The Edge of Honor (39 page)

Brian remembered the first time he had talked to Jackson about the drug problem in the Navy and asked him about the antidrug program in Hood. He also remembered his surprise at the Sheriff’s answer: The chief had as much as said that there wasn’t a drug program in John Bell Hood. That thought crossed his mind again when he encountered Jackson in the passageway.

“Sheriff,” he said. “Just the guy I need.”

Jackson’s eyebrows rose. “Yes, sir?”

“I’m making a little unannounced visit to missile plot.

I’ve got a funny feeling there’s something going on down there. Care to come along?”

“Yes, sir. My pleasure.” Jackson looked as if he meant it. Jackson suspected everyone, all the time.

They walked rapidly forward along Broadway, which at this hour was deserted. All the ship’s offices were locked up and the passageway lights were set on red lighting. They went forward to the missile magazine passageway, turned left, and stepped down a ladder to the next deck. There they walked back aft twenty feet to the door of the missile fire-control equipment room, known as missile plot. As they strode through the darkened passageways, Brian had briefed the Sheriff on the sequence of events in Combat and why he suspected something was amiss.

The first thing they both noticed was that the missile plot’s hatch door was completely dogged down, its chrome-plated operating handle pushed all the way over to the full dogged position. He paused for a moment and looked at Jackson, who was nodding thoughtfully. Under normal watch-standing conditions, the handle would have been only partially closed. Hatches were only fully dogged down for general quarters or when the people inside wanted some warning that someone might be coming through.

The chief leaned forward and put his ear against the hatch door. At first, he heard nothing and then he heard someone laugh, a high, giggling sound. It was loud enough for Brian to hear it, too. Like a drunk, he thought.

Jackson had a gleam in his eye when he straightened up.

He looked at Brian and Brian nodded once. The chief squatted down on his haunches, took the handle in both hands, drew a deep breath, and then stood straight up, undogging the hatch in one sudden flowing movement, popping the door open. He stepped into the white lights of plot, followed by Brian.

There were two men in plot. The senior man, FTM2 Marcowitz, was sitting on the deck between the two fire control radar consoles, a stupid grin on his face and his eyes dilated into large black circles. He giggled again when he saw the two khaki-clad figures appear. The second man, FTM3 Warren, was sitting at the System One console, his headphones still on, the eyes in his black face going round with the shock of seeing the Weapons Department head and the chief master-at-arms standing in the hatch. The burning camel-dung stink of marijuana smoke was everywhere.

“Well, well, suspicions confirmed,” Brian declared, glaring at Marcowitz. Jackson walked over to where Marcowitz was sitting and grabbed his shirt, hauling the slender petty officer to his feet and shaking him.

“Morning, asshole,” Jackson growled. “Having us a little toke, are we?”

As Brian watched from the hatchway, Marcowitz tried to grin, but his face failed him, “Wow, man. Not me, Chief,” he said. “I don’t do no dope.”

“Yeah, right. I suppose it’s Warren here been stinking up the place with weed, huh?”

“I dunno, man. I dunno what’cher talkin’ about. Honest, Man.”

The chief, still holding Marcowitz up on his tiptoes, his large fist bunched in the man’s shirt front, turned his head towards the junior petty officer, who was sitting mutely at his console. “All right, Warren, what the fuck’s going on in here?”

“Honest, Chief, I don’t know. I mean—”

“Chief,” Brian, “why don’t you take that shithead to your office and write him up. Get the doc to give him a piss test. Let me talk to Warren.”

Jackson understood at once. Separate them so that maybe Brian could get the story from Warren. Jackson spun Marcowitz around and frog-marched him out the hatch into the passageway. Brian stared at Warren for a full thirty seconds before speaking.

“Tell FCSC I’m down here in plot and that you need a relief for Marcowitz. Tell him why.”

Warren relayed the message to Chief Correy at FCSC.

He listened for a moment and then nodded his head.

“Plot, aye,” he said in a weak voice, then turned to look back up at Brian.

Brian walked over to stand right next to Warren’s chair, forcing the young petty officer to crane his neck to look at him.

“Let me lay it out for you, Warren. Either you were both doing dope or it was just Marcowitz. You don’t look intoxicated, and he is definitely blown away. So, what’s the story?”

Warren, obviously frightened, stared up at him, swallowed, but said nothing.

