by David Poyer
Dan was feeling more and more unreal. He trusted Byrne, but jumping the chain of command like this was not the way the U.S. Navy operated. Then again, every surface line officer knew that the 1600’s, the intelligence corps, marched to a different drummer—one only they could hear.
“You know, Jack, if I didn’t know better, I’d read that as asking me to be some kind of informer.”
Byrne laughed and picked up the pipe again. “Dan, the Navy’s not such a big place. Stay around a few years, you get a rep. Especially if you’ve been involved in anything … controversial. Want me to tell you yours?”
“If it’s the answer to what I asked you.”
“You have a rep for honesty, but not diplomacy. Put another way, you tend to speak up in situations where the intelligent—meaning safe—thing to do would be to keep a low profile. What I am asking today is, if you saw a situation developing that felt wrong to you, would you be willing to give me the nod to send in the elephants?”
“Elephants?”
“The Naval Investigative Service.”
Dan thought about that. The NIS was one of those agencies nobody liked, because its main job was to keep the rest of the Navy in line, like Internal Affairs in a police department. Usually, you only heard about it after it had wrapped up a case, and not much then. He said cautiously, “You think there’s something going on aboard Barrett?”
“Not specifically. If we thought there was, we’d be aboard right now grilling everybody from your skipper on down. It’s Navy-wide. I’m discussing this same issue with people on other ships, and the same thing is happening at Desron Four and Group Two and Subgru Six and the minesweeps, too.” Byrne hesitated. “I didn’t tell you this?”
“I never heard it.”
“What this thing is, certain quarters are starting to wonder if there’s a hole in our crypto.”
“In our codes?”
“Yeah. See why they’re going to general quarters? If somebody could penetrate those, we wouldn’t have any more secrets. They’d be able to read everything right off the air, ballistic missile targeting, alert condition, execute orders, position of our submerged submarines, anything they wanted.”
“But I thought our codes couldn’t be broken. They’re so random, and we change them so often—”
“Theoretically, that’s true,” said Byrne. “You’d need two things to break our message traffic. Both a current key list and a complete operating model of the decrypting/encrypting equipment. Neither of which the other side has. But the question always remains: Is the theory right?” He waved a match over the pipe, exhaled aromatic smoke.
Dan put two and two together. “Does this have anything to do with the Fleet Minimize?”
Byrne shrugged, a gesture Dan remembered from the Med when someone asked him something he didn’t want to answer. Behind the amber glasses, like barriers against those not cleared for access, he didn’t give anything away for free. “So, can I count on you?”
“I still don’t know what you want.”
“Let’s go over it again, then. Certain people we all work for are getting an uneasy feeling. I can’t be more specific, okay? But if there’s something wrong, it means that our normal ways of preventing ’accidents’ aren’t working. So we want a back channel in place to catch any vague suspicions things may not be the way they’re supposed to be.”
Dan started to ask, Why can’t you go through the chain of command? Then he thought better of it. He could figure that out himself. If they weren’t using the chain of command, that meant they weren’t sure they could depend on the links.
“This is all about as clear as bean soup, sir.”
“Well, let me elaborate,” said Byrne, rubbing his long nose thoughtfully. “Officially, what I am asking you to participate in is called the Passive Listener Liaison. It’s a security-awareness program that operates covertly within the command structure. Certain key individuals are selected for their alertness and trustworthiness. We train them on what to look out for—certain indicators, certain profiles that may point to trouble. We want people we can rely on to detect suspicious activity and report it directly to us.” Byrne looked away. “You won’t be expected to testify against anyone. Your name will never be made public. The PLL just acts as a watchdog. If he signals us there’s cause for concern, then we start a formal investigation.”
“This is pretty … surprising, sir. I didn’t know the Navy did things like this.”
“Wouldn’t do us any good if everybody knew about it, would it?”
“Probably not. Would I be the only one aboard Barrett?”
“You’ll never know if there’s another, or more than one. But, how about it? Feel like helping us out?”
Dan shook his head. “Better count me out of this one, Jack. Don’t take it personally, but I just don’t like the sound of it. It doesn’t sound real … honorable.”
