Flash Point (13 page)

The leader spoke clearly in Hebrew. “Silence! The rest of you, stay behind your seats. You must remain still for thirty minutes. We will be outside on the sand. If anyone moves, we will come back and kill all of you!”

The terrorists put on the red berets of the Israeli paratroopers, and one by one left the bus carrying their Israeli rifles.

They walked up the beach in orderly fashion, looking like an Israeli patrol. A fast black rubber boat appeared. It had a blue Star of David in a white circle on the side and was driven by a man who also wore a red beret. They waded out into the shallow water, climbed into the boat, and disappeared.

Woods strode into the ready room and sat at the desk where he worked as the Assistant Operations Officer. Vialli worked for him as the Flight Officer and drew up the flight schedule every day. Among other things, he kept track of how much flight time each pilot and RIO had each month, how many arrested landings each had had, daytime and nighttime, and how many of each kind of hop each pilot had flown.

Now well past the middle of their six-month deployment to the Mediterranean from their home port of Norfolk, Virginia, the only things they needed to worry about were traps and hours. Everything else had been taken care of before the cruise.

Woods studied the greenie board behind him. He had the second-highest landing grades of any pilot in the squadron, followed closely by Bark himself and Big McMack, another lieutenant. The only one ahead of him was Lieutenant Terry Blankenship, but he didn’t count. All the other pilots thought he was actually a machine and therefore he didn’t qualify for admiration. Woods was proud of his landing grades, butdidn’t talk about it. You were supposed to act as if it was a very ordinary accomplishment that you never thought about at all. Routine stuff. Ordinary day’s work. The objective of Navy Air was to accomplish the impossible with negligible apparent effort.

Woods wanted to draft the flight schedule for Vialli for the first day out of Naples. It would be ready when Vialli got back and he wouldn’t have to try to do it in the middle of the night after everyone had gone to bed, not knowing when they were flying the next day and therefore angry at him for not doing it sooner. And that’s exactly what would happen if he didn’t do it for Vialli. Vialli wasn’t due for one more day. He would undoubtedly rush to get back to the ship the hour his leave expired, which was midnight the night before they sailed. Better to do it now, get it over with, and have Vialli owe him one. He drank deeply from his coffee cup and opened a new file on Vialli’s computer, under the flight schedule macro.

The rear door to the ready room flew open from the passageway. Big walked in with his usual flourish and looked around. There were three officers in the ready room including Woods. Brillo was the Squadron Duty Officer and was sitting in his khakis at the desk at the front of the room, and Sedge was using his ready room chair as a desk to write the evaluations of the enlisted men in his division. He had the Aviation Armament division, which included the AOs, the aviation ordnancemen who handled the missiles and the bullets.

Big saw Woods and walked over to him. “Well, I guess we’re hosed on our port call in Haifa,” he said resignedly.

Woods glanced up, debating whether to ask Big the question he was obviously begging to be asked. Might as well get it over with. “Why’s that, Big?” he asked as he typed “Event 1A” on the computer.

“Didn’t you hear?” Big asked, hiking his pants up around his girth, glad to have found someone who didn’t know what he and most everyone else on the ship knew.

“Why don’t you tell me,” Woods said, bored.

“Terrorist attack in Israel last night. It’s on the closed circuit TV.”

Woods forced himself not to jump up and turn on the television. He knew Big would do it for him. Big crossed to the briefing area in the back of the ready room and turned on the television overhead. Brillo had heard what Big said and turned on the larger set in the front of the room at the same time. They came to life simultaneously. Lieutenant Commander Randy Dennison, Intelligence Officer for the Air Wing, was on the screen.

Woods turned his chair around to listen as Big raised the volume so it filled the room. “. . . But we don’t know yet how many were killed, or why. No one has taken responsibility for the attack. Hamas and Hezbollah have made public statements that they had nothing to do with it, and hint it may be the same people who were responsible for the Gaza crossing attack.” Dennison showed a news wire photograph of a bus sitting by the side of the Tel Aviv road, its windshield shot out. “The bus was on its way from a town north of Haifa to Tel Aviv. It had numerous school children aboard and several adults. There were four adults killed, three men and one woman. None of the children was harmed. For those of you who are wondering whether this will affect our port call to Haifa in three weeks, we don’t know right now. If you have any questions, dial two-two-four-five on your phones.”

