“Senator,” Melissa called after them, “I think he’s discovered girls.” She didn’t mention the pat Matt had given her well-shaped behind when he scampered up the stairs or the clip she had given his right ear in return.
“A bit early for a twelve-year-old,” the senator mumbled. “Now I will talk to him in the morning.”
His wife gave him a rueful grin. “Just like his father and grandfather.”
“I’m a bit past it, at my age.”
“Miss Courtney-Smith obviously doesn’t think so. But for your sake”—she smiled at him—“I hope you are.” It was the way their lovemaking always started.
“And if I’m not?”
“Then you better bring it to bed or I’ll do some nipping and tucking where it counts.”
He put his arm around her waist and gave her a playful squeeze. “If I remember right, it’s more like gnashing and gnawing.” They walked down the hall together. “Matt’s light is still on,” he said. “I’ll check on him.” He watched his wife go into their bedroom before he nudged his grandson’s door open.
“Grandpop?” a voice from the top bunk called.
Pontowski walked over, ruffled the boy’s sandy brown hair, climbed into the bottom bunk, and stretched his frame out. “Matt, you been bugging our home with your tape recorder?”
“Ah, I was just messin’ around, Grandpop. Tryin’ to see what it could pick up.”
“You record anything?”
“Naw, too far away. I need a remote mike. But I could hear real good and learned some super stuff. I’d make a good spy.”
“You going to be a spy now?” Pontowski asked.
“Naw, I’m going to the Air Force Academy and be a fighter pilot just like my dad was.”
The senator caught his breath at Matt’s latest announcement and he could hear the same enthusiasm in the boy’s voice as in his father’s. The old hurt welled up inside of him and he thought about how much he loved Matt.
“Well, you got lots of time to think about that. About this spy business, what did you learn tonight?”
Matt hung his head over the edge of the bunk and looked down at his grandfather. The impish grin was in place and his hair hung down. He was bursting to tell his secret.
“You’re going to need braces,” Pontowski told him.
“Aah, Grandpop, don’t change the subject. I know why they want you to run for governor and not for the Senate next time.”
“Matt, we’ve got to keep that a secret between you and me,” Pontowski cautioned him.
“Okay,” the boy agreed, pulling back into the bed. Silence. Slowly, the senator rolled off the bunk and walked to the door. He paused, remembering the night in 1957 when Matt’s father had told them he wanted to go to the brand-new Air Force Academy and fly jet fighters. With a single-minded purpose that surprised the senator and his wife, the teenager had pursued that goal and graduated with the class of 1964—the class that would lead the air war in Vietnam.
The senator turned off the light when Matt said, “ ‘Night, Grandpop.”
“Sleep tight, Matt.”
Then: “Grandpop, are you really going to be President of the United States?”
The waiting, the grinding delays, the years of frustration and failure were almost over. Avi Tamir had left the bridge of the command ship and taken his position in the control room. He kept glancing at the master clock above his head as if it were the force driving him. In a very real sense it was, for Tamir had been racing it since 1967 when he first started on this project; ever since that evening in Tel Aviv.
Like most of his countrymen, on the twenty-fourth of June, 1967, Tamir was still basking in the glow of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War that had been over for two weeks. He found life exceptionally sweet and, with a little luck, he would break free tomorrow and join his wife who was in her eighth month of pregnancy. But there was much to do, so much captured equipment to collect before it was lost or damaged. The Israelis had reaped windfalls of Soviet technology from the war and it was up to Tamir to see that it was examined and exploited.
Tamir was suffering from a twinge of guilt for not participating in the war. He had tried to join his reserve unit during the mobilization, but his reputation as one of Israel’s finest scientists had preceded him and orders were waiting that sent him right back to his office. Afraid that he had not done his part, he now drove himself, and his staff, ruthlessly.
He had worked through the Sabbath in his office on that Saturday so he could break free for two days to see his wife. He was a bit annoyed by the phone call late in the evening summoning him to another meeting, but since the call came from a secretary to the minister of defense, he could not ignore it. Five minutes later, a car picked him up and he was surprised to see his former boss, Ahrele Yariv, the head of military intelligence, sitting in the backseat. Yariv motioned for Tamir to join him but didn’t say much as they drove through Tel Aviv. Tamir was certain of their destination when the driver turned down the street where Levi Eshkol, the prime minister of Israel, lived.
They found the prime minister in his living room, relaxing in slippers. Tamir was taken aback by the two other men with Eshkol — Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, and Moshe Dayan, the minister of defense. Even though Israel is a small, egalitarian country given to informal ways, Tamir knew this was an important meeting and that he was in the middle of something big. Eshkol did not come right to the point but instead started talking about bomb-disposal techniques and the men who engaged in that line of work. He pointed out that the situation of Israel was much like that — for their first mistake would be their last one. And sooner or later, Israel would make a mistake. He wanted to talk about insurance for just such a time, he didn’t want to be like a bomb-disposal man.
Tamir said nothing as he followed the conversation, his mind racing. He knew what was coming. Finally, Eshkol had leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped together in front of him, and looked directly at Tamir. “We are now producing weapon-grade plutonium at our Dimona reactor. We want you to build us a nuclear bomb.”
“Six minutes,” Van Dagens announced to the control room. He was in radio contact with the delivery aircraft and spoke into the microphone attached to his headset. “We have an arm light.” The control room was eerily silent and the men could barely hear the ship’s engines as they maintained their station exactly twenty nautical miles due north of the old freighter.
Tamir noted the fast-moving blip on the radar scope in front of him and scanned the banks of the monitoring equipment lining the bulkheads of the large room. But his eyes always came back to the master clock above his head. The radar blip was exactly forty miles from its release point. Five minutes to go. In the back of the room, a radar controller was talking to the crew of the F-4, tracking them and ensuring that they were on course and would pickle at the exact spot that would allow the parachute-retarded weapon to descend directly over the freighter. The radar controller confirmed the F-4 was on course and on time.
Tamir took a deep breath. “Send the release code,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact. Again, Van Dagens spoke into his microphone. Both F-4 crew members acknowledged the call, agreeing they had a valid release message. In the frontcockpit, the pilot rotated a wafer switch to the BOMB AIR position. In the rear cockpit, the weapon systems officer toggled the Nuclear Stores Consent switch to the RELEASE position.
“We have a green release light,” Van Dagens said. Now they had to wait. At five seconds to go, the radar tracking equipment on board the ship activated a warning tone that was transmitted on the radio. When the tone stopped, the aircrew in the F-4 would know that the radar showed them at the release point and their system should have dropped the bomb.