Flash Point

by James W. Huston

  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 fas
t 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.

  10

  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.”

  “Go on,” Kinkaid ordered.

  Nicole called up the next slide. “Here is the bus after the attack.” The photograph was from the front and showed the windshield shot out and the driver slumped on the side of the steering wheel. She silently went to the next photo, which she had scanned into her computer, and which was now incorporated into her digital slide presentation. It showed the inside of the bus and the seat behind the driver where the Israeli soldier lay. The next photo had been taken inside the bus looking down the aisle. A man and a woman were lying dead on the floor, face down. Their blood was a dark brown against the black rubber mat of the aisle. “This is the couple who was killed. We have no idea who they were. If the Israelis know, they’re not saying.”

  Kinkaid looked at the photograph hard. “I’ll call.”

  “Mossad or Aman?” Ricketts asked.

  “Mossad,” Kinkaid replied, appreciating that Ricketts knew the difference between the Israeli intelligence agency and their military intelligence arm. He had learned long ago never to underestimate Ricketts. “Who would operate like this, Nicole?” Kinkaid queried. “Why not kill everyone? Why not make demands, and play it out? Why hit and run? To show they could? Some other agenda at work? These the same people who did Gaza?”

  Sami stared at the map, wondering.

  One man in the back spoke. “This isn’t the usual terrorist attack. They did this for a reason. The who is the why in this one.”

  Sami spoke. “If this is the same group as Gaza,” he began, still forming the thoughts, “it’s a new level.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These would be the first civilian targets.”

  “We don’t know they were civilian targets.”

  “Well, the driver, the couple—”

  “We don’t have any idea who they were,” Kinkaid said.

  “Fair enough, but if they are civilians, and it’s connected to Gaza, it would be the first time they have attacked civilians.”

  “So?”

  “Other terrorist groups have focused on suicide attacks. Some of that is to be dramatic. Some of it is because they know they’ll never get away with it anyway, so they may as well go out in a blaze of glory. These guys know they can get away with it. They’re smarter and more clever. And they’re showing the world,” Sami replied.

  “What do we make of that?” Kincaid continued.

  “I think we’re going to be hearing from them. They’re going to want to let everyone know who they are. That’s my guess.”

  Farouk sat down heavily in the chair across the table from the Sheikh. He was proud and content, but exhausted from the journey. “We had complete success.”

  “You bring honor to us. Did everything go according to the plan?”

  “Yes. It went perfectly.”

  “What of the men?”

  “All did well, except for one. He was yelling and screaming. Too charged with feelings.”

  “Do not take him next time.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you find what you expected?”

  “We did. We made sure.”

  The Sheikh closed his eyes and put his head back. He seemed to be thinking for a long time. Finally, he stood and leaned on the chair he had been sitting in. He looked at Farouk. “It is time. I will go to Beirut and show myself. They must know of us and what we stand for. Things will never be the same again.”

  Woods sat in the wardroom with other pilots and RIOs from VF-103. They took up almost an entire table of twenty as they sat shoulder to shoulder drinking coffee in their leather and nylon flight jackets, joking about other squadrons, other carriers, the Pacific Fleet, the Air Force, and one another. The morale in the squadron was as high as Woods had ever seen it. Bark had left the wardroom ten minutes before, which had allowed the rest of the officers to relax.

  “Where’s our next port call, Trey?” asked Brillo.

  “Athens,” Woods answered.

  “What’s it like?” Wink asked. He was on his third cruise, but his first two had been to Westpac, the western Pacific, on the Nimitz. This was his first time in the Mediterranean.

  “It’s really beautiful—“ began Woods.

  “It’s not even a port,” Big interrupted.

  Wink looked at him curiously. “Huh?”

  “It’s not a port. Athens isn’t on the water. Everybody thinks it is, but it isn’t. The port is Piraeus, about fifteen miles south of Athens. It’s a great place though.”

  “Who’s in charge of the admin?” asked Brillo.

  “Gunner Bailey,” said Big, wrinkling his nose, referring to Chief Warrant Officer Ruben Bailey. He was a Warrant Officer, and therefore a member of the officers’ mess. But he was more like a Chief Petty Officer, a senior enlisted man, which he used to be. He didn’t have many friends in the squadron among the officers, mostly because he was very serious about his job and not prone to joking around. He was old enough to make them feel very young, yet, as a Warrant Officer, junior to the most junior Ensign. “He’s got the taste of a hooker,” Big continued. “He’ll find some Greek motel with no running water and prostitutes all over the place. He’ll crow about how much money he saved.”

  Woods replied, “He did a good job in Barcelona.”

  “Yeah, but we got arrested by the Guardia Civil right by the hotel he selected for making too much noise . . .”

  “No, Big, you got arrested for taking a leak on him—you thought he was a light post.”

  The table erupted in laughter as Woods brought up one of the squadron’s mythologically large stories about Big, the one who always seemed to be in the middle of a story if it was colorful.

  Big’s eyes disappeared as he laughed with the others. “How was I supposed to know? Brillo was supposed to be my seeing-eye dog. He allowed me to make that perfectly understandable mistake.”

  Brillo exclaimed, “You’re going to lay that on me? You piss on the meanest cop in the Med and it’s my fault? I don’t think so.�
��

  Big chuckled deeply. “Anybody who wears a hat that stupid deserves to get—”

  The 1MC loudspeaker system on the ship came to life. “Now hear this. Now hear this,” said a young voice that they all recognized as one of the boatswain’s mates on the bridge who routinely made announcements. They quieted just enough to hear whatever he had to say. “Lieutenant Woods to the flag bridge. Lieutenant Woods to the flag bridge.”

  Woods turned deep red. He looked at the other members of the squadron, who were looking at him. Never in his experience in the Navy had he heard of an aviator being summoned personally to the bridge, let alone the flag bridge. His heart was racing as he stood up, reluctantly, ready to go to the executioner. The smiles faded. They could tell from his face that either he had no idea what this was about, or he knew exactly. They didn’t ask.

  Woods walked aft from the wardroom down the starboard side through the knee knockers. They had been on cruise for three months and he had never even seen the Admiral. He didn’t even know what he looked like and couldn’t remember his name. He stepped from gray tile to blue tile, denoting his passage into flag country. He passed the Admiral’s wardroom, nearly as large as one of the forward wardrooms for fifty officers. What’s his name? Woods asked himself. He found the shining ladder with white painted rope wrapped around the rails and began his long climb up to the 08 level, eight levels above the main deck—the hangar deck—and five above the wardroom and the ready rooms on the 03 level.

  He jumped up the last two steps on the ladder to the 08 level and breathed deeply to catch his breath. Standing in front of the closed door that led to the bridge, he was finally ready. He opened the door and stepped through the hatch, stopping in his tracks as he neared the bridge—the Admiral, the Ship’s Captain, the Air Wing Commander, and Bark, his Squadron Commanding Officer, were all there. The Admiral was holding a sheet of yellow paper, which was obviously from an official Navy message.