“That would be nice. I haven’t made many friends here yet.”
“Hey, I’ll be your friend. Maybe I could call sometime.”
“Jaybird, I hope so.” Her smile was perfection.
Senior Chief Dobler growled at Helen as he led the group from the office. Jaybird stood watching. Helen was last to leave. She waved and gave him her best smile, then hurried out.
“Damn,” Jaybird said softly. Now there was a girl. She had to be eighteen. He could check on the chief’s personnel file. Hell, no. She was at least eighteen. He’d call her tonight and have a chat. The chief couldn’t object to that. Jaybird snorted. The chief damn well would if he knew about it. He must protect Helen like he was a Doberman pinscher without a leash.
Later that afternoon Jaybird went to a movie by himself, had a beer, then from the apartment he shared with two other SEALs, phoned Senior Chief Dobler’s home. Helen answered.
“Hi, this is Jaybird, hoped that you would be home. How was the swim?”
“Fine, but those breakers are so rough.”
“I could teach you how to duck under them.”
“That would be great. Only…”
Jaybird laughed. “Only your father wouldn’t let you anywhere near me in your swimsuit. Hey, if I were in his place, I’d probably do the same thing. You have a boyfriend?”
“No. We’ve only been here a short time. I hardly know anybody.”
“That will change. Are you out of school?”
“No. Soon.”
“You’ll probably go to college.”
“I hope to. Did you have any college?”
“Just a few courses. No chance now that I’m a SEAL.”
“Is it… do people shoot at you?”
He laughed. “Oh, yes. From time to time. But not when we’re on base or in training.”
“It must be hard. All that training. Then you go on the missions. Dad tells us a little about them, but not much. Mom goes out of the room when he starts talking about them.”
“Good idea. Then she won’t worry.” He wanted to ask her if she would worry about him when they went on a mission, but he couldn’t. “Hey, maybe we could go to a movie or something sometime.”
“Maybe. Dad doesn’t like me to go out on dates.”
“You have been on dates?”
“Sure, not a whole lot.”
“You ever go to the Coronado library?”
“Once or twice.”
“Maybe you could go there to research something and I could just happen to be there. Your dad wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“We could talk?”
“For hours we could talk. How about tomorrow night, about seven at the library?”
“Yes. I’ll be there. I better hang up. Bye, Jaybird.”
Jaybird said good-bye and sat there grinning. He hadn’t been so pumped up in years. A girl? He was getting this excited about a girl who was also the apple of the eye of his senior chief? He must be nuts. He laughed. Yeah, he was nuts, all right, nuts about this little lady Helen. Right then he couldn’t wait for Sunday to end so he could wait for Monday night. If they had a night exercise or night training tomorrow, he was gonna kill somebody.
Monday came at last for Jaybird, and the training was easy, some classroom things about new weapons and then a ten-mile training run along the sand. He was tired, but so nervous he couldn’t spit, as he walked up to the Coronado library. He was ten minutes early.
Jaybird found a table with no one sitting at it in the far corner of the reading room. He picked a book off the shelf and pretended to read. When he looked up from the book for the twentieth time, Helen stood across the table from him. She watched him as she stood there smiling but with her arms folded protectively across her chest.
“You came,” she said, sliding into the chair opposite him. She reached out and touched his hand across the table. “I told Daddy that I wanted to bring home some mysteries. Let’s do that first, then we can talk.”
They found the mysteries, checked them out, then went back to the table and talked. Mostly she listened to him. He told her about his growing up in Oregon. She told him about moving from one Navy base to another. It was so comfortable, seemed so right to Jaybird. He’d never been this open with a girl before.
Helen looked at her watch. “Oh, dear. I have to be home by eight-thirty and it’s almost eight already.”
“I’ll walk you home, almost all the way. First, let’s look in the stacks.”
They went into the long rows of books and stood close. When nobody was in the row, she reached out quickly and kissed his lips, then came away.
She sighed, her smile radiant. “Oh, my,” she said softly.
He kissed her back and held it longer. They clung together.
“I think I love you, Jaybird,” Helen whispered to him.
“Oh, yeah, I feel the same way. But you’re my boss’s daughter and he would kill me if he could see us right now. What the hell am I supposed to do now?”
3
Three days after the Benghazi Messenger left Odessa, it docked in Tripoli. The port authorities knew it was coming. They had reported the time of arrival to the twelve-man Revolutionary Command Council and Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, the council head as well as Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, and Commander in Chief of the Libyan Armed Forces.
A huge celebration had been planned and exploded the moment the sleek, twenty-two-knot freighter touched the dock with its light cargo strapped down on the deck.
What few Western journalists there were in the capital had no idea what the celebration was about. There was no television or radio announcement about the landing. Nor when Qaddafi made a short speech at the site did he explain what was so important on board the ship.
Qaddafi had spoken from a low platform surrounded by two hundred of his elite personal guard. When he finished, he marched away in the center of this guard to his armored limousine, and it rolled away in a six-car caravan. The vehicles began changing places until it was confusing which one the Libyan leader rode in.
Two hours later, Qaddafi paced back and forth in a well-guarded warehouse near the waterfront. He watched his best engineers dismantling the nose cone of the Russian Sasin ICBM.
“Can’t they go faster?” Qaddafi asked.
The man generally considered to be the number-two man in Libya had been pacing with his commander. They both stopped. The second man was Abdul Fantoli.
“Now is an excellent time to exercise some patience, Mr. Prime Minister. That way we don’t rush the engineers so they make a mistake and ten nuclear weapons go off all at once, reducing our beloved Tripoli to an ash being washed over by the boiling Mediterranean.”
Qaddafi stared at Fantoli for a moment and shrugged. “Just so the ten little packages are all safely inside and we can get them out and use them. For fourteen years I have been waiting for this day. So well I remember our blistering defeat in Chad back in eighty-seven when we had to pull out and leave a billion dollars worth of military equipment behind. That will never happen to us again. Never again.
“This time we will sweep in with power and speed that will make the Nazi Blitzkrieg look like a schoolboy game. This time we will overwhelm them and make them pay.”
Fantoli nodded. “Yes, we are ready. Our special strike forces can be ready in three days, then move out to the assembly areas in the desert. One thing we need to finalize is the delivery method.”
“Finalize it today, Fantoli. Test it tomorrow, alert the strike force the next day. Three days from then we strike.”
Fantoli acknowledged the order and hurried away. In his own limousine, he phoned his top engineer. They met in his office, both arriving at about the same time in the bomb-proof structure four stories below ground.