The Edge of Honor (86 page)

Brian looked up into the back of the Caribou at the collection of aluminum caskets. “I sure hope so, Chief, but look what happened. And I think FROM Three Warren feels worse than I do about it.”

Jackson shook his head. “Warren did the best he could. If he did fuck up, it was because he was rattled and tired from those assholes leaning on him. Martinez and I are gonna do something about that, too. Either way, you can blame the North Vietnamese, the CO’s cancer, or the druggies, but like I said, you were doing your duty, Mr. Holcomb. That’s all the Navy ever asks, you know?”

“Yeah, Chief,” Brian said, looking across the harbor again. “But sometimes that’s a hell of a lot to ask.”

The Caribou started one of its engines in a cloud of blue exhaust smoke.

A crewman standing by the ramp was looking pointedly at Brian. Unable to talk anymore because of the engine noise, Brian and Jackson shook hands, looked at each other for a few seconds, and then Brian walked up the back ramp and into the cargo bay to begin his six-thousand-mile vigil across the Pacific.

Washington, D. C.

Brian could hear the approaching cortege before he could see it. It was late afternoon, and the winter gloom was gathering on the hillside below the Lee mansion. The thump of a bass drum, the clip-clop of the horses pulling the caisson, the sonorous tones of the funeral march, and the muted tramp of the ceremonial platoon echoed through the drizzle of a dying December day as the official party approached the grave site.

Brian stood apart from the crowd of friends and professional acquaintances, his role as escort officer taken over by a senior captain. As the only member of the ship’s wardroom attending the funeral, he felt very much alone. Him of all people. He felt as if he should be back with the ship.

Winter had come early to Washington this year. He shifted his feet uncomfortably in the wet grass, conscious of the cold seeping up from the partially frozen ground.

He could see that the others waiting on the hillside were just as uncomfortable as he was, huddled into their overcoats, their breath daubing puffs of vapor into the deepening twilight.

Waiting for the captain, that inexplicable man. For an instant, his eyes betrayed him; he forced himself to stare at the black rectangle in the ground, surrounded by incongruously green Astro Turf and the draped chairs, until he regained control. The captain’s wife, whom he remembered as the soul of cheer and competent, bright optimism, seemed shrunken now in her black coat, her hair a silver cap in the twilight, standing with her face hidden from view. She was propped up on either side by her two grown sons as they waited for the sad procession to halt in the narrow lane behind them. Maddy stood right behind her, one hand held loosely on her right shoulder. To Brian’s surprise, there were four of the wardroom wives in the crowd, as well.

Brian stood patiently for the unloading of the casket, listening to the muted clinks of metal as the troops assembled into ranks and the soft shuffling of the mourners closing in around the grave site as the casket was borne to the chrome-plated rails above the grave. Above, on a low ridge, the ceremonial firing squad stood in front of a grove of bare oak trees, positioned in an exaggerated pose of parade rest, eyes fixed on the ground, their white gloves gleaming along the tips of sloping rifle barrels.

Behind them, the bugler, also staring at the ground, cradled his instrument against the cold.

Brian raised his head and forced himself to look at the bronze-coated casket as the chaplain began the reading, but his eyes refused to focus.

From across the cemetery, a car’s headlights created a sudden golden gleam along the side of the casket, and the image of the first time he had seen the mountains of Luzon rising up out of the South China Sea’s eastern horizon filled his vision. That glowing memory drowned out the chaplain’s quiet words, the tenebrous cold, and the soft, stamping footfalls in the crowd, bringing back that first day. It seemed like only yesterday.

He contrasted the picture of Hood standing into Subic Bay, freshly painted, big, clean, new, full of energy, ready to take the Red Crown station, with what he had seen out the airplane’s window, of the ship being pushed backward into the floating dry dock, her port side blackened from the bridge back to the helo deck, an oily suppuration from that gaping hole hi her port side, and the two missile directors pointed out to port, one high, one low, as if still looking for the enemy who had done this thing. And as far as most of the wardroom is concerned, that enemy includes you, thanks to the exec.

