The Edge of Honor

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The Edge of Honor Page 67

by P. T. Deutermann


  “And what about … injuries?” asked Mrs. Grafton, not wanting to use the dreaded word casualties. Mrs. Huntington bowed her head. She spoke in a small voice.

  “Everyone in the boiler room—and I think he said there were four enlisted men there—was killed when a steam line ruptured. There may have been two or three other enlisted killed in the CIC when a part of the jet came through the superstructure; they’re still not sure how many.”

  “So all the casualties were enlisted?” asked Mrs. Mains, posing the question that was on everyone’s mind.

  Mrs. Huntington stared at the floor. “No,” she said finally. “There was one officer who died. The headquarters chaplain is on his way over here right now.”

  There was a general intake of breath in the room. “You mean he wouldn’t tell you who?” Tizzy cried, an edge of hysteria showing in her voice.

  Mrs. Huntington gave her a severe look.

  “They never do that over the phone, Tizzy. They’re on their way right now. I think … I think we all just have to be patient and quiet, and not get all hysterical. I know … I know this is very hard, for you, for me, for all of us. It’s rather like waiting for a jury, isn’t it? I think I’ll just go make some more coffee,” she said as she turned away from the ring of stunned faces in her living room.

  Maddy sat down hard on a cushion on the floor and hugged her knees. She could not bear to look at any of the other women’s faces, afraid that she would start crying as two of them already had done. She saw Tizzy staring at the floor and biting her nails. A storm of thoughts whirled through her own mind. It was as if an executioner was coming, an executioner who would pull into the driveway in a half hour in a black sedan, who would get out, knock on the door, and then ask, a piece of paper in his hand, which one of them was Mrs.—who?

  Everyone in the room was silent, allowing the sounds of a fall morning on Coronado to intrude: birds in the garden singing, the occasional car going by out front, the muted thunder of jets over on the air station heading out for the day’s training sessions, the blat of the ferry’s horn and an answering whistle from a destroyer standing down the channel. Another great Navy day, as Brian would sometimes quip as he headed out to the base in the morning. Jesus Christ, could it be him?

  She searched her intuition and found nothing. No anticipatory dread, no unbidden certain knowledge, no fatal hunches. Brian was alive. Brian had survived. How could she know that?

  Was she just indulging in blind optimism, whistling past the graveyard, her subconscious lying to her to protect her from such a calamity? Wives always know when something’s happened. Faithful, loving wives always know, that is. Unfaithful, selfish, “it’s me or the Navy”

  wives, they may not know. For the first time, the import of what might be coming and the possible connection, the consequence of her infidelity, began to loom over her like an approaching thundercloud. She hugged herself tighter, her mind squeezing out the images even as her eyes squeezed back the tears.

  The sounds of the official car’s arrival outside in the street penetrated the silence in the living room like a glass breaking. They could hear every sound—the brakes, the idling engine shutting down, the chunk of doors. Maddy couldn’t stand it. She got up and headed for the front door. Mrs. Huntington had come back into the living room and was standing in the middle of the room, her hands worrying a dish towel.

  Maddy saw her face out of the corner of her eye, saw her expression, and then the cold flash of intuition came. She knew just from looking at the older woman’s face. She knew. She whipped her face around to look through the window in the door, and when she saw the tall four-striper coming up the walk with the young chaplain, his face grim, the piece of paper in his hands, she remembered what Brian had said about these things. If a lieutenant commander dies, they send a lieutenant commander to make the notification. They had sent a captain.

  Her mouth dry, her eyes stinging, she opened the door. The two officers stopped outside, out of Mrs. Huntingdon’s line of vision. Maddy stared at them until she realized she was blocking the doorway. She stepped back, unconsciously trying to put distance between herself and them. The captain stepped through the doorway and looked across the room directly at Mrs. Huntington.

