The Edge of Honor

by P. T. Deutermann

  Wilson had been in Hood for three and a half years, almost time for orders. Jackson flipped back through the performance evals again and found that the plateau in his performance marks started during a tour at the San Diego Naval Station, where Wilson had been a master-at-arms.

  Master-at-arms?! Damn. Another surprise. Why hadn’t the exec assigned him to Hood’s MAA force? He frowned. Something amiss here, and he was now pretty sure it had to do with race relations. He had seen that Wilson had his own circle of exclusively black friends, but, hell, that wasn’t unusual. And there had never been the slightest hint of radical activity attributed directly to Bullet. The man kept to himself. Solid achievement up to E-6 in a technical-engineering rating. So why the Sambo dialect?

  Looking at his watch, he had an idea. It was 2210, which meant that Fireman Baker, one of his snitches in the 1C gang, ought to be back in forward Gyro rewinding the movie reels right about now. Baker usually had the night movie detail. He picked up the phone and dialed the 1C room.

  “Forward gyro, Baker speakin’, sir.” Jackson could hear the whirring of the rewind machine in the background.

  “Baker, this is Chief Jackson.”

  “Oh, yeah, Chief, what’s up?”

  “Baker, I need you to patch my phone into the electrical shop’s phone so that when it rings, mine rings, and when they make a call, I get me a ding up here.”

  “Now, Chief?”

  “Yeah, now, chief, and Baker? This is official business, which better not leave the 1C room. Do we understand each other?”

  “Gotcha covered, Chief. You’ll be on in two minutes.”

  “Okay. Patch me out at twenty-three-thirty.”

  “You got it, Chief.”

  Jackson hung up. Six months ago, he had caught Baker and another fireman soaping each other up in the shower together after taps. Rather than turn them in for homosexual activity or, worse, tell their division mates, he had turned them into snitches. All of the ship’s interior communications, including the admin telephones, went through the 1C room’s switchboards. Baker the Twinkie had turned out to be extremely useful.

  The telephone dinged once and then again. He waited for a few seconds and then carefully lifted the handset. It was one of the electricians, a white man’s voice, calling Main Control. He listened in and hung up when the other two did. Ten minutes later, another ding. Another call, same guy, this time to CIC: Something about the new call circuit—the buzzers still weren’t working. Lieutenant Commander Austin’s voice and the same white voice in the electrical shop. Did it work now? he asked. No, only two of the three stations were getting the buzzer. Could they test it tonight? No, the Old Man had secured. Try again tomorrow. He hung up when they did.

  A half hour later, his phone rang. He moved to answer it but then hesitated. The phone gave a half ring before going silent—not his phone; their phone. He picked up as quietly as he could, his hand clamped over the mouthpiece.

  He heard two black voices this time, a younger one and what sounded like Bullet’s voice. Finally. The younger man’s voice was overlaid with heavy machinery noise that sounded like one of the main-propulsion spaces.

  “Hey, man, what you want me to do with this here brine pump? I got less’n fifty ohms to ground, but the first class, he wants me to leave it runnin’.”

  “Put a heating blower on it,” Bullet said. “Dry it out.

  Megger it again at the end of your watch. If it’s still got grounds, you’ll have to take it offline, bring it back here where we can bake it out. Tell the top watch that. If he has a problem with that, have him call me.”

  “You got it, man. But I think this sucker’s gonna die.”

  “Then get some heated air to it. Now.” Bullet hung up, followed a second later by the engine room electrician.

  Jackson hung up his phone and settled back in his chair.

  Well now, that’s what I wanted to know. No Rastus talk there. Straight technical orders from a senior electrician.

  So we have one face for whitey and another for the brothers, do we? He chuckled. For him, Bullet used the shuck and jive: Shows where I stand, he thought. But a college education, a brain, and an attitude problem that gets him lowered marks but no words in his evaluations.

  Well now, indeed. He grabbed the phone and dialed the goat locker.

