Firebreak

by Richard Herman

  Laughter and playful screams drifted up from the boarding platform as the first group of water-skiers took off, cutting across the wake of the Ferrari-powered ski boats. Shoshana was leaning against the rail, talking and smiling at Mana, actually enjoying the conversation when the high-pitched wail of four approaching jet skis demanded their attention. Lisl Wisser and Matt Pontowski were standing on the lead ski, cutting graceful arcs back and forth in a scissors pattern with another jet ski. Lisl was topless. “Ah, I see your friend from last night casts a wide net. But then, that is expected of a fighter pilot.”

  “Oh, please,” she laughed, finding his Oxford accent pleasant, “save me from fighter pilots!” She noticed that Mana did not take his eyes off Lisl. Shoshana was wearing the wrong swimsuit.

  Lisl set the style on board for most of the women who promptly went topless within minutes after her arrival. Two younger girls were sunbathing nude on the forward deck. Much to Shoshana’s confusion, Mana was following Lisl around like a puppy, captivated by the half-naked woman. According to Mana’s file, he preferred her type to Lisl’s. Could the file be wrong?

  “Arabs like blonds,” Matt said, joining her. “But don’t worry, Lisl will throw him back.”

  Shoshana didn’t like the American knowing she was trying to attract the Iraqi and reprimanded herself for being so obvious. Tall, fair, and muscular, Matt was certainly a contrast to Mana. Clothes hid Matt’s well-conditioned body and the muscles that rippled under his smooth skin when he walked or moved. She suspected he was very vain and spent hours working out in a weight room. You are probably something else in bed, she thought, disturbed by the man’s magnetism. She peeled down to her swimsuit, deciding to do some water skiing. “How long does she play with her prey?” Shoshana asked.

  Matt liked the sound of her voice. “In this case, I’d guess about thirty minutes.” He gave her a thorough look. “Like your swimsuit,” he said, meaning it. “Perfect for water-skiing. Want to give it a try?”

  Shoshana caught a playful change in his voice, almost as if he were shifting gears. She shrugged her shoulders and climbed down the boarding stairs to the floating dock to wait for her turn. Matt stood beside her carrying on a light banter. Within minutes, they were sitting on the edge of the float as the ski boat played out their towlines. Then they were up, gliding and skipping across the bright blue water. Matt would roar with laughter as he cut back and forth across the wake of the expensive towboat. Shoshana found she was enjoying herself immensely.

  On a tight pass around the yacht, she noticed that Mana was standing alone at the rail. Suspecting that Lisl had found someone else to play with, Shoshana gave a cutting motion with her hand across her neck, signaling she wanted to drop off. The towboat slowed and she threw her rope clear and coated to a halt by the dock. “Enjoyed it!” Matt yelled as the boat accelerated away. Strange, Shoshana thought, he wasn’t coming on at all. He only wanted to play.

  She climbed back up the ladder, sure she now had a clear shot at Mana. She knew how to soothe wounded male pride. He was watching her as she worked her way through some dancing couples. “Americans,” she fumed, joining him at the rail. “I can’t get rid of him.” The smile that lit Mana’s face told her she had hit a responsive chord.

  “They can be persistent,” he said, still smiling.

  Shoshana caught his last word and decided to play it. “I prefer them to be nonpersistent and nontoxic.”

  Mana looked at her in surprise. The words had a special meaning for him.

  Don’t stop now, she warned herself. “There I go talking shop,” she explained, laughing, enchanting him. “I work for a commercial insecticide company and I guess it comes out when I’m fighting off bugs.”

  “So do I,” he said. “Well, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Then that’s why you know the Wissers.” He only nodded. She pressed her opening. “Would you mind riding with me back to the port? Otherwise the American”—she cast a glance toward Matt who had finished skiing and was climbing the stairs—“will swarm all over me.”

  “It would be my pleasure.” His formal way of speaking amused her.

  Shoshana made sure they were engrossed in a conversation when they brushed past Matt so she could ignore him. Matt watched them leave. “Aced out by a fucking raghead,” he muttered. Then he laughed. “Well, it has to happen once every five hundred years.” He shook his head and went looking for Lisl. He found her sunbathing nude on the forward deck.

