Reckless by William Nicholson
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Books help me make sense of my life,’ he said. Then he added, ‘Well, some books, anyway.’
This rather impressed Pamela. She felt he had raised the stakes of their conversation, and it was up to her to follow suit.
‘My daddy died,’ she said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Rupert. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You could marry my mummy if you want.’
She had learned that this sort of suggestion caused a subdued consternation among the grown-ups, which added to her prestige. But once again, Rupert took her seriously.
‘Your mother’s a wonderful person,’ he said, ‘but I’m quite sure she doesn’t want to marry me.’
‘But she’s sad,’ persisted Pamela. ‘And you’re sad.’
Rupert gazed at her through his spectacles in a way that made her feel he was thinking not about her but about what she’d said.
‘Sometimes I’m sad,’ he said, ‘and sometimes I’m happy. Isn’t that how it is for you?’
‘Yes,’ said Pamela. ‘But I’d rather be happy.’
His words stayed with her. Simple though they were, they seemed to her to be important, perhaps because of the serious way he looked at her when he said them. She wondered if they were true. Then it struck her that although she was often cross she was rarely sad. In fact, sometimes she wasn’t nearly as sad as she should be. Her father dying was very bad, and everyone looked at her sorrowfully, but the truth was that for most of her young life he had been away. He was always going away. This dying felt like just another going away.
Already she was forgetting him. That showed that deep down she was a bad person, which she had long suspected. She made herself cry because of forgetting him, but then realised she was crying for herself, not for him, and stopped and wiped her eyes.
There was a little house at the end of the yard that had been an outside lavatory, which she had taken over as her secret place. She would often sit there on the warped wooden seat and listen to the rain on the tin roof and watch the spiders in their webs in the single-paned window. She wasn’t sure why she liked going there, it was boring and she never stayed long, but it was while perched in that musty-smelling gloom that she wondered about her own badness. The main form her badness took was only really caring about herself. Good people cared about other people. She pretended to, but she didn’t. It was just one of those things about her, like her brown eyes and her skinny legs, and being pretty like her mother. It never struck her that there was anything she could do about it.
Her five-year-old sister Elizabeth kicked at the closed door of the outhouse.
‘Pammy? You there?’
‘Go away, Monkey.’
‘Mummy says Rupert’s going and you’re to say goodbye.’
‘I said go away.’
She waited until her sister had gone back into the house and then emerged. That was an example of her badness. She wouldn’t come out when told to by her sister, even though she wanted to come out. Now why was that?
Rupert shook her hand to say goodbye, which she liked better than the grown-ups who expected to be kissed. Then Larry drove him to the station. Hugo turned up in his big white van and started unloading boxes of wine into the garage. He and her father had been partners in the wine business. Now, after the accident, Larry was going to be his partner instead.
Pamela liked Hugo, and knew he liked her.
‘How’s my little sweetheart today?’ he said.
They had an agreement that when she was old enough he would marry her, but of course it was only a game. It was her mother he really loved. Once he had kissed her, and she had seen.
‘Darling Hugo,’ said her mother, ‘he’s only a boy.’
But he wasn’t a boy, he was a grown-up.
‘Do you want to play with the families?’ said Elizabeth.
‘Not with you, Monkey,’ she replied.
Elizabeth burst into tears.
‘Why do you have to be so mean?’ said Kitty.
Why did she? It was a mystery. But now she had a way of silencing all criticism.
‘I miss Daddy,’ she said.
‘Oh, darling.’
Tears sprang into her mother’s eyes, but didn’t fall.
‘So do I,’ said Elizabeth, which was a lie.
‘He’s watching over you both,’ said Kitty. ‘He’s in heaven, watching over all of us.’
But he wasn’t. He was where he always went, which was away.
Then quite suddenly Pamela had a memory of him that was so clear and strong it made her gasp. They were on the side of Mount Caburn playing Aeroplanes. Her father was below her down the slanting hillside, standing with his arms reached out on either side, squinting into the sun. She was further up, waiting to run. The grass was long on either side of the track, and the air was warm. Monkey was there, and their mother, but all she saw in this memory was the tall lean figure of her beautiful father, waiting to catch her.
‘Off you go!’ he cried.
She set off running down the close-grazed track. She ran and ran, until she was running so fast she couldn’t stop. It was like falling, tumbling down that track, windmilling her arms and laughing as she went. All the way, her skirts flying, her chest tight, all the way watched by his beautiful face and bang into his strong arms. He caught her and swept her up and swung her round and all the world was dancing.
‘Don’t go, Daddy! Don’t go!’
Now, remembering, she cried real tears, and she was crying for him and it hurt, and she didn’t like it at all. She ran to her mother and cried in her arms, which made Kitty cry too. Then Monkey joined them and of course she cried to be like them, but it was false crying. Then Hugo came in and found them and said, ‘My goodness, it’s a weeping family.’
Hugo was nice like that. He said ordinary things in an ordinary way.
A few days later she and Hugo were alone in the yard and she said to him, for no reason at all, ‘I suppose you’ll marry Mummy now.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said, blushing red. ‘I’m not the one who’ll be marrying Kitty.’
