Flight of the Skyhawk

Chapter 4

4

Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Pod Seven.

Yosef started, “When my brother was of age, he chose to emigrate to America. The family was very upset with him leaving, but he insisted. It was the late 1950’s. He became a US citizen and then went to university at the United States Naval Academy as a cadet. After graduation, he served in the Navy as a fighter pilot.” He grinned. “He was so proud. His aircraft was an A-4E Skyhawk, and from what I was told by the others in his squadron, he was the best.”

Talia turned and walked to the wall, lost in a swirl of thoughts. Her historical knowledge of the Israeli Mossad afforded her not only an extensive understanding of Israel’s military capabilities and past actions but that of her allies and enemies as well. She turned to him and said, “Skyhawks were fighter-bombers.”

“That’s right. And during the Cold War, when tensions were high enough with the Russians, the United States would arm Skyhawks with tactical nuclear weapons, secured to the underside of the plane, and launch them from the decks of carriers. The weapons were thermonuclear, and depending on the fusing options chosen, were capable of detonating in a variety of ways.”

Talia crossed her arms. “Yes, I’m well aware. But how do you know—” She stopped herself. “Tactical devices are meant to be used in any number of situations. They can detonate in air burst, ground burst, can be dropped free fall, could detonate on contact, or even be used under laydown delivery.”

“Your Ph.D. has not gone to waste,” he said with a cough. “And depending on the fusing option chosen, the explosive yield of a single device could be adjusted from seventy kilotons up to—”

“One megaton,” Talia said as she nodded. “And I’m not a Ph.D. yet.”

“And that was exactly the type of weapon Israel was desperate to possess. Since a foreign aggressor could approach us from any side, by the time their attack was detected, it would have been too late for our Army to thwart. We needed a tactical nuclear weapon just like that to neutralize the threat. And the fact that the weapon carried by the Skyhawk could be varied in yield when detonated made it ideal. We would have a weapon which could be tuned on demand as the situation warranted.”

Talia nodded, but her shoulders slumped. “And I suppose Israel would have made sure all of our enemies knew we were in possession. That way, they would think twice before invading.”

“Exactly.”

She exhaled. “What did you do?”

“I enlisted.”

“In what?”

“In the United States Navy.”

“Hold on,” Talia said as she held an open palm to Yosef. “Your brother, Golan, if he did exist, may have been a US citizen, but you weren’t. You couldn’t have enlisted.”

Yosef grinned. “You are correct. My brother had become a US citizen after a year-long process. I, however, did not have that kind of time. The details of how I was able to enlist are not important. Let’s just say I had help.”

Talia nodded. The Mossad, she thought.

“In the Navy, I became a Chief Warrant Officer and requested assignment to a particular aircraft carrier, the same carrier Golan was assigned. Since I also had obtained a brand new identity, no one knew we were siblings. And since my sole directive was to get my hands on a nuclear weapon, I figured, the best thing to do was to become a weapons specialist. It would give me direct access to the weapons themselves.”

“You’re telling me you were going to attempt to steal a nuclear weapon from the United States Navy? Were you insane?”

“I was trained to load, unload, and store armaments of all types, including those with nuclear tips. And as a Warrant Officer, I had authorization to be in restricted areas where others were not permitted.”

Talia looked down as if lost in thought. “Which carrier was Golan assigned?”

“The USS Ticonderoga.”

It took a moment, but then Talia’s mouth opened. “The Ticonderoga? Wait a minute. We studied this in grad school. That’s the ship that in 1965 lost a nuclear device. They were in the, ah, the—”

“The East China Sea. We were part of Attack Squadron 56. We had departed Subic Bay in the Philippines, performed a combat tour in Vietnam, and thirty-one days later were eighty miles from Kikai Island, the Kagoshima Prefecture.”

She pointed at him. “You were on board the Ticonderoga?” But she stopped herself. “Wait. First, you lead me to believe you were a baker, that you died when I was five, and now this? This must be what Moshe was talking about.”

“Ah, Moshe. What did your godfather tell you?”

“He always said you were crazy.” She crossed her arms again. “I don’t believe a word of what you’re saying.”

Yosef nodded. “Moshe has his own motivations. He and I never really saw eye to eye.” Yosef continued with the story. “It was a bitter, cold December day. The seas were hell, I don’t mind telling you. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

Talia’s tone sharpened. “Fine,” she said as he sat in the chair then threw one leg over the other. “Go on then. Tell me how you did the impossible, stole a nuclear weapon from a naval warship. I’d love to hear this.”

“I didn’t.”

“But you just said—”

“I failed.”

Talia shook her head. “You failed? At your mission?”

He nodded.

“All right then,” she said, “tell me how you thought you were going to steal a nuclear device from a US warship.”

“At the time, my brother, Golan, had no idea I had entered the United States. He certainly did not know I was a Warrant Officer deployed aboard the same vessel as him. I tried, and I tried, but when I finally came to the conclusion there was no way to steal the weapon outright, I knew I would need help. So I approached him.”

