“What’s the emergency?” Admiral Sweat asked Woods.
“It’s about Vialli, sir.”
“We’ve had this discussion. Does your CO know you’re here?”
“No, sir. It’s not the same conversation we had before, sir.”
“You have thirty seconds.”
“I think we should do something about Vialli, sir.”
“Like what? His death didn’t even involve us, Lieutenant. If you recall, he had to lie to his Commanding Officer—a lie which you joined—just to be where he was to get himself killed.”
“We should retaliate, sir,” Woods said, as if he hadn’t heard a thing the Admiral had said.
The Admiral looked surprised. “How? And against whom?”
“Against the people who sent the communiqué, sir.” Woods answered, words gushing out as if he were now free finally to speak his mind. “I think they said it was faxed from Beirut. Pritch even printed out the translation. Didn’t you see it? I’ll bet our intelligence knows who this Sheikh is, and exactly where he came from.” He glanced at the Intelligence Officer on the staff, a small bookish man of about forty who made no sign of agreement or disagreement. “Once we find where they’re hiding, we attack them.”
The Admiral stared at him. “They thought they were killing Israeli citizens,” he said.
“Not too many people would mistake Vialli for an Israeli for long.”
“We don’t take action on our own, Lieutenant. It’s not for us to decide. You know that. It’s up to the politicians.”
“Admiral, couldn’t we at least ask for authorization?” Woods begged.
“No.”
“Couldn’t we tell them we’re here, that we’re available, that we could do it if they wanted us to? Sir?”
“They know we’re here, Lieutenant. The President will take whatever action he deems appropriate. Your time is up.” With that, the Admiral redirected his attention to the document in front of him.
“Couldn’t we at least tell them it’s feasible, and we could do it if they want? Maybe put the idea into their heads?”
“I think not,” the Admiral said as he leaned back and removed his reading glasses. “Look, I know how you feel. I’ve lost a lot of my friends in this business. I know how it pulls at you. I know how you wish you could have done something different, so it never would have happened. Especially in your situation. You could have prevented the whole thing by the exercise of a little leadership,” he said, looking hard at Woods. “You were his superior officer. You could have ordered him not to go. But now you’re going to have to learn to deal with it.” He picked his glasses up again. “Dismissed.”
Woods swiveled and began walking toward the door. Then he stopped and turned back to Admiral Sweat. “How many of the friends you lost were murdered, Admiral?”
Admiral Sweat remained silent, and Woods left quickly.
He opened the door to Ready Room Eight and saw a brief in progress. They hadn’t missed a beat, fitting the memorial service in during the time the ship was leaving port—still in sight of port—and not yet in position to fly. Wouldn’t want to interrupt the flight schedule with something as mundane as a memorial service for one of the Air Wing’s pilots.
Woods had never gotten used to the Navy’s cold approach to death. The first time he had seen someone killed aboard the carrier during a catapult accident, the ship hadn’t even slowed down. The launch went right on and the spare was launched to replace the downed airplane. The memorial service had been a few days later, when it could be held without interfering with the flight schedule. He had been told that if they did it any differently death would loom too large and affect the pilots’ willingness to put themselves at risk. He wasn’t convinced.
He closed the door quietly so he wouldn’t disturb the brief, removed his coffee cup from its hook, filled it, and took his seat at the desk on the other side of the ready room. He began working on the next day’s flight schedule. They were going to operate in the Aegean Sea south of Athens, to a small island, Avgo Nisi. An island reserved for military use, to be shot and bombed. It was inhabited only by very scared mountain goats and sheep.
Bark saw Woods come in. He got up quickly and strode to the back of the room. Bark had the look on his face that Woods had learned to dread.
“Hey, Skipper,” Woods said, trying to be nonchalant.