“You smoking marijuana down here, Warren? Doing dope on watch? In a war zone? You ready for a general court-martial for dereliction of duty?

How’s ten years breaking rocks in Fort Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary sound to you, Warren? That what you joined the Navy for?”

“No, suh,” the man blurted, his eyes close to tears.

“I didn’t do nothin’. I don’t wanta be no fink, Mr. Holcomb. But I didn’t do nothin’. You can piss-test me if you want. But I don’t do that shit.”

“Did you see Marcowitz smoke marijuana?”

“I … uh … I don’t wanta say, Mr. Holcomb. Some a those guys, they’ll—”

“They’ll what, Warren? You afraid somebody’s going to kick your ass if you fink out on Marcowitz?”

“Yes, suh. I heard—I heard you can get thrown over the side, you go blabbin’ about guys doing shit. Please, Mr. Holcomb, I didn’t do no dope. But don’t make me say nothin’.”

“Explain to me why the missile radars couldn’t get on track the first time but could the second time.”

“Uh, it’s the weather, sir? The autotrack circuits were climbin’ all over the clutter from the rain and shit. We had to take them in manual to get a lock.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Why it failed the first time and worked the second. Who was primary scope the first time?”

“Uh, he was, suh—Marcowitz.”

“And the second time?”

“That was me, suh.”

Brian took a deep breath. “Okay. You stay here until Marcowitz’s relief shows up. Then you go to Chief Jackson’s office. He and the doc’ll give you a piss test. You better not come up blue, you understand me? We’ll talk about the rest of this later.” He turned away as if to leave, then paused. “By the way, where’s his stash?”

“Stash? I don’t know, Mr. Holcomb. He just had the one—”

Brian smiled grimly as the kid realized what he had just said. “Thank you, Warren. Leave the hatch open until this place smells like humans again, understand?”

“Yes, suh,” said Warren in a small voice, looking genuinely frightened now. As he left plot, Brian wondered about the fact that the kid was as frightened of being fingered as a storyteller by the druggie crowd as he was of being caught by the command. It was bad enough that a second class petty officer was using dope on watch; but if the druggies were organized enough to be capable of retribution against witnesses, that was something else again.

As Brian reached the CMAA’s office, one of the main hole snipes was looking over his shoulder at the activity while he filled a steel thermos with coffee from the mess decks urn. Brian gave him a hard look and the man decided he had enough coffee and disappeared. Brian found a rapidly sobering Marcowitz sitting at attention in a straight-backed chair while the chief hospital corpsman watched the Sheriff add a chemical to the contents of a urine-sample bottle. As Brian stopped in the doorway, the doc held the bottle up to the light. The yellow sample turned bright blue.

“Bingo, motherfucker. You’re down,” said Jackson.

Marcowitz stared straight ahead, saying nothing at all.

“Doc,” Brian said. “I need you to test FROM Three Warren when he gets relieved. He’ll be coming up here in a few minutes.”

“Aye, sir. No problem. Got this shitbird dead to rights, don’t we?”

“Looks like it to me. Sheriff, I’m going back up to Combat. I presume we see the XO in the morning with the report chits?”

Jackson stepped around Marcowitz and out into the passageway while the doc filled out the test-result report.

Jackson motioned for Brian to come with him, pulling the door ajar before answering.

“Yes, sir, although you probably ought to give him a call tonight so’s he knows about it before he hears people talking. You know how word gets around.”

“Right, I’ll take care of it. I gotta tell you, this really pisses me off. We caught this guy in the middle of a drill, but it could just as easily have been for real. You’re an ex-gunner’s mate. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I surely do, Mr. Holcomb.” Jackson paused for a moment, choosing his words. “But I’m not sure you’re going to get a lot of satisfaction out of the XO on this.”

“Meaning precisely what?”

“I think the best thing is for you to see how it goes.

Then perhaps we can talk again. Please, sir.”

Brian stared at him, but the Sheriff’s black face was impassive. He obviously had more to say but wanted to wait.

“Okay, Sheriff. You’ve piqued my interest, so I’ll play along. But this isn’t a game for me. Missile techs smoking marijuana on watch could get us all killed out here.”

“I couldn’t agree more, Mr. Holcomb. I’ll get the report chit drawn up right now.”

“Okay, Chief. I’ll call XO tonight and we’ll go see him first thing after quarters.”