  “CPO mess, Chief Hallowell.”

  “Hey, Hally. Jackson here. Martinez in there?”

  Petty Officer Second Class Marcowitz sat in the straight backed chair in Jackson’s office in a cold sweat. The Sheriff had just finished explaining to him what was coming: captain’s mast, transfer to the brig in Subic to await court-martial, the court-martial itself, probably up at Clark Air Force Base in Manila, and then shipment back to the States and out to Kansas for a minimum ten year stint at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.

  It was 2100; the ship had begun to settle down for the night. Sounds of the crew’s movie on the mess decks could be heard outside in the Broadway passageway.

  Jackson kept his eyes down on his desk and worked some papers, letting the pressure build. He already knew that the guys in the Fire Control Division were beginning to turn on Marcowitz for sitting on his ass in the compartment while they had to double up on watches. And Jackson, on one of his tours through the berthing compartments, had casually asked Marcowitz if he had seen the chief boatswain. That had been a day ago, and Marcowitz had been looking around every corner when Jackson had brought him to his office a little while ago. Just for the hell of it, Jackson had faked a reply to a phone call from the bridge about eight o’clock reports.

  “Yeah, Boats. No. I don’t know where he is. He’s supposed to stay in his berthing compartment except for meals and head calls. Yeah, I will.

  Thanks.” He had then gone back to his paperwork, still not looking at Marcowitz. Finally, when he figured he had the petty officer’s full attention, he looked up at him.

  “Well, Marcowitz, I sure hope that was some good dope. Because you’re going to pay a serious price for it.”

  Marcowitz looked around the small office, then swallowed but said nothing.

  “Of course, there is a way you can maybe mitigate some of this offense.

  Although I don’t know … you were drugged on duty, at the missile-radar consoles, in a war zone, where enemy aircraft have made threats against the ship. Those Air Force flyboys up there at Clark, they’re not going to be too sympathetic to that kind of shit, you know?”

  Marcowitz nodded, his hands twisting in his lap. Jackson laid it on some more.

  “I need to verify your next of kin’s address—that’s your parents, according to the record.”

  Marcowitz cleared his throat. “My parents?”

  “Yeah, your parents. We have to write them and tell them why you’ve been transferred off the ship. Give ‘em time to find out where Leavenworth Penitentiary is. It’s kinda remote, out there on the Great Plains somewhere.

  Big fuckin’ walls, like a goddamn castle, steel gates, and a coupla thousand murderers, rapists, embezzlers, child molesters in the cage.”

  “Cage?”

  “Cage. Prison. Figure of speech, Marcowitz. Slammer talk.”

  “You’re gonna tell my parents?”

  “Absolutely. We don’t just make guys like you disappear.

  And this Central High, that was your high school, correct?”

  “My high school?”

  “Yeah, see, we always report back to a guy’s school when he gets discharged. See, most of them keep records on how well their graduates did out here in the world.

  Unfortunately, we’ll have to tell them you’re in federal prison for ten, maybe twenty years. They want to know this shit. And, of course, the Navy has to do a press release to the hometown news service. It’s all in the regs.”

  Marcowitz was visibly shaken. “You have to tell—”

  “Oh yes. Have to. Full public disclosure. Otherwise, all these Communist war protestors will say we’re running a secret pol
ice state, imprisoning people without a trial or a hearing, making them just disappear, like that gulag thing over there in Russia. No, we have to keep the whole thing pretty public. It’s a shame in one sense, but then, who’s gonna give a shit about a guy who does dope at his watch station in a war zone, you know?”

  Marcowitz put his face in his hands and bent over in his chair. Jackson waited for him to remember where they’d started. Finally, Marcowitz looked up.

  “You said … you said there was a way I could mig—mata—”

  “Mitigate?”

  “Yeah. Mitigate. That means like cut me some slack, right? If I do something?”

