The Edge of Honor (26 page)

Brian sat at the evaluator table, leafing through the huge stack of messages that had come in since he had left Combat at 1800. Combat’s daily mail. His mind wandered off to the letter he had written Maddy a few hours before.

He had told her about the Sea Dragon operation and what had happened to Berkeley, omitting the gory parts. He had also decided to tell her about the staff captain’s visit and his own suspicions that there was a fairly significant drug problem in the ship. He had closed with almost a page of encouragement for the home front, noting that by the time she got this letter there would be less than six months to go before the ship got back. Pushing it a little, he thought, but what the hell—sounds better than seven months.

He continued to sort through the stack of messages, discarding most of them but keeping any that bore on the PIRAZ operations. Message air plans, logistics reports, admin traffic, Navy policy messages, fleet schedules, intelligence summaries, and the countless reports flowing out from the MACV headquarters down in Saigon accumulated at the rate of six hundred separate messages every day. Each of the evaluators had to sort the stack continuously during his watch to keep up with it.

“Feel like a goddamn message clerk,” Brian grumbled.

“Yes, sir, there’s a ton a that shit. And wait till they get the strikes going again—it doubles.”

Brian groaned. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open, and several of the messages blurred as he thumbed through them. Then there was a commotion over in surface.

“Evaluator, Surface,” came a voice over the bitch box. “Five-three reports a tracer!”

“All right!” exclaimed Garuda. He switched over to an air-control circuit to call the airborne early-warning E-2 aircraft to relay the news to the carrier. Brian went over to surface to stand behind the controller, who was talking urgently to the SAR helicopter pilot.

“What’s a tracer?” he asked. “Where was it?”

Rockheart pointed to a glowing symbol near the helicopter’s video.

“Right there, Mr. Holcomb. The pilots carry a thirty-eight with tracer bullets. On a night SAR, they’re supposed to shoot ‘em off when a helo gets close enough to see them. Mother says he’s on a flare-out now to hover in the area and see if they get another one.”

“Second tracer! They have a guy—they have a guy in sight!” shouted the controller. “Five-three on final to datum, swimmer on the wire!”

Brian went back over to D and D and buzzed the captain to report that Big Mother 53 had a possible survivor and was preparing to lower a swimmer down to pick him up.

“Call the exec, and make sure there’s a medical team back there on the flight deck when Five-three lands,” ordered the captain. “You inform CTF Seventy-seven yet?”

“No, sir, I was waiting to make sure they pick the guy up and give us an initial condition report before I called CTF Seventy-seven.”

“Okay, but then tell ‘em right away.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Brian hung up. Garuda was grinning sheepishly.

“What?”

“I reported the tracer to the E-Two on UHF secure; they’ll have told the staff on the carrier. I didn’t realize —”

“Yeah, that’s okay. I just didn’t want to get bombarded with questions before I had at least one or two answers.”

“I’D ask the next time. I forgot who was the evaluator.”

“Well, hell, Garuda, I didn’t tell you not to. It’s no big deal.” The bitch box’s red light came on.

“Evaluator, Surface, Big Mother Five-three reports one soul recovered and they are RTB.”

“Evaluator, aye. Garuda,” he said, “what’s—”

“RTB means returning to base, or in aviator-speak, returning to boat.

They’re on their way back. You better call the XO.”

“Oh shit, yes. I forgot.” Brian got on the phone as Garuda called out to the bridge to get the ship back on flight course and speed.

Twenty minutes later, Ensign Folsom came into Combat from the bridge. He was still dressed out in his flight deck gear, with a green jersey pulled over his khaki shirt and two Navy flashlights jammed in his pockets. He wore a CO2 life jacket in a pouch strapped to his waist and he was carrying his cranial helmet. Coming in from the darkness of the bridge, he blinked his eyes rapidly in the relatively bright lights of CIC. The lower part of his face was red from the winds across the deck and the rotor downwash. He walked over to where Brian was standing.

“Got one back!”

“Yeah, you did. The CO’s really pleased, not to men don the CTF Seventy-seven people. They’ve passed the word to the Air Force. Guy able to tell what happened?”

“Sort of, but Jesus, you should’ve seen him.” Folsom shook his head as if trying to dislodge the memory.

