Blowing My Own Horn, Part Two

Blowing My Own Horn, Part Two:

Slowly the World Burns, While I Help to Fan the Flames

“One day, your reward will be peace.”

Slowly, the World Burns: Genesis

“It came to me in a dream” is such a cliché of creativity that it makes us groan to hear it.

But part of my life is a writer is the constant search for new ideas. That means mining the internet for ideas on a more or less constant basis. As I did that, stalled in The Will Bryant Thrillers series, just having completed two World War II novels and without a solid concept for a third, I came upon two ideas that would not let me go.

First, I happened upon the shadowy world of the Rand Corporation, and their golden age of far-out studies, the late 1950s and early 1960s.

This was a time of boundless optimism, twinned with existential dread. America was immensely rich, blessed with seemingly endless reserves of wealth and talent. And yet, she nervously watched the horizon for a vital, boastful, vengeful rival, whose leader promised publicly “We will bury you!”

In auto showrooms and shopping malls, such doubt and fear was not on display. Watch Mad Men if you don’t believe me. But in the Pentagon and the White House, folks were considerably less sanguine about the prospects of eternal American power.

Enter Rand. The first of the “think tanks,” assemblages of the best and brightest, minds for rent, essentially, it was their job to forecast the future. And in 1959, the future was, as Tom Petty would say, wide open.

First to catch my eye was Project Horizon, a proposal for a USAF Moon base as early as 1966. Considering that the first men landed on the surface in 1969, under conditions of warlike urgency, I didn’t consider this timeline completely unrealistic. This stuck in my mind and became the basis for the fateful meeting point of the two enemies in the novel’s climax.

Next, I read about a mobile basing “racetrack” for train-mounted ICBM launchers proposed for construction under vast swaths of the US West. This was the genesis for the “Warwagon” trains manned by the protagonist and his colleagues.

“’3…2…1…impact!’ The monitor showing the surface flashed white, then black, as the scrambling men burst into flames.”

Finally, I found myself reading about deep drilling, the earth’s crust, and related subterranean subjects.

“Finally, she spoke. ‘I hate it when they try to replace what we’ve lost. I really wish they’d just forget it.”

I began to dream of trains loaded with deadly weapons, circling on endless tracks beneath a blasted landscapes; massive vaulted caverns, deep underground, housing miserable people, never seeing the sun; and finally, space, explored not by public heroes, but by the same men, living in secret, unknown to the hidden masses.

“The whole world should’ve been watching. It would’ve given people hope.”

So was born my next novel. Dreams became the stuff of nightmares. I visualized a future past, populated by familiar figures, leading very different lives, trapped in eternal war, desperate for a way out.

The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Fork in the Road

“My point is this: My sources in the USSR and US governments tell me there are rumours from Cuba. Rumours about Russian-speaking men driving huge trailers that cannot turn corners. The fear; the fear is jumping the riverbank.”

Anyone familiar with my body of work knows of my sick fascination with all things nuclear.

I can’t help it: I’m a child of the final escalation of the Cold War, the Reagan era. I came of age in the era of SDI, the Neutron Bomb, the SS-20 and Pershing II. My adolescence coincided with the close call of Exercise Able Archer in 1983, the setting for my novella Launch on Warning. I recall being told to come in out of the rain after a Chinese H-Bomb test in 1977. I watched Threads and The Day After.

They came with warning labels, those movies. Such was the fear. The imagery of Armageddon never left me.

Add to that, the experience of my father. In October 1962, David Patterson was an Able Seaman on HMCS Bonaventure, Canada’s only aircraft carrier. In time of war, their orders were to sail for the US, pick up nuclear depth charges, and then go hunting Soviet submarines.

In harbour in Portsmouth, UK, at the time, that’s exactly what they did. Leaving 100 men of the ship’s company behind. On the trip to South Carolina, they zig-zagged to avoid Soviet hunter-killers, while the aircrews of their Tracker anti-submarine aircraft, not yet armed for war, discussed kamikaze attacks on Soviet missile boats, if it came to that. These men were completely prepared to give their lives for people they’d never met.