Brian went back up to Combat and resumed the watch as evaluator. After he received a call from the doc confirming that Warren was clean, he called the exec to report the marijuana incident. The exec listened to the story and then instructed Brian to close-hold the incident until he had had time to brief the CO in the morning.

“I don’t think young Warren had anything to do or say about it, XO,”

Brian concluded. “And his piss test was clean. The other guy is dirty as hell. He’s the one we’ll want to bust.”

“We’ll talk about it in the morning, Weps.”

Brian hung up and found Garuda swung around in his chair.

“Nothing going on; the BARCAP will be relieved in about thirty minutes.

The weather is getting shittier and the crud is clobbering up the radar picture, but nothing seems to be stirring ashore, so I guess the lousy radar doesn’t matter too much. What’d XO say about the doper in missile plot?”

Brian just looked at him for a moment. So much for keeping a lid on it.

Garuda grinned. “FCSC told me what went down after you were done with your, uh, head call,” he offered.

“Yeah, well, what it looks like is the FN-Two was doing a joint and the other kid was keeping his mouth shut. We can mast the FN-Two for doing dope on watch; that’s some serious brig time. We can hit the FN-Three for not doing anything about it, but that’s a little tenuous, apparently—and probably unfair, too. XO said we’d talk about it in the morning.”

“Surprise me if anyone actually goes to mast,” said Garuda.

“You gotta be shitting me. I mean, I know we handle simple possession in our own in-house way, but this was blatant: Suppose the Migs had come put and that little fuck was so stoned he couldn’t establish missile track?

He could have killed the whole ship.”

Garuda fished for a cigarette before replying. His latest attempt to quit smoking had lasted two weeks. “Yes, sir, I hear you,” he said, speaking through the familiar blue cloud. “And I may be all wrong here, but I just don’t think this Old Man’s willing to have real go-to-mast drug busts while we’re out here on the line. Now, if we were in Subic and this maggot got caught doing a joint in the BEQ, that’d be different. That’d be an on-base drug incident, not a shipboard drug incident. But, like I said, I could be wrong.”

Brian thought about it as Garuda went back to his scope, remembering what the boatswain had told him.

Brian looked over into the weapons module and found Chief Correy looking his way. The chief turned back to his console. Fox Hudson had told him that Chief Correy was a go-with-the-flpw kind of guy, not one to impose much discipline on his troops. That’s part of my problem, Brian thought.

It’s not good enough to play gun-deck justice with this shit, he thought. We’ve got to rip these slimeballs out of the crew when we find them, and we have to find the druggie organization. Just like you take a tumor and the lymph nodes out when you find it. I can’t have that shit going on down in missile plot. His blood ran cold at the thought of what might have happened if that tracking drill had not been a drill. We’ll just see, he thought to himself. We’ll just see.

As Brian was finishing breakfast after getting off watch, the exec came into the wardroom. He sat down at the senior table with Brian and Raiford Hatcher and scribbled down his breakfast order. Then he looked over at Brian.

“Captain would like to see you before you hit the bag for your morning nap,” he said. “Has a piece of paper for you.”

“Aye, sir. Do you know what it’s about?”

“I’ll let him tell you. But you’ll like it, so relax and finish your breakfast.”

Brian nodded and drained the last of his milk. He had been about to bring up the missile plot incident, but the exec was busy skimming his morning message traffic, so Brian excused himself and headed topside. He stopped in his cabin to wash his face and comb his hair, debating whether or not to shave, and then said to hell with it and went up and knocked on the captain’s door.

“Come in.”

“Yes, sir, Cap’n,” Brian said as he stepped through the door.

“XO said you wanted to see me, sir?”

The captain was sitting at his dining table, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers. He looked better than he had the last time Brian had seen him, which was when? Brian found himself trying to remember. Despite that, the captain’s face still seemed gray in the sullen light slatting through the rain-streaked portholes. The captain motioned toward a seat at the table.

“Come in. Sit down. Want some coffee? No, I guess not, huh? You need to recover from the mid.”

Brian sat down at the dining table across from the captain, who picked up a manila file folder and passed it over to him. Brian opened it and found a fitness report with his name on it. He looked back up at the captain, startled to find the captain watching him with a look that reminded Brian of the look a hawk gives a rabbit. But then the captain appeared to smile and said, “Go on, read it. It’s a special. I’m putting it in before the lieutenant commander board next month.”