Bark pulled a chair up until it was touching Woods’s. He moved his face close to Woods’s and spoke in a low intense voice. “Don’t ‘Hey Skipper’ me,” he said, his eyes boring holes in Woods. “I just got a call from Admiral Sweat’s Chief of Staff. Later this afternoon, after I fly, I get to go tell the Admiral how it is one of my loudmouth Lieutenants showed up at his wardroom unannounced, to tell the Admiral that we should launch an attack on somebody, and if not that, to at least notify the Secretary of Defense and Congress, if not the President, that the nuclear aircraft carrier Washington is in fact in the eastern Mediterranean and ready to attack whoever they want us to.” His brown eyes bored into Woods. “That about sum it up?”
Woods tossed his black government-issue ballpoint pen down. He answered in a voice equally intense. “I was pissed, Skipper. Everybody is taking this too lightly . . .”
“Wrong!” Bark exploded, drawing looks from everyone in the ready room. He lowered his voice again. “You have no idea what anyone is doing! You’ve got a chip on your shoulder. We’re all pissed. We all would love nothing better than to hit back. But you know how these things go. The people who commit these acts are usually killed. Then it becomes real sticky. If the politicos want to go after the bad guys, they have two choices. To use the military—”
“We never go after the bad guys, Skipper! We just tool around the Med boring holes in the sky and worrying about our next port call! We never hit terrorists. Even when we know who they are, and where they are! We might send a Tomahawk somewhere, but the most powerful country in the world just whines about it!”
“You can’t just go after a terr—”
“Why not?” Woods argued, energized by the chance to talk about it. “Why can’t we go after them? It’s not like we don’t know who they are. They sent a communiqué to the press, saying how happy they are that they got to kill an American in their attack! It was a big bonus for them. We should take them at their word and make them pay for it.”
“We can’t just take revenge against them.”
“I’m not talking about taking revenge, Skipper. We have the biggest military in the world and we let these two-bit terrorists murder us or hold us hostage, and we sit around and wring our hands wondering what to do. Well, I know what to do. We know who they are and where they live. We ought to go knock the shit out of them. And we have the ability to do it right here on this ship.”
“It doesn’t work that way. I’m sure if the government wants to go after the terrorists, they’ll send the CIA after them. There are a lot of things that happen that you and I never hear about. We need to leave it to—”
“The CIA? The CIA? You’ve got to be kidding me, Skipper,” Woods said, barely holding back a smirk. “Those guys? Send some guy in with a handgun to get some terrorist mastermind? He wouldn’t have a chance. We’ve got to hit them, and hit them hard. So they know it’ll cost them if they attack Americans.”
“They weren’t attacking Americans, Trey,” Bark replied. “They had no way of knowing there was an American on that bus. They thought—”
“Come on, Skipper! They had to know he was an American! How do we know they weren’t there because of him?”
Bark stood up quickly. “That’s it, Trey. I’ve had enough. I came here to talk to you about going to the Admiral without my knowledge. That reflects poorly on the squadron.” His voice was loud enough for everyone in the ready room to hear now. “I was prepared to write that off as a lapse in judgment. But I think your head is full of bad judgment right now.” He pointed to Woods’s chest. “You’re grounded. From right now until when I say, you’re off the fl
ight schedule. You’re the SDO for life until I say so. You got that?”
Woods stood up, looking at his Commanding Officer in stunned disbelief. He didn’t know what to say.
“Easy!” Bark yelled to the front of the ready room. “You’re relieved as SDO. Woods will take your place. Write yourself into the flight schedule.”
Easy looked at Bark with big eyes. Lieutenant Junior Grade Craig Easley was a junior RIO in the squadron. It was his first cruise. He had never seen a Commanding Officer on the warpath before. “Yes, sir,” he said quietly.
Bark turned from Woods and strode quickly to the front of the ready room. He picked up the papers on his seat and moved toward the door.
Woods yelled from the back of the room, “You can’t do this!”
Bark stopped where he was and turned, saying softly but clearly, “You may think you’re immune from Captain’s mast or court-martial. You’re not. You’re already over the line. Don’t push it,” he said as he walked out.