Garuda was turned around in his chair, and the surface module watch slanders were gathered in the doorway to D and D, listening hard.

“What, was he badly injured?”

“Well, from what the baby doc says, no.

But apparently you punch out of an F-Four at altitude, there’s shit that comes with the territory—his eyes, for instance. His eyes were like fucking baseballs. I mean he looked like some kinda space alien.

Something to do with the sudden pressure drop. And his ears were bleeding, the rest of his face looked like raw hamburger, and his ankles looked like softballs puffing up through his poopy suit. When they brought him out of Big Mother on a stretcher, I almost puked. Bad shit.”

He shook his head again.

“And did he say what happened to the other guy—was this the pilot or the backseater?”

“Guys in the helo said this was the RIO, the back seater. He said the pilot command ejected him, that the bird was on fire both sides, and that it blew up a few seconds later. He said it happened too fast for the pilot to have made it out. Guy saved his RIO’s ass but bought the farm.”

“Damn. They take the guy to sick bay?”

“Yes, sir. They’ll keep him there with the medical officer overnight and then take him off on the log helo tomorrow, I guess. They better not let anybody see him with those eyes, though. Guys’ll be having nightmares.

You should’ve heard the chief boats when he saw him— started talking Indian shit.”

“I’m guessing it’s sort of like explosive decompression,” said Brian.

“His eyes should be normal by morning.

We have to be grateful for getting one back at least.

Garuda, we have to do some Op reps or anything?”

“No, sir, I’ve made the reports by voice. The CTF Seventy-seven people will send out the Op reps. What we gotta do now is secure from flight quarters.” The other people standing around D and D began to drift away to retell the story.

“Right.” Brian keyed the bitch box’s key down and called the bridge, telling the OOD to secure from flight quarters. He looked at his watch; it was 0230. For his first midwatch on Red Crown, time was moving right along. For the first time in days, he felt enthusiastic and energized.

By the following morning, however, the reality of being up since midnight began to intrude. At 0930, Brian found his eyelids drooping as he plowed through the backlog of departmental paperwork. He decided it was time to get out on deck for some fresh air. Maybe have his little talk with Louie Jesus. What a name. He called down to the Weapons office and told the yeoman to find the chief boatswain. Five minutes later, Chief Martinez tapped on the stateroom door; it sounded like he was using a two by-four. He stuck his head in and Brian grabbed his ball cap and took the chief by the wardroom to get coffee.

They went out onto the weather decks, through the breaks, and up on to the forecastle, shifting the hot paper coffee cups from hand to hand.

It was a typical day in the Gulf. The sky was overcast and hazy, a mass of warm, humid air suspended over a flat, glare-filled sea. The horizon was indistinguishable except where the dark underside of a rainsquall marked the demarcation between sea and sky. Hood was barely moving, maintaining station in the PIRAZ box and conserving fuel. There were none of the usual sea sounds, or even a hint of a breeze. Patches of dried sea salt sparkled at the base of the missile launcher.

Three sweating crews of deckhands were chipping paint and chasing rust spots on the forecastle. A boatswain’s mate second class by the name of Strickland was supervising the work in the style of boatswain’s mates everywhere: leaning against the side of the missile launcher, positioned so he could watch all three gangs, one foot hooked over a sound-powered phone box, the beginnings of a pendulous beer belly hanging over his belt, along with a holster for his rig and knife, a dirty china mug of black coffee in his hand, and his ball cap pulled down over his eyes against the glare.

They walked forward, across the gray expanse of steel, heading for the point of the bow. Brian glanced back up at the bridge, but the green-tinted windows were bright with glare and revealed nothing. Brian realized that for the rest of the crew not directly involved in the PIRAZ operations, the forty-five-day line periods must be exceedingly boring. He mentioned this to the chief.

“Well, yeah, it is and no, it ain’t,” replied the chief.

“We get a lot of time to do this kinda chippin’ and paintin’, which is good, ‘cause we don’t got enough guys to cover all the topside spaces, a ship this size. I got gangs workin’ up here, and midships on the boats and the davits, and we do some trainin’ for unreps and stuff like that.

And then there’s helo ops, sometimes night ‘n day, like last night.

