Home Goes The Warrior

by Jeff Noonan

  The captain swiveled to look toward Lee and Tim. “Do you agree with Mr. Carvell’s assessment of King?”

  Lee just nodded.

  Tim spoke up, “Yes sir. We have been saying that the ship has problems for a while. It’s a long way behind schedule.”

  Captain Jones took one of his characteristic long pauses, then he turned back to Lee and Tim. “I would like for your organization to take the lead on resolving this. Look into the ship’s status, see what you can do to get some contractor support on scene, and give me a revised schedule for the ship. Can do?” The answer came from both Lee and Tim. “Yes sir!”

  The captain turned back to Askew and Carvell. There was no hesitation this time. “You’re damned right the shop is going to pay for the contractors. There is absolutely no excuse for being this far behind schedule and hiding it. Mr. Carvell, I will be waiting to see what disciplinary actions are taken on this.” His voice had dropped several octaves. For once, Captain Jones was pissed.

  The meeting moved on to other topics and gradually came to an end. When it was over, Captain Jones dismissed the civilians in the group and asked the Navy people in the room to stay seated. The civilians slowly filed out. Lee noticed that he was getting some unsettling looks from Vince Askew. He ignored them.

  Once the civilians were out of the room, Captain Jones visibly relaxed. He turned to Lee and asked, “Did you have anything to do with the shop’s change of attitude about the King?” He was grinning widely. The attention of the other captains in the room were suddenly riveted on Lee.

  He smiled and was still thinking about his response when Tim blurted out the answer, “Hell yes, he did. He collared them before the meeting and told Vince that either he confessed or Lee would blow the whistle on him! Ed Carvell took the heat, but it was Vince that was lying. I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when Ed gets him back to their building.” Tim was almost comical in his eagerness to tell what had transpired. He’d been battling with the grizzled shop head over this for a while, as he later told Lee, and he was ecstatic that someone had finally gotten the truth out.

  Unexpectedly, the four captains broke into laughter. Two of the three who hadn’t yet met Lee stood and came to where Lee was seated to shake his hand, giving him a very hearty “Welcome Aboard.” The other captain, a Navy supply corps officer, just smiled and nodded.

  The remainder of the meeting was devoted to arranging for Lee to get his “introductory tours” of the various shipyard organizations. Starting the following Monday, he was to spend time in the planning department, followed by the supply department, and then the production department. Tim tried to protest, telling everyone that this indoctrination wasn’t needed, but the captain blithely overruled his objections. With the arrangements made, the meeting concluded.

  Lee listened with half an ear to Tim on the way back to their office. He suddenly realized that his main mission was now starting. The combat systems work that he’d been doing was only a cover for his real purpose here. Now it was time for the real work, the work he was dreading.

  Today was just Tuesday, he reflected. He had the rest of this week to do some snooping around and to get settled in his combat systems role. Then next Monday he would start his “indoctrination.” This was going to be an experience. His mind wandered as he asked himself for the thousandth time, Is there really major theft in progress here? Or is it just incompetent shipyard work?

  Nobody knows for sure, but, it’s my job to find out and it’s finally time to get started.

  CHAPTER NINE - CONUNDRUMS

  ack in the BOQ that evening, Lee got out the police reports the FBI had given him regarding the three dead shipyard workers. Again he studied them, looking for any detail that might give him a clue as to what had happened to these people. He decided to take a hard look tomorrow at the drydock where the unfortunate shipyard planner, Joseph Ziterowski, had met his end. Two of the three dead men, Ziterowski and the guy who’d been shot in South Philly, Bernie Shapiro, had worked in the shipyard’s planning department. It was probably a good place to start the indoctrination, he thought to himself. But before he began, he wanted to do some digging on those two deaths.

  Joe Ziterowski had, according to the report, stumbled and fallen into Drydock #4 while he was walking along its southwestern corner. He had fallen to the concrete floor of the dock. According to the report, the fall had totally maimed his body, breaking his legs and one arm. It had also crushed his skull. The cause of death was listed as “massive head and body trauma due to falling a large distance”. Lee had to smile at the wording. That’s a real understatement. He resolved to go take a good look at the southwestern corner of Drydock #4 tomorrow morning.

  But reality intruded on that plan. When he arrived at work the following morning, he was greeted by a huge stack of paperwork. Most of it was routine, and he disposed of it rapidly. But then, just when he thought he was reaching the bottom of the stack, he found himself holding the long DOD questionnaire that was required for a security clearance. Puzzled, he called Jane to his office. “Jane, I have a DOD Secret clearance. Why is this paperwork on my desk?”

  She smiled with the infuriatingly complacent wisdom of secretaries everywhere. “Sorry, Lieutenant. You have to be cleared to Top Secret with a crypto endorsement, to do the job that you have now. So you need to get busy.” She thought this was funny and she laughed at the surprise on his face.

  “Why, Jane? What is there in this place that would require a clearance at such a high level?”

  “I don’t know the details. You’ll have to ask Thomas Sloan. He manages the security vault here as part of his job, and he knows why all this stuff is needed. I’m just the messenger.” With that she left the room.

