The Edge of Honor (85 page)

Time had slowed down for the rest of the day. Terrified of going back to her empty apartment and too upset to go to work, she had simply stayed there, in the background, trying to be inconspicuous but unwilling to leave. At the end of the day, she had been sitting out in the garden, dozing and drained after the sleepless night before and the trauma of the morning, when Mrs. Huntington had come out onto the patio with the exec’s wife, whose protestations had awakened Maddy. Mrs. Huntington was being firm.

“Barbara, go home. Maddy’s here. You all have families to attend to.

I’ll be all right. She’ll stay with me.

Tom’s making all the arrangements, so you guys go home now, please.”

“Are you sure? I can get—”

“Please, I’ve kind of had it with crowds right now.

Maddy’s here. Please—”

The exec’s wife withdrew then, taking along the three other wives still at the house. Mrs. Huntington walked slowly out into the garden and sat down in the chair next to Maddy. For almost a half an hour, she simply sat there, saying nothing at all. Maddy had taken her hand after awhile but kept her own silence. The evening shadows deepened until it was almost full dark, the familiar San Diego evening chill descending on the garden like an invisible mantle. Finally, the captain’s wife spoke.

“Well, Maddy. All those brave words.”

“Yes.”

“They still hold true, you know.”

Maddy bit her lip and shook her head.

“Yes, they do. Warren and I had twenty-seven years, only three less than the Navy had him. Death can come anytime, in a car crash, a fall in the bathtub, in sickness, anytime. And usually it’s so mundane, so …

awkward.

We don’t know what happened out there, but I do know in my bones that Warren would rather have died out there, doing what he had spent his life doing, than in all the hundreds of ways sixty-year-old men die here at home. I am very sad, and I think I’m going to cry a lot before sunrise, but if it has to be, this was a fitting death.”

Maddy shook her head again. Her voice was small, as if she was talking to herself. “I’m just not sure. I don’t think I’m strong enough to do this. To go through this, what you … Because it is what they do—they go in harm’s way every time they go to sea. Brian told me that once and I teased him for being melodramatic, but it’s true. Dear God, it’s true!

And I’m so scared.” Despite herself, her eyes were filling with tears.

The captain’s wife’s voice was disembodied in the darkness of the garden. “I told you a Navy marriage was about risk, Maddy. Risk is what gives marriage value.

The career, children if you have them, a love affair with one person that matures into the best kind of human bonding, these are life’s treasures, and now, especially now, I’m counting on their being sustaining treasures.

But if they’re not at risk, whether because either of you might falter or because the career is inherently dangerous, or because you have alternative lives to fall back on, there’s not half the value.”

She paused to put her hand on Maddy’s. “And now that you know this, what choice do you really have, Maddyholcomb?”

Subic Bay, the Philippines It. Comdr. Brian Holcomb stood on the hot concrete apron in front of the ops building at Cubi Point Naval Air Station. He wore pressed khakis with ribbons and his fore-and-aft cap.

His uniform shirt had a black cloth band pinned to the left sleeve.

Parked in front of the ops building was an Army Caribou, a short-haul, drop-ramp transport plane that was used to ferry cargo from Cubi Point Naval Air Station up to the big Clark Air Force Base outside Manila. The Caribou was painted out in camouflage, which made it look smaller than it actually was. The back ramp was open and an honor guard of perspiring Hood sailors stood in their whites at the back at parade rest, heavy M-1 rifles at their sides. Chief Jackson stood behind them. The crew of the Caribou hung around the flight deck doors, dressed in their olive drab flight suits. It was ten o’clock in the morning and they were waiting for the casket to come down from the hospital. The remains of the other six men killed in the attack were already onboard.

Across the bay, Brian could see the ship, her stern pointing into the opening of the floating dry dock, a clutch of tugs milling around her.

They were pushing her back into the dry dock, where they would close the hole in the port side before she went back to the States. Vince Benedetti had estimated it would take ten days to position and weld the patch. Her flags could be seen at half-mast, even from here.

