Flash Point

Synopsis

Lieutenant Sean Woods doesn't tell anyone when Tony Vialli, his roommate, best friend, and fellow F-14 pilot, submits false leave papers and sneaks off to Israel to rendezvous with his new Israeli girlfriend. But when Vialli and the woman are assassinated in a brutal terrorist attack, Woods is shattered by the loss and now wants revenge on the man he knows is responsible — Sheikh al-Jabar, the self-appointed defender of Islam. Taking matters into his own hands, Woods secretly signs on with an elite Israeli strike group. As the confrontation escalates and tempers flare on both sides, Woods finds himself caught up in a web of international intrigue and deception that stretches from the Middle East to Washington, and finally unravels in an explosive showdown with Islamic assassins in the Iranian mountains. Combining his storytelling flare with an insider's knowledge of military hardware, former Navy jet-fighter pilot turned author James W. Huston once again provides a high voltage, action-packed military political thriller.

United States Constitution. Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, Grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.

The dirty white van sputtered and stalled as it approached the Gaza checkpoint. The driver looked harried. He leaned forward and tried to start the van quickly. The engine caught, turned over, and stalled again. He glanced in his mirror and ahead of him at the other traffic.

One of the Palestinian guards watched the driver out of the corner of his eye as he waved two more cars through the border checkpoint. The van was about to block the morning’s commuter traffic — the thousands of Palestinians who crossed into Israel every day to work the menial jobs the Israelis didn’t want.

The Israeli soldiers on the other side of the border were much more serious about the traffic crossing into Israel. Exhausted from unending vigilance coupled with interminable boredom, they imagined a bomb in every car. They carried their loaded M-16s in their hands and sweated under their bulletproof vests. To them Gaza was just a large Trojan Horse.

The van had created a gap; only a lonely Fiat stood between it and the checkpoint. The Palestinian guard glanced toward the checkpoint and walked to the van. The van lurched, then started to move, inching along. It sat with its engine chugging reluctantly, waiting for the Fiat, now thirty feet in front of it, to pass through.

The rusty Fiat was waved on and the van was next. The van shuddered and the engine quit. The driver turned the key and the starter noisily cranked the engine. It wouldn’t catch. Again and again he tried, without success. The Palestinian guard approached the window angrily. “What is the problem?” he asked gruffly in Arabic.

“I’ve had some engine trouble?” the driver replied, also in Arabic.

“Move it or we’ll push it into the ditch! You’re blocking the way!” The road into Israel was crowded. The bright morning sun was low in the eastern horizon, shining into the eyes of the Palestinian guards.

“Yes, yes. I’m trying . . .” The driver leaned forward as if lending his own energy to the van. He turned the key with his right hand, and reached subtly under the dash with his left and flipped a switch. The van chugged to life with half its cylinders working. The driver smiled at the guard apologetically and the vehicle began moving slowly toward the checkpoint. It was clear it would take the van a long time to make it.

“Get this thing off this road!” the guard finally yelled, exasperated with the slowness of the stupid white van that was now blocking the entire checkpoint. The Israelis watched and waited with concern. Anything out of the ordinary received humorless, intense scrutiny; any problem, any angry outburst, anything. It could be someone about to do something dramatic, or a diversion for someone else.

The driver nodded, surrendering, and began a Y-turn to go back the way he had come. The Palestinian guard, his rifle in one hand, watched in disgust. The van turned around, now headed toward Gaza City, the driver apparently abandoning any hope of getting to Tel Aviv. He reached under the dash again, and the van’s engine coughed and died once more. The guard, barking obscenities, angrily advanced toward the window on the right side of the van. The driver suddenly raised an enormous handgun and fired, the bullet penetrating the man’s bulletproof vest, throwing him back onto the side of the road, where he lay silently, his legs jerking involuntarily.

The rear doors of the van flew open and eight men with large machine guns rushed out and opened fire. The bullets made a distinctive, unusual sound as they flew toward the Israeli and Palestinian guards who fell quickly as the bullets tore through their protective vests. The eight fanned out and fired with precision, aiming at the targets each had been briefed to hit. The Israeli guardhouse on the other side of the border was splintered, the guards inside shredded. On both sides of the border, the cry went out for Palestinian and Israeli reinforcements. Six Palestinian guards lay dead on the Gaza side.

The shooters stood staring at the dead guards on both sides, as if waiting for something. An Israeli Armored Personnel Carrier raced for the border from its safe point a half mile away. There was a loud metallic sound and a TOW missile flew out the van’s open doors from a tube bolted to the deck inside. The thin wire that carried the guidance information to the missile trailed behind it as the TOW raced toward the Israeli APC, slamming into the belly of the armored vehicle, instantly killing the Israeli soldiers inside.

The Palestinian and Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint were dead, but dozens of others were rushing to the border from their safe positions a mile away. The eight shooters, unharmed, ran back to the van, diving through the closing rear doors. The driver threw both of the switches under the dash and the finely tuned eight-cylinder engine roared to life. The van sped off in the direction of Gaza City.

Several soldiers standing in the back of an Israeli truck approaching the checkpoint began firing at the van. The M-16 bullets, small but fast, slammed into the back of the vehicle but fell harmlessly, bouncing off the van’s inner lining of Kevlar. Small chips of rubber flew off the solid tires as the bullets hit, but nothing slowed the van.

It sped down the highway, back the way it had come. A Palestinian security truck raced toward the border near the retreating van. Too late, the truck driver realized that the target he was pursuing was the van about to pass them. The truck slowed but the van had already raced by, untouched. It reached the outskirts of the city and made a sharp turn into an alley. Another van pulled in front of the entrance to the alley, blocking it completely.