The old man stared off into nothingness. “Just seeing me shocked him to his core. You see, Golan and I never really saw eye to eye either.” He wafted a hand. “Those feelings between us went back a long way. As a child in Tel Aviv, I always believed that since he was older, the family loved him more than me. And as you know, in Israeli households, to a certain extent, that is true.”

He coughed but was able to settle himself before it could go further.

“On board the Ticonderoga, I had no other choice than to try to recruit him into the operation. After all, he was Israeli. If I could convince him to work covertly for Israel, his true homeland, we could accomplish the mission together.

My plan was that he would take off from the deck of the carrier with the weapon attached. He would fly off-course to a remote location we would coordinate with the Mossad where he would land. The weapon would be offloaded, and he would take off again and report a weapons malfunction. It wouldn’t be the first time a bomb had come accidentally detached from its mounts and dropped into the sea.”

“But he didn’t go along with it, did he?” Talia said, as her foot bobbed back and forth.

“No,” the old man replied as he again began coughing. This time, as he gripped at his ribcage and doubled over, the coughing intensified to a point at which a digital alarm began to pulse on one of the monitors.

Talia stood. “Grandpa? Are you all right?”

The hacking continued, and the nurse rushed in and helped him lean back. She repositioned the nebulizer mask across his mouth, then checked his vital signs. “You need to stay calm, Mr. Stiel. Perhaps you should rest now?”

“I will be fine,” he said as he cleared his throat.

“All right then,” the nurse said. “But please stay calm. And it’s very important you get some rest.” She glanced at Talia as if to say, “Visiting hours are over,” then walked out.

He waited until the nurse was out the door before continuing. “At first, my brother was torn between service to his homeland, and service to his new home, America. He loved the United States, you see. Eventually, he refused.”

“And you murdered him for that?”

He scowled at her. “Working in an air-conditioned laboratory may afford you the ability to stand back and pass judgment. You have the advantage of looking behind you, then evaluating decisions that were made in real time. Without the weight of a million tons of tanks, artillery, and boots standing on your head, it is easy for you to think in terms of black and white, right and wrong. But when faced with utter annihilation, nothing is that simple.”

His eyes formed into slits.

“You have no idea what it’s like to have the future of a nation in your hands.” His voice stiffened further. “Israel was in imminent danger. Hundreds of thousands of lives were on the line, and I had sworn to protect them!”

Talia rubbed her temples. “All right, all right.”

After a few moments of calming down, Yosef continued. “My brother may have initially been torn between loyalty to his homeland versus his new home, but once he made the decision to honor his commitment to the United States, he was clear. He struggled internally with what to do with the information, that an Israel operative was on board and was trying to actively steal a nuclear device.”

“He was deciding whether to turn you in or not.”

“I could see it in his eyes. There was inner conflict. Eventually, I couldn’t risk it anymore. Even though he was my brother, I knew I had to honor The Land over my own family. I had to kill him.”

Talia shook her head. “You were trying to save your own skin.”

He pointed a crooked finger at her. “That, my dear, is where you are mistaken. I would have gladly traded my life for Golan’s. I think about it every day. But if the United States were to discover the operation, Israel’s chance of obtaining a weapon would be severely damaged.”

“If this is true, you are a murderer.” Talia snatched her purse from beneath the chair.

Yosef’s voice descended into a gravelly whisper. “And Yahweh will judge me for my sins.”

“As will I.” She started to walk out.

His hoarse voice escalated. “I will be dead soon.” Talia stopped just before she reached the door but did not turn around. “I am a man of sin. I admit that. But I am dying. Please hear me out.”

She turned to face him. “What do you want from me? Why have you dumped all this on me?” A wave of emotion pushed tears against the backs of her eyes.

“I want you to do something that I cannot. I want you to honor your uncle. I want you to clear his good name.” He stared at her a moment. A tear welled in his eye, then fell. “You must have Golan’s remains returned to Israel.”

She walked back to the bedside and dropped the purse onto the chair. “Returned? Where are his remains now?” But then she put her hands into the air. “No, wait a minute. I want to get this over with.” Her teeth clenched. “You want to unburden yourself? You want to dump all this on me? Fine. I want to know how you murdered my great uncle.”

“My dear, the details are not—”

“I’m tired of all this evasive double talk. Tell me!”

The up and down movement of Yosef’s chest increased and his eyes filled with fear. “Don’t make me retell it,” he said shaking his head. “It is too painful.”

Talia reached down for her purse, but Yosef grabbed her other wrist. “I will promise to tell you everything if you promise to stay.”

Talia stared at him a moment, then nodded.

“As weapons specialist, I had direct access to the devices. In my mind, I had run through every scenario of how I could smuggle one off the ship. But nothing was feasible. Security was too high.

“Originally, I had reasoned that if I could have uninterrupted time, I would be able to physically separate the internal components of one of the bombs. I had training that would enable me to remove the warhead from inside the nose cone and reassemble it.