“Whoa.”
“I know, that’s irrelevant … . If NIS wants a mole inside the ship, why don’t they put an agent aboard? Give me a little credit, Jack. Barrett’s being singled out. Why?”
His chair creaked as Byrne leaned back. He relighted the pipe, which had gone out as he talked. Finally, he locked his fingers behind his neck and met Dan’s eyes again. “Barrett’s a brand-new ship, a very valuable ship. It has systems aboard that are of considerable interest. It might be a target—or become a target—for that reason alone.”
Dan grinned. “Sir, remember Comphibron Ten? On the flag bridge, trying to grease the right decision past Double-Nuts without him noticing? I can tell when you’re bullshitting me. I can hear it in your voice! What’s really going on?”
“Okay, you asked for it. How do you feel about homosexuals?”
“What?”
“Homosexuals. Gays. Queers. How do you feel about them?”
Dan remembered to close his mouth. “I don’t know any.”
“Oh, you probably do.”
“I don’t think so. Anyway, I’ve never met one.” He remembered the groper in Palma. “That I knew, I mean. How do I feel … well, my experiences to date have not been real pleasant.”
“Childhood? Youth? Navy?”
“On liberty … and a couple guys got me in a basement once and felt me up. I must have been about eight.”
“Those would be pederasts, not homosexuals. They go for children, regardless of sex.”
“Well, I don’t know about the fine distinctions.”
“So the reaction is negative but uninformed.”
“I guess so. There aren’t any in the Navy, I know that.”
“Really,” said Byrne.
“Yeah. Why are you asking me that?”
“Because maybe you’re right. Maybe you need to know why we’re concerned.”
He nodded, and the N-two said, “Let me flash back to something that happened a couple of months ago. Threadfin.”
Dan said, surprised, “The sub we lost in the North Pacific?”
“Right.”
“The papers are saying it was one of the welds.”
“We don’t think it was a structural failure.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a rumor that one of the torpedomen aboard was gay. He had a big insurance policy made out to his shoreside lover. There are those who think he tampered with one of the warheads. If a Mark forty-eight went off in the torpedo room, at depth, that would be it. They all got blown to hell. Of course, we won’t know till we actually find debris.”
“Holy smoke.” Dan reflected on that. “But what has that got to do with—”
Byrne shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Or maybe just that, if we’d had a PLL aboard that boat, we could have saved a hundred and twelve men.”
“Jesus, Jack! So if something happens on Barrett and I don’t blow the whistle, it’s my fault?”
“No, not exactly. I guess what I’m really saying is, we really, really are concerned about this. We know there’s something rotten, but we don’t know where. A
nd I’m asking you to get on the team and help us out.”
Dan rubbed his mouth, hoping he wasn’t making another bad decision. “Sir, I want to help, but this is just not the kind of thing I think we ought to be doing. I thought we were supposed to trust our people, not spy on them.”
Byrne studied him for a couple more seconds while Dan tried without success to interpret his expression, then shrugged. He tapped out the pipe briskly, ran a cleaner through it, and propped it on a rack. “All right. That’s clear enough. I’ll just remind you that this is all classified, everything we just discussed. And I expect you to treat it as such under the provisions of the relevant statutes.”
“What, that’s all? You’re not going to tell me what you mean?”
“Well, you’ve made it clear you don’t want to cooperate. So there’s no point in going any further, is there?” Byrne glanced at the door, got up. “It was good seeing you again. That invite still stands. I know Rosemary would love to see you again.”
“Well … thank you, sir.” He wanted to backtrack, try to find out more, but Byrne didn’t give him a chance. He just led him out to where yeomen and officers were working, gave him a card with his home number, shook hands again, and said so long.
Standing outside, he buckled his helmet as the bike idled, drawing glances from passing sailors. He was trying to mesh it together in his mind. But no matter how he tried, the gears didn’t mate. All he ended up with was that something was loose somewhere—something that was making the top brass nervous. And shit, as everyone who’d ever been in the service knew, rolled downhill.
He rolled the bike off the stand, swung aboard as he let in the clutch, and gunned it back for the ship.