Woods moved slowly to the SDO’s desk and sat in the chair recently vacated by Easy. He slid down until his head rested against the back of the chair, staring at the cables coursing through the overhead.
The phone on the desk rang. Woods let it ring. After six rings he reluctantly leaned forward and picked it up. “Ready Room Eight, Lieutenant Woods speaking, sir.”
“This is Captain Clark. Chief of Staff. Is your Commanding Officer there, Lieutenant,” he asked, saying “lieutenant” as if it made him sick.
“No, sir,” Woods replied with no attempt at being helpful.
“Would you please find him, Lieutenant, and inform him that his appearance before the Admiral has been moved up. He will now be here at 1300. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir. Crystal clear, sir—1300, sir. I’ll tell him, sir,” Woods said sarcastically, gripping the phone hard. The phone line went dead. Woods slammed down the phone, picked up a ballpoint lying on the desk, and made a note of the call on a pad of white paper.
“I am impressed,” said Lieutenant Big McMack, who had been sitting in the chair closest to the SDO with his feet up on the safe. He hadn’t moved since Woods got there. Woods hadn’t even noticed him. “I can’t remember when I’ve seen a junior officer anger so many senior officers. Nice work, Trey.”
Woods looked at Big with contempt. “Up yours, Big. I’m not ready for any of your sarcastic shit right now.”
“Now going after friends and peers, soon to be ridiculing strangers, women, and children.”
“Did I ask for your commentary?” Woods said.
“No.”
“Then keep it to yourself.”
“Can’t. It’s like poetry. It just flows. The real tragedy for the rest of the world is that I don’t have sycophants following me around writing down every word to pass my wisdom and humor to succeeding generations.”
Woods gave half a smile and a begrudging snort. Then he looked at Big. “What the hell is a sycophant?”
“Sorry. No clues. You only learn new words by looking them up. If I told you, you wouldn’t remember and then the next time I used the word brilliantly, you wouldn’t understand it then either, again missing the moment.”
“You an English major or something?”
“We’ve been together so long, and still you don’t know me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sorry. Another allusion. No I wasn’t an English major, Trey. I am one of those rare species—a drama major, now flying for the greater good in the world’s best fighters.”
“Drama?” Woods said incredulously. “Drama?”
“That’s right. Thespian. Actor extraordinaire. Writer of dramatic works, performer of the Bard, wizard of special effects on the stage.”
“How did you end up here?”
“I went to college on an NROTC scholarship. That which all you Canoe U grads wish you had done in retrospect.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because we went to accredited colleges that had numerous women and real football and basketball. And we only had to play Navy one day a week, and we could major in things like drama.”
“I thought you had to be a hard science major.”
“Nope. Most do, but there’s room for guys like me, with talent in so many areas. As long as we take physics, math, and the other extraneous crap that allows the Navy brass to think we’re truly just misguided science majors, we can still get a full scholarship and graduate with the rest of you pinheads, only senior to you in lineal numbers, because they throw us all into a pool, distinguished only by grade average. And our grades are always better than you chumps at the boat school.”
“We’ll see who makes Admiral,” Woods said defensively.
“You can have it. I’m going to make my fortune as a screenwriter after this gig.”
“Right,” Woods said, rolling his eyes. His mind was still dwelling on his sentence of death, his grounding. “Did you hear what the Skipper said to me?” he asked.
Big sat up in his chair. “I think everybody on the ship heard the last part, but I heard the whole thing, being nosy and all.”
Woods looked at Big’s face, trying to read him. “Was I out of line?” he asked, finally.
“Way.”
“Why?”
“You said things you shouldn’t have said. You challenged him, the ship, the entire political system. You could have said all that to me, but not to him, not here, not like that.”
“Don’t you agree?” asked Woods. “Don’t you think we should do something about Vialli and not just sit around?”
