Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [80]
LeMay announced that the air force would be ready for attack at dawn on Sunday, although Tuesday would be better. The implication was clear: we professionals are getting ready; you politicians are sitting on your thumbs.
When the meeting adjourned, the men in uniform lingered in the Cabinet Room. Blissfully unaware that it was bugged, they waxed candid.
“You really pulled the rug right out from under him,” Shoup told LeMay admiringly.
“Yeah,” Wheeler agreed, chuckling.
LeMay soaked it up.
Then Shoup made what was, by his standards, a speech.
“Somebody’s got to keep him from doing the goddamn thing piecemeal. That’s our problem. Go in there and friggin’ around with the missiles. Go in there and friggin’ around with the airlift. You’re screwed, screwed, screwed. Some goddamn thing . . . some way, that they either do the son of a bitch and do it right and quit friggin’ around.”
The others nodded in solemn agreement.
Such was the level of debate among the American military on the subject of human annihilation.
Listening to the tapes later, JFK could have been left in no doubt that his dogs of war were eyeing their master’s crotch. As he said to his personal assistant, Dave Powers, “These bastards have one great advantage in their favor. If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them they were wrong.”
JUST BEFORE TEN o’clock on the morning of Saturday, October 20, Clem stashed his bike inside Franklins’ unruly hedge, then froze. The sound was harsh, grating. And loud; it had come from close by. Then another, the coarse roar of some sort of machine. And above him, rooks in tumultuous outrage. The wind was light but bitter. His imitation-suede jacket was little defense against it. He stood, indecisive, shivering, then moved cautiously through the undergrowth toward the ruins of the house. When he got to the stump of its gable wall, he stopped. He stopped totally — breathing, heartbeat, brain function all at a standstill. He heard laughter, and because nothing made sense, he thought it might be his own.
It had all gone. All of it. The barn, the pines, the bramble and bracken. The low table of land that they had occupied was a smear of raw brown soil and torn roots. Beyond it, fifty feet into the vast field, a bonfire plumed smoke into the wind. As he watched, half a flight of stairs collapsed in it, like a blackened accordion. Then a huge caterpillar-tracked bulldozer reversed into his line of sight. The man perched at its controls, looking backwards, with a cigarette in his mouth, was his father. Clem dropped to the ground as if he’d been shot.
They’d found out. Him and Mortimer, they’d found out. And this was what they’d done about it. Smashed them. Erased them.
He sat with his back against the wall, numb at first, then slowly filling with fierce grief. The sound of the dozer settled into a heavy chug, then died. Voices. A second engine fired up, somewhere off to his left. Clem got to his knees and peered over the wall. His father was sitting atop the machine, speaking to someone hidden from view by the remaining walls of the house and a surviving clump of hawthorn and gorse. Clem crawled to the corner of the ruin and out behind a low, overrun bank, perhaps once the edge of a kitchen garden. He raised his head again.
Three other men, one maneuvering a tractor fitted with a toothed digging bucket. The trunks of the felled pines, decapitated, their limbs amputated. A big trailer, half full of rubble. A huge mound of brick and slate and jutting broken timbers that had been the barn.
A stocky man in dirty blue overalls and Wellington boots was poking around in the wreckage. He lifted something on the end of a stick: the sleeping bag — their sleeping bag — barely recognizable, the filthy ragged skin of an ancient roadkill.
“That look like some ole tramp’re being sleepun rough up here, George.”
Grinning.
His father laughed from on high.
“Aye. The bugger’ll get a right shock if he