  Jackson appeared to think for a minute. “Probably not, now that I think about it. I mean, what can you do for me that would possibly count against what you’ve done to us, to the ship?”

  Marcowitz studied the deck again, gnawing his lower lip. Jackson watched him, a twenty-five year-old petty officer second class, an E-5 with eighteen months of advanced electronics training and three years’ experience in the fleet. He could have gotten out and named his starting wage with those credentials in half a hundred businesses. But right now, he looked like what he was: a badly scared kid. Finally, Marcowitz looked up.

  “I can tell you where I got it.”

  “Hell, son, I know where you got it. You talked to a black guy and he got it for you.” Marcowitz blinked.

  “You don’t want to know who he is?” he said.

  “What good’s that do me? I can’t arrest him on just your say-so.”

  Marcowitz bit his lip, but then a crafty look came into his eyes.

  “But what if I made a buy for you? Something you could watch? Then you could bust him.”

  “You think this same guy’s gonna get within thirty feet of you now?

  After you’ve been busted?”

  “Awright. Shit. I guess it doesn’t matter,”

  Marcowitz said. “I didn’t want to say this, but you guys have my ass in a crack. It isn’t just one guy or a coupla guys. It’s any of them.”

  Marcowitz stared up at Chief Jackson.

  “Any of the nonrated black guys. Shit, I figured you had to know this—you’re black. You wanta score in this boat, man, you just go see a black dude.”

  Jackson stared back, trying to control his growing anger.

  “And who’s the main man?”

  Marcowitz snorted. “Shit! How would I know that?

  But I’ll bet you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It ain’t no fuckin’ white guy, is it?”

  Brian stood out on the darkened bridge with Jack Folsom, who had the 04-08 OOD watch. It was a warm, humid, moonless night, punctuated occasionally by sudden showers. Brian had borrowed the quartermaster’s binoculars and was staring off to the starboard beam, trying to make out the nuclear cruiser Long Beach in the gloom. She was only two thousand yards distant, a bare sea mile, but totally darkened and thereby invisible except for a busily winking red signal lamp high up on her boxy superstructure.

  “Think this’ll work, Mr. Holcomb?” asked Folsom.

  “It will if some Migs come up. We’ve been letting it slip discreetly over clear radio circuits that Long Beach will be relieving us in two more days.”

  “Is there some reason we’re expecting Migs?”

  “In our vicinity, no. But they fly all the time around Hanoi and Haiphong. That’s the beauty of this little op—they know we can’t touch anything beyond forty miles, so they feel safe up-country at eighty miles, as long as that cruiser over there isn’t around. They know her Talos birds go a hundred miles.”

  “But if she lights off her radars, won’t that give them time to hit the deck?”

  “Well, that’s the essence of this caper. She came out of Subic radio-silent, so, in theory anyway, the Soviet ocean-tracking systems don’t know where she is. We’ll light off our missile radars and track the distant Migs; they won’t give a shit because they’ll recognize a Terrier radar, and they know we can’t reach ‘em. But we’ll be passing precise tracking data over to Long Beach via the NTDS link, and when the Migs are up at altitude and think they’re safe, she’ll launch her Talos birds on our data. When they’re about eighty percent of the way down their flight path, she’ll bring up her own illuminators and, yes, the Migs will have warning, but by then intercept will be about six seconds away. Those Talos birds are ramjets—they just keep accelerating until they hit something.”

  “I saw a Talos once—they’re huge—forty-two feet long, four feet in diameter.”

  “Yeah. They’re designed to fly right through their targets at around three thousand miles an hour.”

  “So the trick is to make sure the bad guys don’t know she’s here yet.”

  “You got it.”

  Folsom scanned the darkness with his own binoculars.

  “Who thought this little scam up?”

  “Believe it or not, someone down on CTF Seventy seven’s staff. They’ve apparently even spread deception around Subic and Olongapo.”

  Folsom nodded in the darkness. “They better; those bar girls know more about ships’ movements than the Seventh Fleet schedulers.”

