The water boiled just forward of the squared superstructure amidships. Kelly had turned down the audio track, but network engineers had laid a flashing violet arrow onto the picture as they magnified and outlined in complementary yellow the gap blown in the White Plains’ hull by the torpedo launched from two hundred yards away. The man with the camera had not started filming until moments after the explosion, even as the shock waves pounded his own vessel.
The engineers isolated on another portion of what was originally a panorama shot with a short-focal-length lens. The bow, with its designator TR4, expanded grainily on the screen, flecks of random phosphor blurring the sharpness somewhat as raster lines were added in processing between those swept on the videotape original. The amidships three-inch gun installations had been stripped from the White Plains to make room for additional antennas when she was converted to her new mission, but one twin turret on the foredeck had remained.
The guns pointed skyward, their outlines slightly jagged from the computer enhancement. Somebody had told Kelly that three-inch seventy-caliber guns should always be mounted in pairs so that there might be one in operating condition when the need arose. In the case of the White Plains, both tubes had jammed at the first shots at the fighters diving to strafe the vessel. The crew had continued to traverse the weapons in a desperate attempt to bluff the attackers, however. Now a helicopter, a big Super Frelon. made a leisurely pass at mast level to fire rockets point-blank into the gun turret. Flashes of white, then orange as ammunition detonated in a secondary explosion, threw bits of men and plating skyward.
The engineers expanded the helicopter again in freeze-frame. This time the arrow and highlight were on the national insignia above the flotation and landing-gear spon-son of the Super Frelon: the six-pointed star of the Israeli Air Force.
“Hard to tell,” said Tom Kelly in a voice that did not tremble the way his hands did, forcing him to hold the VCR controller against his left leg while his right palm dried itself fiercely on his slacks, “whether it was that scene that bothered people most, or . . .”
The screen flashed back to a full shot of the White Plains, listing so that the hole ripped by the torpedo was already beneath the angry surface of the water. A lifeboat, white against the smooth gray hull, was being lowered from the davits amidships. There were about a dozen sailors in it, far fewer than its capacity, but somebody had decided to launch it before the ship’s distress made that impossible.
Tom Kelly aimed the controller with a hand which no longer shook, and thumbed up the sound. The picture jumped, the cameraman flinching at the muzzle blasts of the 20 mm cannon near where he was standing. Shells from the automatic cannon burst against the flank of the White Plains, then traced from stern to amidships across the swaying lifeboat. The lifeboat’s bow plunged as the sailor there on the winch lowered abruptly in a vain attempt to avoid the gunfire. His companion on the stern winch had leaped into the sea an instant before the shells chewed his position into flying splinters and the black smoke of bursting charges.
The gunfire paused and the video camera picked up the sound of men shouting on the deck of the torpedo boat, though the words were indistinct. Then the automatic cannon opened up again, its rate of fire deliberate enough that the crack of shells bursting could be heard as counterpoint to the louder, deeper, muzzle blasts. The bow of the lifeboat exploded just as it touched the water foaming into the torpedo wound. Even without enhancement, one could see the sailor’s bare arms fling themselves wide as a white flash hid his torso.
The picture paused a moment later in a crackle of colored static: the Israeli cameraman had either run out of tape or stopped recording of his own volition. The ABC engineers had not ended there, however. As Kelly dialed off the audio again, the final picture flashed back onto the screen. A glowing outline expanded and drew with it the image of the man in the bow of the tilting lifeboat, his hands bracing him upright on the lowering tackle.