The Edge of Honor

by P. T. Deutermann

  Rocky snorted. “Oh yeah? We? You got a Marine battalion in your pocket or something? Just what the fuck you suggest we do about a guy who chases trucks and bites their back tires off for fun, hunh? That fucking Injun goes on the warpath after guys like Gallagher, that’s not my fuckin’ problem; that’s their nightmare, shipmate.”

  Garlic shook his head impatiently. “Yer not thinkin’,” he said. “Other commands, guy gets caught, gets wrote up, gets busted, restricted, whatever, he’d say he brought the shit with him. On here, guy gets terrorized ‘cause the fuckin’ Injun comes around to lift his hair, he might say who he really got the shit from, you readin’ me? That starts to be your fuckin’ problem, right there.”

  Rocky stared hard at the fat man. “If that monster ever figures put where most of your bank comes from,” he said, “it’s gonna be your problem, too, so don’t go getting all holy on me, Mr. Rockefeller.”

  Garlic returned the hard look. “Only way he’ll find that out is if you or Bullet tell him, and I figger he’ll be tearin’ your arms off right about then, so I ain’t exactly worried about it. Ain’t nobody made no connections between the bank and the dope, so if he’s on the rag about dope, he ain’t gonna come after me.”

  They both stared at the deck for a minute as they considered the potential wrinkles. Each realized that

  Rockheart and Bullet had the same lock on Garlic that they had on each other, so finger-pointing was a waste of time. Finally, Garlic pulled out a dirty handkerchief and blew his nose.

  “Shit,” he grumbled. “This fuckin’ AC gives me a cold every time I come out to WESTPAC. Look, this is all bullshit. Everybody knows Jackson is a fuckin’ nut.

  Stays up all night, sneakin’ around like some kinda hound dog; nobody takes him seriously. What the fuck you getting’ all spooked for?”

  Rocky sampled the coffee and made a face. He checked out the two mess cooks and then waited while a couple of snipes walked by on their way to one of the main holes before replying.

  “It’s not really Jackson. It’s the combination of Jackson and Godzilla.

  What it might mean is that the command is thinking about coming down on the dope scene.

  Like I’ve seen Jackson talking to the new department head, Holcomb.

  Martinez works for Holcomb, and they’ve been buddy-buddy lately. And Holcomb’s East Coast Navy; I hear he’s making noises about tightening up on guys who get caught with dope. Originally, I thought the new guy was okay, but now …”

  Garlic shook his head. “That ain’t what I’m hearin’.

  This Old Man don’t believe there is any such thing as drugs. And even if he did, this is his last cruise; he don’t want to make no waves. He ain’t gonna start no fuckin’ doper purge right at the beginnin’ of a cruise. No way.

  Make the ship look bad, make him look bad. Get ahold of yerself. Forget about the khaki in this boat—they all just want to get by, just like the rest of us. And the WESTPAC guys’ll straighten out the new guy.”

  “Man, I hope you’re right. Look, I gotta roll.”

  Garlic cuffed him on the shoulder; Rocky tried not to stagger. Garlic was grinning again.

  “Hang in there, Rocky baby,” he said. “We got the whole cruise to get through. Just think about how rich we’re gonna be, we get back. And don’t sweat Jackson; he’s black: He ain’t gonna be lookin’ at the brothers to be runnin’ the system. We gotta, we can always offer up some dumb bastard once in a while, throw the fuckers a bone, give Jackson a drug bust and Louie Jesus somebody to squash. Feed the animals, man, they don’t go eatin’ on the keepers.”

  Rocky climbed down the ladder from the main deck passageway to the second deck level, being careful to lower the scuttle over his head as he went down. As duty master-at-arms, he was conducting his after-chow tour of the sounding-and-security route, a function that involved checking the compartments and hatches in the bowels of the ship to ensure they had been properly secured for the night. It was perfect cover for his real mission, which was to add to his cash stash in the starboard shaft-alley pump room down on the third deck. The first ladder led down into a small vestibule compartment, barely big enough for two men to stand side by side next to the hatch in the deck that led to the shaft alley itself. The vestibule was lighted with a steam-tight incandescent fixture, but there was nothing in it except electrical junction boxes, a fire-main branch rising from the pump room below, and the hatch to the shaft alley.

