The Kennedy Coup by Stephen Austen
A few weeks later, the Gunny was standing on top of Hill 327, just west of Da Nang. He surveyed the scene below while urinating on the bullet-scarred wall of an old French Army observation tower. He viewed a verdant valley to the west, set against the dark green backdrop of the mighty Annamese Cordillera Mountains.
Daylight was retreating now, cooking fires dotted the villages below and a thin layer of smoke rose over the valley. Farmers wearing yellow conical hats prodded their placid water buffaloes from the neatly maintained, bright emerald rice paddies. Groves of bamboo and coconut palms completed this idyllic scene that would soon be dubbed “Happy Valley”.
“Shit, we’ll be outta this mother-fucker by Christmas,” he opined, buttoning his fly then pulling a stale Lucky Strike cigarette from the C ration five-pack on his helmet band.
Half a planet away in various venues, the “cognoscenti” also gathered. In a sailboat on Chesapeake Bay, a clubhouse by the greens of Augusta, a hunting lodge in Wyoming and in other places, assessments about the scope and duration of the war were underway. Those conversations were expressed in terms of potential defense contracts for ships, aircraft, helicopters, and the other accoutrements of modern warfare. The projected revenue numbers tallied in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The project number of body bags wasn’t yet a factor.
Another important realization took place on a corporate fishing yacht, forty-miles out of Port Galveston in the Gulf of Mexico. It was after dinner and most of the guests – all decision makers and peddlers of influence from both the public and private sectors – had already retired below with their hostesses.
But on the upper deck one guest was lost in thought. He stared at the twinkling arc lights of several multi-storied oil drilling rigs nearby. Standing on sturdy supports of concrete and steel against the lash and swells of wind and wave, each rig stood a mute testimony to America’s thirst for petroleum resources.
He slowly rolled up a maritime chart of the coastal regions of South Vietnam. It was scribbled with notes, coordinates, numbers and locations. One port in particular was circled in red. He gestured to his executive assistant.
“Jimmy, I’m fixin’ to go below -- call Houston an’ set-up a meet with Brown & Root. Tell ‘em the main logistics port will be Cam Rahn Bay.” He ordered. “We also need to see if the Frenchies at Schlumberger Limited know anything about the oil reserves under the Cuu Long Basin, off Saigon.
“Okay, Boss! Yeah, those Schlumberger guys all work for French Intelligence, anyway. Hell, they should have something - Vietnam was a French colony for almost a hundred years.” Jimmy agreed, pausing to sip his bourbon and branch. “Between a friendly White House, the oil and all that defense work, this’ll be a nice, profitable little war for everybody.”
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Dear Reader:
The 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy finds key facts fading from memory. As with most historical events, time has a way of dimming the stark realities of that day. In a world enthralled with instant communication and conclusion, the simplest solutions are embraced. The broader questions of “Why” it happened are overshadowed by the facile analysis of “Who” and “How”.
This excerpt is from my “Onyx OPS: The Paladin Papers” novella. It is offered, gratis, as another slant on some of the larger issues facing the word of the early1960’s.
The 1960’s was a time of intense global competition, not just for the hearts and minds of men, but for the very resources essential to civilization. That generation, fresh from the horrors of World War II, lived with the daily, dark reality of the Cold War.
They knew civilization was fragile at best. They also knew that times of peace were far fewer than times of strife and war. Matters of national survival were not far from the minds of those who had the most at stake.
I hope you’ll find this offering thought provoking – if not simply an excursion into alternative history.
In “The Paladin Papers” series some characters and locations are fictionalized, but the central themes, methods and means are all anchored in fact. The other stories:
“Bent Spear: Missing Missiles Over America” –
“A B-52 bomber mistakenly loaded with six nuclear warheads flew from Minot Air Force Base, ND, to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on August 30, resulting in an Air Force-wide investigation..." -- Army Times, September 10. 2007
"The weapons were always in our custody and there was never a danger to the American public." - Air Force Spokesman.
But since the usual load-out of twelve missiles left Minot AFB, how were six nuclear missiles replaced enroute with six “duds”? Where did the live, nuclear cruise missile go?
“ONYX OPS: The Global Grab For Global Resources” - Masters of black ops ruthlessly navigate today’s globalization. From World War II; to the Cuban Revolution and the Kennedy assassination; through the CIA’s Operation Phoenix and the oil fields of Vietnam; it leads into today’s Afghanistan.
Must-read, fast-paced fiction with high-impact insights into the geopolitics of global resources. You will think about this long after you put it down.
“Tacit Alumni: Tracking Terror” - occurs in a world of Global Jihad. It is September 11, 2011 the tenth anniversary of 9/11. From downtown Washington DC to Area 51 to Somalia and the Gulf of Aden, “PALADIN” and his high-tech Onyx Ops team commemorate this tragic event in their own special way. Follow the masters of global black operations at Onyx Ops as they orchestrate new technologies in the relentless hunt for terrorists.
This is an excursion into the near future of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technology and the possibilities it raises. We justifiably fret over the “asymmetric attacks” from our adversaries. We sometimes forget that we have the technological means at our fingertips to leverage some “asymmetric attacks” of our own.
“411: Cybergeddon” - it is April 11 - “411” - in the near future. Iranian agents launch brutal cyber-attacks that eclipse “911“. PALADIN and his Onyx Ops team must track down the perpetrators and deliver swift justice. The story moves from Dubai and Venezuela to the United States. The scenarios in the story were adapted from actual industrial mishaps and SCADA-related security failures. It is a cautionary tale about just how fragile our society truly is.
“Pave Bolo: Target Iran” is the fifth story in “The Paladin Papers” series. Having the Stuxnet virus tee-up Iran’s basis for a cyber-based counter attack made the story both plausible and fun to write. What turned out was either a stand-alone yarn or a prequel to my previous “411: Cybergeddon” installment.
As always, Thank you! for your friendship and support. I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I did in writing them.
Sincerely,
Steve
Stephen W. Austen