And thanks to your own hubris, for deciding to take those guys to mast, thereby leaving a brand-new FTM3 on the console when the moment of crisis came.

For the thousandth time, he went over it. He knew in his heart that what the exec was saying was just plain wrong. Just as he had told him in the passageway that night. And just as the captain had told him. He had taken the time to tell Brian. He had thought it was important to tell him—bent over a counting bomb in the wreckage of CIC, his guts on fire, his nerves awash with morphine, and yet he’d made a point of it: You did the right thing. We did the wrong thing. But, Christ, at what cost? The consequences of doing the right thing were supposed to be good! But maybe, just maybe, the consequences, that man in the aluminum box up there, the others in theirs, going into the ground today instead of back on watch, back into Two Firehouse, back into Combat and the Cave, and the broken families, the broken ship—just maybe these are consequences of the god damned drugs and the command’s decision to hide the problem under a blanket of gun-deck justice, like Chief Jackson had said.

Just maybe, these were the consequences of doing nothing.

He seized on that idea and held it, knowing that it would be his only defense against the hauntings to come.

And Maddy. They had found only one chance to talk, what with his escort duty requiring him to stay with the casket until it had been delivered to the mortuary at Andrews and Maddy’s responsibility to stay with Mrs. Huntington until members of her family had arrived in town. Last night, in the BOQ at Andrews, after the exhausting flights—he all the way from the Philippines in a cargo plane; she from San Diego to San Francisco to Washington—they had agreed simply to hold each other in the tiny room with its single bed.

For a while, they had both slept. And then he had awakened and, finding her awake, had told her the whole story, about the impact of the drugs aboard the ship, the command’s live-with-it solution, how he had come to upset the apple cart, the rumors about what really had happened to the captain, and what he faced when he went back to the ship. She had asked almost no questions, strangely silent through it all, almost as if she was considering what to do about all of it. It had taken him almost three hours to tell it, and when he had finished, he had fallen asleep, leaving her to stare up at the ceiling until daylight. Not too different from deployment day, now that he thought about it.

And now he wasn’t sure what to think. On the one hand, he harbored grave doubts about going on with a Navy career. He was afraid of the consequences of wrong decisions and his own idealistic notions of right and wrong. The bloody, bloody consequences, from the horrors of the Berkeley’s wardroom, to the oily black well that was Hood’s drowned fire room, to the atomized remains of the men in the EW module. But on the other hand, he was not so sure he had done the wrong thing. If nothing else, he had done his duty, and now he must return to the ship and face what was coming, to exonerate himself and his honor, and, most important, give it another try.

But how was he going to tell that to Maddy? How could he admit that he had gone to sea and faced its elemental power, gone to war and faced death, blood, and destruction, assumed the mantle of command as the evaluator in Combat, launched missiles that destroyed airplanes and killed other men, and yet now was afraid! While at the same time trying to claim that he was still a man, that he still loved her and wanted her as his wife and mate? And despite everything that had happened, despite the emotional travail she had been through during the deployment, despite the fact that at least some of the wardroom held him partially responsible for the disaster, despite the fact that his career was now facing a gauntlet called a board of inquiry—how to explain to her that he wanted to go on with it, that he felt it his duty to go on with it?

He looked across all the backs and heads standing between him and his wife. He wanted desperately to go over there, to stand beside her, to put his hands on her Shoulders even as she was supporting Mrs. Huntington.

But he had this awful sense that everyone knew what was going on in his mind and what had happened out there in the Gulf of Tonkin, that this assembly of hard faced naval officers and their wives, being made of stronger stuff, would bar his way.

The burial detail presented the flag, distant headlights brushed once more across the casket, and then it was being lowered into the ground, as if hurried on its way by three volleys from the hillside. How on earth could he ask her to stay the course with him? He waited for it to be over. He waited for Maddy.

Maddy stood rigidly in the cold, almost holding her breath lest she begin crying or make some other emotional spectacle of herself. She focused all of her attention on the woman in front of her, leaving her hand on her shoulder, an occasional squeezing pressure to let her know she was there. She heard none of the words the chaplain was saying, although others did, others whose faces were pulled into strange expressions as they tried for control. She wished Brian was up here with her instead of somewhere back in the crowd. But he had insisted. “You go with the family. I can’t go up there with you, not now.”