  Rocky stepped off the ladder at the bottom, turned around, leaned down, and spun the actuating wheel on the scuttle leading to the shaft-alley pump room. The round steel scuttle popped open with a faint hiss of air smelling of salt water and ozone. Reaching down through the hole, he found the light switch for the shaft alley and snapped it on, revealing a second stainless-steel ladder leading to a long, narrow compartment twelve feet below.

  The outboard bulkhead of the compartment was the ship’s hull, curving inward at the bottom and lined with steel racks in which lengths of angle iron and steel pipes were stored in a jumble of metal. Directly below the ladder was a cage that ran the full length of the compartment; within the cage was the starboard propeller shaft, a thirty-inch-diameter horizontal column of steel rotating silently on its pedestal line-shaft bearings mounted at the forward and after ends of the compartment. The shaft had been painted with red barber-pole stripes so that anyone coming near it could see if it was rolling or not.

  Rocky let himself down the final ladder, once again tripping the scuttle closed over his head before descending.

  He had every right to be in here if somebody was to question it, because he was required to inspect the space for possible flooding as part of his MAA tour. He climbed down the final rungs of the ladder and stepped out onto a small bridge over the line-shaft cage. Walking across the bridge, he dropped down onto the deck plates of the pump room, where number-four fire pump, a four-hundred-pound centrifugal pump driven by a sixty-horsepower electric motor, was mounted on the deck. The fire pump was also running, emitting a low roar from elderly bearings, supplying 125-psi seawater pressure to the ship’s damage-control fire mains. Its cooling seals dripped a steady trickle of salt water down into the bilges, and one of Rocky’s responsibilities as MAA was to see whether the sounding-and-security watchman had pumped the bilges down in the past two hours. Rocky knelt down on the deck plates and inspected the bilge area, shining his flashlight into the maze of steel pockets created by the confluence of the inward-curving ship’s hull and the support structures for the fire pump and the shaft bearings. There appeared to be a normal water level in the bilge. He then checked to make sure the eductor pump was running. The eductor was nothing more than a four-inch vacuum pipe that took a constant suction on the bilges to keep the water from rising and shorting out the fire pump’s motor.

  He snapped off the flashlight, looked up to make sure that the hatch was still closed, and walked over to an electrical junction box on the after bulkhead. The box had no cables coming to or from it, and a steel plate on the door was marked spare—no terminations. He inspected the top of the box with his finger to feel for the strip of Scotch tape across the crack. It was intact. Then he undid eight steel butterfly nuts and swung back the panel’s door, ripping the tape in the process. The box was three feet high, two feet across, and five inches in depth, with a heavy rubber gasket on its four edges to keep connections dry if the space ever flooded out.

  Flattened inside was a plastic bag filled with rags.

  Rocky pulled out the bag and fished in his pocket, extracting a tight roll of greenbacks. He found a loose rag in the bag, wrapped the roll in it, tied the corners in a knot, and stuffed it back into the bag. He hefted the bag.

  Not too bad, for the first line period. There was probably eight to ten thousand dollars hidden among the bundles of rags. He folded up the bag, pressed it back into the box, closed and secured the cover, stripped an inch of Scotch tape off his belt, and put it over the crack on the top.

  By the e
nd of the cruise, he expected to have six times that amount secreted in the junction box. Tax-free, untraceable green cash money.

  He checked around the pump room one more time to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. When he thought about where he was actually standing, well below the waterline, within about ten feet of the keel, it always gave him an eerie feeling. The shaft alley was hot and humid from the heat of the fire room next door and the loose water in the bilges, and there was that huge propeller shaft rolling silently through it in its wire cage. Despite the heat, he shivered. He checked the box again, then began the climb back to the second deck, dogging down hatches and securing lights on the way up. His shirt was damp with perspiration by the time he lifted his head through the hatch into the second deck passageway. As he was dogging down the final hatch, he noticed that one of the Deck Division’s prime weirdos, Seaman Coltrane, was loitering in the passageway about ten feet away.

  Coltrane saw Rocky and grinned at him. Rocky scowled back at Coltrane, who promptly scampered down the passageway. Rocky completed dogging down the hatch, nodding to Ensign Folsom as he walked by. Radarman First Class Rockheart, the ever-conscientious MAA, making his duly appointed rounds.