“Absolutely. I’d like nothing better. But there are the right ways to approach things and the wrong ways. Going to see the Admiral was stupid. Did you really figure that because some Lieutenant comes barging in the Admiral’s going to say, ‘Okay, you got me. Let’s launch an attack?’ he asked, raising his hands in exasperation. “Without authorization?”
“I thought I’d get him to think about it. Maybe pass something up the chain of command.”
Big waved his hand in dismissal. He put his large feet on the deck. “You’re amazing. You’re one of the coolest customers I’ve ever seen in the air. You never get rattled. The tougher the situation, the calmer you get, like you feed on the pressure. But down here, on terra firma, or aqua firma if I may mix my metaphors, you go loony. You attack the Admiral in front of his whole staff, put him on the spot without going to the Skipper, making him look like puppy ca-ca in front of the world, then when the Skipper reads you out about it, you challenge him!”
“I’m just thinking of Boomer,” Woods said.
“Boomer’s dead, Trey. You’ve got to start dealing with reality again soon or you’ll end up like him. You’re going to lose your concentration in the middle of a strafing run or something and prang yourself.”
Woods sighed. “I just can’t let him down. I’m going to get that Sheikh guy. One way or another . . .”
“You’re not letting him down. He couldn’t ask for any more.”
“I don’t know, Big.” The speaker box behind him that was tied to the radio frequency used by pilots when landing aboard the carrier crackled to life as the Landing Signal Officer transmitted to the F-14 on final. “Power!” he said with authority. “Power!”
Woods and Big both quickly looked at the small black and white television in the corner behind Woods. It was the PLAT, the Pilot Landing Assistance Television. The camera was in the middle of the flight deck and directly below it. The lens pointed out through a very small, almost imperceptible window in the middle of the flight deck and looked up at the approaching planes. The crosshairs represented the glide slope. It was the view from the camera with the crosshairs that Woods and Big saw when they looked at the F-14 in its final approach to the flight deck. It was well below the center of the crosshairs. “Power!” the LSO yelled, his voice augmented by the sound of the approaching jet in his microphone. “Wave off! Wave off!” the LSO screamed as the F-14 went to full power try
ing to stop its rate of descent, finally leveling off at the same attitude, the same angle of attack, and flying twenty feet over the arresting gear.
“Geez, nice pass. Who the hell was that?” Big said.
“XO,” Woods said, shaking his head.
“204, say your state,” the Air Boss transmitted.
“3.9,” replied Lieutenant Junior Grade Bill Parks, the XO’s RIO, whom everyone called Brillo because of his wavy, kinky hair.
“Great,” Big said. “What’s Bingo today?” The fuel level at which the ship sent you to the nearest airfield instead of coming aboard the carrier.
“3.5,” Woods replied.
“Where’s the Bingo field?”
“Crete.”
“One more pass, then it’s tank or consequences,” Big said.
“They’re tanking him now,” Woods said, listening to the radio chatter.
“How’d the XO get so low on gas on his first pass?” Big asked.
“I don’t know. That’s a question he was undoubtedly hoping to avoid. Probably trying to show some junior officer the intricacies of air combat. Something he doesn’t know much about.”
“Not everyone can be a Topgun instructor like you, big shot.”
“Spare me,” Woods said. His face clouded again. “I still think I’m letting Vialli down if I just let this go. If I let American politics take its course and do nothing, like we always do . . .”
“I don’t know that it’s fair to say we do nothing. I mean when President Carter faced the hostage crisis in Iran he waited with great intensity nigh on four hundred days. He wrung his hands effectively, and overall did an admirable job of worrying and sweating. How can you say we did nothing? And then at the end, he launched that fiasco in the desert and tried to control it from the White House. Why, never a prettier bit of ‘doing something’ have I ever seen. And Clinton, Carter’s modern protégé in the looking tough and doing nothing department, specialized in mechanical strikes by Tomahawks and invisible stealth jet bombers. Wouldn’t want to actually risk a human being. Of course what would you expect from someone who fought like hell to stay out of the evil military. Now as to George Bush—”
Flash Point Page 13
