going to go to war with the Brits we’re going to get hurt real bad unless we hit them now with everything we’ve got.’
The thirty-fifth President of the United States of America had looked at Curtis LeMay with cool, contemplative eyes.
‘You know I’m not going to do that, General LeMay.’
‘I’ll know it when you tell me, sir.’
Jack Kennedy had looked to Walter Brenckmann.
‘I’m sorry about your son, Captain,’ he’d said. Shaking his head he’d straightened and turned to Curtis LeMay. ‘Stand down Strategic Air Command and order all Polaris submarines to surface and to squawk their names and positions in the clear. All SAC aircraft are to be grounded forthwith. All SSBNs are to return to their home ports. Do you have any question general?’
Curtis LeMay had had no questions.
The President had spoken for peace.
That short meeting now seemed like a dream.
“I’m sorry,” Walter Brenckmann told the Attorney General, grimacing ruefully, “I’m not at liberty to divulge that information.”
Bobby Kennedy didn’t take offence.
He clunked down his glass.
“I came down to invite you to the ‘hand of peace’ ceremony in the Oval Office. It is a mess up there but Jack wanted the Press and the TV people in to witness the show.”
Chapter 48
It was chaos. The Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack hung side by side on a hastily rigged frame behind the President’s desk while photographers ducked and dived and flash guns exploded. The floor was a treacherous snake pit of cables for NBC’s live network broadcast. Everybody was exhausted, a lot of people in the room had been drinking all evening and Jack Kennedy and Edward Heath were ad-libbing to the increasingly fierce barrage of questions being hurled at them from the crowded body of the half-wrecked Oval Office. There were bullet holes in the wall, concussions from a rocket propelled grenade strikes had brought down plaster from the ceiling and NBC’s lights threw deep, sinister shadows across most of the people in the room.
Walter Brenckmann was feeling as light-headed as the others. His son was alive and there would be no war. The United States of America and her old ally, Great Britain, had been reunited by the travails of recent days; each publicly agreeing that they’d been afflicted and tormented by the same mutual conspiracy. Henceforward they would combat the cancer of Red Dawn together, hunt it down and exterminate it like the parasitic plague-carrier it was wherever it manifested itself, and at whatever the cost. It made for a good narrative, a readily available lick of paint to cover over the yawning cracks in the old alliance. But it was a beginning, a turning of the tide. Maybe, just maybe, the World’s remaining nuclear superpowers had signalled a willingness to dream of a better future. Only time would tell; in every trial reconciliation the devil was always in the detail. Walter Brenckmann the man and the officer, the servant of his President, wanted to see the positive, the career lawyer part of him recognised that the road ahead was going to be exceptionally rocky.
However, today he’d thank God — even though he didn’t believe in the existence of a merciful, all-loving God: where was the evidence? — for the life of his son and the preservation of what was left of the country he’d sworn to defend that long ago day in 1940 when he’d been inducted into the United States Navy.
“What happens now that HMS Dreadnought has reappeared?”
That was going to be a problem. Pragmatically, the survival of the British nuclear boat kissed goodbye to any lingering hope the Administration retained that the ‘Scorpion Incident’ might be quietly buried. Inevitably, there would be boards of inquiry, inquests, savage recriminations and a raft of questions nobody really wanted to hear answered.
Edward Heath looked the man who’d shouted the question in the eye.
“For the moment we rejoice that over a hundred brave men feared dead have survived…”
“What assurance can you give the American people that the murderers of the ‘brave’ Americans on the Scorpion will not be forgotten, Mister President?” Demanded another voice.
Jack Kennedy made a pacifying gesture with his hands.
“This is not the time to pre-empt the official boards of inquiry that both our navies will convene to discover the truth.”
The President’s calm gravitas briefly quietened the room.
Walter Brenckmann sensed it was the quiet before the storm. Washington was a seething cauldron of shocked, traumatised humanity and everybody in the Oval Office — every man from the Secret Service agents fingering their guns to the blank-eyed White House junior staffers and secretaries — was operating in an unreal daze. Allowing so many pressmen into the inner sanctum of the Presidency was a dumb idea. If the President’s closest advisers had been thinking clearly — which under the circumstances it wasn’t very easy to do — they wouldn’t have touched this three-ring circus with a long stick.