  ‘if Brian sat bolt upright in his rack as the ship’s announcing system blared out an urgent call:

  “SAR! SAR! SAR! SET THE HELD DETAIL FOR EMERGENCY LAUNCH OF BIG MOTHER FIVE THREE. I SAY AGAIN, SAR! SAR! SAR! SET THE HELO DETAIL FOR EMERGENCY LAUNCH OF BIG MOTHER FIVE-THREE. ALL HANDS NOT INVOLVED IN FLIGHT OPERATIONS STAND CLEAR OF THE FLIGHT-DECK AREA.”

  Brian snapped on his bunk light and looked at his watch. It was 2240. He had gone to bed at 2030 in attempt to get some sleep before taking the midwatch in his six on, six off rotation with Austin in Combat. He shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs, as the 1MC repeated the whole announcement. He had been dreaming about Maddy. He felt the ship lean into the beginning of a turn, the hull trembling as she came up in speed. He could not remember whether he had a role in the launch of the SAR helo. Jack Folsom, the first lieutenant, would already be on his way back to the flight deck to act as the landing signals officer. Brian remembered the drill: Each night the search-and-rescue (SAR) helo was preflighted and then tied down on the flight deck. Depending on the state of readiness required, the helo crew, two pilots and two crewmen, might be anywhere from asleep in the aircraft to belowdecks in their bunks. A regular launch took up to forty-five minutes to walk through all the inspections and preflight procedures. An emergency daytime launch could get off in less than five minutes; at night, it took a few minutes more.

  He looked at his watch again, trying to focus on the radium dial, and decided to get up and go see what this was about. The ship lurched again as she bent into another turn, the deck thrumming now as the sixteen16?

  foot-diameter propellers bit in. He pulled on his khaki trousers and shirt and slipped into a pair of black Wellington-style sea boots, grabbed a foul-weather jacket and his red-lens flashlight, and headed up to Combat.

  As he came through the door, he found a scene of barely controlled pandemonium. Austin was hunched over the SWIG console on one side, with the captain on the other. Fox Hudson was sitting SWIC. There were three air controllers standing around the AIC consoles in various states of uniform. He heard a radio circuit chattering in the overhead; it sounded like an air-control circuit. There was a general cross fire of comments and conversation going on at the watch stations and consoles in Combat.

  Hudson was talking on Air Force Green to the staff down on Yankee Station, giving them a situation report. The surface watch team was busily rigging phones for the helo-control circuit and setting up a SAR box on the plotter. In D and D, the officers were concentrating on the SWIC scope, which had been scaled down to cover a sixty-mile area to the immediate west.

  “What’s the deal?” Brian asked one of the AICs, Monty Montana, who, like himself, had come up to Combat when the word was passed for night SAR.

  “Air Force F-Four got shot up on a photoflash run over the Red River Valley. Recce bird, camera pod, no ordnance. They’re trying to make it out over the Gulf so we can get ‘em. Say they’re on fire. That’s him on the scope there, ‘bout fifty miles northwest, just comin’ feet-wet.”

  At that moment, Austin noticed that Holcomb was in Combat.

  “Mr. Holcomb,” he said, “you’re supposed to be getting your beauty rest so you can relieve me promptly at twenty-threeforty-five.”

  “One ME woke me up; I decided to come see what’s happening.”

  “I think we can manage, thank you. You’ll have to get used to leaving emergencies up to the evaluator on watch.”

  The captain turned around and nodded. In the garish scope light, Brian noticed that he looked much older, with dark circles under his eyes and the lines in his face accentuated by the harsh scope light. Brian saw that the captain had pulled on a pair of khaki trousers and an aviator’s leather flight jacket but not a shirt. He had bedroom slippers on instead of shoes or boots.

  “Brian,” he said, “Count’s right; it’s not like a destroyer where everybody turns out when there’s a fire bell in the night. But if you want to watch, you ought to go back to director one. A night launch is quite an evolution.”

  “Aye, aye, sir, I think I will. Didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean that at all,” replied the captain. “It’s just that if both my principal evaluators jump out of bed every time something happens at night, I’ll have two zombies up here. Short of GQ, you let the other guy do it if you’re off watch. But now that you’re up, go back and take a look.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.” Brian left Combat. As he dropped down two ladders to the wardroom level, the 1MC came on again.

