The Edge of Honor

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I guess what I wanted to say is don’t take this as too big a deal. The captain’s not really mad. And he’s not one to stay mad even when he does get pissed off, so don’t sweat that angle.”

  Brian was not worried about the captain being mad at him. He was more worried about the captain’s apparent indifference to the whole incident.

  Not indifference, exactly; there was something else—distracted, maybe that was the word. The exec was still talking.

  “Let me tell you that you’re doing all right for someone who’s brand-new to this combat system and the whole Red Crown business. What we’ve got to focus on now is what the hell the North Vietnamese are up to, sending Migs feet-wet.”

  They talked for several minutes about the implications of the sudden change in the North Vietnamese air tactics and the fact that there would be some high-level interest in what had happened tonight, and probably some interesting message traffic on the subject. Brian had the sense that the exec sincerely was trying to take the sting out of the session in the captain’s cabin, especially when he recounted some of the times he had clutched up when he had been an Operations officer. When the conversation dwindled, Brian realized that the fence-mending was over and he was supposed to get back on watch.

  “Appreciate the words, XO. I guess I better get back in there. It was a good lesson in the consequences of doing nothing.”

  The exec laughed. “Consequences? You ever hear the one about the ninety-year-old lady who called the cops, told ‘em she’d just pushed her ninety-one-year-old husband of sixty-five years out a second-story window? The cops get there, ask what the hell, both of ‘em ninety something, married sixty-five years, why had she done such a thing. She said he’d done gone and got a younger girlfriend, and she figured, if he could fuck, he could probably fly. Hang m there, Brian. Remember, it all counts on twenty.”

  “Yes, sir.” Brian laughed.

  Brian returned to Combat and resumed the watch. A disgruntled-looking electrician was working under the evaluator’s table on the bat phone’s wiring, with a very tall, thin black first class supervising. Garuda was fixing coffee and a cigarette at the same time, the wire on his headset stretched across D and D to the coffeepot.

  “All quiet on the western front?”

  “Yowsir, boss. No more Miggies; Wager Bird is off station and the link is quiet.”

  “Right. I got it.”

  “You got it.”

  Garuda made the appropriate announcement in Combat and came back to his chair and settled in. The electricians left to get some more buzzer relays. Brian sat in his evaluator’s chair at the table next to SWIC and rubbed his face. He would normally have had another cup of coffee, but after the evening’s events, he was not sleepy. He looked at his watch.

  Austin would be up in ninety minutes to relieve him.

  “Go get absolution out there with the XO?” Garuda asked without looking at him.

  “Yeah, sort of. A little damage control after the session in the CD’s cabin. But you know, there was something weird about all that.”

  “In the Old Man’s cabin?”

  “Yeah. You notice it? Like who was in charge down there? It sure as hell wasn’t the captain.”

  Garuda was silent for a minute. “Well,” he said, “you gotta realize, Cap’n Huntington’s almost sixty years old.

  Woke up out of sound sleep with someone telling him his ship nearly got waxed by a gaggle of Migs. Mess with your mind, too.”

  Brian glanced over at Garuda, but the warrant was focusing on his scope, his empty scope.

  “Tell me about the CO, Garuda.”

  Garuda finished his cigarette and fired up a replacement.

  “Huntington came in back in 1940, right before the big one let go. Saw action in the Pacific mostly, on a cruiser that went down at Savo in ‘42, then in a tin can with Arleigh Burke’s Eager Beavers, then in another tin can that was beat to shit by the kamikazes off Okinawa.

  That’s where he got that Navy Cross.”

  “Something about a bomb, as I recall.”

  “Yes, sir. Jap Betty came in low over the bridge and dumped a bomb through the pilothouse and into CIC before impaling itself on the mast.

