The Edge of Honor (79 page)

He didn’t see Rocky’s right hand reach for the nest of loose cables at the base of the fire pump’s motor, didn’t see him rip a 440-volt cable out, felt too late the sudden movement by his knee, and then a giant humming vise grabbed the entire left side of his body and drew him headlong and paralyzed into blackness.

Chief Martinez bounced off the bulkhead for the fifteenth time and cursed it roundly for being in his way, his voice muffled by the OBA mask. He was trying to get back up the after officers’ passageway to the mess decks to find some more OBA canisters. Martinez normally headed up Repair Two, stationed in the forward part of the ship, but since there was no damage in his area, he had taken his firefighting team amidships to help the exec and repair teams Five and Three with the fuel fires there. They had been making progress until some of the aviation fuel, pooled in pockets around the boat decks, had been sucked into an inadvertently energized supply vent fan, spreading an aerosol mixture of fuel and air into some of the officers’ staterooms, where it had ignited with an ominous roar beneath their feet. The exec had reorganized the teams and sent Martinez and his repair party into the ship to come up from the fantail and attack the fires from the inside. Martinez had dispatched his four man OBA team into the thick of it, unsnarled the fire hoses with the rest of the DC team, and then gone to get more breathing canisters.

The smoke in the passageway was now so thick that he could only feel his way forward, relying on his day-today memory of the passageway to know where he was.

As he went past the after officers’ head area, he wished he could be dragging Bullet into the smoke with him.

Pissed him off, they came so close. But now they knew, thanks to Rockheart. He knew he was nearing the mess decks area, near Two Firehouse, when he could no longer feel the heat from the fires aft. But the smoke from the fuel fires was a solid, toxic, roiling black wall of soot particles, carbon monoxide, and other poisonous gases.

The chief wore a red damage-control steel helmet on his head, his entire face contained in the OBA mask, perched above the black canvas breathing bags on his massive chest. His khaki uniform was completely soaked through with firefighting water and perspiration, and his hands were covered in heavy asbestos gauntlets. The miner’s light strapped to his helmet was totally useless in the smoke; he had long since turned it off.

He swore again as he slipped on something on the deck and nearly lost his balance, his arms freewheelingtor a few seconds until he found the bulkhead. He sensed what felt like a current of air rising from the deck, knelt down, awkward in the OBA rig, and took off a glove. He found a hatch open, from which a rising current of air was flowing. Suddenly, he could even see a little bit. He snapped on his helmet light, realizing this was the hatch down to the starboard shaft alley. He remembered catching a couple of his stars sleeping down there when they were supposed to be on a working party.

Why the hell was the hatch open? Then he heard a noise, an unmistakable gargling, gabbling noise a few feet away in the gloom of the smoke. What the fuck! He moved across the passageway, once again encountering something slippery on the deck. He shone the light down and saw blood smears on the deck. He heard the noise again and found Seaman Coltrane, suddenly visible in an alcove. The air rising from the hatch had scoured out a pocket of breathable air in the alcove opposite, and Coltrane was curled up in a ball, holding his bloody head.

The chief pushed his mask aside.

“Coltrane, what the fuck? What’re you doin’ here?” he asked, before remembering whom he was talking to.

Like asking a door what day it was. Except that Coltrane had grabbed the chief’s sleeve and was trying desperately to tell him something, pointing down and gesturing at the nearly invisible open scuttle across the way, babbling incoherently, pointing to his head, then miming a—what? A punch?

“What? What is it?! Calm down. Spell it out for me.”

Coltrane stopped struggling and looked at his chief.

Then he reached out and took the grease pencil from Martinez’s OBA pocket and bent down on hands and knees. Printing laboriously on the deck tile, he spelled out the name Rockheart on the tile deck. Then he pointed to his head and gestured urgently down at the hatch.

“Jesus Christ, Coltrane. I didn’t know you could write.

All this fucking time—wait a minute. Rockheart did this?

He hit you? And he’s down there in the shaft alley?

Right now?”

Coltrane nodded vigorously, then winced with pain.

Martinez looked over at the opened hatch. What the fuck was going on around here? What would Rockheart be doing down in the shaft alley? He stood up, the light from his helmet again obscured in smoke. With his mask askew, he immediately started coughing. He squatted down again.