Brian felt as if he was AWOL, standing here on the tarmac while the ship was making the move to the dry dock. The board of inquiry had been going on for three days, and he was emotionally exhausted after being grilled for hours by the panel of captains and commanders, on both the air attack and the drug problem in the ship. And there was more to come when he returned to the ship. He had not yet been designated a party to the investigation, but one of the Navy lawyers on the board had advised him to request counsel. When he had asked whether he was being or going to be accused of something, the lawyer, a commander, had simply shrugged.

“You’re going to be a pivotal witness, Mr. Holcomb.

Frankly, the board’s informal consensus is that you did very well, but
still think you ought to have counsel. If and when indictments are made, important witnesses can become targets, if you follow me.”p>

Brian didn’t really follow him, but he had submitted the request, anyway. His duffel bag was already on board the Caribou. The exec had appointed him as the official escort officer for Captain Huntington’s remains. He would make the long flight back across the Pacific to Travis Air Force Base with Captain Huntington’s body.

He would then accompany the casket to Washington, D. C., where the captain would be buried at Arlington. In Washington, a full captain would assume the duties of escort at the national cemetery, but a lieutenant commander would suffice for the flight.

Since the casket would first land at Travis Air Force Base, located north of San Francisco, Mrs. Huntington would be allowed to accompany her husband’s remains to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington.

Strangely, at least to Brian, she had asked for Maddy to accompany her on the trip to Washington. In their short phone conversation the night before, Maddy had not explained it very well, other than to say that after the word had come in about the attack, they had all gathered and spent most of a day at the Huntingtons’ waiting for further word from the Pacific. She said they had been relieved by the first reports that no officers had been casualties in the attack, then stunned when they were finally told that the captain had died following the incident. For some reason, Mrs. Huntington wanted Maddy to be the one who went with her.

Brian had not told her what he knew about it, because the board of inquiry was still going on and everyone had been ordered to keep silent.

Austin had recovered consciousness a day out from Subic, but he was concussed and almost useless as a witness. His ravings up on the forecastle the night of the attack had made the rounds of the wardroom, and, while no one could figure out exactly what had happened, many were eager to assume the worst. Vince Benedetti had been fully involved in the damage-control efforts, so he could testify only about what happened after the attack. The South SAR station ship, USS Preble, had driven out of the morning twilight with fresh damage-control teams and medical supplies and people. The first helo to come up from Yankee Station brought an investigation team on board, headed by the same captain who had looked into the Sea Dragon incident. As the evaluator on watch, Brian had been debriefed extensively, as had Garuda and the surviving supervisors in Combat. The focus had been exclusively on the attack and the aftermath, until a grim faced lieutenant commander had come into the wardroom with the ship’s disbursing officer, carrying a deck log.

The mysterious log. There were all sorts of rumors flying around about what was in that log. Brian remembered the captain keeping Jack Folsom with him on the morning of the attack, and asking for the deck log.

Folsom wasn’t talking, but it would make a world of difference to Brian if the captain had come clean about the drug problem. Especially with the exec reportedly claiming that the Migs got in because the weapons officer had an inexperienced FTM3 on the missile consoles when the attack came. Amidst all the rumors, Brian had resolved to follow the captain’s advice: Just tell the truth.

He sighed. There were going to be a lot more questions to answer when he returned to the ship again. You could say one thing about the Navy—they might not always want to ask the question, but once a mess was exposed, they would scrape the paint right down to the keel to find out what had happened.

As if in counterpoint to the whole incident, the lieutenant commander’s promotion list had come in by an AINav message the night after the incident, and Brian’s name had been on it. Mission accomplished. The exec had signed temporary promotion papers so that it would look better having a lieutenant commander as the escort rather than a lieutenant.

Brian remembered reading the temporary promotion language, with its codicil about accepting permanent appointment in the new rank. He wondered now whether he would.

He would have to talk to Maddy at some length about all of this, about going on in the Navy and committing to a thirty-year career. He had encountered levels and degrees of responsibility far beyond anything they had talked about at the Academy, and he had also learned that in a ship, every action or inaction has its consequences.

