Balance of Power

by James W. Huston

  Tucker looked around. “Where is he?”

  Her voice cracked. “He was in one of those concrete buildings. He’s dead.”

  “What happened?”

  She hesitated. “We had just gotten up…for breakfast. They told us to come, and he went back to get his Bible so we could have our morning devotions. This bomb hit it….” Her voice trailed off, then stopped altogether as she looked for something to distract her, to give her an image different from the one that was seared into her mind. “So why are you here?”

  “These are the men who attacked an American ship, murdered the crew, and sank their ship just north of Jakarta. We came to get them. Why’d they bring you here?”

  She shook her head. “They never told us anything. They just told us to do what they said.”

  “Did they harm you, did they touch your daughter?”

  She shook her head. She turned and looked at her daughter and stroked her face.

  Dillon tried to ignore the throbbing headache and the bruise on his chest as he led his group up the path to find Colonel Tucker. Luther was with him. Gordon had stayed behind to have a battle dressing placed on his leg wound by a Navy corpsman who had responded to the radio call from the Marines clearing the tunnel.

  “There’s the colonel,” Luther said.

  Dillon looked at Bonham. “You going to make it or should we get Colonel Tucker to come here?”

  “No, I’ll make it,” Bonham said curtly, trying not to slow them down.

  Dillon hailed the colonel from twenty-five yards.

  Several of the Marines turned to glance at the trio. “Dillon!” Tucker said, walking toward him. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “A mortar shell went off right next to us and blew in the side of the hill. There’s a big cave there. We fell in.”

  “What?” Tucker said looking at Luther for confirmation. “Well, what are you…”

  Dillon put up his hand. “Colonel Tucker, this is Captain Bonham of the Pacific Flyer.”

  Tucker extended his hand, “You’re the captain of the ship that got attacked?”

  Bonham looked at Tucker and examined the Marines around him. His face displayed shock and confusion. “What is all this?” Bonham said.

  “We came to get you and take care of these assholes,” Tucker said. “Are you all right?”

  Bonham sighed. “More or less.”

  Tucker looked around at the Indonesians lying face-down near the edge in the jungle, their hands being tied behind them. “These the men that took your ship?”

  “Yeah. The head guy that calls himself Washington was just in the tunnel.”

  “Did you get him?” Tucker asked Luther.

  “No, sir,” said Luther. “He took off through an escape tunnel and it blew up on him.”

  “That’s too bad,” Tucker said, feigning pity. “Well, Captain Bonham, I think we’re about done here. We’ll get you back out to the Wasp and get you cleaned up. You can write down what’s happened to you ’cause I’m sure somebody is going to want to know about it.” He suddenly remembered Mary Carson. “Did you know they had a missionary family here as well?”

  “No,” Bonham said. “They kept me blindfolded mostly. I knew something was going on, but I sure didn’t know what.”

  The group walked toward Mary Carson. “Captain Bonham, this is Mary Carson and her daughter.”

  “Hi,” Bonham said awkwardly.

  Mary stood silently.

  Tucker, sensing the awkwardness, turned toward Luther. “Corporal Luther, you’re relieved from birddogging Mr. Dillon. I’d like you to take care of Mr. Bonham and get him back out to the Wasp, next available transportation.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tucker looked at Bonham, “I’ll catch up with you out on the Wasp. I’d like to hear all about this.”

  Bonham scratched his head. He looked around at the hundreds of Marines and the dead Indonesians, unsure what to say.

  Dillon’s gaze followed Bonham’s and for the first time he noticed the dozens of dead men lying within a hundred feet of him, flies around their eyes and their bodies beginning to swell. He fought back a sudden surge of nausea.

  Luther led Bonham toward a waiting CH-53E.

  Tucker picked up his discussion with the Marine captain. Dillon walked over to Mary Carson. “I’m Jim Dillon,” he said, extending his hand.

  She took his hand passively. “Hello.”

