The Edge of Honor (22 page)

“Uh, no, sir, I don’t, not exactly. I heard—”

“Yes, what exactly have you heard, Mr. Holcomb?” Walsh , leaning forward.

Don’t volunteer, Brian thought. But he just had. Decision time, smart guy. He made up his mind.

“Well, sir, I heard that the boiler casualty was caused by loss of ACC air. That the on-line ACC compressor tripped off when we were at twenty-seven knots and that they couldn’t hold it.”

“Do you know why they couldn’t hold it, Mr. Hoi comb? Why they did not cross-connect the ACC air from one fire room to the other? The captain says you’re a Destroyer School graduate, so you’ve been instructed on steam plants; you know the ACC system can be cross connected, right?”

“Yes, sir. But the answer is no, I don’t know why they didn’t get it cross-connected.”

“You’ve heard nothing about an engineer being high on marijuana as the cause, Mr. Holcomb?”

Brian tried to hold his face still, but it was difficult.

Where the hell did that come from? Had Benedetti admitted the real cause of the incident? Am I being set up by this guy, or worse, by the captain and the exec? Can’t be.

“No, sir,” he said, his mouth dry. “That’s the first I’ve heard anyone say anything like that.”

“You look surprised at what I just said, Mr. Holcomb.”

“Yes, sir, I am. That’s a pretty serious accusation.

… Sir.”

“Indeed it is, Mr. Holcomb.” Captain Walsh leaned back in his chair and closed his notebook. “You see, we had a report from one of the America’s log helo crews on the day of the incident, after the Marine choppers had come up to remove Berkeley’s casualties. This man claimed that someone on Hood’s flight-deck crew told him that one of the BTs was spaced-out and turned the wrong valve when they tried to cross-connect the ACC air.

We all recognize how suspect such rumors are, of course, but the admiral told me to pull the string. Captain Huntington here assured me that a BT made a mistake but that drugs were not involved. And you’ve heard nothing about anybody being drugged up at GQ, correct?”

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir, nothing like that.”

“So. I guess that’s all I need from you, Mr. Holcomb.

Thank you for your cooperation.”

“Thank you, Brian,” said the captain, indicating that he could go. The exec gave him a brief smile and a nod as he left the captain’s cabin.

He stopped outside the captain’s door and exhaled audibly. Then he walked to his stateroom to use the head before going back up to Combat.

He washed his face in the stainless-steel sink in his room, toweled off, and then looked at himself in the mirror. Well, well, well, he thought.

First lie’s the toughest one. I guess you’ve decided how you’re going to play this game, Mr. Hoicomb, sir. Well shit, what else could I do?

Blurt out that, yes indeedy, simply everybody knows that BT2 Gallagher was flying high, that the ship is loaded with dopers, and that somebody really ought to look into things here in the good ship Hood! After all, he didn’t know for a fact that any drugs were involved; he was like everybody else, going on scuttlebutt. Uuh-huh. And where’d you get your law degree?

He shook his head as if to dislodge the mocking voice.

As he left his stateroom and headed back up the ladder to Combat, he recalled the discussion with Benedetti the night before. I guess this makes me one of the good guys, he thought. Or at least one of the guys, whispered his conscience. Well, I may have retreated on the notion of going after the dopers the regulation way, but I will not look aside when
I find it. He’d have to have that talk with the bosun, old Louie Jesus, and his division officers. I guess for now, I’ll do it the Hood way. There really was no other choice.p>

Austin and Benedetti were up in Combat when Brian came through the door.

Garuda was standing next to the SWIC console, his intercom wires draped over his shoulder as he did a button-smashing drill on the adjacent computer control panel. As Brian walked over to the evaluator’s table, Benedetti looked at him expectantly and Austin raised his eyebrows.

“Well?” he said. Garuda tried to look as if he was not listening. The rest of the people in Combat all appeared to be very busy.

“Well,” said Brian, joining the two lieutenant commanders at the evaluator table, “he had a bunch of questions about my GQ station, but what he really wanted to know was what I’d heard or knew about the cause of our dropping the load.”

“And?” said Austin.

“And,” he said, looking at Benedetti, “I told him that I’d heard it was an ACC air failure.”

“He ask you anything else?” said Benedetti, stepping closer and lowering his voice.

“Yeah, he asked if I’d heard anything about one of the snipes being high on dope when it happened. I told him no.”

