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 ha
ppened 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.
On his way back to the wardroom, he passed the Sheriff’s office. He was surprised to see Jackson, who was wearing reading glasses, working at his desk on a liberty night.
He stopped in.
“Sheriff, I’m surprised to see you on board. I thought it was a chief’s duty to tear up Olongapo every night.”
Jackson smiled. “It’s the troops that go tearing up the town every night. We chiefs know how to pace ourselves.
You know, the old bull/young bull story.”
“I think I gained some direct experience on that score last night.”
“Yes, sir, I heard that the doc had to bring the first rites to you this morning.”
“The first rites. I love it. He did indeed. I embraced a concoction called a Subic Special last night. Proved once again that I have no real head for booze. So what’s happening in the cops-and-robbers department these days? I hear our boy Marcowitz had some, uh, misfortune at the main gate.”
Jackson leaned back in his chair, his expression neutral.
“Yes, sir. I’ve got the report right here.”
“Seems he was taking coals to Newcastle.”
“Sir?”
“An English expression. Like taking ice to Alaska. If I have it right, Olongapo is a place where an American buys dope, not sells it.” Brian leaned back out of the doorway to check the passageway. “My take is that this was a setup. Somebody planted the stuff in the guy’s overnight bag and then fingered him at the main gate.”
The Sheriff gave him a speculative look but said nothing.
Brian sat down in one of the two chairs in the office.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said, then recounted his conversation with the captain up in D and D, where he had found out that the exec had not briefed the captain about Marcowitz.
Jackson took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes for a moment, then put them back on. “Well, sir, I guess that’s possible,” he said. “That the XO didn’t tell the Old Man.
The impression I have is that Captain Huntington lives in his memory of the old Navy. Maybe he just refuses to accept that his sailors are doing narcotics right here in the ship. Or maybe the exec has given up trying to convince the Old Man that we have a problem and so he’s decided to work the problem on his own.”
“Who’s doing the planting and fingering?”
Jackson seemed to withdraw a little. Brian realized that the Sheriff was probably trying to figure out how much he could or could not say.
“Forget I asked,” he said. He thought for a minute.
Then he looked up at the Sheriff.
“The exec sort of let me in on it last night in the club.
He says the legal system can’t do anything for him, so he’s doing it his way. Guy gets caught with drugs on the base, it’s a base drug incident, not a Hood drug incident.
And a guy who we know is dirty is taken off the boards.
He calls it justice.”
“Sounds like justice to me, actually.”
“Yes, but—”
Jackson leaned forward. His glasses glinted in the fluorescent light.
“Yes, sir, I know about that ‘but.’ So maybe the XO is running a vigilante operation here.”
“The XO is dispensing military justice in the ship, and that’s supposed to be the sole prerogative of the captain—who’s apparently turning a blind eye to the whole deal.”
Jackson sat back and began to play with a pencil on the desk. They were both silent. Brian was trying to grapple with the professional dilemma he faced. He was becoming increasingly convinced that the XO’s system was an illegal perversion of the military justice system that was only driving the drug problem further underground.
One fine day, some young pothead would get them all killed. But on the other hand, isolated from the real power structure in the ship, he was worried that his career, which was on the cusp of a promotion and the opportunity for the XO/CO track, might be destroyed if he pushed the drug issue. The exec had gently put him on notice last night. If he chose to, he could put it not so gently. Brian knew full well that the executive officer was a very powerful man in the chain of command: He could put the knife in a department head’s career in about twenty different ways, all of them as lethal as they were legal. And then there was Maddy. What chance did he have of keeping Maddy if his career went off the rails?
/> Maybe guys like Austin had the right idea: Go along, watch where you put people, let the XO play his game, get your fitrep, and get on down the road. He looked up, to see Jackson watching him. He shook his head.
“I’m not sure what to do with all this, Sheriff. As somebody else said, it’s the captain’s boat. If this is how he wants to run it, I guess I don’t have a lot to say about it.”
Jackson nodded slowly.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Brian continued. “I think the world of Captain Huntington. He seems to be honestly sincere about caring for his people.
And I’m also not implying that there’s corruption here. But I think he’s deluding himself on this drug thing and that it’s going to bite us in the ass one day.”
Jackson nodded again. “He has been a damn fine CO, Mr. Holcomb. I’ll tell you what—anybody who worked the bomb squad and who personally saved a ship by disarming a bomb is okay in my book. I don’t know if he’s deluding himself or if this is just the way he wants it done.
Personally, I don’t reckon the XO could do any of this, the Old Man didn’t give him the nod. But that’s an issue that’s above my pay grade.
That’s kind of why I’m looking down, not up. I’m trying to find out who’s really running the drug operation. But I agree with you on one point—we may be running on borrowed time here.”
“You find out anything more about that Bullet guy?”
“Close that door, please? Yes, sir, I did. I talked to some of the other chiefs.”
Jackson reminded Brian about what he had found in the record. “The other black chiefs confirm Bullet’s got a clique, but they wouldn’t go so far’s to call it a gang. If he’s running drugs, they’ve seen no sign of it. I did get some marked money into the system, though. If the main man is investing with Garlic, I may or may not find it while we’re in port, when the kids start running out of cash.”
Brian nodded. “The black chiefs—how do they feel about the fact that you’re focusing on another black man?”
Jackson grinned. “Well, it wasn’t the most comfortable discussion I’ve had. But the way I put it, if the drug ring here is black, it’s in our interests and a matter of pride for us to clean it up.”
The Edge of Honor Page 39