The Edge of Honor (42 page)

Jackson hung up his phone and settled back in his chair.

Well now, that’s what I wanted to know. No Rastus talk there. Straight technical orders from a senior electrician.

So we have one face for whitey and another for the brothers, do we? He chuckled. For him, Bullet used the shuck and jive: Shows where I stand, he thought. But a college education, a brain, and an attitude problem that gets him lowered marks but no words in his evaluations.

Well now, indeed. He grabbed the phone and dialed the goat locker.

“CPO mess, Chief Hallowell.”

“Hey, Hally. Jackson here. Martinez in there?”

Petty Officer Second Class Marcowitz sat in the straight backed chair in Jackson’s office in a cold sweat. The Sheriff had just finished explaining to him what was coming: captain’s mast, transfer to the brig in Subic to await court-martial, the court-martial itself, probably up at Clark Air Force Base in Manila, and then shipment back to the States and out to Kansas for a minimum ten year stint at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary.

It was 2100; the ship had begun to settle down for the night. Sounds of the crew’s movie on the mess decks could be heard outside in the Broadway passageway.

Jackson kept his eyes down on his desk and worked some papers, letting the pressure build. He already knew that the guys in the Fire Control Division were beginning to turn on Marcowitz for sitting on his ass in the compartment while they had to double up on watches. And Jackson, on one of his tours through the berthing compartments, had casually asked Marcowitz if he had seen the chief boatswain. That had been a day ago, and Marcowitz had been looking around every corner when Jackson had brought him to his office a little while ago. Just for the hell of it, Jackson had faked a reply to a phone call from the bridge about eight o’clock reports.

“Yeah, Boats. No. I don’t know where he is. He’s supposed to stay in his berthing compartment except for meals and head calls. Yeah, I will.

Thanks.” He had then gone back to his paperwork, still not looking at Marcowitz. Finally, when he figured he had the petty officer’s full attention, he looked up at him.

“Well, Marcowitz, I sure hope that was some good dope. Because you’re going to pay a serious price for it.”

Marcowitz looked around the small office, then swallowed but said nothing.

“Of course, there is a way you can maybe mitigate some of this offense.

Although I don’t know … you were drugged on duty, at the missile-radar consoles, in a war zone, where enemy aircraft have made threats against the ship. Those Air Force flyboys up there at Clark, they’re not going to be too sympathetic to that kind of shit, you know?”

Marcowitz nodded, his hands twisting in his lap. Jackson laid it on some more.

“I need to verify your next of kin’s address—that’s your parents, according to the record.”

Marcowitz cleared his throat. “My parents?”

“Yeah, your parents. We have to write them and tell them why you’ve been transferred off the ship. Give ‘em time to find out where Leavenworth Penitentiary is. It’s kinda remote, out there on the Great Plains somewhere.

Big fuckin’ walls, like a goddamn castle, steel gates, and a coupla thousand murderers, rapists, embezzlers, child molesters in the cage.”

“Cage?”

“Cage. Prison. Figure of speech, Marcowitz. Slammer talk.”

“You’re gonna tell my parents?”

“Absolutely. We don’t just make guys like you disappear.

And this Central High, that was your high school, correct?”

“My high school?”

“Yeah, see, we always report back to a guy’s school when he gets discharged. See, most of them keep records on how well their graduates did out here in the world.

Unfortunately, we’ll have to tell them you’re in federal prison for ten, maybe twenty years. They want to know this shit. And, of course, the Navy has to do a press release to the hometown news service. It’s all in the regs.”

Marcowitz was visibly shaken. “You have to tell—”

“Oh yes. Have to. Full public disclosure. Otherwise, all these Communist war protestors will say we’re running a secret police state, imprisoning people without a trial or a hearing, making them just disappear, like that gulag thing over there in Russia. No, we have to keep the whole thing pretty public. It’s a shame in one sense, but then, who’s gonna give a shit about a guy who does dope at his watch station in a war zone, you know?”

Marcowitz put his face in his hands and bent over in his chair. Jackson waited for him to remember where they’d started. Finally, Marcowitz looked up.

“You said … you said there was a way I could mig—mata—”

“Mitigate?”

“Yeah. Mitigate. That means like cut me some slack, right? If I do something?”