6
RACKS of glittering bottles reached higher than his head, aisle on aisle. GIN. SCOTCH. VODKA. SAVE WITH SUMMER PRICING AT YOUR NAVY EXCHANGE. Dan rubbed his mouth, considering. Enough for the weekend, and Beverly would probably expect him to take a bottle to this thing tonight … . He got a fifth of White Horse, a fifth of Smirnoff, and two of Seagram’s gin, then added a clay-colored bottle of Lancer’s at the wine section. Standing in line to check out, he remembered and went back for two cartons of Benson & Hedges 100’s.
Outside, the late-afternoon sun slammed off four lanes of hoods and grilles and fenders locked together like a Rubik puzzle on Rivers Avenue: shipyard traffic, base traffic, rush hour. Hot air sucked through engine after engine until it was a brown roiling haze. He oozed with it, blipping the throttle and dragging his boots along the potholed concrete. Sweat matted his hair under the helmet and ran down his back. He thought about stopping for a cold beer on Spruill. Cars were pulling left toward it at the light ahead.
There was a Spruill Avenue outside every shipyard and naval base in the world, though they went by different names. They smelled the same: stale beer, stale butts, urine-soaked alleys. What old-time sailors had called a Fiddler’s Green: hookers and hoods and two-for-one drafts in smoke-filled pool clubs, pawnshops and tattoo parlors, go-go clubs and used car lots with fluttering plastic banners. The North Charleston police liked to put a policewoman in fishnets and fuck-me heels at the corner of Spruill and Reynolds, just outside the gate. They took down twenty or thirty guys on a good night. The locker clubs had gone once civvies were allowed aboard ship, and the all-night greasy spoons and live sex shows were falling to fast-food franchises and video clubs. But though the shop fronts changed, the feeling never did, and maybe never would as long as there were sailors and those who preyed on them. He extended an arm to turn. But then he remembered the bottles shock-corded to the seat, that he had a woman waiting for him, so he dropped it and went straight when the light changed.
When he pressed the buzzer of the town house, she opened the door as if she’d been waiting just inside. She was barefoot, wearing a green embroidered dressing gown. He held up the bag. “Got you something.”
“Two cartons! Thanks.” He felt her naked leg engage his. Some faint revulsion made him want to pull away. Then, behind her, he saw the kid watching from the door of his room. He took his hand off her ass and said, “Hi, Bartholomew.”
“Hi, Lieutenant Dan.” His face lighted up and he ran out into the living room.
His mother said something about getting a drink and disappeared into the kitchen. Dan looked down at the boy, then picked him up. He yipped and clutched. “Whoa, don’t grab the uniform, okay? How are you, Bartholomew?”
“Billy, Lieutenant. You smell like motorcycles.”
“Sorry, I forgot. Billy.”
“Did you fight any Russians today?”
“No, we just mainly fought ourselves today.”
“Scotch and water? Or something with gin?”
“Scotch, with ice. Look in the bag—”
“I still have some you brought last week.”
Billy wanted a ride, so Dan gave him a merry-go-round for a couple of minutes. His head whacked into an overstuffed chair, but he didn’t want to stop. Dan grinned, planing him up toward the ceiling.
His mother came out with glasses. “Oh—don’t be too rough. He loves it, but … Now don’t mess his uniform, Billy. You’d better go back to your room.”
“Oh Mom, do I hafta? Lieutenant Dan and me—”
“Your room, I said, young man. Jennifer will be here in a little while. Dan, want to come upstairs? I’m still getting dressed. Billy, stay down here. You can watch TV till we come back down, okay?”
Dan looked back as they climbed the stairs, to see the boy’s saddened eyes watching him.
“DID you like that?” She rolled over, tucking the sheet between her legs, and propped her head on her arm. He kneaded between his eyes, wishing the knot would go away. Fucking depressed him, he didn’t know why. “Yeah, it was great,” he said, glancing at the door. The boy’s eyes—he couldn’t get them out of his mind.