  Lee thought about this for a minute. It just didn’t make sense that the shipyard would require such a clearance level. Their job was to repair and overhaul hardware. A crypto-level clearance was needed normally for access to cryptographic, coded, super-secret radio communications on operational ships, primarily used in time of war. Even aboard ship, only a very few carefully selected people carried such a clearance. Lee just didn’t understand this.

  He remembered meeting Thomas Sloan the other day. Thomas was a bland, chubby man in his early forties who was in charge of the office’s electronics division. Lee turned to his phone and called the number listed there for that division. Sloan answered immediately.

  “Thomas, can you come up to the front office? I need to get smarter on something and I hear you’re the man that can help me.”

  “Certainly. Be right there.” Lee remembered the division head’s friendly voice when he heard it. Thomas had struck him as a very eager, knowledgeable, engineer when they had been introduced.

  Sloan was soon standing in his doorway, and Lee invited him in, gesturing to a seat. He came in, still wearing the big smile that Lee remembered.

  “Thomas, I’m trying to figure out why I need a Top Secret-crypto security clearance here. Jane tells me that you’re the local expert on this stuff. Can you explain it to me?”

  “Sure, Lieutenant. We work on the crypto gear as part of the overhauls, so we have to be cleared. Besides that, we work on the IFF6 and the ECM7 systems and things like that. So we have to be cleared appropriately.” He paused and looked at Lee to see if he was satisfied with this explanation.

  Lee thought for a moment before answering. “Yeah. But all of that hardware is classified Secret, not Top-Secret. Only the operational frequencies and the coding of the units are classified higher than the Secret level. I still don’t understand why a shipyard would need this stuff.”

  It seemed to Lee that Sloan’s smile had become very strained. Lee wondered if he was in danger of looking like an amateur to this man. After all, Lee’s specialty was missile systems, not this electronic warfare stuff. But he held his gaze on Thomas, deciding that, even if he was asking a stupid question, he still wanted to know the answer. Sloan’s eyes dropped away, and his smile faded.

  “We
ll, Lieutenant, we do take these ships out on sea trials. When we do, we have to operate the systems to check them out. If we have the wrong frequencies or codes emitting from the systems, we could have problem with other Navy ships or military aircraft while we are at sea. So we have to keep the information available to use at sea.”

  Lee nodded, apparently satisfied with this answer. “Okay, I guess I have to fill out all of this paperwork, then. Thanks, Thomas.” He smiled at the engineer who rose to leave. Lee stopped him then with another question. “Do you have any one who is responsible for keeping all of this classified paperwork safe?”

  “Yes sir! We have a lady whose full-time job is the maintenance of our security safe. She could show you around if you would like to see that. Her name is Sheila Novak. I can send her up to see you, if you like.” Sloan’s big smile had returned.

  “No, not now, Thomas. I’ll get to that soon, but not right now. Thank you.”

  Sloan waved as he departed.

  Lee sat back in his big desk chair. He’d appeared to accept Sloan’s explanation for the need for the clearances along with the operational codes and frequencies, but it still bothered him. He didn’t remember ever having this kind of a requirement, or this level of classified information, when he had taken ships in Maine out for sea trials. The more he thought about it, the less he liked it. The ships in Philadelphia all had some Navy personnel aboard. If they needed operational codes or frequencies, the crew would take care of that. Not the shipyard. Something smelled bad about this. But Thomas Sloan was the picture of an ambitious, eager engineer who was trying to do a technically difficult job. He didn’t look like there was an ounce of guile in him.

  Abruptly, Lee straightened his chair and reached for a pen. Dammit, Mr. Raines. Don’t get distracted here. Your job is to find out who is stealing money from the shipyard, if anybody really is. It’s not to get some overzealous yardbird in trouble. With that, he shook his head and proceeded to fill out the long security forms.

  It was mid-afternoon before he was able to get out of the office. Putting his hard hat on, he took a copy of the shipyard map, told Jane that he was going to try to find his way around the shipyard, and left. The office had an electric golf cart for his use, but he decided to walk. He could see more that way.

  He wandered between buildings for quite a while, making a point of stopping often to consult the shipyard map, particularly when people were in the area. He headed out paralleling the Delaware River as he regularly stopped to look at buildings, ships, facilities, and drydocks.

  Finally he arrived at his destination, Drydock #4. He walked around the end of the dock so he was standing in the southwest corner, about where the report had placed Ziterowski on that fateful day. Approaching the edge of the dock, he grabbed the iron pipe railing that encircled the top of the dock and leaned over to get a look into the abyss below him. But he couldn’t see directly down the drydock.

  The pipe safety railing kept him back about eighteen inches from the lip, and, even when he leaned over to look down, all he could see directly below him was the walkway used by workers in flooding and then pumping out the drydock. The walkway jutted out for at least five feet into the dock. The drydock side appeared smooth from the edge of the walkway down to the drydock floor. The walkway’s edge was protected by a chain safety fence that was about three feet tall.