“Though they were facing away, the backlit clouds reflected the intense light into Thunderbolt and Mowbray’s faces, blinding them temporarily as the blast wave hit them.”

Bearing that in mind, I couldn’t start the novel in any other place. The Reagan era notwithstanding, it’s the closest we’ve ever come to Armageddon.

In the novel, disaster is not avoided, and the future takes a very different turn.

World, Interrupted

In October 1962, the USSR and the USA go to war, prompted by a US invasion of Cuba. Unbeknownst to US intelligence, the Soviets have recklessly provided Castro with launch authority over their Frog rockets, tipped with tactical nukes. As soon as the US invasion force lands, Castro hits the landing beaches and South Florida, prompting an immediate reaction from the Strategic Air Command Alert Force.

Bloody-minded architect of the firebombing of Japan, Curtis LeMay, unleashes a profligate and indiscriminate war plan, SIOP-62. Every Communist nation is incinerated. The US suffers the loss of Florida, New York City, and Washington. The command structure of both countries is decimated.

Though the US has suffered far less than the USSR, the chaos caused by the exchange brings Richard Nixon to power at the head of a secretive governing body, EMGOV. Civil liberties are curtailed by a Federal Police under J Edgar Hoover. A state of perpetual war ensues, despite the absence of further nuclear exchanges.

“Since 1962, government in this country has functioned as a literal reflection of the society it serves: underground.”

People deemed security risks, like Martin Luther King, Abbie Hoffman, and Allan Ginsberg, are imprisoned without trial. Censorship hides the true nature of the war. The US and Canada, led by the iconoclastic young Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, commit to a long-term struggle. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union prepares for revenge.

“Within the next week to six months, the Soviet Union will undertake a massive retaliatory strike to avenge the losses caused by SIOP-62.”

A Soviet attack two years later forces the remaining US population underground. The Warwagon trains, firing ICBMs, and nuclear submarines, are the only way North America and the Soviet Union can hit each other now.

Both sides are devastated and demoralized. Slowly, figures on both sides begin to think of a way out. But the other option is a new technology that can destroy the “Cathedrals” that are now man’s only safe haven in the Northern Hemisphere.

Harrison Mowbray: Man, Out of Mind

In 1971, an unusual Soviet probe lands outside RCAF North Bay, Ontario. Stealthy, it evades ABM attack, and delivers a message for only one man. But why this man?

“’The classified communication device located in the warhead compartment of the North Bay RV appears to permit communication with only one individual: Mowbray, HW, MAJ USAF.”

Harrison Mowbray III, Major, USAF, is not an anti-hero. He is a man who fully intends to be a hero. He takes all the right steps, from emulating his war hero father, to entering the USAF Academy at Colorado Springs, to joining LeMay’s SAC.

Yet he is fundamentally vulnerable, in a way he only suspects until he is captured by the KGB on the first night of the war. Sole survivor of a downed B-52, he becomes an experimental subject for mental manipulation. All that follows stems from this.

The hero, transformed, becomes a villain. A villain unsure of who he is.

“The second group was a low-susceptibility group, unable to be co-opted easily, but perceived as particularly valuable nevertheless for various reasons.”

The Soviets make him a useful tool but cannot completely convert him into a willing agent. At most, he can act only when he truly believes action is necessary in the cause of peace. Unlike an agent he encounters and disposes of midway through the book, Mowbray is no traitor.

Yet the man who is not a traitor, a man whose father and grandfather have both travelled to the Soviet Union, and maintained contacts there since Stalin’s time, betrays his country nevertheless. The probe that lands in Canada is Mowbray’s child.

“We know you have something we need to know. Remember Albuquerque? We need to know, Harry.”

Mowbray’s mentor and his father’s wingman, General Abraham Lewis, knows Mowbray is unreliable. Torn in his own mind, obsessed with a daughter missing on the surface, and tortured by two unusual suicides by his crew members, he is the last man you would dispatch on a secret mission.

But the Soviets insist: He is the man. The only man they will talk to. Lewis has no choice.

