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 fast 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.”