The white van stopped deep in the alley and the eight men and the driver quickly walked away, blending in with passers-by who were completely unaware of what had happened. Each of the shooters wore clothes different from those he had worn during the attack, and each left his weapon lying on the floor of the van next to the TOW launcher. They split up, each taking a different direction, then climbed into the unremarkable sedans that were waiting for them and disappeared.

“Hey, Wink,” Lieutenant Sean Woods, “Trey,” as he was known, said into his oxygen mask.

“What?”

“This our last intercept of the night?”

Wink looked at the clock on the instrument panel in the backseat of the F-14. “Probably.”

“Let’s have some fun,” Woods said.

“Always.”

Woods glanced at his fuel indicator. They were fat. “You ready?”

“I’m ready,” Wink replied, then immediately transmitted, “
Victory 207’s ready
.”

“
Roger. Victory 207, your bogey is 284 for 42, angels unknown
,” Tiger replied. The bad guy — their wingman — bore 284 degrees from them, forty-two miles away, and the controller didn’t know their altitude.

Wink slaved his radar toward the left side of the Tomcat’s nose as Woods pulled around hard to the west in a three G turn. Wink picked out their wingman while still in the turn: “
207, contact 284 for 40. Judy
,” Wink transmitted, taking control of the intercept. Lieutenant Vialli and Sedge, his Radar Intercept Officer, RIO, in their F-14, were forty miles away and turning in at the same speed.

“Roger, out.”

The radio went silent. Woods changed the mode on his HSD, his Horizontal Situation Display, to show the radar picture Wink was seeing in the backseat. He immediately knew what kind of intercept Wink would run. He checked his fuel ladder, a group of boxes he had drawn on his knee board to keep track of how much fuel he would need at what time to get back aboard the carrier with plenty of fuel left to go around if they couldn’t trap the first time. They had fuel to burn.

“What’s his altitude?”

Wink hooked the target on the PTID — the Programmable Tactical Information Display, which showed him the radar information. “Twenty-three.” Twenty-three thousand feet above the ocean.

Woods pushed the throttles forward to the stops — as hard as the engines could work without afterburner — and pulled the nose of the Tomcat up ten degrees above the horizon.

The green glow of the screens reflected on their clear visors. The night was as dark as any night could be and still be illuminated by stars. Moonrise wasn’t for another hour. The overcast cloud layer below blocked any light from the sea, not that there was much in the middle of the Mediterranean.

“Want to take him down the throat?” Wink asked.

“May as well since we’re coming in high, but we’ll need a little angle.”

The F-14 climbed hungrily into the cool night sky. “Think they’ve got us?”

“Sure,” Wink replied.

“Then they’ll know what we’re up to?”

“If they’re paying attention. But it’s the last one, they’re the bogey. May not notice our altitude. Starboard to 300 to build up some aspect angle.” Wink wanted to come in from the side so they could roll out behind their target.

Woods turned the F-14 gently as he continued to climb. He steadied on a heading of 300.

“Okay, come port to 278.”

Woods complied as they passed through thirty-four thousand feet, still climbing. He instinctively looked behind him to see if they were leaving contrails, but quickly realized he couldn’t have seen them in the darkness even if they were there. They continued to climb straight ahead without speaking until they were at forty thousand feet.

“Ten miles,” Wink said. “We’ll start our normal intercept turn to kick him out about seven miles or so, then back in around five.”

“Roger,” Woods said, leaning forward to see down, but unable to pick out his wingman far below. “What are their angels now?”

Wink looked again. “Ten.” Five miles below them.

“That asshole,” Woods said, smiling under his mask. “They’re sitting on the overcast.”

“We’ll just have to start down earlier, and watch our speed.”

“Piece of cake,” Woods said, grinning at the thought of screaming down thirty thousand feet in the dark upside down.

“Starboard hard,” Wink called.

Woods turned the F-14 steeply but carefully in the thin air. After passing through whatever heading Wink was watching for, he called for a hard port turn.

Woods pushed the stick hard left until the Tomcat was on its back. He leaned back on the stick and let gravity pull them down toward the earth. Looking through the canopy toward the darkness below, he saw Vialli’s red anticollision light. “Tallyho,” Woods said.

“Got him,” Wink responded, glancing up. “We’re nearly on his line. Pull straight.”

“Roger.” Woods leveled the wings upside down and pulled back on the stick harder until they were pulling four Gs. Their speed increased through six hundred knots as the nose of the Tomcat pointed straight at the ocean. Woods eased the throttles back, no longer needing the full thrust of the engines; gravity could do most of the work. “Think he’s got us?”

“They may be wondering what the hell we’re doing up here.”

“I doubt it,” Woods said, grunting against the G forces. “How far behind them we going to be?”

“About a mile if you hold this.”

“Perfect.”

“Watch the speed,” Wink said as they passed through 625 knots. Woods brought the throttles back more and pulled a little harder on the stick.

“Passing through twenty,” Wink called calmly.

“You got him locked up?” Woods asked.

“Yep. Pull up at fifteen thousand feet, then we can descend to their altitude.”

“Okay,” Woods answered, taking a quick look at the engine instruments. They were still ahead of their fuel ladder. He pulled back harder on the stick and held five Gs to increase their altitude on pull-out.

Woods watched the nose of their Tomcat come through the horizon and back up toward the east. The artificial horizon told him he was approaching level flight again. He relaxed the back pressure on the stick and felt the bladders of his G-suit deflate against his abdomen and thighs.