The Edge of Honor (50 page)

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.”

“That satisfy them?”

“I guess. For the ones who’ve secure about the race bit, that rang a bell. For those who’ve still figuring out where they stand, well …”

Brian got up. “I didn’t mean to pry,” he said. “This whole race issue is such a raw nerve, everyone’s afraid even to talk about it, call a spade a spade.” Then Brian realized what he had just said, but Jackson was grinning at him. “So to speak, Mr. Holcomb?”

“Aw, shit, Chief—”

Jackson laughed and waved off Brian’s apology. “I know what you’re saying—if you weren’t colorblind, you wouldn’t have used that expression. Sometime we ought to talk about this.”

“But it’s going to get in the way of your investigation, isn’t it, Chief?”

“Yeah, it might. Depends on how much I let it.

Wouldn’t be the first time I lit a fuse that ‘everybody’ would rather I hadn’t. But in reality, it pisses me off.

These guys were given an opportunity they didn’t deserve.”

It was Brian’s turn to laugh. “I may know more about that position than you’d think. I’m going to finish my rounds. Then I’m going to get a good night’s sleep, because tomorrow night, I want you to know I’m going on the beach with Godzilla himself.”

Jackson grinned. “The bosun? Get lots of sleep, Mr. Holcomb.”

“I will, but I’m going to make another round about twenty-three-thirty, see what it’s like when the liberty party returns.”

“I’ll be doing the same thing, sir.”

“Well good. Why don’t you meet me on the quarterdeck at twenty-three-thirty.”

San Diego

Maddy lay in bed at 2:30 on a Friday morning and tried not to cry. Brian had finally phoned from Subic Bay, and it had just about been a complete disaster.

First, they had been disconnected. She had picked the phone up, awakening from a troubled sleep, and not recognized who it was until the static diminished and the connection suddenly cleared.

“Brian, is that you? Oh, I can’t believe it!”

“Hey, Maddy,” he had said, using the traditional Georgia salutation.

“Brian, where are you—what time is it—oh, I’m confused.

I’m not awake.”

“Sorry, babe, I’m lucky even to get a line. I—”

And then the line had gone dead, his voice replaced with a roar of static. She had groaned, sworn, and hung up. He had told her this might happen; now the trick was for him to get his operator back without losing his place in line. She had waited, rubbing her eyes, afraid to leave the phone even to go to the bathroom. He had come through again ten minutes later, and, after an incompre hensible exchange with a Filipino operator that she had finally recognized was a request for a collect call, Brian was back.

He had asked how she was doing and she had said, “Fine, good as can be expected. I miss you. Do you miss me?” He had told her about the big foreign-exchange building and that he was going to get himself a stereo and her a surprise present. She asked how he was doing in Hood and he said that he had seen the special fitness report, and that, if they sent it, it looked good for promotion, even though there were some things about the Hood that were not … well, he’d tell her about it later.

“What do you mean, if they send it? Why wouldn’t they send it?”

He had demurred at first, but she had pressed, and then he had started talking around the drug problem, trying to disguise what he was talking about because all the phone lines from Subic were monitored by a Navy security group. He had told her of his somewhat anomalous position vis-a-vis the exec and the captain on what happened to people caught with drugs aboard ship, how his future fitness reports would depend on going along with the ship’s system, and how he was having trouble coming around to doing it their way.

“Brian, is that smart?” she had asked. “I mean, the whole point of taking this ship, this damned deployment, was to get to lieutenant commander, wasn’t it? Maybe you’re just going to have to go along, get through it, and get off the ship as soon as your tour is up.”

“But Maddy, this isn’t right, what’s going on here. I mean, it may be politically the right move, and there are guys like Austin who think that is exactly how we should play it, but I hate the thought of some pothead with his fingers on the missile radars. Look, we should probably stop talking about this, okay?”

“Okay, but Brian, don’t throw away this whole deployment.

I mean, I hate your being gone, and I’m … I’m probably not doing a terrific job adjusting to this side of the Navy, but please, don’t let it all be for nothing.”

“Maddy, you don’t understand. As a department head, I’ve got a responsibility to the ship, not just to the political interests of the CO and the XO to keep their drug problem under wraps. I’m just not sure how long I can go along with this stuff.”

“Brian, think about it, okay? Just think about it. It’s only for this one tour of duty. You said that, remember?

That we had to go through this to get well and to get you back on track for lieutenant commander? Once you’ve got that, you have a shot at being an XO yourself; then you can call the shots and run a ship the way you think you should. This is what you told me, remember?”

“Yeah, I know. But there’s so much happening out here—things I can’t talk about, operational stuff. Everything’s a whole lot different from what I expected. And this port-and-starboard business, I’m just barely getting back to normal after almost two days in port.”

“Okay, honey, I know. Angela told me what that was all about. Just get some rest there while you’re in port.

But Brian? Don’t be a crusader. I don’t think the Navy likes crusaders.”

Brian had been silent for a moment. She almost thought the connection was gone again when he spoke.

“Maddy, I’m going to have to play this one by my conscience. If the Navy is going this route with druggies, then maybe I don’t want to be a lieutenant commander.

But I don’t think it’s the Navy. The Navy’s policy is pretty clear. I think it’s this ship, this command. There’s something going on with the captain, and I can’t figure it out.”

None of this had sounded very good at all to Maddy.

For the first time during the conversation, she wondered whether he had been drinking. Brian tended to get very serious, almost morose, if he had been drinking. He had almost no capacity for liquor.

“Brian, Brian, just hunker down and do your job.”

“That’s what I’m talking about, Maddy—doing my duty as an officer and not as some kind of flunky who’s desperate to get promoted. I thought you’d support that notion.”

“Not if it means we’re going through this deployment for nothing, Brian.

That doesn’t make sense. I know there’s a lot I don’t understand, but just remember why we’re putting up with this … this hateful separation.”

“Well, I’ll try, Maddy. Look, there’s a big line here—”

There had been some pain in his voice, and Maddy recognized that she had somehow said the wrong thing.

But she hadn’t really known what to say. She fell back on something reliable.

“I love you, Brian. Tell me more in your letters so I can understand it better. I didn’t mean to sound selfish.

It’s just that I need you here.”

“I know, Maddy, I know. And I love you, too. Things aren’t that bad. I may be all wrong about this, but I don’t think so. I guess I do need to fill you in some more so you’ll understand. I can’t really talk on this open line.”

“Okay. I’m really glad you called. Just do what they want and hurry home.”

“You surviving all this?”

“Fair, Brian. Just fair. Thank God for the job at the bank, or I’d be out of my mind. I know this much, wherever we do go after this tour, I’m going to have to have a job, a career even, if you’re going to deploy some more.”

“If I go to a ship, I’ll deploy. That’s kind of what we do.”