  CO was killed, buncha other people tore up pretty good, and everybody knocked flat on their asses on the bridge. This bomb, apparently it was just sitting there in all the wreckage of the CIC, but there was some kinda fuze burning on it. Huntington had been up on Sky One—you know, gun control in the old days—and had actually fallen through the overhead of CIC into Combat. And there was this fuckin’ bomb and all these wounded and burned guys just staring at it. So he climbs over all the busted metal and tries to move the bomb. No go—three hundred and fifty pounds. So he pulls out a knife and unscrews the fuze cap. Pulls the fucking thing out, still sputterin’ and smokin’, and throws it over the side. End of story. Nobody could believe he did that. Got him the Navy Cross.”

  “I guess you fall through the roof and practically land on a smoking bomb, you’d have little left to lose in trying to defuse it. But—”

  “Fuckin’-a, but. I’m not sure how steady my hands woulda been, pickin’ a fuze on a three-hundredand-fifty pounder with my bosun knife. A smoking fuze, to boot.”

  “After that?”

  “Kicked around the tin-can force for a coupla years after Willy Willy Twice, then got out. Went to school, worked in Civpac, didn’t like it, came back in when Korea broke, and came up the line in tin cans and cruiser duty. Was XO in the cruiser St. Paul, before they put her out a coupla years back, and then got Hood. Been here going on two years.

  Nicest four-striper in the whole world. Super wife—you’ve met her. She takes care of the wardroom wives like he takes care of us. Really likes people, and they—hell, we—all respond to it.”

  Brian studied the SWIC scope absently for a few minutes and then asked the question that had been nagging at the back of his mind.

  “Any chance he’s sick?”

  Garuda gave him a guarded look. “Sick? How do you mean?”

  “I mean sick like in a heart condition or something.

  He just doesn’t look all that well. Tonight, he looked almost … well, almost drugged. You saw him.”

  Garuda shook his head emphatically. “Naw. I don’t think so. I think it’s just his age and nearly thirty years of kicking around the Nav. Some of those years pretty hard years, considering.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Brian yawned. “It’ll be nice to get off watch and sleep at night for a change,” he said.

  “Chief snipe coming off the watch bill again?”

  “I hope not, but if he is, Mr. Austin is welcome to the mids and the afternoons.”

  Brian eyed the oily black coffee in his cup, felt his stomach lurch, and set it back down on the evaluator table, wedging the cup between a three-ring binder and the night’s stack of messages. Hood was rolling slowly across a lumpy sea, the result of three days of sloppy weather.

  It was not enough to make people sick, but sufficient to be uncomfortable and to warrant care with coffee cups. Garuda, who was losing the battle to cut back on cigarettes, squirmed uncomfortably in his SWIC chair. At 0130, Brian was fighting the familiar stay-awake battle. His hopes for the watch bill had been dashed when Benedetti had done one more evaluator watch before being sucked back into the holes.

  Austin, who had the privilege of being the senior watch officer, had conveniently rigged it so that Brian ended up with the midwatches again.

  Brian even tried thinking about Maddy, but his eyes kept betraying him.

  His attempts to rouse up some of their better bedroom encounters kept ending in a longing just to cuddle up on the couch with her in front of a fireplace and going to—

  “SWIC, Track Supe, E-Two is RTB!”

  “SWIC, aye.”

  The SWIC screen was almost empty. The BARCAP were onstation, but the heavenly host, and now the duty E-2, had bagged it for the night
. The main air-search radars were degraded by fast-moving low clouds scudding through the darkness outside. The land smear of North Vietnam was fuzzy around the edges, partially obscured by the rainsqualls that were expending themselves against the coastal mountains.

  Brian looked again at his watch. Four and a half hours to go. He remained standing beside the evaluator’s desk, knowing that if he sat down, he’d be asleep in a minute.

  The rest of the watch standers in Combat were stepping through their own small routines of trying to stay awake: standing up in front of their chairs, rubbing their eyes, drinking the asphaltlike midwatch coffee, smoking yet another sour cigarette, reading a tech manual, or fooling with their console controls, each trying desperately to keep from tumbling over into his individual sleep trench.

  One more week, and then Long Beach relieves us. And then a couple of weeks in Subic, followed by a repair ship availability in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. And then back here. He groaned inwardly at the thought of another seven weeks onstation but quickly replaced that thought with speculation on the Subic visit. From everything he had heard, Subic and Olongapo City were something else. Even discounting as total BS half the stories about Olongapo, the riotous sailor town that crouched on the outskirts of the naval base, he still found it hard to believe what the old WESTPAC hands had been telling him.