  On the boat ride into the harbor, Shoshana sat close to Mana, their thighs touching, and kept him talking about himself. The young man waited with her as the black Mercedes, now driven by Habish, pulled up. “Would you be kind enough to join me for dinner tonight?” he asked, his English still formal.

  “I’d love to.” She smiled at him. “I’m staying at the Atalaya Park.”

  “Yes, I know. Shall I pick you up at eight o’clock?” Shoshana nodded in agreement. “Please wear the black dress.” He almost was blushing when he said it.

  “If you wish.” She gave him a promising look as Habish pulled away.

  “You wore the wrong swimsuit,” Habish growled. “You were going after the Arab, not the American.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” she protested. “I am going to dinner with him.”

  “That was luck. You attract Americans by being provocative at first and then becoming very reserved. They have a basic prudish streak in them. With Arabs, it’s show all the way. Get them panting and keep them that way.”

  “But Mana was a perfect gentleman … reserved … polite …”

  “That’s a protective disguise Arabs adopt when they travel. The perfect Western gentlemen. They revert to type when they are home and become egotistical, domineering bastards. Listen to me next time. You won’t have so much trouble.”

  Shoshana sank back in the seat. She had much to learn.

  Brigadier General Leo Cox ambled down a corridor of Arlington Hall Station, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s annex located three miles from the Pentagon. A sharklike grin split the cadaverous face of the Air Force one-star general when he stopped at the office door of his best Middle Eastern analyst, Lieutenant Colonel William G. Carroll. “Bill, you busy?”

  The analyst glanced up from his work and immediately shot to his feet. Unlike many of the personnel assigned to Arlington Hall, Carroll liked Cox. When the general had been assigned to run Arlington Hall by the DIA he had swept through it like a vengeful banshee, clearing out the dead-wood, bringing in fresh talent, and changing it from a dead-end assignment into a top-notch analytical organization. Fools and paperpushers did not last long around Cox and he picked his key men with care. Carroll was one of the “spooks” whom Cox relied on and was far from being a deskbound paperpusher.

  “Whose toes did I tread on this time, General?” Carroll knew that Cox liked to drop in on his subordinates unannounced, bypassing the chain of command. It was a habit that kept the higher-ranking milicrats, the military version of bureaucrats, in the DIA stirred up and their lower-ranking protégés afraid for their careers. The working troops loved it.

  The general shook his head and closed the door behind him. “Sit down and relax, Bill. I’ve got a problem.” Cox stretched out his skinny six-foot-four-inch frame in the only decent armchair in the office. “I sent you last analysis about Iraq and Syria showing signs of kissing and making up over to the CIA to be included in the PDB. Hogan bounced it right back with some scathing remarks about us being out to lunch. I won’t repeat what he said about your linking the Iraqis with the economic negotiations going on between Egypt and Syria.”

  Carroll’s mouth twisted into a rueful grimace. Hogan was the staffer in the CIA who compiled the President’s Daily Brief, of PDG, and it was widely rumored that he wrote it up with a crayon. Supposedly, the PDB summarized the best intelligence the United States had for the President, and since the CIA had sole direct-reporting access to the President, all intelligence had to go through the CIA. “The troo
ps over at the CIA think we’re too pro-Israeli.”

  “Don’t tell me, Bill.” Cox smiled, raising a hand. “I know that not a single one of those shit-for-brains over there speaks Arabic.” Carroll was fluent in Arabic and Farsi; and could, in a pinch, get along in Berber.

  “Someone had better tell the President what’s going down or we’re going to get our asses in the proverbial crack-again,” Carroll said. Cox valued the slender and youthful-looking lieutenant colonel because his linguistic and analytical abilities were backed up by an outstanding record in the field. Carroll was one of the most highly decorated Air Force officers on active duty and wore the Air Force Cross for his role in rescuing 280 prisoners of war.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” Cox said. “But no one else, most of all the CIA, is reading the signals the way you do. I floated your analysis by General Howard and he almost threw me out of his office.” Lieutenant General Howard was the Army three-star general in command of the DIA and Cox’s boss. “No one is buying your analysis that Saddam has become a martyr to the Arab people and could be a rallying point against the West. The Agency boys believe that we stomped Saddam hard enough to keep everybody in line and that the Arab claim that they have the men and money to change their third world status and only lack the will to do it is just so much hot air.” Cox held up his hand to keep Carroll silent. “Bill, I agree that Iraq is secretly rebuilding its military much like Hitler did in Germany in the 1930s. A nation learns more from losing a war than from winning it. We know they’ve gotten back all their planes from the Iranians. But the goes against the party line that the Iraqis are now rational actors and that the Mideast is stabilizing.”

