Flash Point (53 page)

“So America sells its own equipment, or gives it, to Israel, then conspires with Israeli intelligence to ensure that American Naval forces fly off their aircraft carriers and into Lebanon and Syria to attack our people. But when called to task, when called to account, they lie, say they weren’t there, and then use it as an excuse to do more of the same.”

A few of the journalists were becoming impatient and wanted to ask questions. But the Ambassador was not slowing down even for a second. He had things to get off his chest and he was determined to do so. Unlike most diplomats who made speeches at times such as this, this Ambassador seemed truly to believe what he was saying.

“So the Americans claim that there is a new terrorist organization operating out of Syria, Sheikh al-Jabar. They of course have no evidence that he has ever even been to Syria. They claim he is operating out of Lebanon. Once again, they have no such evidence. They then, without provocation, use these excuses to attack the self-defense capability of Syria and Lebanon.

“Perhaps we now understand. This is the big chance that America has yearned for for so long to come into the Middle East in force. CNN shows us that the Marines are coming. It looks like the Sheikh is right. The Americans are the next Crusaders.

“I want to make the Syrian position extremely clear: If one American sets foot on Syrian soil, or Lebanese soil, we will respond with force. If the Americans think they have a fight now, they haven’t seen anything yet.”

The journalists were lining up for questions. The Ambassador’s dark countenance served him well in discouraging people from asking the obvious questions.

“That is all. I will not take any questions. Go ask the Americans all the questions. Ask them why they are attacking innocent people and when it is going to stop.” He turned quickly and walked away from the shouting journalists.

“There it is,” Pritch said.

“They can ask
me
those questions,” Woods said, dead serious. “We will never stop until the Sheikh is dead. Simple as that. At least I won’t.”

If the
Washington
had a Main Street, it was the main deck. Post office, barbershop, ship’s store, cafeteria-like ship’s mess, chiefs’ mess, berthing compartments, XO’s office, ship’s admin offices, legal office, supply office — where you could get paid — just about everything you could want.

Woods walked forward to the chiefs’ mess. He looked around at the sea of khaki. All men in their thirties or forties. The red ordnance shirt stood out among the khaki ones. “Gunner!” he called. He had thought he might find the Gunner here. As a former chief, he still identified more closely with the chiefs he had left behind than the officers he had joined in the wardroom.

The Gunner looked up from his table, surprised to see Woods. “Yes, sir,” he replied. He stood up slowly, reluctantly, from the table and crossed over to the door. Woods could go into the chiefs’ mess if he chose to, but he knew better than to go in unless invited. “Figured you’d be here.”

“Yes, sir,” the Gunner said in his unique, disinterested way. He was clearly unhappy about being interrupted.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Yes, sir,” the Gunner said. He put his hands on his hips and waited for Woods to talk. The chiefs around the mess watched the conversation with mild interest. They knew Woods was one of the good officers. He didn’t lord it over his chiefs, which was the main test of a good officer from their perspective. Let your chiefs do their job and yours will be easier.

“Let’s go to your shop,” Woods said, almost in the tone of an order.

The Gunner heard the tone and realized something was up. He gave a quick head movement to his friends to let them know he was leaving, turned out the hatch, and headed aft on the starboard side of the carrier. They went up two levels to the 02. The ordnance door was painted black and yellow in squadron colors and had a drawing — painted ordnance red — of a falling bomb on the door. A laser-guided bomb, for those who cared to examine the painting — and a good rendition, for those who really looked, with the fins, laser guidance system, and a good trajectory.

They stepped inside the shop and closed the steel door with a slam. Two ordnancemen, Petty Officers in their red long-sleeved cotton shirts, their cranial helmets up on top of their heads, ear protectors off their ears, stood quietly in the shop looking tired and worn. Their shirts had the cast of three days of dirt and grime. They had been up all night preparing the Tomcats for the night strikes about to start. So far, they were very pleased with performance of the F-14’s of VF-103. All the bombs had come off the racks when they were supposed to, and had been placed on target with no casualties. They were keeping a running tally of how many pounds of bombs were being dropped.