  “SWIC, AIC, tanker inbound to BARCAP station for happy hour.”

  “SWIC, aye,” said Garuda. After the last Mig incursion, CTF 77 had changed the pattern, bringing the airborne tanker to the CAP on their patrol line rather than taking the CAP off-station. Now if something popped, they could theoretically break off the refueling evolution and be on it in a heartbeat. Brian looked over at the scope again and saw the lone symbol representing the tanker moving slowly across the screen toward the amber line of the BARCAP station. An A-6 with wing tanks strapped on instead of bombs. It would make a good practice target—which gave him an idea.

  “Garuda, have the AIC call that tanker and tell him we want to do a missile radar tracking drill with him. Let me know when he gives the okay.” He spoke softly, not wanting to alert the FCSC, Chief Correy, that he was going to start something.

  “SWIC, aye.” Garuda gave the instructions to the AIC on intercom. The AIC switched over to the tanker’s control freq and obtained the pilot’s permission to track him with missile fire-control radars. It was more than a formality: When the tracking beams found the A-6, all sorts of alarms would go off in the cockpit.

  “Tanker says do it to it,” announced the AJC.

  “SWIC, aye. We’ll need to go off the link when we do this, Mr. Holcomb.

  I gotta make him hostile before I can send the engage order. Computer won’t engage a friendly air.”

  “Rug. Go ahead. This won’t take long. I just want to see if they’re alive down there in missile plot.”

  “Roger that.” Garuda had the track supervisor inform link control down on the carrier that Red Crown was coming off the link for five minutes for “maintenance.”

  Brian studied the tanker’s symbol. It was about halfway up the Gulf between the carriers and the BARCAP station, passing in and out of patches of weather. Garuda finished his arrangements and then took control of the tanker’s track and turned it into a hostile air. He then sent an engage order to the FCSC, who sat up abruptly, as did the EC.

  “The fuck did this come from!” he exclaimed as he punched buttons quickly on his console to accept the designation. The EC moved to load the launcher, but Brian cut him off.

  “Tracking drill only,” he called. “That’s an A-Six tanker. Get on him, Chief.”

  The directors rumbled on their trunnions overhead and then settled into their fine-search patterns, looking for aluminum skin among the rain clouds some 60 miles away and 25,000 feet up. Director one went into nutation, which was a pattern of motion around the track axis. To a human observer, the big director would appear to be nodding and shaking its head at the same time in tiny increments as the beam went through a statistical search pattern to find its target. In Combat, nutation sounded like a large garage door opener starting and stopping in a rhythmic pattern.

  After a minute, it became obvious that neither director was getting on the target. Brian walked over to the weapons module. Chief Correy was talking urgently on his sound-powered phones to missile plot.

  “What’s the prob, chief?” Brian asked. “That’s an A-Six with air-to-air refueling tanks strapped on and broadside to us. Should be a piece of cake for the Spooks.”

  “Yes, sir, but they can’t seem to get a lock.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Uh, I’m not getting a whole lot of info just yet, Mr. Holcpmb.

  It’s—hang on a second.”

  Brian waited while the chief listened. Then he heard the chief starting to get angry.

  “Goddamn it, Marcowitz, I don’t wanna hear that shit.

  You get on the scope if you have to, but that’s bullshit.

  We shoulda been locked up an hour ago.”

  Brian watched and waited while the chief listened some more. Something wasn’t right here. The systems had been reported fully operational, and this was an easy target. And he had the feeling that the chief was being evasive. He wondered.

  “SWIC, FCSC, System Two’s tracking. Going IDD.

  System One’s tracking.” The chief sat back, relaxing slightly, and looked up at Holcomb expectantly.

  “Break track and centerline. We’ll do it again,” Brian said. “Garuda, prepare to redesignate.”