That was when she knew it would be Larry. She was glad about that because she liked Larry, and because it meant Hugo could marry her. But selfish though she was, she knew enough to understand that this must be hard for Hugo.
‘Does that make you very sad, Hugo?’
‘Oh, Lord, no,’ he said. But she could see it did. ‘And anyway, I’m going to marry you.’
‘Not until I’m sixteen. That’s nine more years.’
‘I shall wait,’ said Hugo gallantly.
*
The next year Kitty married Larry and became Mrs Cornford. Then one year after that Hugo married someone quite unspeakable called Harriet. Rupert didn’t marry anybody.
PART TWO
Deterrence
January 1961 – June 1962
8
The yard outside was deep in snow. A light patter of flakes was still falling. It had been snowing since the night before the inauguration.
McGeorge Bundy stepped out of the house onto the porch to retrieve the newspaper. His breath made clouds in the sharp cold. Back inside, he stamped the snow off his shoes and shook the snow off the paper.
Mary was in the kitchen, fixing breakfast for the boys. Bundy took his usual place, unfolding the New York Times as he sat down. Mary placed a mug of coffee before him and he sipped at it in silence, his eyes scanning the columns.
‘Oh boy!’ he exclaimed softly.
He read on.
‘Someone screwed up big time,’ he said.
‘Finish up, Stephen,’ said Mary to her eldest, who was dawdling over his French toast.
‘I’ll have it if he doesn’t want it,’ said Andrew.
‘No, you won’t,’ said Stephen, reaching an arm round his plate. ‘You’ve got your own.’
Four boys between the ages of five and ten. Their racket filled the big house from morning to night, but to look at Mac you’d think he did
‘What is it?’ said Mary.
He showed her the headline in the paper.
KENNEDY DEFENSE STUDY FINDS
NO EVIDENCE OF A ‘MISSILE GAP’
‘Jack just about built his campaign on the missile gap.’
‘What’s a missile gap?’ said Stephen, interested.
His father demonstrated, holding one hand a few inches above the table.
‘We have this many missiles.’ He raised his other hand to twice the height. ‘The Russians have this many. The difference between them is the missile gap.’
The boys all stared at him wide-eyed.
‘So the Russians have got more than us.’
‘They would have if it were true.’
‘Is it true, Dad?’
‘No, Stephen. It’s not true.’
He gulped down the rest of his coffee and jumped up.
‘Quick march, boys! The car’ll be here soon.’
The chauffeured Mercury sedan picked him up at 7.45 each morning. On school days the three eldest boys scrambled into the car with him and he dropped them off at St Albans on the way. Usually he was at his desk in the Old Executive Building next to the White House by 8.15, which gave him time to go through the early-morning cable traffic before the staff meeting at nine.
This morning would be different.
Sitting in the car, hissing over the snowy side roads of Spring Valley into the wide cleared streets of downtown DC, he ran through the possible sources of the leak. He concluded that it had to be Bob McNamara.
On reaching his office he telephoned Bob and got the full story. Then he crossed to the White House and took the elevator directly to the president’s private quarters. He found the president sitting up in bed reading the New York Times.
‘What the fuck’s going on, Mac?’
‘I’m afraid it’s Bob’s screw-up, Mr President.’
Bob McNamara was Secretary of Defence in the new administration. As national Security Adviser, Bundy was technically McNamara’s junior, but the Bundys and the Kennedys had known each other a long time.
‘Bob had a bunch of reporters round yesterday,’ he told the president. ‘He told them the briefing was NFA, Not For Attribution. He didn’t realise that meant they could still run the story so long as they didn’t name the source. He thought it was the same as Off the Record.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ groaned Kennedy.
He held up the newspaper.
‘He’s telling the world we can absorb every missile the Russians can throw at us and still have enough firepower to wipe out 80 per cent of the Soviet Union.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Is it true?’
‘Sure it’s true,’ said Bundy. ‘I know it and you know it.’
This was why Kennedy listened to Mac Bundy more than any of the others. He got to the point fast. Kennedy had told him he would have made him his Secretary of State if he hadn’t looked so young. ‘Two baby faces like yours and mine are just too much.’
‘It doesn’t matter what I know,’ said Kennedy. ‘What matters is what the American people know, and what the Russians know. I should sack Bob for this.’
‘Bob’s good. We need him.’
‘So what do I do? I campaigned on a missile gap.’
‘Well, Mr President,’ said Mac Bundy, thinking fast, ‘this defence study is based on the findings of surveillance flights over the Soviet Union. The U2s can’t fly over every inch. It stands to reason we can’t know for sure how many missiles there are down there. And as long as we’re not a hundred per cent sure, we do what we have to do to defend the American people.’
‘I buy that,’ said Kennedy. ‘That’s good.’
‘Our best today. Better tomorrow.’
This was the motto of the Dexter Lower School, which both Bundy and Kennedy had attended as small boys. Kennedy grinned.
‘Ask not what your school can do for you, ask what you can do for your school.’
This was the motto of Kennedy’s prep school, Choate. Bundy himself had been at Groton, which was rather more distinguished, and had as its motto ‘To serve is to rule.’