“Brillo!” Woods shouted. “Call him and ask if there were any Americans on board.”

“Don’t you think he’d tell us?”

“Do it!” Woods screamed.

Brillo looked quickly at Big as if to ask, “What the hell’s up with him?” but Big simply shrugged. Brillo dialed the phone on the desk and spoke to an intelligence specialist, first class, who was covering the phone in CVIC, the carrier intelligence center. Lieutenant Commander Dennison took the call.

“Yes, sir, Ready Room Eight. Sir, we were wondering if there were any Americans on that bus in Israel.”

“Why do you care?” Dennison asked.

“Just interested in our fellow citizens,” Brillo said, glancing at Woods.

“We don’t know. I don’t have any information either way. Looks like it was just a bus trip from Nahariya.”

“Okay. Thanks, sir,” Brillo said, hanging up. “They don’t know. School trip from Nahariya,” he told Woods.

Woods jerked visibly on the mention of Nahariya. He fought the panic he felt deep in his gut. He tried to act nonchalant and drink his coffee as he looked at the flight schedule, but he realized he had been staring at it for five minutes without writing anything. He glanced up suddenly and saw Brillo and Big studying him. He couldn’t shake his feeling of foreboding.

The ready room door swung open again and Bark came in carrying a stack of papers. He sat in his chair and opened the steel drawer between his legs. He dropped the papers in the drawer on top of another pile of papers and tried to shut it. The drawer wouldn’t close. “Damn it!” he said, standing up quickly. He turned around and kicked the drawer. The drawer flew back and jammed, with paper stuck betweenthe drawer and the seat bottom. Muttering, he sat down in the chair with the drawer hanging open three inches. He got up again, walked three steps to the front, and leaned down under the blackboard and sliding charts. He examined the stacks of individual mailboxes that one of the squadron’s shops had created at his request. He stood on the enormous skull and bones cut into the tile in the front of the ready room. It had been his idea to bring the template of the skull and bones used to paint the huge Tomcat tails to the ready room and use it to make a tile masterpiece on the deck when the squadron retiled the ready room in Norfolk. He had purchased the black and white tiles with his own money. The pilots had cut pieces to form the skull and bones, which now lay perfectly as part of the tile floor surrounded by the yellow tile of the rest of the room, the squadron’s color. He was the only one in the squadron actually allowed to walk on the skull and bones.

He looked into his mail slot as he spoke to Brillo, sitting at the desk to his left. “Mail call yet this morning?”

“Yes, sir. Petty Officer Whaley just put it all in the slots.”

Bark bent over farther, looked into the back of his slot, and saw some letters. “Aha!” he exclaimed, drawing out three letters in pastel envelopes with the same writing. “She
hasn’t
forgotten me!”

“Well, she may have; she may just be writing so you don’t know it yet,” Big said, laughing hoarsely at his own humor. He was as his name suggested. Big. He was about six four, well over two hundred pounds, with a jolly round face and thinning hair.

“Thanks for the encouragement, Big,” the CO said, sitting back down in his seat. He held the letters to his nose and breathed in deeply. “Aaahhh,” he said, exhaling. “Why is it that perfume fades on the body in a matter of hours, but stays on a letter for weeks, or months?”

“I don’t know, Skipper,” Big said, glancing at Brillo. “I’ve always been fascinated by that question myself. Probably some scientific explanation about that. Maybe we should write to Chanel, or . . .”

“Maybe you should shut the hell up, Big,” Bark growled as he opened the letter with the oldest postmark. “As much as I love e-mail, there’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned letter . . . Hey, Brillo,” Bark said, stopping momentarily. “Where’s Vialli? I need to talk to him about the flight schedule for the next at-sea period. He’s had me on too many night hops lately.
Real
night hops. That’s no way to treat your Commanding Officer. I need a few more pinkies.” Pinkies were hops that landed after sunset but before it got really dark. They counted as night hops.

“He’s on leave, Skipper.”

“That’s right,” Bark replied, pulling out the two pages from his wife’s first letter.

“Hey, Trey,” Brillo said loudly so Woods could hear him from the back of the ready room. “When’s Boomer due back?”