  For the second time that day, Lee’s understanding failed him. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t see how anyone could possibly fall from where he was standing to the bottom of the dock. First, a person would have to fall over the pipe safety railing around the dock. It was about three feet tall. Then, if the person made it over the pipe, his fall would be stopped by the walkway. It would be impossible to fall from here and get past that walkway. Looking at the situation, he had the thought that there was only one possible way that he, in as good of shape as he was in, could possibly have done what Ziterowski had apparently done. He would have had to climb over the pipe and then dive as far as he possibly could in order to clear the walkway. That would be a Herculean effort, from a flat-footed start on the other side of the pipe straight out at least five feet, clearing the chain safety guard around the walkway. I could probably have done that in my best high school track days, but it would be tough now. The police report had described Ziterowski as being forty-three years old, five and a half feet tall, and about one hundred and fifty pounds. This just didn’t compute. Once again, something was wrong. But why would the base police decide that he’d fallen?

  Lee spent a full hour going over the drydock. He found his way to the walkway, then down to the drydock floor. He soon discovered a clean place where someone had obviously washed down the concrete. It was even farther from the drydock wall than he had anticipated. Pieces of yellow crime scene tape were still around the area, but the blood and signs of tragedy had been washed away. Looking up, he found the spot where the man must have gone over the side, as well as the point where he would have had to pass the walkway. Then he went back to both places, looking for clues. But there was nothing to find.

  Somehow a small, middle-aged, man had launched himself, from a standing position, horizontally for about eight feet in order to land where he did. It wasn’t impossible, but it was certainly improbable. The only possible way that it could have happened would have required the man to take a running vault, using the pipe railing as a vaulting point to launch himself into the space over the dock. That would require superior athletic ability and a total dedication to the effort. It just didn’t add up. But Lee reminded himself to check and see if Ziterowski had been an athlete.

  Lee was so engrossed in the scene and its puzzle that he failed to notice the two yard workers approach him. “Yo, mister. Is there something that you need here?” The voice spun him around and he found himself face-to-face with a huge, hard-faced shipyard worker. The color of his hard hat identified him as a shipyard rigger. Recovering as fast as he could, Lee worked up a smile and answered the man.

  “No, just learning my way around the yard. I’d heard about the guy that fell somewhere around here, so I was curious, that’s all.”

  The big man just looked at him, obviously disdainful of Lee’s answer. “Mister, it’s dangerous around these drydocks. You could easily get killed here. I saw you leaning on this railing to look over. What the hell would you have done if it had given way?”

  He had a point and Lee couldn’t think of a good reply, so he just nodded with a rueful look on his face.

  “You’re right. I need to get my stuff together. Thanks for your concern.”

  Unexpectedly, the bigger man smiled. “Is okay. Just be careful, friend.” He slapped Lee on the shoulder and went on his way, followed by his silent companion. Lee watched them go, lost in thought.

  Lee walked back to the office, still thinking about his day and its revelations. When he reached the office, he found that Jane and most of the civilians had gone home. Tim greeted him from the depths of his office, a cubbyhole across the reception area from Lee’s office. They talked for a moment and decided to call it a day.

  Back at the BOQ, Lee discovered that he had a message waiting at the reception desk. Maggie had called earlier and wanted him to call back. When he got to his room, he threw his jacket and hat on a table and picked up the phone.

  She answered immediately. “Hey big guy, I’ve got news! I’m coming to Philly! I put in an application on Monday and called my detailer. My transfer is already approved. Apparently they have trouble getting people to go there, so they grabbed me before I could change my mind.” She was so excited that the words stumbled over each other as she tried to say everything at once.

  Lee started laughing. “Whoa, beautiful lady! Slow down and tell me everything.”

  She paused then, giggling a little at herself. Then she went on to tell Lee that she would be able to leave in about two weeks. She had to report to the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, just up Broad Street from the shipyard, in about a month. The exact date
s were still being negotiated.

  By the time she finished describing this turn of events, Lee was as excited as she was. He hadn’t realized how much he missed her. It had been wonderful having someone he could talk to and share his life with. That cross-country trip had left him wanting more, and he was smart enough to know it. He thought to himself that the two of them were like excited children on the phone. But he just didn’t care.

  But then she surprised him. “Sweetheart, the bad news is that I have to stay there for a three-year tour. So you’d better be planning on sticking around Philly.” He thought about this for a moment, a moment that obviously bothered her.

  “Lee, is this a problem? If it is, I may be able to cancel the orders. But I have to do it right away if I’m going to.”

  That woke Lee from his thoughts. “No. No problem. It just startled me. I hadn’t thought about sticking around here. But there isn’t any real reason not to. I was just thinking ahead. If we’re staying here for that long, we’ll need to find a place to live. This BOQ is old and substandard. We can find a lot nicer place out on the economy. I’ll do some looking around this weekend.”

  “Lee, are you sure? I know that you have some old memories that may haunt you - I mean, us. Are you positive that you want to live there for that long?”

  “Maggie, my love, I would live in hell itself if I could live there with you. Besides, those are old memories and I need to put them to sleep. I’ve carried that baggage around for far too long.” He paused for a moment, then continued, “But I am not going back to my family’s old home and I’m staying far away from Tony Bruno. I’m going to look around and find us a nice little house in one of the suburbs around here. Nothing with any history attached to it.”