  “So what else is new?”

  ‘I need to get the attention of the President or the National Security Council,” Cox said, “but I’m out of ideas and airspeed. If I can’t do it through normal channels, it’ll have to be leaked to the media.”

  Carroll studied the pencil he was holding. He gave a little snort and shook his head. “That’s a bad choice …” He understood the general’s problem. Everyone in the administration was hailing the current negotiations between Egypt and Syria for an economic and mutual assistance treaty as a harbinger of peace and stability in that shattered area of the world, as everything the allied forces had fought for. But Carroll had discovered something else. At first, everything he had seen supported the accepted view of the treaty. Then a Mossad contact had passed him a top-secret protocol an Israeli spy had discovered buried deep in the negotiations. The protocol fused the Syrian and Egyptian military command and control systems and established communications links with Iraq.

  After blending it with other intelligence, Carroll had come to one simple and overriding conclusion: The Egyptians, the Syrians, and possibly the Iraqis, were using the treaty to prepare for a major war and there could only be one targetIsrael. Cox also had a contact in Mossad, one much higher than Carroll’s, who had passed along the same intelligence to him.

  “The Israelis know what’s going down, so why doesn’t the Israeli ambassador warn our State Department?” Carroll asked.

  Cox shook his head. “Lots of reasons. Too many congressmen and senators would claim the Israelis are crying wolf. Their new prime minister is one cocky son of a bitch. Yair Ben David thinks Israel can take on all the Arabs as long as they keep their powder dry. He isn’t worried, so his ambassador isn’t worried. Everyone over here is happy because that supports our administration’s position that the Israelis are on top of the situation, Iraq has quit lusting after its neighbors’ oil, and that peace and prosperity are just around the corner. People only see what they want to see.”

  The general gave vent to his deeply ingrained cynicism. “What we’ve got here is a classic case of double whifferdill inverted rectalitis where everyone is looking up everyone else’s asshole and seeing light at the end of the tunnel.”

  “Right.” Carroll grinned. “And feelin’ cool because the wind is in their face.”

  “Bill,” Cox said, looking at his feet, “I can’t leak it.”

  “And you want me to?”

  There was no answer as the general disappeared out the door.

  Just watching Shoshana move across the hotel lobby as they met for their dinner engagement excited Mana and he could feel the start of an erection. He willed it to go away as he joined her, exchanging ritualistic small talk. Up close, it was easier to take his eyes off the dress that promised so much. He was certain she was wearing nothing underneath and became even more excited when she entered the backseat of his limousine and flashed a bare leg.

  Inside the car, the dress seemed to move over her, outlining her figure and then hiding it away. He was a flustered young man. “I … I hope that you will like the restaurant,” Mana stammered. “It’s a small place, very exclusive, with a quiet garden.”

  “It will be fine if we can talk,” she said and reached out and touched the back of his hand. She was following Habish’s instructions to the letter—get him panting and keep him that way. Shoshana felt sorry for Is’al.

  The two-block walk from where the van pool dropped Carroll helped break the tension generated by the DIA and the daily grind at Arlington Station. He was relaxing into the peaceful routine of suburban Virginia when he turned up the walk to his house. He waved at his neighbor, a bureaucrat in the Department of the Interior who got off work much earlier, and braced himself. His son, a two-and-a-half-year-old bruiser, flew down the steps and bounced into his arms, demanding to be caught.

  “Daddy, do you know what this is?” Brett Carroll challenged. A picture of a red stop sign was clutched in his small hand.

  “Looks like a stop sign to me,” Carroll replied. He knew how to hedge his answers.

