The Edge of Honor (49 page)

I’ll see ya later, Mr. Holcomb. You have a real nice day now.”

The chief left. Brian was amazed at the transformation.

He went back into the head, took a quick shower, shaved, brushed his teeth, and put on a fresh khaki uniform. As he stuffed the whites into his laundry bag, he found Maddy’s crumpled letters. He put them down on his desk with a pang of embarrassment, but with less than ninety minutes on the clock, Maddy would have to wait. He headed out the door to get the day under way while he still could. God bless Louie Jesus and his magnificent friend, the doc.

By nightfall, the last remnants of his hangover were almost gone. His head seemed soft, like a submarine that had been depth-charged all day and survived. By comparison with the morning, he was feeling pretty good.

By comparison with the morning, just being alive felt pretty good. He stood up on the forecastle as the sun set over Grande Island out in the bay, nursing a cup of coffee and trying to ignore the lumps of heavily preserved Navy ham it crouched in his stomach like escaped criminals.

Sailors in civvies streamed along the bulkhead pier and sidewalks leading to the shuttle bus stops. The last of the supply trucks rumbled back toward the supply depot around the corner. Across the street, the Filipino workers shuttered the galvanized-steel warehouse doors for the night with a loud rattle. The messenger of the watch stood by the jackstaff, ready to execute evening colors when the sun officially set.

The ship seemed a bit more relaxed now that she was refueled and all the stores and supplies were safely loaded belowdecks. Tomorrow, the weapons station would deliver two pallets of five-inch ammo and a Terrier missile, which would complete the load-out. Brian was grateful to have made it through the day with his head in one piece.

The doc’s hangover cure had worked as promised, with the headache, a general feeling of wooziness, and a racing heartbeat returning shortly after he had handled quarters and put out the instructions for the day to his departmental officers and chiefs. The boatswain had been discreetly solicitous when Brian had thanked him after quarters for getting the doc up. The exec had been businesslike at officers’ call, though not unfriendly, but he had also seemed interested in getting quickly through the morning’s first meetings. Brian wondered whether the doc had been making rounds throughout officers’ country this morning, as there seemed to be several officers interested in the passage of time.

Brian had spent the morning in his stateroom, alternating an hour of rack time with an hour of catching up on old paperwork and beginning to work on the stack of new paperwork delivered with the mail.

Brian faced aft, stood to attention, and held a salute as a long blast on a police whistle came over the 1MC, announcing evening colors. The sound echoed across the harbor from the 1MC speakers of every ship in port. The messenger of the watch slowly hauled down the Union Jack from the jackstaff at the bow. After several more seconds, three blasts on the police whistle sounded “carry on,” indicating that God now had permission to complete sunset. Another Navy day was officially over.

As the messenger walked aft with his prize, Brian heard the handwheel on the forecastle hatch scuttle turning.

The leonine head and shoulders of the chief boatswain lifted out of the round hatch like a slow-moving Polaris missile. The chief had a cup of coffee in one hand and two long green Tabacalera Grande cigars in his right fist. He flipped the hatch back into place and spun the wheel with his boot, then walked forward to where Brian was standing in the eyes of the ship. He handed over one of the cigars.

“Evenin’, boss,” he rumbled. “Got a Grande for ya.

Good goddamn cee-gars, and they’re even fresh.”

Brian dutifully hauled out his knife and whacked one end off the nine-inch-long cigar. The chief did the honors with a Zippo embossed with Hood’s crest. They puffed fragrant clouds of blue smoke into the night air and listened with satisfaction as the harbor mosquitoes banked away into the gathering darkness to find other victims.

“Know how they make these?”

“I’m not sure I’m old enough.”

“They got these really fat ole women, see, and when the guys’ve got the cee-gar rolled nice and tight, they hand it over to these sweaty ole women, and they pull up their dress and seal it by—”

“Chief.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I had to eat Navy ham for dinner. Let’s just enjoy the cigars, shall we?”

“Yes, sir.”

They stood in silence for several minutes, watching the orange sunset paint the tips of the mountains to the east. The pastel colors were gradually overcome by the sodium-vapor lights along the pier. Brian found himself actually enjoying the cigar.