‘You said it, Mr President.’
‘I pledged in my campaign to close the missile gap with a major build-up of defence spending. So that’s what I’m going to do.’
After Bundy had left him, Kennedy got out of bed and got dressed. His back problems made it hard for him to get his socks on, but he didn’t call for help. His morning struggle with his socks, which led through pain to victory, set him up for the day.
9
From a distance, the base looked like a prison. On all sides stretched the fields of Norfolk, still winter grey. The road ran straight and narrow, the three military cars carrying the inspection group bunched close together. RAF Feltwell, their destination, was ringed by a high wire fence from which rose thin steel gantries bearing floodlights, and stubby observation towers. Beyond the fence loomed grey hangars, with flat-roofed brick buildings alongside.
‘It was an airfield in the war,’ said Mountbatten, sitting beside Rupert Blundell in the back of the lead car. ‘Totally rebuilt, of course. Must be a strange life for the men here. If they ever carry out the job they’re trained to do, it’ll all be over.’
‘I don’t see any missiles.’
‘They’ll be sleeping. They’ll wake them up for us.’
Rupert believed he knew all there was to know about the missiles, but he had never actually seen one. They were called Thor, after the Norse god of thunder. There were sixty of them, deployed in RAF bases spread over Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, all targeted on the Soviet Union. Three-quarters of the Thor force was held at T-15, which meant they could be launched within fifteen minutes of the order to scramble. Each missile carried a 1.45 megaton warhead, and would detonate over its target in Russia eighteen minutes after launch. The Thor force carried more explosive power in a single strike than had been delivered in all wars in all history.
The RAF called them the Penguin squadrons: ‘All flap and no fly.’ The chiefs of staff viewed them as a liability. Earl Mountbatten, now elevated to the post of Chief of Defence Staff, took an even dimmer view.
‘You might as well put a bloody great sign over the east of England saying, “Hit me.”’
The convoy drew up to the gates of the compound. An RAF police sergeant was waiting by the guardroom at the salute. All security procedures were followed to the letter. The gates then opened and they drove in, past fire tenders and fuel tanks, past a fenced storage enclosure guarded by USAAF personnel, to the main RIM building, beside which stood the Mission Control Centre. Outside on the tarmac stood the officer in command, flanked by two squadron leaders and two launch control officers.
Mountbatten and his party emerged from their cars and took the salute. The wing commander introduced his staff, and led the visitors into the building.
Tea was served. Mountbatten’s style was informal.
‘So what have you laid on for us today?’
‘We’re going to run a wet countdown on one squadron, which is three missiles. In theory this is a no-notice exercise, but of course the men know you’re here. I think you’ll find they’re pretty sharp.’
‘Wet?’
‘Fully fuelled. We aim to get the birds into firing order in eight minutes.’
There followed a tour of the base, in which the visitors were shown one of the launch pads, with its missile still horizontal beneath its protective cover. The Chief of Defence Staff then had an opportunity to talk to some of the men training in the missile flight school on the base, and to meet the members of the USAAF 99th Support Squadron, who had charge of the nuclear warheads. Captain Jerry Kreiss showed Mountbatten a key hanging on a chain round his neck.
‘The missile isn’t armed until I turn this key,’ he said.
‘And where do you get your orders?’ said Mountbatten.
‘Omaha, Nebraska,’ came the reply. ‘Offutt Air Fo
This was the famous war/peace key, the physical embodiment of the policy of dual control. The British independent nuclear deterrent could only go bang if the Americans said so.
The group watched the wet countdown exercise from the control centre. Mountbatten himself gave the order, which in war conditions would have come down a dedicated phone line in coded form. The code was in two parts, one part held by the prime minister and one part held by the Chief of Defence Staff. Only when both codes were combined could an order to fire the nuclear missile be given. A similar code-based order had also to be received by the American authentication officer.
‘Not exactly snappy, is it?’ said Mountbatten.
‘You’ll see,’ said the wing commander. ‘We’re got it down to a pretty slick operation.’
The go order was given. The teams on the bases exploded into action. Men in white protection suits, looking like spacemen, swarmed over the launch pads. A klaxon began to sound as the first shelter rolled back on its tracks to reveal the immense white rocket beneath. The launch mount arms locked onto the rocket, and hydraulic pumps began to raise it from horizontal to vertical.
‘See that, sir?’ said the flight control officer with a chuckle. ‘There’ll be fun in the married quarters tonight.’
The klaxons sounded on the other two pads, and two more rockets began to rise.
‘When are they assigned targets?’ asked Rupert.
‘Three times a day,’ said the wing commander. ‘On every shift change the target data is checked. Each missile is given a fifteen-digit number to feed into the guidance system.’
‘So the crew has no idea where their missile will land?’
‘No idea at all. Frankly, they’re happy to keep it that way.’
‘I can tell you, if you’re interested,’ said Rupert. ‘The current Thor force allocation is six air defence facilities, three missile bases, three long-range airbases, and forty-eight cities.’
The three missiles were all now erect. Electric motors automatically unscrewed the holding bolts, allowing the lifting arm to drop away.