Austin looked down at the deck and smiled, nodding slowly. Benedetti did not move. “He say where he got that?”

“He told me that a helo crewman from the America’s log helo had heard it from somebody on our flight-deck crew. Did he ask you two the same question?”

Austin nodded. “It came up, but we both drew a blank.

Vince here even got indignant, didn’t you, snipe?”

But Benedetti was not in a joking mood. He gave Brian a straight look and said, “Appreciate it, shipmate.”

Austin laughed. “Now isn’t that touching. Now I suppose the XO’s gorilla squad is going to engineer an accident of some kind for poor Gallagher.

Let’s see, what will it be this time? I think we’re overdue for a hand injury—yes, a problem with a hatch coaming.”

“I suppose you’d give the little fuck a commendation, tell him to keep up the good work,” growled Benedetti.

Austin looked down his nose at the engineer, with an aloof expression, and shook his head.

“All this goon-squad stuff, this cops and robbers, good guys and bad guys—what purpose is it serving? Do you think you’re deterring this riffraff”—he swiveled his face around Combat to indicate the enlisted men—”from doing their stupid drugs with all this hugger-mugger? No way, gentlemen, no way. Let me give you some advice, Mr. Holcomb. You find out who’s clean and who’s dirty, and you make sure the dirties aren’t in a position to put your career on the block.”

“Easy for you to say, Austin,” snorted the engineer.

“Your watch stations are full of senior petty officers, chiefs, and officers. Any swingin’ dick in my main holes can bring the plant down, and all of your fancy twidget stuff with it.”

Austin arched his eyebrows. “Well, Vince, I can’t help it if you picked engineering as the horse to ride, eh?

Should have stuck with a white-collar specialty like Ops or Weapons, or Supply. Supply’s really good for staying detached.” He made a show of looking at his watch.

“I’ve got to get down below for dinner so I can relieve Mr. Holcomb here.” Austin gathered his notebook and cap and left Combat. Garuda looked back over his shoulder.

“You got it, Mr. Holcomb? No changes since you left, ‘cept I had to reload the op program.”

“Yeah, Garuda, I got it.” He looked at Benedetti, who was staring down at the deck plates.

“Is that the end of it, then?”

“Yeah,” replied the engineer. “No tellin’ what this guy’s saying to the CO and XO, but the staffies won’t pursue the drug angle—especially when they don’t want to pursue it. I’m sure the admiral and this staff guy know full well that it’s probably true, but they also know what can and can’t be done about it. He’s probably down there saying something brilliant, like ‘Don’t let this happen again.’ Shit. How many days is it?”

“Days?”

“Yeah, days. They used to keep a count on the status board, up here—yeah, there it is. See?” He pointed to one of the Plexiglas boards at the back of D and D, where a box had been drawn in yellow grease pencil and the number 179 inscribed in it. “That’s days till we get back to Dago. Actually, it’s a hundred and seventy-eight days and a wake-up.

But who’s counting, huh? Anyway, you made the right call down there. And there’s some truth in what Austin said—you gotta know who’s dirty and who’s not.”

“Ask the chiefs?”

“Right. In Weapons Department, it’s your bosun and Chief Vanhorn. And see the Sheriff. You definitely need to talk to Jackson. He’s black, but he’s tough as fuckin’ nails on this subject. I’m not sure about some of your other twidget chiefs. But Fox Hudson and Jack Folsom, they’re switched in. And Garuda here.”

Brian nodded, taking it all aboard. He looked around the darkened modules of Combat, at all the young faces bent over consoles, their skin tinted with amber scope light. His face must have shown his frustration, because Benedetti gave him a rueful smile.

“Yeah, it’s a bitch, ain’t it? You come on here expecting to have to work your ass off learning all this technical stuff but assuming your people are your people. But that’s not how it is, shipmate. The bad guys, they know who they are, and they know who the good guys are, too.

You gonna get through this tour in one piece, you’re gonna have to play at every level. I gotta split.”

Benedetti left Combat. Brian looked at his watch. He had forty-five minutes before Austin came back up and relieved him for the evening meal. Garuda was discussing the scheduling of tanking the BARCAP with Hoodoo.

Brian could see Rockheart talking on his sound-powered phones to the flight deck. The captain’s phone buzzed.

“Evaluator, sir.”