  She looked back into his eyes for a few seconds and then visibly wilted, dropping the towel and putting both hands to her mouth and making a small sound of despair. While the rest of the wives looked on uncomprehendingly at first, Maddy moved quickly across the room to hold her, to put her arms around her and to pull her in, and, to her sudden surprise, to hold her upright. Out of the corner of her eye, Maddy saw a gray-faced Tizzy Hudson put her hand over her mouth as if she was going to be sick. Mrs. Huntington had been taller than Maddy, but now she seemed to have shrunk with the blow. There was a chorus of

  “Oh no,”

  “My God,” all uttered from the heart and propelled by a marrow-deep sense of relief among them that the blow had fallen on someone else.

  Captain Farwell and the chaplain helped Maddy to shepherd Mrs. Huntington into the study, where she collapsed into one of the leather chairs. Maddy stepped back as Mrs. Mains led the rest of the wives into the study. She joined in the chorus of condolences, torn as they all were between the emotions of sympathy and grief for the captain and his wife and her secret urge to shout with joy that it was not her husband, followed in turn by a small wave of guilt for being selfish at a time like this.

  Maddy edged out of the room when she could, suddenly needing to be alone, away from this storm of raw emotions and away from the one person in the house who had been touched by death. Besides, she was not one of them; her good intentions had come a little late. She slipped out the door to the garden.

  It was a typically bright and beautiful San Diego day outside. She suddenly hated this city with its postcard setting by the sea, its idyllic weather, its perpetually blue skies and balmy temperatures that seemed to be indifferent to the fate of ordinary mortals. She could visualize a massive earthquake, the “big one,” as they called it out here, with the city in ruins and thousands perished in the rubble, and the skies would still be blue and the temperature lovely, despite the calamity on the ground. A Navy jet arced slowly over the neighborhood, turning on final for North Island. San Diego had been a Navy town for a long time. She wondered how many times over the decades this scene had been replayed, somber men in uniforms coming in black cars to tell yet another terrified woman that her world had ended on the sea.

  Standing in the garden, listening to the sounds of grief, consolation, and anxiety within, she found all of her resolve and resolution dissolving, in the past week, she had learned that Brian and her marriage meant much more to her than she had ever imagined. She realized now that to “do your own thing” with human relationships was a snare and a delusion: It implicitly meant that you were going to go through life forever alone. But now this. Good God, was this how it would end? Last night, she had been ready to muster all of her strength, her powers of manipulation, and her determination to go forward with their Navy career. But now she was afraid again, afraid and very much alone.

  Time had slowed down for the rest of the day. Terrified of going back to her empty apartment and too upset to go to work, she had simply stayed there, in the background, trying to be inconspicuous but unwilling to leave. At the end of the day, she had been sitting out in the garden, dozing and drained after the sleepless night before and the trauma of the morning, when Mrs. Huntington had come out onto the patio with the exec’s wife, whose protestations had awakened Maddy. Mrs. Huntington was being firm.

  “Barbara, go home. Maddy’s here. You all have families to attend to.

  I’ll be all right. She’ll stay with me.

  Tom’s making all the arrangements, so you guys go home now, please.”

  “Are you sure? I can get—”

  “Please, I’ve kind of had it with crowds right now.

  Maddy’s here. Please—”

  The exec’s wife withdr
ew then, taking along the three other wives still at the house. Mrs. Huntington walked slowly out into the garden and sat down in the chair next to Maddy. For almost a half an hour, she simply sat there, saying nothing at all. Maddy had taken her hand after awhile but kept her own silence. The evening shadows deepened until it was almost full dark, the familiar San Diego evening chill descending on the garden like an invisible mantle. Finally, the captain’s wife spoke.

  “Well, Maddy. All those brave words.”

  “Yes.”

  “They still hold true, you know.”

  Maddy bit her lip and shook her head.

  “Yes, they do. Warren and I had twenty-seven years, only three less than the Navy had him. Death can come anytime, in a car crash, a fall in the bathtub, in sickness, anytime. And usually it’s so mundane, so …

  awkward.