  “It’s an octagon, Daddy.” Condescension was apparent in his voice. He wiggled out of his father’s arms and ran past his mother, off on the important business of two-year-olds.

  “He’s into shapes today,” Carroll’s wife told him. Mary Carroll was a tall, slender woman, a former Air Force officer and one of the POWs that Carroll had helped rescue from Iran. She kissed him and they walked arm in arm into the house, talking about the trouble their son had been in during the day. Mary caught the signs immediately that something was bothering her husband. She waited through dinner, knowing he would soon tell her.

  Brett finally had run down and, with howls of protest, had been put to bed at seven-thirty. An unusual calm settled over the house. Mary settled onto the couch next to her husband and waited. “Mary,” he began, “I’ve got a problem …” When he finished talking through his conversation with the general, his wife sat for a minute, studying the problem and her husband’s face.

  “Bill, you don’t have to leak it if you can back-door it to someone upstairs. I have an old friend who might know someone who can help. Why not talk to her?”

  “If I get caught off base, they’ll crunch my head big-time. That means the end of this.” He looked around the room, thinking about Brett and their home. It was a good life. “But Cox thinks this is important.”

  “Why doesn’t he do it? Why pass it off on you?”

  “The general is too well-known, too controversial, too proIsraeli,” Carroll answered. “If he leaks it to anyone, they’ll either name him as their source or disregard it, figuring he’s grinding some ax. But I trust him.”

  Mary sighed and stared across the room. She didn’t want to put her home, her family, in jeopardy. Lower-ranking officers got stepped on hard when they played outside the established rules. Then she rose and walked to the phone, her decision made.

  Two hours later, Bill Carroll was sitting in a parked car, telling what he knew to Melissa Courtney-Smith.

  “I love the beach at night,” Shoshana said, slipping off her shoes. She almost lost her balance and stumbled into Mana. “Sorry. Too much wine.”

  He smiled at her and took off his shoes. “I’ve never done this before. It’s just like in the movies.” Shoshana took his hand and
led him down to the water’s edge. The dinner had been everything Mana had promised and, much to her dismay, she found she liked the Iraqi. He was shy, eager to please, and so unsure of himself—just like so many Israeli boys she knew. That’s it, she decided, he’s still a boy. Habish’s warning about Arabs reverting to type in their own country came back to her.

  “Come on then,” she said and pulled him into the water.

  “Rose,” Mana said. “You said you worked for an insecticide company in California.” They were walking through the gentle lapping surf.

  “Oh, Is’al, please don’t talk business. I’m only a scheduler and just tell the plant foreman when to run a batch, how much, and where to ship it to.” She reeled off some of the details Habish had given her to memorize about her cover story. “It’s boring.”

  “You know I also am in the chemical industry.” She could feel him looking at her, his brown eyes pleading. “I thought we might have much in common.”

  She leaned against his arm, letting him feel her breasts. “We do.” She gave him a low laugh, full of promise. “But let’s not talk about business. It’s almost light. Please walk me back to the hotel.”

  The concierge on duty ignored them when they walked across the hotel lobby to the elevator. “It’s all right,” Shoshana assured him. “Be natural. Relax.” She was amused by how proper he was trying to act. He had even put on his shoes before entering the hotel. Inside the elevator, she gave him a kiss, aware that even barefoot, she was taller than he. “That’s nice,” she said. “I like the way you kiss.” She rubbed against him, feeling his erection. The elevator stopped and he drew back, blushing furiously that they might be seen in an embrace. “Oh, come on,” she laughed, taking him by the hand down the deserted hall.

  Outside her door, she fumbled for her key, let one of the gown’s straps fall off her shoulder, and deliberately dropped the key. “Oh,” she whispered and bent to pick it up. The low-cut dress opened provocatively and she could hear him breathe more rapidly. She stood and opened the door before turning to him, again brushing against his chest. “Thank you for a lovely evening,” she said, putting her arms around his neck and pressing against him. She gave him a long and leisurely kiss and felt him respond. She pulled back, ran her right hand down his chest and pulled a shirt button loose. She reached in and stroked his chest as she kissed him again, her tongue into his mouth.