What was Rocky, a senior radarman, doing in the starboard shaft alley in the middle of a no-shitter crisis, the ship on fire, everything all fucked up, and everybody going crazy? He knelt down on one knee and grabbed Coltrane’s chin in one massive paw.

“You stay where you are. You got an air pocket’s long as that hatch is open. I’ll come back, get you when I’m done down there. But don’t try to go nowheres, ‘cause it’s all smoke in either direction. Keep your head right on the deck. Got it?”

Coltrane nodded again, this time with more care. Martinez stood up and moved over to the hatch. He looked down, surprised that he could see anything, but the engineering spaces had their own independent air-supply systems, and this one was still running. The ladder led down to the next hatch, which was also locked back and fully open. Something definitely going on here, something not right. In the yellow glow of the battle lanterns, he spotted the shadow of somebody moving around down there. He began to strip off the OBA—with his girth, he could never fit through the hatches with an OBA on. He stripped off his mask, laid aside the breathing bags and harness, and started carefully down the ladder. He reached the vestibule below and heard the spray of water from a ruptured line. Being very careful now, he got behind the hatch and looked around its edges into the shaft alley. There he saw the inert form of Chief Jackson sprawled next to the fire pump, his left leg bent under him. And across the pump room was Radarman First Class and Master-at-Arms Rockheart, gathering the last sodden bills out of the water and stuffing them into a rag bag full of money that he was clutching to his chest.

And suddenly Martinez knew. It wasn’t Rocky the radarman, was it? It was Rocky the main man, the second man. Them, Garlic had said. Money from them. And it was Rockheart that night who’d been yelling at Coltrane outside Jackson’s door. It hadn’t been Coltrane listening to them, it had been Rockheart. And somehow, Jackson had caught on, too, and Rocky had taken him out. Rocky, after his god damned money in the shaft alley, thinking the ship was going to go down, which it might. As he watched, Rocky straightened up, causing Martinez to jerk his head back. He saw Rocky’s leg strike out at Jackson’s chest and then he saw Rocky’s hands reach for the ladder rails beneath him. Okay, fuckhead, you got the cowboy, but you ain’t gonna get the Injun.

As Rocky started up the ladder, the chief sat back on his haunches behind the hatch and reached around to release the holdback latch. When Rocky’s hands came off the ladder and rested for a fraction of a second on the lip of the hatch, Martinez slammed the hatch down with all his strength, the knife edge of the round scuttle nearly amputating all of Rocky’s fingers. Even with the noise of the spraying water below, Martinez heard a very satisfactory scream. He popped the hatch back up and saw Rocky drop all the way to the steel deck plates below, his precious bag tumbling open, spilling money all over the pump room, Rocky landing with a crash on the deck plates. With a growl that would have done a grizzly bear proud, Martinez stood up and dropped straight down through the hatch, crashing onto the deck plates with enough force to catapult Rocky over into the bilges below, where he landed on his back with another shout of pain. As he tried to sit up, Martinez was already there, casually stomping him in the face. When Rocky flopped back into the bilgewater, Martinez stepped down and stood with one foot on Rocky’s chest, the other in the calf-deep bilgewater.

“Yo, kingpin, how they hangin’?” Martinez asked as he saw the shock spreading across Rocky’s face. “What, you havin’ a bad dream, Rocky?

Things going’ wrong all of a sudden?”

He pushed hard with his foot and Rocky’s chest and head were forced underwater, where Martinez held him for many seconds before relaxing some of the pressure.

Rocky’s face burst out of the water, his mouth open, his chest heaving, and his eyes blinking rapidly from the oil in the bilge. He tried to raise his mangled hands to wipe his eyes but screamed again with the pain.

“What’d you do to the Sheriff here, huh? You hurt my buddy Jackson, did you, you fuck?” He pushed Rocky underwater again, holding him longer this time. When he eased off, Rocky spluttered to the surface, trying to draw breath and talk at the same time, his bloody hands staying underwater this time. It sounded to Martinez as if he was saying the word deal.

“Deal? You wanna make a deal with me, scumbag?

Not in your lifetime, Mr. Dealer.”

“Don’t kill me! Please. I’ll testify,” shouted Rocky, his eyes wild. “I can give you Bullet. You can have the money—I even got more!”

“Oh yeah? You already gave us Bullet, remember?