  We don’t know what happened out there, but I do know in my bones that Warren would rather have died out there, doing what he had spent his life doing, than in all the hundreds of ways sixty-year-old men die here at home. I am very sad, and I think I’m going to cry a lot before sunrise, but if it has to be, this was a fitting death.”

  Maddy shook her head again. Her voice was small, as if she was talking to herself. “I’m just not sure. I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this. To go through this, what you … Because it is what they do—they go in harm’s way every time they go to sea. Brian told me that once and I teased him for being melodramatic, but it’s true. Dear God, it’s true!

  And I’m so scared.” Despite herself, her eyes were filling with tears.

  The captain’s wife’s voice was disembodied in the darkness of the garden. “I told you a Navy marriage was about risk, Maddy. Risk is what gives marriage value.

  The career, children if you have them, a love affair with one person that matures into the best kind of human bonding, these are life’s treasures, and now, especially now, I’m counting on their being sustaining treasures.

  But if they’re not at risk, whether because either of you might falter or because the career is inherently dangerous, or because you have alternative lives to fall back on, there’s not half the value.”

  She paused to put her hand on Maddy’s. “And now that you know this, what choice do you really have, Maddyholcomb?”

  Subic Bay, the Philippines It. Comdr. Brian Holcomb stood on the hot concrete apron in front of the ops building at Cubi Point Naval Air Station. He wore pressed khakis with ribbons and his fore-and-aft cap.

  His uniform shirt had a black cloth band pinned to the left sleeve.

  Parked in front of the ops building was an Army Caribou, a short-haul, drop-ramp transport plane that was used to ferry cargo from Cubi Point Naval Air Station up to the big Clark Air Force Base outside Manila. The Caribou was painted out in camouflage, which made it look smaller than it actually was. The back ramp was open and an honor guard of perspiring Hood sailors stood in their whites at the back at parade rest, heavy M-1 rifles at their sides. Chief Jackson stood behind them. The crew of the Caribou hung around the flight deck doors, dressed in their olive drab flight suits. It was ten o’clock in the morning and they were waiting for the casket to come down from the hospital. The remains of the other six men killed in the attack were already onboard.

  Across the bay, Brian could see the ship, her stern pointing into the opening of the floating dry dock, a clutch of tugs milling around her.

  They were pushing her back into the dry dock, where they would close the hole in the port side before she went back to the States. Vince Benedetti had estimated it would take ten days to position and weld the patch. Her flags could be seen at half-mast, even from here.

  Brian felt as if he was AWOL, standing here on the tarmac while the ship was making the move to the dry dock. The board of inquiry had been going on for three days, and he was emotionally exhausted after being grilled for hours by the panel of captains and commanders, on both the air attack and the drug problem in the ship. And there was more to come when he returned to the ship. He had not yet been designated a party to the investigation, but one of the Navy lawyers on the board had advised him to request counsel. When he had asked whether he was being or going to be accused of something, the lawyer, a commander, had simply shrugged.

  “You’re going to be a pivotal witness, Mr. Holcomb.

  Frankly, the board’s informal consensus is that you did very well, but still think you ought to have counsel. If and when indictments are made, important witnesses can become targets, if you follow me.”p>

  Brian didn’t really follow him, but he had submitted the request, anyway. His duffel bag was already on board the Caribou. The exec had appointed him as the official escort officer for Captain Huntington’s remains. He would make the long flight back across the Pacific to Travis Air Force Base with Captain Huntington’s body.

  He would then accompany the casket to Washington, D. C., where the captain would be buried at Arlington. In Washington, a full captain would assume the duties of escort at the national cemetery, but a lieutenant commander would suffice for the flight.

  Since the casket would first land at Travis Air Force Base, located north of San Francisco, Mrs. Huntington would be allowed to accompany her husband’s remains to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington.