“Chief.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’m curious. How was Marcowitz set up?”

“Marcowitz, sir?”

“Yeah. Marcowitz, sir. The guy I busted for doing dope in missile plot.

The guy who was picked up with dope in his overnight bag by the Marines at the main gate. I’m just sort of curious, Chief: Why wasn’t he on premast restriction, and what kind of a guy takes three Baggies for one night’s liberty into Olongapo, Chief?”

The boatswain was silent for a minute. “A dumbass doper, maybe?” he said. Then he grinned, nodded, and flicked a long ash over the side. A passing seagull jinked briefly to examine the ash and then flew on.

“Okay. So maybe somebody planted a little something’ from the XO’s evidence locker. You know the OOD inspects overnight bags at the quarterdeck, makes sure guys aren’t takin’ more’n two packs a cigarettes into town—you know, stuff from the ship’s store or the PX.

Black-market rules and shit.”

“So who had the quarterdeck last night?”

“ETC Franklin; he’s the Boilers Division senior chief.”

“Okay. So then what happened?”

“So then maybe the BTC calls the base CDO office, talks to a chief he knows over there, tells him what’s gotta go down. CDO chief calls the Marines at the main gate. Franklin sends a guy inna ship’s truck, he drives out to the main gate, meets the gate gunny, points out our boy, and comes back to the ship. Jarboons make the grab, find the shit right where it’s s’posed to be, and our dickhead gets hauled off to the brig.”

“And now it’s the base legal officer’s problem and we’re done with it.”

“And Marcowitz goes down, don’t forget.”

Brian nodded slowly. He had figured it would be something like that. He flicked his own ash off over the lifelines into the darkness under the bow. A swarm of seagulls was screeing and squawking over a dumpster on the pier as the mess cooks carried out the evening meal’s garbage.

“And I don’t suppose that Chief Franklin did all this on his own, did he?”

The boatswain stared out over the row of metal warehouses cooling in the early darkness. Farther down the pier a yard crane rumbled down the tracks, escorted by two shipyard workers, its warning bells making a racket.

The crowd of sailors going on liberty parted on either side of the yard crane like a stream around a rock.

“I ain’t sure how much I kin say, boss. I mean, you’re my department head an’ all, but—”

“I think I understand, Boats. There’s an inside operation going down and you don’t know if I’m on the inside yet. Right?”

“Yeah, well, something’ like that. I don’t wanna—”

“Don’t sweat it. The XO and I had a little talk last night in the club.

I’m guess I’m still sorting out how I’m going to play it, and I think he’s waiting to see how I’m going to come down. My problem is that I still want to see it done regulation Navy. The XO obviously thinks his way, your inside operation, is the only way to go. He explained it a little bit last night.”

“We do it regulation, mosta them dopers get off and we end up fuckin’ ourselves.”

“Yeah, I know those arguments. But by the same token, your way, the Hood way, most of the dopers stay on board and someday they may fuck us because they’ll be on the missile console or in the mount or in the fire room at a critical moment, and they’re still just potheads with oatmeal for brains.”

“Yes, sir, I hear that,” the chief said. He gave Brian a speculative look around his cigar. “You tell the XO that?”

“No. I was too drunk and too tired. But mostly drunk.

I’ve never been much of a boozer.”

The chief chuckled. “Me, neither, but it don’t stop me none.”

Brian smiled and flipped the remains of his cigar into the harbor.

“Look, Chief,” he said. “I’m not going to screw up the works here, okay?

I don’t approve, because I think the regulation Navy way is always the best way to go. You know what they say about every Navy regulation being drafted in the blood of someone’s mistake at one time or another. If the insiders are worried that I’m going to blow the whistle, forget it. But if
I find another guy doing dope, like Marcowitz, I’m going to write him up—by the book. What happens after that is a command decision, even if it’s like what happened to Marcowitz.”p>

“I hear that,” the chief said.

“Sounds fair enough to me.” He looked down at his watch. “I guess I gotta go get ready for eight o’clock reports, boss. I’ll see ya on the quarterdeck.”

“Okay .Boats.”