  “How did you end up on this island?”

  “Missionaries. We were kidnapped from another island.” Her face was full of pain.

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I think we’ve taken care of these men, though. They won’t be kidnapping anybody else.”

  She examined his face without speaking.

  “You said we, you and your daughter?”

  “My husband and my daughter and me.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “He was killed in the attack. By one of your missiles, I think.”

  Dillon went slightly pale. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  Mary’s daughter came over to them. Mary put her hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m Special Assistant to the Speaker of the House of Representatives.”

  “How did this happen?” Mary asked.

  “How did what happen?”

  “This attack. Did the President declare war on Indonesia?” she asked.

  “No,” Dillon said. He studied her face. He couldn’t tell if she was looking for someone to blame or congratulate. “Congress ordered this. I found a power in the Constitution that hadn’t been used in a long time, and Congress ordered this battle group to attack.”

  “This is your doing?” Mary asked, tears welling in her eyes.

  Dillon felt a huge burden shifting to his shoulders. “I guess so,” he said.

  Mary took her daughter’s hand and turned toward the path to the helicopter.

  Dillon watched her go, knowing that nothing he could say would make any difference.

  Admiral Billings stared at the display screens in front of him. The Predator showed the image of the woman and child clearly as they spoke with Tucker and Dillon. Tucker had just reported by radio what Mary Carson had told him about her husband. He looked at Beth and saw the deep pity in her eyes for the wife of the missionary. “These things never go like you expect them to go, do they?” he said.

  “No, sir, they don’t,” Beth replied so quietly most couldn’t hear her.

  “We smoked a missionary. I can read the headlines now.”

  “No way we could have known that, sir.”

  “Yes, there is,” Billings said, angry. “If we had been in communication with Washington.” He looked at her.

  “I bet they knew about it.”

  “I bet we will find out whether or not they did. And if they did, and didn’t tell us, they may have something to answer for.”

  “There’s going to be plenty of answering done by a lot of people in the next few months,” Billings declared.

  The helicopters cycled back and forth from the clearing, ferrying people back to the Wasp. They moved efficiently, taking the wounded Marines first, then the wounded Indonesians, and then Marines with the Indonesian prisoners.

  Dillon watched the procession by himself, uninterested in speaking with anyone. After a few minutes, he sat on a fallen tree. Its leaves were green and perfect. Its trunk was intact, except where it had been severed by an explosion. Dillon stared at it. The tree was already dead as a result of the battle; it just didn’t know it yet. Dillon sat on the ground and leaned against the fallen tree.

  Dillon removed his helmet. His hand unconsciously went to the back of his head to feel the bump that was growing larger by the minute. A corpsman had already pronounced him fit, but told him to get medical attention, including an X ray, when he returned to the Wasp.

  A Marine sergeant ran up to him. “You’re on the next helicopter, sir,” he said. As Dillon leaned forward to rise, he felt a searing pain in his chest
. He took a deep breath and noticed a pungent, unpleasant smell. Then he realized it came from him. It was more than just a dirty smell from camping, it was sharper, more metallic. He realized he had never been this dirty in his life. He turned his head to the side to take a deep breath of fresh air and walked toward the helicopter.

  The marine sentry opened the door and Dillon stepped through into SUPPLOT. Admiral Billings was waiting for him. Dillon had his Marine utilities on; the patch over the pocket read USMC. He hadn’t even washed his face. He had come directly from the Wasp to the Constitution’s helicopter to return to the carrier. Another special trip, not originally on the flight schedule, about which numerous people were bent out of shape. But Dillon was tired of thinking about the burden he was to this operation. He was thinking more about how glad he was to be alive. The Marine closed the door behind him.

  Admiral Billings looked up from his lunch. “Well, Mr. Dillon, you made it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dillon said, reaching for the chin strap to undo his helmet.