And I don’t give a shit about your money, or Bullet’s money, or Garlic’s fuckin’ money. Garlic’s fuckin’ dead, see? And I ain’t sorry he is. And you’re next.”

“No, please, no! I can’t breathe … your leg … this oil … Jesus Christ, my fucking hands! Please. There’s thousands here. You can have it all. You can keep it, you want to. I won’t tell. I’ll do anything you want, man. I’ll testify—I can give you the whole thing. But please, please don’t kill me, man!”

The chief stared down at him as Rocky’s lungs spasmed and he had a choking fit from inhaling oil. When he got his voice back, he said, “Please, man. I don’t wanna die. I can tell you about Garlic, too, but you gotta let me outta here. I don’t want to drown. Oh, God, my hands.

I’ll take the fall, I don’t care. I’ll testify, say anything you want, just don’t let me drown in this shit—”

The chief loomed over Rockheart like a gathering storm. “What else you gonna tell me, we don’t already know? Bullet? We got the goods on fucking Bullet, got his ass in the box. We don’t need your ugly ass.”

“But you think you killed Garlic, don’t you? You beat him up and then he croaked. They’ll find out, they do an autopsy at Da Nang. They’ll find out he got the shit kicked out of him before his so-called heart attack.

But I can get you off. You didn’t kill him, man—I did.”

“You?”

“Yeah. I found him, beat to shit, probably bleeding internally. He could finger me; he was the other guy could finger me, besides Bullet. I … I pressed his carotid artery until he shut down. He was probably finished anyways, okay? So I just did it. You didn’t kill him. I did.”

Martinez stood up. “Well shit, I don’t think I wanted to hear that. I thought I had killed the slimy fuck, and now you’re telling me you did it? After I counted coup and everything? Son of a bitch!” Martinez took his foot off Rocky’s chest. As Rocky sat up, he kicked him hard in the face, bouncing his head off the fire pump’s foundations and knocking him cold. Rocky’s upper body settled down into the bilgewater. Martinez reached down into the water and pulled him up the sloping deck to the base of the fire pump, propping Rocky’s head up out of the water. He lifted one of Rocky’s eyelids and, satisfied that Rocky was truly out, left him, fighting hard the urge to choke the life out of him.

He climbed over the bilge strakes to the pocket of water where Jackson lay. He saw the 440 cable sticking down into the pocket of bilgewater and wondered.

Breaker should have popped, but … Being careful not to touch the water, he checked for signs of life. Jackson was breathing, but he didn’t look right, and he was also out cold. Martinez unholstered his knife and went over to the fire-hose rack next to the eductor pump, looking to make sure Rockheart was still out.

He sawed through the canvas and rubber-lined fire hose and cut out a ten-foot length. He slipped this around Jackson’s chest and dragged him upright to the base of the ladder. Then, holding the ends of the hose in one hand, he climbed the ladder one step at a time, lifting Jackson by his improvised sling up through the two hatches to the alcove above, where he placed him on his side. Coltrane stared at them from across the passageway, his eyes streaming from the smoke. Jackson groaned but did not come around.

Martinez checked to make sure the alcove was still relatively free of smoke and that Jackson was still breathing.

He climbed back down into the vestibule above the pump room. He looked through the hatch. Rocky lay where he had coldcocked him, sitting slumped, with his lower body in the bilges and his chest and head resting against the fire pump. The pump room was wrecked, the fire pump useless, and the bilges were awash with oily water—and greenbacks.

Dirty water, dirty money, dirty guy. Needs a good bath. He had an urge to go over to the eductor suction pump in the corner and shut the isolation valves, let the fucker just drown. Martinez thought about it for a moment, shook his head, slammed down the hatch, and climbed back up to get his OBA so he could take care of Jackson and Coltrane. He also had to tell Repair Five that they had flooding in the shaft alley.

Ten minutes later, Rocky started to come around. He tried to move his head, but the resulting pain brought stars to his eyes and he groaned out loud. His body felt pummeled, as if he had been tenderized, and his hands felt as if they were wearing puffy, stinging gloves. He couldn’t quite get his breath as he tried to remember where he was. Then he became aware that someone was with him, someone moving around. He cracked open his eyes but couldn’t move his head for the pain. A dark figure in an OBA mask was standing a few feet away, looking down at him.