The Edge of Honor Page 4

“Yes, sir. Unfortunately, you’re right.” Austin turned to find Brian.

  “Lieutenant Holcomb, front and center, please.”

  “Hiya, Brian,” said the exec with a grin. He often ^m seemed to be deliberately trying to offset Austin’s imperious formality. The exec had come from Hood’s sister ship, USS Sterrett, where he had been the Operations officer. He appeared to be more than happy to stick a pin in Austin’s balloon on a regular basis, especially when it came to who knew more about WESTPAC operations.

  Brian realized that the exec enjoyed playing off Austin’s instinctive “I’m right and you’re wrong” stance with his equally strong desire to please his superior officers.

  “XO here tells me we’re going to do some shore bombardment,” Austin said. “Which, I must say, is a real departure for a Red Crown ship. I assume you and your people remember how to do naval gunfire support?”

  “Morning, XO. Yes, Mr. Austin, I remember how to do NGFS. If your plotters can plot and your naviguessers can navigate, and your radio talkers can radio-talk, my gunners can shoot.”

  The exec’s eyes twinkled. He was obviously of the school that thought competition among the department heads was healthy as long as it did not begin to hurt the ship.

  “Brian, that’s great,” he said. “I suggest you get your chief gunner’s mate, the gunnery officer, and your director officer up here in about twenty minutes. Count, you round up your surface module NGFS people.

  Brian, apparently we’re going to divert on our way up to Red Crown to join a Sea Dragon task unit for a surface shoot above the DMZ. They need one more five-inch fifty-four gun, and that’s us.”

  Brian felt a surge of interest. A fire mission against North Vietnamese targets. And, unlike operations in the South, the Communists often shot back. Suddenly, the war business seemed very real; his apprehensions about his career were pushed into the background.

  “Aye, XO, I’ll get ‘em right up here.”

  Jack Rockheart came out of the chow line with a trayful of Navy-standard heavy lunch. He was nearly six feet tall, heavyset in the chest and shoulders, with a large head and face, slicked-down black hair, wide-set dark brown eyes under heavy black brows, and a hooked nose. His face was framed in a full, neatly trimmed black beard. Rockheart walked deliberately, as if aware he needed more space than most men, and maintained an alert, aggressive expression. His uniform was immaculate, with sharp creases pressed into his short-sleeved chambray shirt, a custom-tailored patch containing the three chevrons of a petty officer first class on his sleeves, and clean, trim-fitting dungarees above his highly polished shoes. A master-at-arms badge gleamed on his left shirt pocket, indicating that he was one of the six deputies on the ship’s master-at-arms force, in addition to being a radarman.

  He spied two other radarmen at a table on the crowded mess decks and joined them, stepping over the steel swing-out chair with his tray and settling carefully into his seat. The air in the mess decks felt unusually humid and smelled of fried chicken. There was a hum of general excitement at being in Subic and finally on the way to the Gulf.

  Rockheart greeted the other two radarmen with a nod.

  “Yo, Rocky,” responded Radarman Second Class Hartley, a tall, thin redhead whose freckled face was almost obscured by his gray plastic navy-issue eyeglasses.

  The other man at the table, Radarman Third Class Mckinnon, simply grunted as he concentrated on a piece of chicken. Mckinnon was a beefy individual with an oversized belly, and he was already eyeing the chow line to see when he might go back for seconds.

  Rockheart suddenly realized he was not very hungry; he had not been paying attention when the messmen filled his tray.

  “I hear the Cunt is going to start the Red Crown watches as soon as we leave Subic,” said Hartley, talking around a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

  “Yup,” replied Rockheart. “Trying to show the Old Man that he cares.”

  “Only thing that fuck cares about is his next fitness J report.”

  “Well, that’s what we all work for, isn’t it?” said Rockheart with a cynical grin. “Get those evals, make rate, all that extra money, do your twenty years, retire, and then sit back and relax in a trailer in Florida.”

  “Jesus,” said Hartley. “I grew up in a trailer in South Florida. I hate fucking Florida.”

  The new Weapons officer, Lieutenant Holcomb, came walking through the mess decks on his way back to the Weapons office. Hartley eyed him surreptitiously.

  “You talk to the evaluators. What’s the new guy like?” he asked Rockheart after Brian had passed by.

  “Like any other department head—sweating the load, trying not to fuck up,” replied Rocky, picking at his food.

  “I heard he’s from LANTFLEET; doesn’t know shit about WESTPAC.”

  Rockheart shrugged and said, “He’s a lieutenant in a lieutenant commander’s billet, you know? Doesn’t know NTDS, doesn’t know PIRAZ, so sweat pumps on max.

  But so far, he’s not acting like that prick Austin.”

  Hartley nodded and went back to his lunch. As a rule, Rockheart didn’t pay too much attention to officers, other than to identify the ones who were going to give him a hard time or who were otherwise jerks about salutes and saying sir. He had observed Brian standing his breakin watches as evaluator in Combat. He had quickly realized that Brian knew next to nothing about the PIRAZ business and thus would be dependent on the junior watch officers and the senior radarmen to keep him out of trouble until he learned the ropes in Hood’s state-of-the-art CIC. From the enlisted perspective, how Brian handled the awkward situation of being the senior officer on watch while still not knowing everything there was to know about Combat would be a good measure of the man. The smart ones simply asked until they got everything down; the pricks tried to fake it. Austin was a notorious prick, but from what Rocky could tell, Brian looked as if he was playing new guy for as long as he could, which to Rockheart was eminently sensible—the CO and the XO would have to wait a while before jumping in his shit.