Jackson appeared to think for a minute. “Probably not, now that I think about it. I mean, what can you do for me that would possibly count against what you’ve done to us, to the ship?”

Marcowitz studied the deck again, gnawing his lower lip. Jackson watched him, a twenty-five year-old petty officer second class, an E-5 with eighteen months of advanced electronics training and three years’ experience in the fleet. He could have gotten out and named his starting wage with those credentials in half a hundred businesses. But right now, he looked like what he was: a badly scared kid. Finally, Marcowitz looked up.

“I can tell you where I got it.”

“Hell, son, I know where you got it. You talked to a black guy and he got it for you.” Marcowitz blinked.

“You don’t want to know who he is?” he said.

“What good’s that do me? I can’t arrest him on just your say-so.”

Marcowitz bit his lip, but then a crafty look came into his eyes.

“But what if I made a buy for you? Something you could watch? Then you could bust him.”

“You think this same guy’s gonna get within thirty feet of you now?

After you’ve been busted?”

“Awright. Shit. I guess it doesn’t matter,”

Marcowitz said. “I didn’t want to say this, but you guys have my ass in a crack. It isn’t just one guy or a coupla guys. It’s any of them.”

Marcowitz stared up at Chief Jackson.

“Any of the nonrated black guys. Shit, I figured you had to know this—you’re black. You wanta score in this boat, man, you just go see a black dude.”

Jackson stared back, trying to control his growing anger.

“And who’s the main man?”

Marcowitz snorted. “Shit! How would I know that?

But I’ll bet you one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“It ain’t no fuckin’ white guy, is it?”

Brian stood out on the darkened bridge with Jack Folsom, who had the 04-08 OOD watch. It was a warm, humid, moonless night, punctuated occasionally by sudden showers. Brian had borrowed the quartermaster’s binoculars and was staring off to the starboard beam, trying to make out the nuclear cruiser Long Beach in the gloom. She was only two thousand yards distant, a bare sea mile, but totally darkened and thereby invisible except for a busily winking red signal lamp high up on her boxy superstructure.

“Think this’ll work, Mr. Holcomb?” asked Folsom.

“It will if some Migs come up. We’ve been letting it slip discreetly over clear radio circuits that Long Beach will be relieving us in two more days.”

“Is there some reason we’re expecting Migs?”

“In our vicinity, no. But they fly all the time around Hanoi and Haiphong. That’s the beauty of this little op—they know we can’t touch anything beyond forty miles, so they feel safe up-country at eighty miles, as long as that cruiser over there isn’t around. They know her Talos birds go a hundred miles.”

“But if she lights off her radars, won’t that give them time to hit the deck?”

“Well, that’s the essence of this caper. She came out of Subic radio-silent, so, in theory anyway, the Soviet ocean-tracking systems don’t know where she is. We’ll light off our missile radars and track the distant Migs; they won’t give a shit because they’ll recognize a Terrier radar, and they know we can’t reach ‘em. But we’ll be passing precise tracking data over to Long Beach via the NTDS link, and when the Migs are up at altitude and think they’re safe, she’ll launch her Talos birds on our data. When they’re about eighty percent of the way down their flight path, she’ll bring up her own illuminators and, yes, the Migs will have warning, but by then intercept will be about six seconds away. Those Talos birds are ramjets—they just keep accelerating until they hit something.”

“I saw a Talos once—they’re huge—forty-two feet long, four feet in diameter.”

“Yeah. They’re designed to fly right through their targets at around three thousand miles an hour.”

“So the trick is to make sure the bad guys don’t know she’s here yet.”

“You got it.”

Folsom scanned the darkness with his own binoculars.

“Who thought this little scam up?”

“Believe it or not, someone down on CTF Seventy seven’s staff. They’ve apparently even spread deception around Subic and Olongapo.”

Folsom nodded in the darkness. “They better; those bar girls know more about ships’ movements than the Seventh Fleet schedulers.”

“So I’ve heard. Course, there’s not much I haven’t heard about Olongapo.”

Folsom laughed. “It’s all true and then some. You want an experience, get the chief boats to take you on the beach.”

Brian thought about that for a minute. “I’m not exactly used to going on liberty with the enlisted,” he said.