There was so much to talk about. Last night, she had known the first peaceful sleep in many months in his arms, if only for a few hours. When she had felt him stirring, she had awakened, and he had begun to tell her what had happened put there. Dear God, in all of the days and weeks leading up to the deployment, in all of her complaining, nothing of this scale and consequence had crossed either of their minds. And now he was trying to make the biggest decision of his life. She wanted this funeral to be over, because there was a lot she had to say to him.

How am I going to do this? she wondered as she absorbed the elegant ceremony, the stony faces of these men, the stoic strength of these women, the glinting rifles on the hill, the granitelike stillness of the ceremonial detail, and the elegiac grace of the chaplain. How am I going to sustain him in the face of all this strength? How am I going to convince him that he must go on with it, that being a naval officer is what he is, that the Navy would give him a fair shot because the Navy would see that he had been doing the right thing, despite the outcome?

And that if it didn’t, this time she would be there for him, to help him fight for his honor.

She would never tell him about Autrey; Autrey had been about sex, about the games she used to play, about the girl she had been, before she found out what marriage can really mean. As Mrs. Huntington had said: Where was Autrey now?

How will I tell him that, yes, I am afraid, afraid to be left alone again? Afraid that I don’t deserve to succeed, after the things I have done and the betrayal I committed and the secrets I now must keep? It’s about risk, Mrs. Huntington had said. The value of marriage is always proportional to the risks.

She felt everyone holding their breath along with her as the bugler played taps and then the three volleys crashed out, burying the final haunting notes of the bugle even as the pallbearers lowered the casket into the ground after presenting the flag. When the Huntington family drew into a close knot and the other wives moved toward them, she stepped back, feeling that her job was done for now.

She had been stunned to see the other wives here. She had flown for free, but these women had come at their own expense to stand up for one of their own. She realized that she desperately wanted to be a part of that now, and if that meant deployments and separations, well, so be it.

The physical things she had felt for and with Autrey had been very real, but they paled to insignificance in the light of what had happened to the Hunttingtons, the ship, and her husband. She looked around and saw Brian standing at the back of the crowd. She took a deep breath and hesitated for a second, but it was all clear in her mind. She would probably have some hard selling to do, but she was determined. She only hoped that Brian needed her as much as she now needed to sustain him.

She turned around and went to find her husband in the gathering darkness.

Author’s Note Naval history buffs are generally familiar with the two 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incidents that are credited with sparking a dramatic escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. It is not generally known that the North Vietnamese attacked U. S. Navy fleet units operating in the Gulf of Tonkin again in the late days of the Vietnam War. The attack on USS John Bell Hood depicted in this novel is based on an actual incident that happened in the spring of 1972. The guided-missile frigate (since redesignated a guided-missile cruiser) USS Sterett was patrolling the Red Crown station in the northern Gulf of Tonkin, escorted by USS Higbee, an all-gun, World War II vintage destroyer. The North Vietnamese launched a coordinated night attack against the Red Crown station, using electronic warfare jamming, antishipmissile-firing FT-boats, and Migs configured to carry iron bombs. Sterett, which by no means was a drug-infested or incompetent ship, distinguished herself in the ensuing battle driving off the gunboats with her single five-inch mount, downing an antiship missile and two Migs with her Terrier missiles, and damaging a third Mig. But that third Mig penetrated inside Steretfs minimum missile range and dropped a bomb into Higbee’s after five-inch gun mount, doing considerable damage and prompting Higbee’s commanding officer to deliberately flood her after powder magazines in order to save the ship. As a result of this daring raid, the U. S. Navy redesigned its entire combat systems training architecture to deal with what then became known as the multithreat environment. Today’s advanced Aegis guided-missile cruisers are specifically designed to deal with multiple threats in the air, on the surface, and even submerged. But it was this incident that provided the wake-up call.