  Garuda gave him a thumbs-up and waited for the directors to slew off then-target and come back to their centerline position. He punched the buttons and the alarms sounded again at FCSC. The chief accepted the designation, and once again, the directors rumbled out to the bearing.

  This time, they locked on independently within ten seconds.

  “More like it,” muttered Brian. “Turn on CWI.”

  The chief energized illuminator radiation. After a few seconds, the AIC reported that the pilot had missile radar illumination alarms.

  “Down CWI. Break track. Centerline. Go standby.”

  “CWI down. Breaking track. Ready, standby, sir.”

  Brian walked back over to D and D ad thought about it. Garuda redesignated the tanker friendly, had the AIC tell the pilot to regard all further alarms, and put Hood back into the task force data link. It had sounded like a people problem, not a system problem. The chief was still chewing on someone down in plot but trying to keep Brian from hearing it. He leaned close to the SWIC.

  “Garuda, I’m going to take a little unannounced walk down to missile plot,” he whispered. “Something’s not kosher here. You take the watch, okay?”

  Garuda nodded. Brian stood back up and stretched.

  “SWIC, I’m gonna make a head call,” he announced in a loud voice. “You got it.”

  “I got it. SWIC, aye.”

  Brian walked to the ladder at the rear of Combat and headed down below, passing the level of his stateroom to come out on the level of the wardroom, and then descended one more deck to Broadway. As he turned to go forward, he met the chief master-at-arms, who apparently was out on one of his late-night tours.

  Brian remembered the first time he had talked to Jackson about the drug problem in the Navy and asked him about the antidrug program in Hood. He also remembered his surprise at the Sheriff’s answer: The chief had as much as said that there wasn’t a drug program in John Bell Hood. That thought crossed his mind again when he encountered Jackson in the passageway.

  “Sheriff,” he said. “Just the guy I need.”

  Jackson’s eyebrows rose. “Yes, sir?”

  “I’m making a little unannounced visit to missile plot.

  I’ve got a funny feeling there’s something going on down there. Care to come along?”

  “Yes, sir. My pleasure.” Jackson looked as if he meant it. Jackson suspected everyone, all the time.

  They walked rapidly forwa
rd along Broadway, which at this hour was deserted. All the ship’s offices were locked up and the passageway lights were set on red lighting. They went forward to the missile magazine passageway, turned left, and stepped down a ladder to the next deck. There they walked back aft twenty feet to the door of the missile fire-control equipment room, known as missile plot. As they strode through the darkened passageways, Brian had briefed the Sheriff on the sequence of events in Combat and why he suspected something was amiss.

  The first thing they both noticed was that the missile plot’s hatch door was completely dogged down, its chrome-plated operating handle pushed all the way over to the full dogged position. He paused for a moment and looked at Jackson, who was nodding thoughtfully. Under normal watch-standing conditions, the handle would have been only partially closed. Hatches were only fully dogged down for general quarters or when the people inside wanted some warning that someone might be coming through.

  The chief leaned forward and put his ear against the hatch door. At first, he heard nothing and then he heard someone laugh, a high, giggling sound. It was loud enough for Brian to hear it, too. Like a drunk, he thought.

  Jackson had a gleam in his eye when he straightened up.

  He looked at Brian and Brian nodded once. The chief squatted down on his haunches, took the handle in both hands, drew a deep breath, and then stood straight up, undogging the hatch in one sudden flowing movement, popping the door open. He stepped into the white lights of plot, followed by Brian.

  There were two men in plot. The senior man, FTM2 Marcowitz, was sitting on the deck between the two fire control radar consoles, a stupid grin on his face and his eyes dilated into large black circles. He giggled again when he saw the two khaki-clad figures appear. The second man, FTM3 Warren, was sitting at the System One console, his headphones still on, the eyes in his black face going round with the shock of seeing the Weapons Department head and the chief master-at-arms standing in the hatch. The burning camel-dung stink of marijuana smoke was everywhere.

  “Well, well, suspicions confirmed,” Brian declared, glaring at Marcowitz. Jackson walked over to where Marcowitz was sitting and grabbed his shirt, hauling the slender petty officer to his feet and shaking him.