In jerky slow motion, his chest exploded and his body, hurled backward, rebounded from the steel hull. At the final degree of processed magnification, nothing could be seen of the American’s face but a white blur and the blotch that was his open mouth. The hull behind him was red with the spray of all the blood in his chest cavity.
“. . . or maybe,” said Tom Kelly as he switched off the picture, “it was that one that caused most of the flap after it was shown on the evening news.”
“Which one bothered you, Mr. Kelly?” said Elaine, one of the figures in his peripheral vision, ignored by the part of Kelly’s mind that was now in control. . . . Ignored unless they moved suddenly, in which case he would kill them – in this moment he would kill them, and the release would be worth any regrets he had afterward.
“On principle,” said Kelly in a voice like a pond of melt water, still and deep and very cold, “it all bothered me. If Israel had a problem with the way we pulled out of the Lebanon so sudden, that’s fine – I understand that, getting mad about being left in the lurch. But you don’t shoot up an American spy ship off your coast just because you’re pissed at people in Washington. None of the poor bastards on the White Plains were behind the bugout from Lebanon.”
Kelly tried to set the controller on top of Congressman Bianci’s desk, but his fingers slipped and the unit thumped instead to the blue-carpeted floor. The veteran’s whole body shuddered and the room sprang into focus again.
“Shouldn’t do that to me,” said Kelly as he kneaded his cheeks and forehead with both hands. “Really shouldn’t.”
His voice had changed back to its usual lilting tenor as he went on, “If you mean personally, Danny Pacheco was in the SIGINT Tank in the midships hold, right where the torpedo hit. Guess he was one of the fifty or so who drowned there before they knew what was going on. And yeah, he was a good enough friend that it bothered me. But that’s already in the file, I guess.”
“You had good reason to hate the Israelis, Mr. Kelly,” said the woman, giving a hitch to her skirt as she leaned her hips against the ceiling-height bookcase behind her. There was a tiny purse in her left hand, the gold-plated clasps an inch open. If she was smart enough to have that good a grasp of the situation, then she was smart enough to know that she had no real chance to clear the gun in her purse in a crisis – unless she planned to preempt Kelly.
The veteran laughed, briefly euphoric with the catharsis of having watched the attack on the White Plains for the first time since the slaughter came to its true climax in a military court in Jerusalem. “I don’t hate anybody,” he said. “Nobody in the world.”
“You hated them enough,” retorted Doug, “that you left your post in Turkey and spent two months tracking down that tape or something like it.”
Kelly looked at the other man, whose present splay-footed stance suggeste’d karate training. Elaine was playing with her subject, a tense game because of Kelly’s emotional charge, but all the better thereby to flesh skeletal file data into a man. Doug, on the other hand, was genuinely belligerent instead of professionally playing the bad cop in an interrogation routine. That was fine. . . .
“When I brought my boys back to Diyarbakir,” Tom Kelly said in a soft voice and with a smile that gouged, “that was the third time I’d been over the line in Iraq, officially – ”
Doug said nothing, though the pause dared him to speak. The Tasking Order had specifically forbidden American citizens to accompany into Iraq the guerrillas they trained at Turkish bases.
“When I came back, I had maybe a year of leave I’d never got around to taking. If I needed some time off, then I had it coming. And – ”
“That doesn’t – ” started Doug.
“And don’t give me any crap about leaving my post, the way NSA pulled the plug on the Kurds as soon as Iraq kicked out its Soviet techs,” snarled Kelly in a voice like machineguns firing.