Gunner sat down at his desk. As the Warrant Officer of the Ordnance Division, he was in charge of all the weapons for the Jolly Rogers: the 20-millimeter cartridges that went into the Gatling gun in the nose of the Tomcat; the Sidewinder, Sparrow, and Phoenix missiles that went on the aircraft for air to air combat; and all the bombs that were loaded on the belly. He pushed his dark brown hair from the side where it grew across his shiny head to the other side where it lay. It looked ridiculous, but no one would ever even think of telling him that. He was far too serious to ever be ready to hear that his comb-over hair look was silly. He regarded Woods with skepticism.

Woods sat in the metal and vinyl chair and glanced around the shop. Woods was envious. The idea of having a tight group of men and women working for you in a small shop with a narrow focus, where you could measure success on an hourly basis, where you knew exactly where you stood all the time, was attractive to him. It was an oasis from the world of ambiguity.

Woods watched the ordnancemen eat candy bars as they studied the air-plan ordnance loads for the night launches. The Air Wing commander had decided to fly all the strikes at night so that some fool with an AK-47 didn’t connect with a wild shot on one of the Air Wing’s jets.

The calendar on the wall above the steel desk was the latest
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit calendar. The more lurid calendars had been taken down long before under protest because of the addition of women to the ordnance shop. It had changed everything but women were now so commonplace that no one commented. If people felt unhappy about their presence, they kept that opinion to themselves. They all knew what they were supposed to think, and that’s what they said whenever asked.

“We’re not getting these guys,” Woods finally said.

“The Sheikh’s guys?”

“Right.”

“Bombs aren’t doing the job?”

“Not even close.”

“That figures though, don’t it? You can’t blow up a whole mountain. You got to have a target that you can hit. They can probably blow up the building, his fort or whatever, but not the whole damn mountain. I guess he’s buried. I just wish we knew where his headquarters were.”

“We do.”

The Petty Officers glanced at him, eavesdropping. Interested.

“Got the message this morning. They know where he’s hiding.”

“That shit-head. I’d like to just pinch his little neck with a big set of tweezers.” He touched his hair to see if it was falling. “So where is he?”

“In their fortress in Iran.”

“Okay.”

“You’ve seen the BDA photos, right? Two-thousand-pounders are hitting exactly where we’re aiming. All we’re doing is turning big rocks into little rocks. We’re bombing the hell out of the sides of couple of mountains, but I don’t think we’re getting through. Maybe ten or twenty feet deep, but not deep enough.”

The Gunner shrugged. “Don’t know what they expected. Those things can’t penetrate granite, or even dirt. At least not very far.”

“Exactly. But it’s worse.”

“What’s worse?”

“The place where he is hiding is the fortress in northwestern Iran. Called Alamut. They think he’s buried in that mountain seventy-five to a hundred feet.”

The Gunner turned down the corners of his mouth in disapproval. “Can’t get down there with what we got. Never happen.”

“Exactly. That’s why I came to you.”

“I just said we can’t—”

“I think I’ve got a solution,” Woods said. His eyes were intense in the dim light. “We need to get ahold of a couple of GBU-28s.”

The Gunner sat back. He looked at the overhead as he called up the picture of the massive weapon. “Designed for another one of our pals, Saddam Hussein. Made out of an eight-inch howitzer barrel packed full of explosives or some shit. Never seen one, but sure would like to.”

“That’s it. That’s the one.”

The Gunner smiled, showing his uneven teeth. “That ought to do it. Who’d carry them?”

“I would.”

The Gunner felt another felony coming. “How? The F-14’s never been certified.”

Woods said, leaning forward, “Can we get one of them?”

“Air Force bought a hundred fifty of them in 1995 or ’96. I think two F-111s dropped a couple in Desert Storm and blew Saddam’s bunkers to hell. But he wasn’t there. After that, the Air Force convinced
somebody
they needed a warehouse full of these things.” He smiled. “We ought to be able to get a couple.”

“Where are they?”

“I think Eglin, but I’ll find out. But nobody’ll let us drop ’em if they haven’t done the flight tests on it.”

“They
did
do the flight testing. When I was an instructor at Topgun they did some flight tests at the Pax River. A couple of us were allowed to observe. I flew on the wing of the guys who did the drop.”