First Division guys are on the firefighting team, and we gotta man up the motor whaleboat every time they set flight quarters. Trick is to keep ‘em busy and workin’, then they ain’t got time to bitch so much.”

Brian nodded. “We get all wrapped up in Combat doing the Red Crown thing,” he said. “It’s like being in another world. And being on port and starboard, I’m pretty much reduced to watch-standing and sleeping.

Weapons Department must think I’m the missing man.”

“Well, it ain’t like being’ in Dago, but this is WESTPAC.

Mostly everybody stands watch, eats, and sleeps. The routine shit can wait.”

Coltrane and Hooper came walking by, carrying large buckets of nonskid sand from a storeroom to the boatswain locker. Brian shook his head as they passed. He remembered the first time he had seen these two, on a tour of the First Division area conducted by Jack Folsom and the chief a few days after he had reported aboard.

While they had been talking, a curious pair of sailors had emerged from the forecastle hatch, tugging and heaving a paint-stained ten-foot-long aluminum punt up the steep ladder. At the bow of the punt had been an extremely short, scrawny black-haired man of about twenty-two, with a hatchet-shaped face, a birdlike pointed nose, slightly bulging eyes, and a gap where two of his upper front teeth should have been. He had been issuing a steady stream of directions and orders in a broad Brooklyn accent to the other man, who was struggling with the heavier end of the punt.

Brian had stared in wonder at the scrofulous second sailor. He had been dressed in what looked like a selection from the engineers’ ragbag, and even the rags were disheveled. He wore baggy, torn, and paint-stained dungarees, a shirt three times too big for him, and sported a round red face right out of the comics, complete with slightly crossed eyes, a large nose, protruding ears, and a vacant smiling expression under a mop of strawberry blond hair that stuck out in all directions as he nodded agreeably in time with the smaller man’s stream of orders.

Brian had thought he looked like an animated scarecrow as the two made their way past them, hauling the punt aft to the fantail area through the weather breaks.

“What in the world was that?” Brian had asked.

The chief laughed as Jack Folsom explained. “That’s Hood’s dynamic duo,”

he said. “The side cleaners— Coltrane and Hooper. The little one’s Jimmy Hooper; he thinks he’s a wise guy. The village idiot is Seaman Apprentice Hulanny Coltrane, who’s the product of a cosmic joke gone wrong at the Navy Recruiting Command.”

Folsom went on to explain that Coltrane had been inducted at a recruiting station in northeastern Tennessee as a joke by the chief in charge at one of the rural stations, then sent on to Memphis to see what would happen. Through a series of mistakes that only a bureaucracy could cobble together, Coltrane had made it all the way to the boot camp in San Diego, where a horrified master chief had spent a day burning up the phones into the Recruiting Command trying to undo it. While he was shouting at Washington, however, Coltrane and four hundred or so of his contemporaries had been dutifully sworn into the U. S. Navy out on the parade field, making the master chief’s protestations moot.

It would not have been quite so bad if only Coltrane could speak, but, in fact, he could not. He apparently could read, at least a little, and amiably followed everyone’s orders at boot camp, to the point where even the other boots would dispatch him on amusing errands. But when spoken to, he could respond only with a series of sounds that made no sense whatsoever, a fact that had been collectively covered up by every chief at the Recruit Training Center. Coltrane had slowly became a covert project, wherein the chiefs decided to see whether they could actually get him through boot camp and out to a ship without anyone finding out.

“His actual name is Coaltrain,” Folsom said. “Absent a father, his mother apparently named him after the most prominent feature of their lives, the coal trains that went through their trailer patch. Guy at the recruiting station heard Coaltrain and automatically put down Coltrane, like the jazzman. XO did a little checking after he came aboard last year, once he came down off the overhead.

Jesus Christ, was that an interesting day. I saw this creature on the quarterdeck and just knew he was going to become one of mine. Talk about your basic deck-force Cro-Magnon. But the word the XO got back was that, yes, the Navy had fucked up egregiously, but there was no way to undo it without embarrassing a whole lot of people. So we were stuck with him.”

“Fact is,” said the chief, “he’s perfect for side cleanin’. It’s a shit job, down there in that punt on the waterh’the with all them overboard discharges from the shatters and all that oil an’ stuff.”