  “So I’ve heard. Course, there’s not much I haven’t heard about Olongapo.”

  Folsom laughed. “It’s all true and then some. You want an experience, get the chief boats to take you on the beach.”

  Brian thought about that for a minute. “I’m not exactly used to going on liberty with the enlisted,” he said.

  Folsom chuckled. “Yes, sir, that’s all that East Coast Navy training you’ve had. I hear it’s a little more formal back there. But I’m serious. He’ll show you the sights, and he’s big enough that nothing bad will happen to you, which, for a makee-learn, is something to consider.

  Trick is to know when the firewater has gotten ahold of the Injun; then you cut out and get back to the main gates.

  You know about the curfew?”

  “No. What curfew?”

  “When you go over in Subic, you sorta have to decide what your plans are. The base has a curfew, with time limits set by pay grade. Nonrated enlisted have to be back to the main gates by midnight; lieutenant commanders and above back by oh-one-thirty. Everyone else is somewhere in between. They reopen the gates at oh seven hundred, so you either have to make your gate or else fall in love and stay out in the town overnight.”

  “That lets me out; I’m already married.”

  Jack snorted. “Nobody is married in WESTPAC, Mr. Holcpmb.”

  Brian had no answer for that. He’d heard that’rule, too. Cross the international dateline and one’s marital status became a very private affair.

  “What happens if you show up at the gates, say, at oh two hundred?” he asked finally, to get off the subject of marriage.

  “They let you in and write you up.”

  “Officers, too?”

  “Yes, sir, officers especially. Marines love that shit.

  They got the XO once, but he talked ‘em out of it by pointing out that he had three women chasing his ass back to the gate. They were so impressed, they let him off.”

  Brian grinned again in the darkness. They both moved back out of the bridgewing’s doorway as the rain swept in again. Folsom checked the radar to make sure the big cruiser was staying at around two thousand yards on Hood’s starboard beam. Brian pulled his red flashlight out and checked his watch. He needed to get back into Combat.

  “Guess I’d better get back in the house,” he said.

  “Everybody’s busy packing up for turnover. It’s like moving day in there.”

  “Yes, sir, so I understand. That flashing light has been going nonstop since they showed up. All sorts of ‘do you have’ spare-parts messages coming in for the Chop.”

  “Yeah. I’U be glad to get the turnover done with my systems intact, although it’s the Count who usually has to give up the most stuff.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

  “
Now, now, Mr. First Left Nut. Ensigns can’t be critical of light commanders.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  Brian laughed. “The bulkheads have ears, as they say.

  I’ll see you later.”

  Brian put the binoculars back in the holder by the chart table and went back into CIC. Fox Hudson was the SWIC; he was concentrating on the northwest radar sector, looking for Migs.

  “Any business?” asked Brian.

  “No, sir. Although we’re a little early yet. If they’re gonna fly, they usually do a dawn sweep from the bases up the Red River Valley. We’ve still got an hour or so.

  Otherwise, nothing going on. Long Beach is remaining in radio, link, and radar silence, and we’re not talking to her, either.”

  Brian nodded and looked around Combat. The cave was manned at half station, while the rest of the radarmen packaged their message files and scope templates into aluminum boxes for the morning transfer to their counterparts in Long Beach. There was a general sense of excitement as the first line period drew to a close, with the older hands trying to outdo one another with tales of subic.

  “Sounds like a good bit of bullshit going down around Combat,” Brian observed.

  “Yes, sir. New guys’re getting their ears filled.”

  “I can imagine. The missile systems set up to do business?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve got the first team on the consoles down in plot. Soon’s we get a contact, we’ll start painting them with the track beams, get ‘em used to seeing their cockpit alarms.”

  “But not illuminators, right?” :

  “No, sir. An illuminator means you’ve got a missile in flight. They’re used to our tracking beams—we track ‘em even when they’re a hundred miles away, even though they know we can’t touch ‘em.”