The Gunner wasn’t impressed. “It’s not in the confidential supplement.” The supplement was the big yellow F-14 manual that contained the weapons information on the F-14. It was the bible for the operation of the Tomcat with various weapons systems.

“The Air Force said it was going to be an Air Force weapon. They didn’t even want us doing the flight tests. They said the Navy didn’t need to pollute their system carrying around the GBU-28. But it passed the flight tests. Trust me.” Woods watched the Gunner’s face. The Gunner was deciding whether to believe him. Woods hadn’t expected the Gunner to think he was lying about it. He had never even considered he might be losing credibility with those who knew him best because of what he had been willing to do to get the Sheikh.

The Gunner stood. “I know the guy who runs the ordnance shop at Eglin. You know what this means, don’t you?”

“What?”

“The Air Force is already pissed. They feel like they’ve been cut out of the pattern. An air war is under way without them being in the lead. They don’t let that happen. They’ve got more PR guys than we have sailors. They’ve got more videotape recorders then we have airplanes. Any time anything is going to happen, they want to lead. You know that.”

“Right—”

“So I call this guy at Air Force ordnance. If I ask him to get a couple of 28’s ready for immediate shipment to the carrier Battle Group, what will go out is that the Navy is about to do a surgical strike. Everyone knows what the only important surgical strike would be in this war. They know we’re going after the Sheikh. They would also know that we’ve found him — which they may know already. I don’t know. Anyway, they will immediately load two, or three, or fifty GBU-28s aboard a B-2, fly it halfway around the world by refueling it thirty times, and say that this is a routine Air Force mission. You
know
that’s what will happen.”

“So how do we get around it?”

The Gunner put his Jolly Rogers navy blue baseball cap on and pulled it down over his forehead to accentuate his hard look. “I think we plan the mission, and then execute it. If something stops us that’s just the way it goes. If they don’t stop us, then we’ll get our shot.”

“Are you going to help me?”

The Gunner hesitated. He looked at the two Petty Officers hovering nearby. “Give us a minute,” he said loudly.

The Petty Officers put the air plan on the counter and walked out of the ordnance shop, closing the door behind them.

Gunner Bailey stood there looking at Woods. “You’ve already asked me to help you once. I did something I never should have done. I faked some missile records. Which wasn’t easy. The ship’s records are kept by the OHO. I had to call in a couple of big markers. Way big. He was not pleased, especially after the fact when CAG’s hair is on fire and it looks like the biggest damn international incident any of us has ever seen—”

“Look, Gunner, let me—”

“Let me finish,” he said. “I did that, because I thought Lieutenant Vialli got a shitty deal. I was willing to help you. But I don’t like this one bit. I love the Navy. The Navy is my life. More than my family. And I don’t want anyone shitting all over my career for his own reasons. I helped you once, but I’m not sticking my head in another noose. If this is another scam of yours, count me out.”

Woods was stunned. “Gunner, I appreciate what you did. It was risky, and we pulled it off. But this isn’t a scam. It’s totally legit. If we can locate some of these bombs, we’ll put in an emergency requisition request, all aboveboard, all with the Skipper’s approval.”

The Gunner looked into Woods’s eyes for any sign of games. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll get on the e-mail right away.” The Gunner’s demeanor changed. “You need to get on the horn and keep the Air Force’s fat assess out of this. This is
our
fight. If you got any strings, pull them now.”

Woods immediately thought of Jaime.

President Garrett looked every bit as serious as the Syrian Ambassador did. He began speaking slowly, “I generally do not comment on remarks by diplomats of foreign countries. However, this time I could not let the Syrian Ambassador to the UN’s comments pass unnoticed. He has accused us of conspiracies and evil intentions. I will not allow him to slander our country. We are currently at war. True, it is only against one man and the group that follows him. One man and his group of terrorists, Assassins, and murderers. A group whose objective is to kill Americans. Doesn’t matter whether these people are armed, combatants, military, or even Department of Defense. It is despicable to attack unarmed civilians as they have. But more significantly, the Sheikh declared war against the United States. Unlike many times in the past, we decided to respond directly to this challenge to our country. It was the right decision and we will see it home.