A Troublesome Broad: Captain Robyn Hartley

The nuclear exchange and the migration underground notwithstanding, North America is still undergoing explosive social change. The sixties are here, it’s just that Haight-Ashbury is radioactive. Nobody’s meeting you in San Francisco anymore.

Captain Robyn Hartley, an outspoken Black woman with inconvenient opinions and even less convenient sexuality, is the officer Lewis picks to escort Mowbray across North America to his rendezvous.

Hartley is on the verge of being arrested by the FBI when Lewis’ agent handpicks her for the mission. More than once, she keeps Mowbray on track.

“’Man.’ Marcus whistled. ‘That is one mean bitch.’ ‘And you!’ She turned on Marcus. ‘Grab your motherfucking rifle and hustle us to the duct you said you could find with your eyes closed! Or is it my imagination that we’re marching around in circles?’”

But like everyone who has survived the war years, Hartley has trauma she cannot shake.

“Hartley held Mowbray’s arm tightly. She had tears in her eyes. ‘I wish we’d all died then. Together.’”

Giants, Unseated

The Historical Figures of the Novel

One concept I became fascinated with during the crafting of this novel was the potential to recast known, familiar historical figures in a completely unfamiliar milieu.

It’s a world where Martin Luther King is a political prisoner, and Bobby Kennedy still lives, perched on the edge of power. Dino and Sammy headline Vegas, while Sinatra is radioactive ash. Nixon rules supreme, aided by an increasingly doubtful Kissinger. George Carlin is an unknown comic in a socialist commune, and the songs of Diana Ross are banned.

“’More like a guaranteed, you are fucked, unless we get where we are going, threat. You got a joke for that, George?’ ‘Uh, can I get your bags?’ George lit a joint and took a long hit. ‘Anybody?’”

This is where knowing a little history comes in handy. It’s kind of my thing to mix fiction and fact, and I indulge in this full bore in this novel. Trudeau presents as an arrogant dick, yet fearsome intellectual, trying to judge whether to make his peace with the USSR or stick with Nixon, whom he despises. J Edgar Hoover is the same secretive hoarder of power that he always was. Bobby Kennedy is excited by the chance to follow in his brother’s footsteps, yet timid and vain at the same time. Henry Kissinger becomes the unexpected conscience of the novel, a man much despised in the present day, yet following a very different moral arc in this universe.

“’If? You are asking me to gamble the country’s future on trusting men I do not know, who obey a system I am sworn to destroy. Would you do this?”

A huge part of the fun of writing this book was imagining things like Mort Sahl as an underground comic; Eldridge Cleaver writing “Soul Underground,” instead of “Soul on Ice;” and a world without the Beatles. Would it look similar, even if it were underground? Racism, opportunism, humour, and the basic human emotions are not going anywhere. But half of America’s population is dead; the remainder are traumatized and cynical beyond belief. Things underground have to look different.

“The platform was crammed, shoulder-to-shoulder, with dirty and dishevelled people. Sunken- cheeked, hollow-eyed, they listened passively to hawkers who harangued them with every pitch imaginable.

“Crickets! Protein rich! Low rads! Five cents a bag!”

“Corn! Clean, Topside Corn! Low rads! Ten cents a cob!”

“Soy loaf! Get your soy loaf! Certified and guaranteed! Twenty-five cents a brick!”

“Permits! Just like real! Draft exemption! Residency! Triage! Five bucks in ten minutes flat!”

For on the surface, there is no hope. Or so it appears.

Necessary Cubed: Hope and Despair, Up and Down in Slowly, the World Burns:

Mowbray has a date with destiny. As the novel progresses, his complicated, messy, sometimes forgotten history bumps up against his present. He betrays unknowingly and kills automatically. A chance viewing of The Manchurian Candidate gets him playing solitaire; a deliberate Soviet message prompts a suicidal mission.

Mowbray dwells in despair yet lives in hope. Hope that he will, one day, see his beloved Angie again. In this, he has a curious ally in the Soviets, who have equipped him to withstand excessive emotional trauma.