  Beth Louwsma, who was eating with the admiral, as well as Captain Black and the operations officer, stared at him. “Are you all right?” she asked as she noted the dirt streaks on his face and his obvious fatigue.

  “Yeah.” Dillon nodded.

  Billings watched Dillon. He spoke with laughter in his voice. “Colonel Tucker radioed that you about got your Jimmy shot off.”

  Dillon removed his helmet. He pointed to the dent left by Washington’s bullet, right between the two m’s in his name. “Right here,” Dillon said.

  “You got shot?” Beth asked, incredulous. “You have a cut, by your ear. You’re bleeding.”

  “It’s not much.” He touched the crusted blood.

  Beth looked at Billings. “Can civilians get Purple Hearts?”

  Billings smiled. “Don’t know. Find out.” He looked at Dillon.

  Dillon sat down heavily in the leather chair. “It was my first time getting shot.”

  “What happened?” Beth pursued.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said, exhaustion oozing from each word.

  “Well, Mr. Dillon, do you think we did the right thing?” Billings asked.

  Dillon finally sat up. “That’s really not for me to say.”

  Billings looked directly at Dillon. “I think it is for you to say, Mr. Dillon. If you can’t form an opinion now, you never will.” He pressed him. “Are you doing the political thing of waiting to see all the implications before you decide whether it’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? We don’t have that luxury here. We have to act.” He waited for a response from Dillon. “You’re not under my command. Let’s hear what you have to say.”

  Dillon rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know, Admiral. I thought from the beginning that the right thing to do was to go hammer these guys. Now we’ve hammered them. I guess the part of it that surprises me is that I always thought it would feel good once you did it, but it doesn’t…”

  “No, Mr. Dillon. Despite the tough rhetoric, killing is killing.”

  “…and now that I hear an innocent American missionary got killed by this and I saw people get killed…” His voice trailed off. “You just wonder if it was all worth it.”

  “You should always wonder that, Mr. Dillon. We look at everything we do in that same light. Everything. But now that you have, what’s your conclusion?” He studied Dillon’s face and saw the clash of emotions.

  “Even knowing what I know now, it was the right thing. I’d do it again.”

  Billings nodded. “By the way, Mr. Dillon, I’ve got some bad news for you.”

  “What?”

  “The COD’s back up. It should be here in a couple of hours; then you can get out of here.”

  “That’s not bad news,” Dillon said, flooded with relief.

  “Oh, I figured now that you’ve done your John Wayne imitation, you’d want to stay here for the rest of the cruise like us.”

  “Well, Admiral, I’m sure if I were in the Navy, that’s exactly what I’d want, but frankly I’d like to get back to Washington. I’m interested to see how all of this plays out.”

  “So am I. But first, you’d better get down and have the ship’s surgeon check you out.” Billings glanced around. “Corporal Knight, escort Mr. Dillon to sick bay.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Chief of Staff, have you gotten a message off to the Joint Chiefs telling them about the action?”

  “Yes, sir, long gone.”

  “Admiral, I think you better look at this!” Beth was looking at the screen with the biggest picture.

  “What is it?” the Admiral asked.

  “A formation of ships, looks like about eight of them, heading toward us from the northeast.”

  “There are dozens of ships out there.”

  “Yes, sir, but the radio chatter indicates these are high-speed contacts.”

  “What do you mean ‘high-speed’? Are they high-speed patrol boats?”

  “The E-2 doesn’t think so, sir. They’re doing over thirty knots.”

  “Thirty knots? Formation?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get somebody out there to take a look at them.”

  “Yes, sir. They’re on their way right now, but we don’t have any report on who they are yet.”

  Billings listened to the E-2. As he looked at the screen, he noticed the numerous airborne contacts near the Navy formation headed their way.

  “What the hell are all those airplanes doing?” Billings asked.

  “They’re not sure. They’re sending fighters to check it out right now.”

  “How fast are they going?” the admiral asked.

  “Six hundred knots plus.”