  “AIRCRAFT TYPE IS AIR FORCE FOX FOUR; TWO SOULS ON BOARD; BEARING IS TWO NINER-TWO DEGREES MAGNETIC; RANGE, FIVE-SEVEN MILES, DESCENDING, INBOUND TO RED CROWN. EJECTION IS IMMINENT.

  FLIGHT DECK IS PREPARING FOR EMERGENCY LAUNCH OF BIG MOTHER FIVE-THREE.

  THE CLEMENTINE HELO WILL NOT, I REPEAT, NOT LAUNCH. LAUNCH WINDS WILL BE THREE TWO-ZERO RELATIVE AT THREE-ZERO KNOTS.

  PITCH AND ROLL IS ZERO-ZERO. ALTIMETER IS TWO-NINER-DECIMAL-NINER-FIVE.”

  Brian realized that the helo pilots were getting their launch brief via the 1MC rather than taking the time to come to Combat.

  He let himself out onto the weather deck through the port breaks passageway hatch. He stopped immediately upon stepping out on deck as the hatch closed behind him with a bang in the stiff breeze. For a moment, he was totally blind. He could hear the rush of the sea along the ship’s sides and the whistle of the wind through the lifelines, but he could see nothing. He stood there, waiting for his eyes to develop some peripheral vision. Then he remembered his red flashlight, swore, pulled it out, and illuminated the deck walkway leading back to the after end of the ship. He had emerged on the same level as the flight deck but would have to climb two levels up to reach the gallery on top of the helo hangar overlooking the flight deck. He headed aft along the port side, walking through the midship replenishment station and the boat decks. As he made his way farther aft, he began to see the red glow of the flight-deck lights looming in the darkness and hear the sounds of the big SH-3 helicopter’s jet engines turning up. When he reached the port-side three-inch gun, he turned and began climbing a long vertical ladder that led to the top of the helo hangar. The wind rose in velocity as if trying to strip him off the flimsy aluminum ladder, which rattled with vibrations coming from the propellers.

  Letting himself through the safety chains hung across the top of the ladder, he walked aft across the roof of the hangar and found himself with a bird’s-eye view of the flight deck below. With a start, he realized that he was also almost face-to-face with the whirling disk of the SH3’s rotor blades below and in front of him. Standing in the port-quarter corner of the lifelines surrounding the top of the hangar was Jack Folsom, his arms outstretched like a Christos, with red-colored light wands in each hand. Next to F
olsom was a huge dark figure who had to be the chief boatswain. Folsom looked like a spaceman in the glow of the flight-deck lights. He had on a cranial helmet and full-face shield similar to the ones being worn by the helo crew, which protected his face and ears from the clattering roar of the helicopter below. The helmet headset also contained the LSO communications, a sound-powered phone circuit in one ear and the land launch radio circuit in the other.

  Brian found himself holding his own fingers in his ears as he watched, his face buffeted by the wind coming over the bow and the occasional hot vortex of jet exhaust whipping up off the flight deck. Folsom and the chief were not aware of his presence in the darkness behind them as they concentrated on the launch.

  On the flight deck below, firefighting crews crouched behind their hoses and foam nozzles on either side of the hangar, prepared for the worst. They were dressed out in steel helmets, heavy asbestos gauntlets, and goggles.

  Right at the front of the port-side crew was the hot-suit man, dressed in an asbestos suit coated with highly reflective aluminum and carrying an access ax. If the helo caught fire on deck, it was his job to rush into the fireball and hack his way into the cockpit to rescue the pilots.

  Brian waited while the helicopter turned up at full rpm, chained down to the deck with tie-downs and chocks in place, as the pilots completed an abbreviated prelaunch checklist. The aircraft’s navigation lights glowed along its fuselage and the bank of red lights shining down on the flight deck from the top of the hangar were reflected in the helo’s windshield like the multiple red facets on the eyes of some giant insect. An aircrewman crouched under each wheel mount; each wore a cranial set and held on to the chains that secured the wheels, his dungarees whipping in the down blast from the rotors.

  Brian felt the ship steady up on the flight course, which was designed to put a thirty-knot wind diagonally over the flight deck from port to starboard, into which the helicopter could lift without forward motion.