“Necessary. Necessary. Necessary. Mowbray felt the white walls closing in. “They tried it with you, didn’t they? In Korea…” The pain advanced from the back of his head, marching forward, a Red Army in his mind. “You’re my…”

“Controller? I suppose you could say this, Harry. We are on the same, limited mission. We were too strong to be forced to do more. We only want peace as our reward.”

The walls will be tested, again and again. For a world in perpetual nuclear war has much trauma to offer. The Surface, ravaged by radiation and scoured by UV, is a special place of dread.

“He looked over at Clem, now writhing in a fire dream. He checked his own dosimeter. How much time did he have? He would certainly get sick. Maybe he would save a bullet for himself.”

And yet, Mowbray’s time on the surface, in two traumatic encounters, fill him with a spiritual drive he requires to carry on, in conditions that would test the strongest person. A chase after a religious, suicidal officer, on the brink of a Soviet attack, imbues him with a spiritual motivation for what he must endure.

“Lutz embraced him, and soon his breaths came more slowly. He returned the embrace. Lutz whispered in his ear. “Wherever the Lord tells you to meet your enemy, go to him.” Lutz released him gently. “Go back down, Harry. There isn’t much time.”

This transformation in the protagonist is why I will argue that my novel, despite its dark subject matter, is a hopeful novel. If a man as damaged as Harry Mowbray can find hope in a time as damaged as a nuclear 1971, then what’s your excuse?

For What It’s Worth: Hope and Endurance as a Nuclear Antidote

“Overhead, the deadly red trails of Russian MIRVs arced towards them. ‘I always wanted to see this.’ Mowbray admitted. ‘And now I have. Three times.’ ‘It’s beautiful. I have to go now, Harry.’ ‘What about me?’ ‘You have to wake up. Wake up.’ All around them, the desert disappeared in blinding light.”

In the Bible and the Koran, prophets find God in the solitude and isolation of the desert. So, it is for Harrison Mowbray. Until he absorbs the meaning of his encounters with Clem Kinton and Frank Lutz in the radioactive wasteland of the Surface, he understands the what of his mission, but not the why.

For a man serving two masters, one consciously, the other, unconsciously, logic cannot fully answer his questions. Faith is, in the end, the only answer.

Harrison Mowbray is a rational man, and surely, he would balk a comparison to Moses. Yet, perhaps it is an apt one. He is the only man who can lead humanity out of its radioactive Sinai. And in the final act of mercy of a man suffering from radiation sickness; and the ravings of a suicidal lunatic, he finds the answer he is looking for.

Mowbray seeks not only peace but love as well. This yearning is personified by the absent character of his daughter, Angie, whom he last sees as a baby on the eve of war.

“Later, he crept down the hall to find mother and daughter sleeping together. He touched the downy hair on his daughter’s crown. Lord, protect you.”

America has made Harrison Mowbray a killer. The Soviet Union has made him a traitor. But he stubbornly remains a father, and if anything will save him, that will.

Facing the Mushroom Cloud: Why the Novel is Not “Nuke Porn”

Slowly, the World Burns is my longest novel, at 602 pages, and undoubtedly my most ambitious. I vacillate between telling smaller stories and trying to paint the big canvas now. I’m not sure, though, that I’ll ever attempt anything as ambitious as this novel again. I only realized when I finished it and read it for the first time what I’d done.

I see my novel as an attempt to make meaning of the nature of society, when its physical roots are destroyed, and of man himself, when he forgets what he is. The fact that the novel culminates in an alien place is not accidental; it is intrinsic to what I was trying to say.

Man is an animal, and sometimes, in the heat of conflict, he forgets that he can do better.

“Kissinger sighed. He stood slowly and walked over to the window, watching the children with Mowbray. “Ve became like two fornicating dogs who could not unhook. Once a war has begun, it takes courage to suggest this war should end. Ve all created a bright, shining lie, together.”

I’m satisfied that my book, whatever you may think of it, is not what author Ron Rosenstein called “nuke porn,” a lurid tale of annihilation designed solely to shock. Ironically, I set out with no great intentions to write a meditation on the nature of men and nations, but maybe that’s what I did anyway.

They found penicillin by accident too, you know.