Brian watched the chief shamble down the sloping steel deck of the forecastle and disappear into the starboard-side breaks. He poured the cold remnants of his coffee over the side and listened to it dribble into the water twenty-five feet below. The night air settled over him like a wet blanket; the temperature had come down only grudgingly into the low nineties out of respect for nightfall. Brian wondered whether he had done the right thing. Whatever he told the chief would probably get back to the exec. That was okay. The exec would probably be relieved he was not going to rock the boat by talking to any outsiders.

On the other hand, Brian desperately wanted to be on the inside himself.

Every ship was the same: There was always a small group of officers and chiefs who actually ran things. Sometimes this group coincided with the formal chain of command; sometimes it did not. Here in Hood, when it came to the drug problem, the chain seemed to run directly from the exec to some of the chiefs, with the tacit acceptance of at least two department heads, Austin and Benedetti. But right now, he, Brian, was the wild card. So far, he was not included. He figured it was not that he was excluded so much as not yet trusted enough to be let into the real power structure.

In a sense, what happened to Marcowitz was probably a test of sorts.

They knew he would figure it out, and now they would wait to see what he would do or not do. Well, he had just given his answer.

And, hell, maybe they were right. Marcowitz was a doper, no doubt about that. He would now be court martialed, but it would be a base court-martial, a base drug incident, not a Hood drug incident. And, in a backhanded way, their way achieved his own objective, which was to purge the doper from the ship before he could put the ship in harm’s way.

Brian was increasingly worried about the prospect of going in harm’s way. The old WESTPAC hands had been coming out here to Vietnam and the Gulf for so long that, to most of them, anything that happened was routine. To Brian’s uninitiated way of thinking, what the Migs had been doing was immensely threatening, but the WESTPAC mystique seemed to require that everyone be nonchalant about it. If Soviet Migs had run a feint like that against Sixth Fleet ships in the Mediterranean, they would have risked starting World Warlll.

He stared out over the harbor again. The channel buoys were winking and blinking, casting flickers of red and green light on the still black waters of the harbor.

Over on Grande Island, the flare of a barbecue fire shone through the palms as one of the ships held a ship’s picnic on the Special Services recreation beach. What he could not figure out was where the captain was in all of this.

The exec seemed to be firmly in charge of the doper retribution program and every other aspect of discipline.

Well, on one level, that was normal: Supervision of good order and discipline was the XO’s job.

But the captain seemed to be the man who wasn’t there. He was rarely seen out of his cabin, and Brian had had very little contact with him except up in Combat. In his last department head’s job in Decatur, he had seen as much if not more of the captain than the exec. Maybe it had to do with Hood’s being a cruiser-sized “frigate”

with some four hundred people aboard. Twenty-six officers in the wardroom, not counting the four helo pilots, instead of the fourteen in Decatur. In the destroyer, the captain took his meals with the officers and was all over the ship throughout the day. Here, the captain lived in splendid isolation in his cabin, had his own private mess, and seemed to confine his excursions to Combat and occasionally the bridge. And, come to think of it, Brian had not seen the captain since the ship landed.

Benedetti thought that the CO did not believe that there even was a drug scene aboard the ship. And Brian’s brief discussion with the captain about the Marcowitz incident in Combat seemed to prove that the exec was screening the Old Man from even hearing about drug incidents. Or else the captain was a very good actor.

And then there was his personal appearance: Was there something physically wrong with him? Brian thought back to the times he had seen him during the first line period. He never did look particularly well, certainly not when compared with the hale and hearty exec. Okay, in comparison with the rest of the officers and crew, Captain Huntington was an old man, but there were a couple of times when the captain had looked … well, almost drugged. Brian’s eyes widened as he tried to get his mental arms around that notion, but then the 1MC announced eight o’clock reports. He headed aft for the routine evening in-port ritual of eight o’clock reports, held on the quarterdeck, where the Duty Department officers reported to the CDO that then-spaces were all secure for the night.

After eight o’clock reports, Brian made a tour of the ship from bow to stern, checking to see that the spaces were indeed secure for the night.

He would take another tour around 2300 before securing himself for the night.