  Strangely, at least to Brian, she had asked for Maddy to accompany her on the trip to Washington. In their short phone conversation the night before, Maddy had not explained it very well, other than to say that after the word had come in about the attack, they had all gathered and spent most of a day at the Huntingtons’ waiting for further word from the Pacific. She said they had been relieved by the first reports that no officers had been casualties in the attack, then stunned when they were finally told that the captain had died following the incident. For some reason, Mrs. Huntington wanted Maddy to be the one who went with her.

  Brian had not told her what he knew about it, because the board of inquiry was still going on and everyone had been ordered to keep silent.

  Austin had recovered consciousness a day out from Subic, but he was concussed and almost useless as a witness. His ravings up on the forecastle the night of the attack had made the rounds of the wardroom, and, while no one could figure out exactly what had happened, many were eager to assume the worst. Vince Benedetti had been fully involved in the damage-control efforts, so he could testify only about what happened after the attack. The South SAR station ship, USS Preble, had driven out of the morning twilight with fresh damage-control teams and medical supplies and people. The first helo to come up from Yankee Station brought an investigation team on board, headed by the same captain who had looked into the Sea Dragon incident. As the evaluator on watch, Brian had been debriefed extensively, as had Garuda and the surviving supervisors in Combat. The focus had been exclusively on the attack and the aftermath, until a grim faced lieutenant commander had come into the wardroom with the ship’s disbursing officer, carrying a deck log.

  The mysterious log. There were all sorts of rumors flying around about what was in that log. Brian remembered the captain keeping Jack Folsom with him on the morning of the attack, and asking for the deck log.

  Folsom wasn’t talking, but it would make a world of difference to Brian if the captain had come clean about the drug problem. Especially with the exec reportedly claiming that the Migs got in because the weapons officer had an inexperienced FTM3 on the missile consoles when the attack came. Amidst all the rumors, Brian had resolved to follow the captain’s advice: Just tell the truth.

  He sighed. There were going to be a lot more questions to answer when he returned to the ship again. You could say one thing about the Navy—they might not always want to ask the question, but once a mess was exposed, they would scrape the paint right down to the keel to find out what had happened.

  As if in counterpoint to the whole incident, the lieutenant commander’s promotion list had come in by an AINav message the night after the incident, and Brian’s name had been on it.
Mission accomplished. The exec had signed temporary promotion papers so that it would look better having a lieutenant commander as the escort rather than a lieutenant.

  Brian remembered reading the temporary promotion language, with its codicil about accepting permanent appointment in the new rank. He wondered now whether he would.

  He would have to talk to Maddy at some length about all of this, about going on in the Navy and committing to a thirty-year career. He had encountered levels and degrees of responsibility far beyond anything they had talked about at the Academy, and he had also learned that in a ship, every action or inaction has its consequences.

  And he had to make a final decision about what to reveal to her, if anything, about his experience in Olongapo with Josie. He had talked to Chief Martinez about it during a coffee and cigar session the night before they arrived in Subic, but the chief had just laughed.

  “Hell, boss. This is WESTPAC. Ain’t no married guys in WESTPAC. Be like tellin’ yer wife you went out and got drunk—who gives a shit? Besides, what the hell do wives wanta know about foolin’ around, right?”

  Brian thought that it would be best to keep the whole thing a secret, something to bury in his past, as the course that would do the least damage. Everyone was entitled to a secret or two in a lifetime, he thought, and he was sick of damage. But the matter would not entirely go away.

  Martinez had told him what had happened down in the pump room between Rocky and Jackson and about how they had all missed on Rocky in the first place. Up to that point, Brian knew only that Rockheart had been found drowned in the wreckage of the shaft alley pump room two days after the incident and that there had been a large quantity of cash drowned with him. Rumor had it that both Chief Jackson and Martinez were down in the pump room the night of the attack and that Rockheart had been at the top of the drug ring in the ship.

  “Well, Chief, you said you’d off the kingpin if you ever caught him,”

  Brian had said.

 

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