“Tell the flight deck Captain Walsh is on his way back, Brian.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” He hung up and passed the word over to surface. Garuda followed that up with instructions to land Hood^ own SAR helo once the logistics bird was clear of the flight deck.

“Fucking musical helos here, Garuda,” Brian observed.

“Yes, sir, you’re gonna come to hate fling-wings before we get done out here. Every time any other helo comes up here or anytime we want to get the Clementine bird outta the hangar for some flight ops, we gotta get Big Mother airborne and out of the way. For every hour of flight time on combat SAR station, they’ll fly ten hours doing musical helos. I hate helos. Everybody hates helos.”

Brian found a single letter on his desk when he got down to his stateroom, a letter on tissue-weight yellow stationery smelling faintly of perfume, with Maddy’s graceful handwriting on the envelope. He pitched his ball cap onto his rack, sat down at his desk, and ripped it open. Three pages, mostly mundane news, but the closing lines were what he was looking for: “Love you and miss you very much.” No hate and discontent about the deployment. No dark hints of serious talks to come.

A good letter. Not a great letter, but a good letter. Certainly no hint of a Dear John.

He wondered now as he put it down why he had even felt he might get a Dear John. How had the good years at Monterey, all the fabulous times, suddenly been eclipsed in a few short weeks by his return to sea duty?

He remembered the conversations: “I’ve got orders to a great ship, a guided missile ship, a big mother—eight thousand tons, one of the brand new PIRAZ ships. They call her a frigate, but she’s as big as a World War Two cruiser. Weapons officer. Wonderful! We’re going to deploy in six weeks for seven months.” Silence. “Well, okay, that’s not such great news for a wife who has to stay behind while the guy goes off to play Navy. But you’ve got this great offer from Bank of America, a management intern slot with great pay, the wardroom wives’ group—they’re bound to be good people on a frontline ship like this—and then we’re back for the balance of my tour.”

More silence. And for the six weeks leading up to deployment day, no direct attacks: just this sad silence, exacerbated by his long days on the ship, the pressures of taking over a new department, learning all the new systems, twenty-four-hour duty days every fourth day, the macabre mechanics of the predeployment updating of wills, powers of attorney, briefings on survivor benefits.

He realized now that he had left San Diego subconsciously harboring some grave reservations, a fear almost, of what changes his wife might have been going through in those frantic final weeks before deployment.

In their outings with Fox and Tizzy Hudson, Brian had often wondered about the Hudsons’ entirely relaxed attitude toward the upcoming deployment. Both of them seemed to be almost looking forward to the deployment, as if it would provide an interlude for them to resume temporarily their single ways. That was not Brian’s idea of a marriage, but he was uncertain if Maddy shared his opinion of the Hudsons. But now that the pressure cooker was over, the ship finally on her way, and the days counting off toward homecoming, maybe she had leveled off. He read the letter again, especially the last paragraph. Yeah. It was going to be okay. He would write her back tonight, tell her about Sea Dragon. He wasn’t sure whether or not to tell her about the drug problems.

He’d have to think about that.

Rocky arranged to run into Bullet up on the boat decks just after sunset. Several other small clumps of men were either inhaling some fresh air or smoking a last cigarette topside before going below, so the sight of two first class lounging by the lifelines, shooting the shit, was unremarkable. Even so, both first class had taken the effort to make their encounter look entirely casual.

Everyone in the crew was still trading rumors about the Sea Dragon op and what had happened to Berkeley.

“You believe that asshole Gafiagher?” muttered Rocky.

“Boy, a dumb ass, what he is.” Bullet looked off into the dark and took a final drag on his cigarette. The brief red glow momentarily illuminated his dark-skinned features, which had begun to dissolve in the darkness.

He adjusted the heavy electrician’s tool belt around his waist; Bullet was never without his tools, in case GQ went down and he had to scramble to his repair party GQ station.

“Fucking snipes,” Rocky said. “It’s stunts like that bring the gorillas out. Jackson is going around like he’s ready to arrest the whole crew.

We don’t need this kind of heat.”

“You wanna see heat, go catch Louie Jesus. Way I be hearin’ it, that snipe is holed up in Two Firehouse ‘cause LJM say he gonna fuck him up.”

“He can be my guest. I heard that the admiral sent some four-striper up here to check out the whole deal; word is that they heard there was dope involved. Guy was in with the Old Man for an hour and a half. Next thing you know, there’ll be some kind of fucking investigation.”