  Dillon looked from the admiral to the chief of staff and back to the admiral. They listened as the E-2 directed a section of F-14s toward the oncoming airplanes. There were six of them 150 miles to the northeast.

  Billings asked, “Are they squawking mode 4?”

  “We can’t tell, Admiral. The mode 4 code changeover message was due yesterday. We’re out of sequence.”

  “Great,” the admiral said.

  They waited and watched as the targets closed on each other. The closure rates of the targets increased to nine hundred knots, then one thousand.

  The admiral spoke confidently, “Only one country would fly fighters this far from land. Those are our friends from the Truman. Let’s see what they have up their sleeves.”

  On the admiral’s bridge aboard the USS Harry S Truman, Admiral Blazer examined the message and queried his communications officer. “When was this sent?”

  “We just intercepted it about two minutes ago.”

  He looked at the display in front of him, showing every airplane and ship within three hundred miles. “How close are our fighters to the Constitution?”

  His operations officer studied the numbers on the screen. “Under two hundred miles.”

  “Did you see this?” Blazer asked him, handing him the message.

  “Yes, sir, I got a copy.”

  “Looks like we’re too late,” Blazer said, vacillating between frustration and relief.

  “Yes, sir. Their message says it’s all over. The rest of the report is to follow, but the result is in.”

  Blazer stared at the screen. “You think that message was for our benefit?”

  His operations officer shrugged and studied the admiral. “I don’t know, sir, could be. Admiral Billings probably knew we were coming.”

  “Our F-14s are one hundred fifty miles out from the Constitution, sir,” the enlisted intelligence specialist reported as he studied the displays in the dark room identical to the one Billings was sitting in. “The E-2 says the Constitution F-14s are outbound and are running intercepts on our fighters.”

  Admiral Blazer smiled slightly, understanding the irony and difficulty of the situation. “Tell them to let the Constitution Tomcats rendezvous on ’em. Tell them to smile and wave. The fight’s over down here. The way I s
ee it, our mission is over.” He looked around. “Anyone disagree?”

  No one said a word.

  “Set a course to rendezvous with the Constitution Battle Group. Send a message to Washington informing them of our intentions and requesting further instructions.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  36

  DILLON STOOD ON THE STACK OF WASHINGTON Posts in the hallway, fished in his pocket for his key, and unlocked his apartment door. He stumbled into the apartment, dropped his bag on the floor, and kicked the door closed behind him. His answering machine blinked frantically. He bent down and unplugged it. He took off his trench coat, flung it onto a chair in the kitchen, and lay down on the couch in his living room, wincing as he jarred the bump on the back of his head. He turned reluctantly onto his side. He lay there for five minutes without moving, trying to think about the last few days, but his brain refused to replay the tape. It was a blur, like an auto accident in which he had been a passenger.

  He swung his legs over the edge of the couch and sat up, rubbing his face. He knew he should try to sleep, but while his body was exhausted, his mind wasn’t. He grabbed his portable phone and dialed the Speaker’s private residential number. The Speaker’s wife answered the phone.

  “Mrs. Stanbridge, Jim Dillon.”

  “Jim, how are you? Where are you?” Her voice was perpetually pleasant even when announcing natural disaster or political reversal.

  “I’m back. I’m in my apartment. I feel like I fell out of an airplane, but I’m here.”

  “Hold on. I’m sure that John wants to talk to you.”

  I’m sure he’d like nothing better, Dillon thought, especially now that he knows how many Americans died….

  “Jim, you’re back!”

  “Yes, Mr. Speaker. Sorry it took me longer than I expected, but the airplane…”

  “It doesn’t matter at all. You didn’t miss a thing.”

  Very funny. “I’ve got to tell you, Mr. Speaker, from over there, it looked like…well, like a zoo.”

  Stanbridge laughed gruffly, “It looked like a zoo because it was a zoo.”

  “Yes, sir. It sure was. Things weren’t exactly routine on the Java Sea either.”