And he had to make a final decision about what to reveal to her, if anything, about his experience in Olongapo with Josie. He had talked to Chief Martinez about it during a coffee and cigar session the night before they arrived in Subic, but the chief had just laughed.

“Hell, boss. This is WESTPAC. Ain’t no married guys in WESTPAC. Be like tellin’ yer wife you went out and got drunk—who gives a shit? Besides, what the hell do wives wanta know about foolin’ around, right?”

Brian thought that it would be best to keep the whole thing a secret, something to bury in his past, as the course that would do the least damage. Everyone was entitled to a secret or two in a lifetime, he thought, and he was sick of damage. But the matter would not entirely go away.

Martinez had told him what had happened down in the pump room between Rocky and Jackson and about how they had all missed on Rocky in the first place. Up to that point, Brian knew only that Rockheart had been found drowned in the wreckage of the shaft alley pump room two days after the incident and that there had been a large quantity of cash drowned with him. Rumor had it that both Chief Jackson and Martinez were down in the pump room the night of the attack and that Rockheart had been at the top of the drug ring in the ship.

“Well, Chief, you said you’d off the kingpin if you ever caught him,”

Brian had said.

Martinez had shaken his head. “I didn’t do Rockheart.

I wanted to, believe me. And I kicked his ass for what he did to Jackson. But when I left him down there, he was still breathin’. Best the snipes can tell, the eductor pump got clogged up with all that paper money floatin’ around in the bilges and the space just flooded out.”

“Jesus. His own drug money drowned him.”

“Yeah. I love that part.”

“So what happens to Bullet?”

The chief had snorted in disgust. “Who’s the one guy was home free if Garlic and Rocky were outta business, hanh? We still ain’t got one fuckin’ bit of evidence on Bullet. It was all based on what we got out of Garlic, or was gonna get outta that deal set up by Rocky. An’ you wanna know the weird part? Bullet was the Repair Five investigator who found the shaft alley flooded. He said all’s he could do was dog down the hatch, that he didn’t even know fuckin’ Rocky was down there. Talk about doin’ yerself a favor. So. Bullet? Look’s to me like the fucker’s gonna walk.”

“How about the money?”

“Bullet didn’t get the money in the Lucky Bag, and Jackson says they recovered thousands of bucks from the pump room; said they had a hell of a time drying all that shit out.”

“What will happen to it?”

“XO says the stuff in the pump room gets turned in to the Navy. XO don’t know about the stuff we got out of the Lucky Bag, so the chiefs are gonna divvy it out to the families of the guys who got killed. It ain’t much, but it’s something’.”

There was a bustle of activity out on the ramp as the chief called the honor guard to attention. A gray ambulance swooped down the perimeter road and pulled to a stop behind the Caribou. The aircraft crew gathered up their logs and navigation folders and climbed up into the flight deck inside. Brian drew himself up to attention and watched while the ambulance crew rolled the casket out of the back. The chief ordered the honor guard to present arms, and the two ambulance attendants, trying for a little dignity in their disheveled medical whites, rolled the aluminum casket away from the ambulance and up the back ramp of the plane. Brian saluted and held the salute until the casket had disappeared inside. Then he dropped it and walked down to the apron.

As the honor guard filed gratefully back to then-van, Brian walked over to say good-bye to Chief Jackson, wishing him well with the board of inquiry.

“Yes, sir, it’s gonna be a bitch, I think.”

“And I’m sorry about Bullet. After all this—”

“Yeah. Well, Bullet might walk away from this investigation, but he isn’t going to walk away from all the black people I’m gonna tell this story to. We’ll run his ass right out of the Navy.”

Brian looked in the direction of the ship across the harbor. “This was a hell of a way to get some justice done, Chief. Me and my big crusade—look where it’s brought us.”

“It’s what we were crusading against did this, Mr. Holcomb, not you or any of us. They gonna treat you right?”

“We’ll have to see, Chief. There’re folks on both sides of that equation right now.”

“Remember what you told me, Mr. Holcomb. About what the Old Man said. And hopefully what he wrote down in that log. You were doing your duty. The Navy will never punish an officer for doing his duty.”