Beverly Strishauser was tall and pale, an overwhelming paleness: pale blond hair, pale lips, white translucent skin. Her face was a Modigliani oval on a long neck. Lying beside him, she lifted a narrow foot as if admiring the blue veins that threaded it, the hollow beneath her ankle. She had small violet-laced breasts and a hollow beneath her breastbone. Everything about her was long except her hair, which was pageboy short, with a dark streak in back. She liked to wear pastel colors, flower prints in sheer fabrics, with clunky white or pale gray high heels. As she turned for something on the nightstand, his finger traced down her spine. She shifted her hips, squeezing his hand as a lighter clicked. He heard her inhale and then exhale, aiming the smoke away from him.
“Is there anything different you’d like me to do?”
“I don’t think so. Do you want to do something else?”
“No. I liked that—gosh, I liked it. But I thought maybe you’d like something different.”
“I don’t think so,” he said again, not feeling attached to the conversation. The cold light bleeding through the blinds outlined every object in the room starkly and separately: the night table, books, their half-empty glasses, her diaphragm case on the dresser, the poster of the Morris Island lighthouse. He disliked it when she smoked in bed. He’d never smoked, couldn’t stand it; didn’t like the smell, the ash, anything about it. “Hey, have you got an aspirin?”
She searched for her glasses, then got up quickly, patting his hand, and went into the bathroom. He lay with his eyes closed till he felt her fingers insert a tablet between his lips, then hold the drink for him, as for a sick child. The scotch was watery. He remembered a riddle he’d heard about twins who’d been poisoned in a bar, but only one died. The poison was in the ice in their drinks, and one had drunk his drink fast and the other slow.
“Where’s Billy?”
“He’ll be all right. Mr. Rogers is on. The sitter will be in soon.”
“Where are we going tonight?”
“We don’t have to go anywhere, if you’re not feeling well.”
“No, hell. I might ask you to drive, though.”
“Okay,” she s
aid agreeably. He watched her slowly drawing on her underclothes, panty hose, slip.
That was what he disliked about her, her agreeableness. That and the smoke smell that was always on her breath and her Deep South accent and the ugly dress shields she wore. She taught algebra at a local high school. She’d grown up here and married here and been divorced here. She said her ex-husband, who still lived in town, was abusive and unfaithful. Dan didn’t know how true this was—he’d already noticed her tendency to exaggerate—but he didn’t care. The important thing was that she was willing to go to bed with him.
He asked her naked back, “You didn’t say.”
“I didn’t say what, honey?”
“When I asked where we were going tonight.”
“Oh. Down to the Ludwigs’.”
“Do I know them?”
“You met Lauri and Stephen at the play. He’s an attorney. She used to be a librarian at our school; now she’s active in the arts. They have a house on East Battery. It’s a lovely place, yellow brick with white trim.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“Oh, it’s their open house. They have a lot of friends, musical people, artists, Lauri’s friends mostly. Did you bring your civilian clothes?”
“Oh shit. No.”
“What size do you wear?” She came out of the closet with a blazer and slacks, held them up, looking from them to him. “There are shirts, too. He left them at the dry cleaner’s and never came back for them.”
He said, hearing the annoyance in his voice, “Do you have to wear those pads under your arms?”
“These? It’s not very attractive if you don’t. You can ruin a silk dress. It’s going to be warm tonight.” She hesitated, looking over her shoulder at him. “Would you rather I didn’t?”
“I don’t care. Wear what you want.” He rolled over, reaching for the glass.
IF North Charleston was a grimy industrial hell, Old Towne was Gone With the Wind. Nineteenth-century cast-iron streetlamps twisted margarine-hued light along the river. Resting his head on his arm, and his arm on the door of the car, he looked across to the glittering of Patriot’s Point on the far shore. A horse-drawn carriage eclipsed it, and the clop-clop of hooves drifted through the window. The scotch and whatever she’d given him—not aspirin, but some menstrual-cramps pill—made his head feel dense and impenetrable. He glanced at her pageboy and overbite, her long arms and thin fingers on the wheel, remembered her as she’d strained beneath him an hour before. Gardenia perfume and dress shields. Like the masks they drew on their faces, beautiful and cool. And beneath that, something quite different.