Folsom chuckled. “Yes, sir, that’s all that East Coast Navy training you’ve had. I hear it’s a little more formal back there. But I’m serious. He’ll show you the sights, and he’s big enough that nothing bad will happen to you, which, for a makee-learn, is something to consider.

Trick is to know when the firewater has gotten ahold of the Injun; then you cut out and get back to the main gates.

You know about the curfew?”

“No. What curfew?”

“When you go over in Subic, you sorta have to decide what your plans are. The base has a curfew, with time limits set by pay grade. Nonrated enlisted have to be back to the main gates by midnight; lieutenant commanders and above back by oh-one-thirty. Everyone else is somewhere in between. They reopen the gates at oh seven hundred, so you either have to make your gate or else fall in love and stay out in the town overnight.”

“That lets me out; I’m already married.”

Jack snorted. “Nobody is married in WESTPAC, Mr. Holcpmb.”

Brian had no answer for that. He’d heard that’rule, too. Cross the international dateline and one’s marital status became a very private affair.

“What happens if you show up at the gates, say, at oh two hundred?” he asked finally, to get off the subject of marriage.

“They let you in and write you up.”

“Officers, too?”

“Yes, sir, officers especially. Marines love that shit.

They got the XO once, but he talked ‘em out of it by pointing out that he had three women chasing his ass back to the gate. They were so impressed, they let him off.”

Brian grinned again in the darkness. They both moved back out of the bridgewing’s doorway as the rain swept in again. Folsom checked the radar to make sure the big cruiser was staying at around two thousand yards on Hood’s starboard beam. Brian pulled his red flashlight out and checked his watch. He needed to get back into Combat.

“Guess I’d better get back in the house,” he said.

“Everybody’s busy packing up for turnover. It’s like moving day in there.”

“Yes, sir, so I understand. That flashing light has been going nonstop since they showed up. All sorts of ‘do you have’ spare-parts messages coming in for the Chop.”

“Yeah. I’U be glad to get the turnover done with my systems intact, although it’s the Count who usually has to give up the most stuff.”

“Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

“Now, now, Mr. First Left Nut. Ensigns can’t be critical of light commanders.”

“If you say so, sir.”

Brian laughed. “The bulkheads have ears, as they say.

I’ll see you later.”

Brian put the binoculars back in the holder by the chart table and went back into CIC. Fox Hudson was the SWIC; he was concentrating on the northwest radar sector, looking for Migs.

“Any business?” asked Brian.

“No, sir. Although we’re a little early yet. If they’re gonna fly, they usually do a dawn sweep from the bases up the Red River Valley. We’ve still got an hour or so.

Otherwise, nothing going on. Long Beach is remaining in radio, link, and radar silence, and we’re not talking to her, either.”

Brian nodded and looked around Combat. The cave was manned at half station, while the rest of the radarmen packaged their message files and scope templates into aluminum boxes for the morning transfer to their counterparts in Long Beach. There was a general sense of excitement as the first line period drew to a close, with the older hands trying to outdo one another with tales of subic.

“Sounds like a good bit of bullshit going down around Combat,” Brian observed.

“Yes, sir. New guys’re getting their ears filled.”

“I can imagine. The missile systems set up to do business?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve got the first team on the consoles down in plot. Soon’s we get a contact, we’ll start painting them with the track beams, get ‘em used to seeing their cockpit alarms.”

“But not illuminators, right?” :

“No, sir. An illuminator means you’ve got a missile in flight. They’re used to our tracking beams—we track ‘em even when they’re a hundred miles away, even though they know we can’t touch ‘em.”

“They’d recognize the Talos radars, though, wouldn’t they?”

“In a heartbeat. You want to see Migs falling out of the sky, just let them get a whiff of a Talos radar. That’s why this ought to work.”

Brian looked over at the weapons module. Both FCSC and EC were manned by chiefs. After the Marcowitz incident Brian had insisted on the first team when the message had come in about the Long Beach deception operation. He had gotten the impression that the exec would have ordered it if he had not beaten him to it. He also knew that the passive tracking fire mission with Long Beach was going to take some precision coordination if a target presented itself. The cruiser would essentially be firing her Talos missiles at a point in space that Hood’s computers predicted would have one or more Migs flying through by the time the Talos got there. To be fooled, Hood’s computers would have to be told some elaborate lies.