Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [139]
Within five seconds of ascertaining that the Tomahawk was airborne, Captain Breen gave the order for the submarine to depart the region at once. As the crew took her deeper out to sea, Console Operator Max continued to monitor the missile's progress. During the next thirty-two minutes, he would not leave his station. If the command came from the captain or weapons officer for the mission to be aborted, it would be Max's responsibility to input the code for the satellite uplink and then push the red "destruct" button.
The USS Pittsburgh had a long history of firing Tomahawks. This included, most proudly, a flurry of missiles launched during Desert Storm. During that time, all of the Tomahawks had struck their targets. In addition, the submarine had never received an abort command.
This was Max's first firing of a non-test missile. His palms were damp and his mouth was dry. It was a matter of pride that Tomahawk's ninety-five-percent accuracy rate not catch up to the submarine's one-hundred-percent success rate on his watch.
He glanced at the digital countdown clock. Thirty-one minutes.
Max also hoped that he wouldn't have to pull the plug on his bird. If he did, it would take weeks for the rest of the crew to let up on the "firing blanks" and "unleaded pencil" jokes.
He watched the data stream in from the blazing missile as it prepared to cross two narrow time zones.
Thirty minutes.
"Fly, baby," Max said quietly, with a paternal smile. "Fly."
* * *
FORTY-EIGHT
Tuesday, 3:33 p.m.,
the Bekaa Valley
Phil Katzen sat at Mary Rose's station inside the ROC. An armed, English-speaking Kurd stood on either side. Each time Katzen was about to turn something on, he had to explain what it was. One man took notes while the other listened. All the while, sweat trickled down Katzen's ribs. Exhaustion burned his eyes. And guilt churned inside of him. Guilt, but not doubt.
Like most boys who'd ever played soldier or watched a war movie, Phil Katzen had asked himself the question often: How do you think you'd hold up under torture? The answer was always: Probably okay, as long as I was just being beaten or held underwater or maybe electrified. As a kid you think about yourself. You never think: How would you hold up if someone else were being tortured? The answer was very badly. And that had surprised him. But a lot had happened between the days when he'd played soldier in the backyard and now. He had gone to college at Berkeley. He'd seen the campus paralyzed by student marches for human rights in China and Afghanistan and Burma. He'd helped care for students who were weakened by hunger strikes against the death penalty. He himself had partaken in fish-free weeks to protest Japanese fishing tactics which netted dolphins along with tuna. He'd even gone shirtless for a day to call attention to the plight of sweatshop works in Indonesia.
Upon obtaining his doctorate, Katzen had worked for Greenpeace. Then he'd worked for a succession of environmental organizations whose funding came and went. In his free time he built houses alongside former President Jimmy Carter, and worked at a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. He learned that the suffering of parents who couldn't feed their children or the oppression of good souls opposed to tyranny or the pain inflicted on dumb animals was worse than one's own physical pain. It was magnified by empathy and worsened by helplessness.
Katzen had felt sick when Mike Rodgers was being tortured. But he'd felt dehumanized because Sondra DeVonne had been forced to watch, told that her own punishment would be worse. In retrospect, Katzen knew that that was what had broken him. The need to get some of that dignity back for himself and for her. He also knew that the pain he'd caused Mike Rodgers was greater than the torture inflicted by the Kurds. But as he'd discovered