“Tomorrow night,” Woods said. “Midnight. So, undoubtely he’ll be on the last O-boat at 2359. He’s probably trying to figure out whether being ‘back’ means ashore on the pier, or here in the ready room.”

Big stood next to Brillo drinking his coffee, his other hand in the pocket of his polyester khaki trousers, still looking for people who hadn’t heard the news. “Hey, Skipper, d’ya hear about that bus thing in Israel?”

Bark put down the letter and shook his head vigorously. “Could you believe that? I don’t get it at all. Take a bus, drive south, kill four of the people on board and disappear? Not the usual terrorist attack at all. Sounds more like an assassination. But why kill schoolteachers? I’ll tell you, those guys’ll kill anybody.” He shook his head in amazement. “I wonder if they’ll identify themselves. Bunch of cowards.” They all nodded in agreement. He started reading his letter again, then holding the open letter out in front of him, as if reading, he said, “They probably write letters to their sweethearts: ‘Dear Susie, weather is great here in southern Gaza. Wish you were here. I want you, I need you. Had a great day yesterday. Read a good book, killed a few people. It was great. Please write soon. Love, Abdul.’ “ He rubbed his forehead with his fingers. “I just don’t get it. What makes someone able to kill innocent people? Where does that come from?”

“I don’t know, Skipper,” Big replied. “I never have understood it. But if there’s anybody who knows how to take care of terrorists, it’s the Israelis. They don’t take any shit from anybody. We just wring our hands and sit on our asses. If it was a bus full of Americans, I sure as hell’d be ready to hurt someone.”

After the Skipper had read through his letters twice and smelled them three times, he stood up and stretched. “Hey, Trey,” he called out. “You put any more thought into how to intercept those Air Force F-15Es when they come out?”

Woods looked up from his blank flight schedule. “Not really much to it, Skipper. Pick them up on our radar from about a million miles out. They’ll be on the deck, thinking that going fast and low will make us not see ’em, we’ll roll in behind them and shoot ’em.”

“I’ve heard they can go almost supersonic on the deck in military power,” Bark said.

Woods shrugged. “They can go supersonic all day long for all I care. Just means they won’t be using their burners. Saves gas. It’s not like we can’t do supersonic intercepts.”

Bark looked at him as if he was slow. “I just think it’s pretty impressive to be able to go that fast without burner. I wish we could.”

“I don’t know of anybody else who can,” Woods said casually. “Maybe the Concorde. Or the old F-111F. Now
that
was a fast airplane.”

“Want to head down to the wardroom for lunch early? I’m starved.”

Woods didn’t. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to think. He wanted to stare at the blank flight schedule to hide the worry that he knew would soon be showing on his face. “Sure, Skipper,” he said as they walked out the ready room back door. He needed some time. He had to tell the Skipper that Boomer had gone to Israel. But he was probably fine, and if he told the Skipper now, Boomer could be court-martialed. He probably wouldn’t be; Bark would probably just put him in HAQ — House Arrest, Quarters — for the next five thousand port calls, or make him SDO for life, but it wouldn’t be in his record. Take the risk, Woods thought; just don’t be wrong.

The members of the task force had a uniformly grim look. The banter was gone.

Kinkaid spoke. “What do we know?”

Nicole White, a woman with short dark hair, sat next to Kinkaid in the conference room. Sami was in the next seat, and Cunningham sat next to him. She stood and approached the front. She had a small infrared remote control in her hand, which she pointed at her laptop sitting on the conference table next to the Sharp projector. Someone in the back dimmed the lights. She pushed a button and a map of Israel came up. There was an arrow on the map pointing to the coastal highway from Haifa to Tel Aviv.

“This is where it happened, or rather where it stopped. The bus was taken” — she pointed with a laser pointer — “here. The attackers came from the sea, apparently undetected. The Israelis are greatly chagrined about this. They thought their coastal surveillance was impenetrable. They used rubber boats, which don’t show up on radar, and they apparently knew the pattern of the Israeli patrol boats off the coast. The IR sensors and other equipment either didn’t pick them up or the guards watching it weren’t paying very close attention. In any case, they came ashore and took the bus. They drove south twenty miles, killed four adults on the bus, including the driver, then vanished. They left two teachers on the bus, and thirty children.”