“I would have had my hands on the nuclear tip, and, looking at the bomb from the outside, there would be no way for others to tell the nuclear components had been removed. But there would also have been no way to get the warhead off the ship.

“The bomb itself is large, over twelve feet long, with a weight close to twenty-one hundred pounds. But the warhead is only about yay big,” he said as he held his hands about two feet apart, “and weighs eighty pounds. But as I mentioned, security around those devices was high. We had a roving Marine guard on board at all times. Officers would inspect each weapon as it was loaded or unloaded from a plane.”

“Let’s fast forward. Once you knew you had no chance at stealing the warhead, and you had made the decision to kill your brother, what did you do?”

“I had to ensure his death looked like an accident.”

She held her hand up to stop him. “An accident?” She turned and studied the floor until her memory recalled what she had learned about the Ticonderoga. “I remember this,” she said as she began to pace the floor. “My Military Studies professor used it as an example in one of his lectures. The device the Ticonderoga lost was attached to the underbelly of a Skyhawk.”

She snapped her fingers. “There was an accident on the elevator.” Her voice trailed off as the thoughts played forward in her mind. “Something went wrong and the pilot and plane were dumped overboard, and the weapon with them.”

He turned his head, a veiled attempt to hide his eyes.

She pointed at him. “You caused the accident, didn’t you?”

Yosef’s voice choked. “We had completed a combat tour in Vietnam and had rotated off. The ship headed for Yokosuka, Japan for a little R and R. But on the way, the captain received orders for what is called a nuclear strike plan. A Russian carrier group was nearby and tensions were high. The temperatures were below freezing that day, and we were in the middle of a huge weather front. The ocean swells were at thirty feet. Even with the massive size of the aircraft carrier, the ship pitched from side to side. I knew where my brother’s plane was. I knew when and where it would be moved from below decks, topside to be launched.”

He swallowed and covered his eyes with a crinkled hand.

To Talia, it looked as if he was picturing the scene in his mind.

“The plane was rolled from the hangar bay and onto the number two elevator. The elevator sits on the edge of the ship and lifts multi-ton aircraft to the flight deck to be launched.”

He began to cry, and his words came out in fits and starts. “Once on the elevator my brother would have applied pressure to the brake pedal to stop the plane from moving backward. But I had sabotaged the braking system. In the storm, as the ship leaned to port, the plane rolled off the elevator platform and was dumped overboard.”

“And your brother with it.”

“Yes,” he whispered as he covered his eyes. “One of the sailors standing right there describe it to me. He said everything happened so quickly. My brother knew immediately he had no brakes. The look in his eyes was frantic. The sailor said the blue-shirts threw wooden chocks behind the plane, and grabbed at it, but it was too late. The plane rolled right over the chocks and through the safety rail. The back landing gear dropped off the edge and the front gear caused the plane to hang for just a moment. Then the plane dropped. It fell on its back. I picture it in my nightmares. I picture myself strapped into the cockpit, a helmet over my head, then being dumped overboard into the wet darkness.” He looked up at Talia. “The canopy would have held for quite a while as the plane plummeted like a rock toward the ocean floor. Oh, it’s so horrible!”

She walked the floor in front of the bed. “You knew once your brother’s plane had been dumped overboard, he would have had no chance to escape.” She stared at him, her mouth hanging open. “And in the high seas, no one would question the accident.”

Yosef nodded. “His plane had a nuclear bomb attached to it at the time. The reason they never attempted a recovery was because of the ocean depth in the area.”

Talia’s voice descended into resignation. “That is correct. The depth was something like 4,900 meters, three miles down. Far too deep for a recovery.” She put both hands on the top of her head “I studied that incident in graduate school. No public mention was made of it at the time. It wasn’t until 1989 that the US admitted a one-megaton bomb had been lost. The Japanese were pretty pissed off about it as I recall. And now you’re telling me it was deliberate?”

“After the accident,” he said, “I went to—”

“Accident?” she said, interrupting. “History may record it as an accident, but you murdered him. That was no accident.”

“I am sorry, my dear. You are correct.” Yosef cleared his throat. “Having failed my mission, I needed to get off that ship and pursue Israel’s goal another way. I went to the First Officer and told him that Lieutenant Junior Grade Golan Stiel, the pilot that had just perished, was my brother.”

“They sent you home on bereavement leave, didn’t they?”

“As a matter of standard operating procedure, yes. I was horrified at what I had done. I knew I had to honor my brother. My plan was to go home and bury him.”

“Bury what?”

Yosef did not address the question. “And that is where my plans went awry. You see, my brother had dual citizenship, Israeli, and American. But our family were all in Israel.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Talia said. “Bury him? His body was at the bottom of the ocean. What were you going to bury?”

Yosef shut his eyes. “His footlocker.”

Talia’s eyes wandered. “His personals. The Navy would have sent his personals home.”

“That is correct. It was my wishes to place his personals into a casket to be returned home. I at least wanted to pay him that honor.”

The old man looked away. His labored breathing punctuated the silence. Without looking up, he said, “But that is where the story takes a turn.”