“Good enough,” Woods replied. “I was thinking maybe you’d like to take Tony’s spot in my stateroom.”
Big considered the offer. “I don’t know, Trey. This is so sudden,” he said, smiling.
“Well, think about it.”
“Isn’t there someone more senior who would want it? I’m only a frocked Lieutenant. I won’t start getting paid for it for a few months.”
“Vialli was a JG.”
“I never did understand how he scammed a spot in a two-man stateroom when he was a nugget and a mere JG.”
“Sedge was supposed to take it, but he decided he wanted to sleep in the four-man. He hated being right under the catapult at the water break. Every time the cat went off after he went to bed, which was just about every night, he used to sit up like he’d been shot when the catapult hit the water break,” said Woods, laughing as he recalled Sedge’s reaction. “You get zero warning. We’re at the end of cat three, and you can’t hear it coming. All you hear is this ‘BAAAM,’ when the piston hits the water break. I don’t even hear it anymore, but Sedge couldn’t get used to it. So when Vialli came, he took Sedge’s place.”
“I could probably handle that,” Big said. “I’m under cat two right now…”
“Plus there’s Bernie the Breather.”
“Who’s that?” Big asked, his face full of concern. Hedidn’t like there being problems with anyone, especially someone who called himself a “breather.”
Woods laughed to himself. He lowered his voice. “There’s this pipe that hangs down into our stateroom out of the overhead,” he said, holding his fingers together to indicate a pipe of three inches in diameter. “It stops about three feet from the deck. Just hanging there. It’s between our bunk beds — our racks — and the bulkhead.” Woods got a twinkle in his eye. “And sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, it makes this breathing noise. There’s a valve somewhere inside it, not at the end — the end is open and pointing down at the deck — but somewhere in the lower three feet, there is a flapper valve. And the pipe breathes in, a kind of ‘guuushhhh,’ as it breathes in, then a ‘cuh cuh cuh,’ as the flapper flaps down,” he said, using his hand as a valve flapping against an invisible opening in a pipe. “Guush, cuh cuh cuh. It’s stealing air out of our stateroom,” he said, raising his eyebrows twice and smiling mischievously. “Or, maybe, it’s putting air into our stateroom. Either way, we can’t figure out why, or where the pipe is going.”
Big looked at him skeptically. “You’re pulling my leg,” he said.
“Nope. I’m not. You’ll have to see it. I just wanted you to know about it so you didn’t move in and then whine about it. Sedge about went nuts between the water break and Bernie.”
“Sounds weird.”
“It’s a great stateroom. It’s not like those other boring staterooms that only have regular deafening noises; we have the regular deafening noises, but we have the unique noises too.”
“Okay. I’m in,” Big said, shrugging. “How could I not be?”
12
Pritch searched under her seat in the ready room for something. Bark watched her struggle. “Need some help?”
She looked up. “No, sir. Thanks. Just looking for my notepad.”
Bark sat down and studied the message board. Suddenly Pritch sat down next to him. “Sir,” she said, “can I ask you something?”
He looked at her skeptically. “You don’t like going to sea and you want to go home?”
“No, sir, nothing like that. I may be off base, so let me know if I shouldn’t be asking.”
He frowned in expectation. “What?”
“It’s about Trey.”
“What about him?”
She didn’t know how to begin. “He’s… I don’t know. So upset about Boomer. I understand being upset, everyone is. But Trey is over the top. He seems so intense about it. Angry. At the government. What’s going on with him?”
“You are off base.”
“I’m sorry—”
“No, it’s okay. We’re like a family. We see each other every day, and we wonder what’s going on with someone if they’re acting odd. Well, he is. And I know it. And I’ve taken steps to reel him back in. We’ll see.”
“What’s it about? Anything more than meets the eye?”
Bark lowered his voice. “I take it he’s never shown you the notebook.”
“Notebook?” she asked. “What notebook?”
“Pan Am Flight 103.”
“What about it?”
“He has a notebook with every scrap of news or evidence or speculation in it. News reports, book excerpts, photographs, his own notes trying to figure it out, you name it.”
“Why?”
“He wants to know what happened, and why the U.S. didn’t do anything about it. He’s got all kinds of theories—”
“Like what?”
Bark thought. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s been a long time since I got the speech. He doesn’t talk about it much. He’s afraid people will take him for a fanatic or something, like one of those people who’ve obsessed about the Kennedy assassination for decades.”
“Is he obsessing?”
“Probably.”
“What theories?”
“Oh, let’s see. I remember he said that the Libyan thing might be a red herring. Israel started planting stories about Libya being responsible hours after it happened, and the press swallowed it. Some group. L-A-T, or something—”
“LAP?”
“Yeah, I think so—”
“That’s Israeli. Department of Psychological Warfare.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
“If you say so. Anyway, they started accusing Libya — calling journalists all over the world to plant the story — then spread rumors Syria and Iran were involved, and then that Iran did it as revenge for the shoot-down of the Iranian airliner by the USS Vincennes a few months earlier. But then it gets real complex. He loses me, but he says there was some illegal CIA group dealing drugs in the Middle East, and it was tied in to the Iran-Contra thing for funding the Contras, and that that group was on board the plane. They were called KOREA, or something like that. No, COREA, that’s it. And there was an American Army hostage rescue team on board that had been in the Middle East and one of the guy’s suitcases disappeared from the accident scene and was suddenly returned empty. That the COREA group had been tipped off by German intelligence that a bomb was aboard the plane, but didn’t do anything about it… I can’t remember it. I couldn’t really follow it when he was telling me about it.”
“He has information on all that?”
“Oh, yeah, and more. He has stuff from the attorney who represented Pan Am in all the suits from the accident. Trey wrote to him. The attorney got on the scent of all this stuff about the cause of the accident and subpoenaed the CIA, the FBI, the FAA, the NSC, and NSA. The government wouldn’t give him anything. Claimed it invaded national security.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. It’s all very mysterious. Then those two Libyans were sent to trial in Scotland for the thing. He just scoffs at all that. The thing that really got him though was reading in some book that Israel sent one of its Mossad case officers from London—”
“A Katsa?”
“I don’t know what they’re called, anyway, sent him to Lockerbie hours after the crash. Why would you send an intelligence agent to the site of an airplane crash?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anyway, he’s got a lot of skepticism. He distrusts the Israelis, the CIA, and the general approach of the U.S. to terrorism. He thinks it’s all a game to them.”
“Incredible,” Pritch said. “Why does he care so much about Pan Am 103?”
“His father was on it.”
Pritch gasped. “Truly?”