  “They gonna let us go over, hit the PX?” asked Hartley.

  “I don’t think so,” replied Rockheart. He suddenly decided he did not want fried chicken and began to pick suspiciously at his dessert, a sodden lump of what was supposed to be apple pie. Mckinnon began to eye Rock heart’s chicken.

  “That’s a bummer,” complained Bartley. “I need to get some shit; my old lady is all hot to trot for WESTPAC goodies.”

  “You gonna eat that chicken?” inquired Mckinnon, looking up over the bones on his tray.

  “Have at it, Mac,” said Rockheart. “Shit’s too greasy for me. Besides, I have to watch my figure; the birds don’t go for any lardass.”

  Mckinnon just grunted and speared Rockheart’s chicken onto his own tray.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what women go for,” he said, his mouth working ponderously. “I want some gash, I go buy it. They don’t like my big gut, that’s too fuckin’ bad.

  Actually, most of ‘em don’t bitch much—it keeps their heads warm.”

  Rockheart grinned. He was a handsome man in a rough-cut, frontiersman fashion. His spotless uniforms and correct military bearing classified him among the officers as a squared-away, highly professional career enlisted man who was bucking for a chief petty officer’s hat. He was the only radarman first class who was not one of the air-intercept controllers in CIC, having chosen to specialize in surface operations.

  Mckinnon finished off Rockheart’s chicken, looked over his shoulder at the dwindling chow line, and pushed away from the table to get another load. A very tall black petty officer first class appeared at the table, carrying an empty tray. He wore a leather tool belt rilled with electrician’s tools around his narrow waist. He acknowledged Rockheart with a bare nod of his shiny bald head, swept the mess decks with his eyes for an instant, and then asked, “Rocky, my man, you got that twenny you owe me?”

  “Sure do, Bullet,” replied Rockheart, craning his neck to look Bullet in the face.
“Wallet’s in my locker, though—where can I find you?”

  Bullet, nicknamed for the conical shape of his bald head, appeared to think for a moment.

  “I be back in the electrical shop in a li’l bit. Be seem’ you there.”

  “You got it.”

  Bullet moved on, striding toward the scullery with what appeared to be great dignity but what was really an effort to avoid hitting his head on the maze of pipes and cables bundled against the overhead.

  Bartley finished his lunch and got up from the table, followed by Rockheart. They took their trays back to the steaming scullery, where trays and silverware were turned in through a window counter to a pair of red faced, heavily perspiring mess cooks. The mess cooks scraped the trays, banged food scraps into large garbage cans under the counter, and flung the silverware into a deep sink filled with very hot water. The trays were then tossed onto a conveyor belt that led to the scullery machine itself. Despite the fans and the exhaust vents, it was over one hundred degrees in the scullery; the men worked fast to get the job done.

  Rockheart reversed course after depositing his tray, walking back toward the forward end of the mess decks, nodding hello to some of his buddies at their tables.

  Forward of the mess decks he went down Broadway, the central passageway containing the barbershop, the personnel and disbursing offices, the post office, and the ship’s store, with its eternal line. Past the post office, Broadway narrowed down and then ended in a T-junction, intersecting an athwartships passageway. The blank white bulkhead taking up the forward side of the junction was the after bulkhead of the missile magazine. Rock heart turned right, walked twenty feet, and then made a left into a narrower passageway that continued forward toward the bow. After stepping through two hatches, he stopped at a doorway labeled forward crew’s head.

  He looked up and down the passageway before stepping through the door into the humid, astringent atmosphere of the head. There were six urinals, eight toilet stalls, and six shower stalls crammed into a compartment that was barely twenty feet by twenty-five. The smell of pine-oil disinfectant mixed with salt water misting up from the urinals easily overwhelmed the efforts of the two exhaust fans in the overhead.

  He walked across the herringbone-patterned stainless steel deck to the urinal farthest from the door and went through the motions while examining the row of toilet stalls behind him to see whether anyone else was in the head. They all appeared to be empty, which made sense.

  At this hour, most of the crew was grabbing a nooner before turn-to went again at 1300. The only sounds in the head came from the constantly flushing urinals and the vent fans laboring against the noxious atmosphere. Making one last visual sweep of the compartment, he stepped up on his toes and reached into one of the large cableways that ran through the overhead of the compartment. Feeling among the bulky armored cables and smaller wires, his fingers closed on a bundle of soft plastic-covered blocks, each the size of a school eraser. He grabbed one and swiftly inserted it into his Jockey shorts, then zipped up. The feel of the plastic against his genitals was erotic, like a girl’s panties.

  He concentrated on something else immediately, such as the prospect of getting caught.

  The block gave him enough of a bulge without adding complications.

  He left the head and retraced his steps through the passageways, passing back through the mess decks. He had to make his way all the way to the electrical shop, which was on the second deck, underneath the fantail.

  There he would meet Bullet, who would give him three hundred dollars for the single block of powdered Mexican hashish. Bullet would then break the block down into small individual tokes and sell them through his network to customers throughout the ship.

  Rocky smiled as he walked aft. He was going to be a rich man before he finished his tour in John Bell Hood. Hell, he was already a rich man, especially by Navy pay standards. As the main supplier, Rocky had been dealing dope in the ship for nearly two years, courtesy of another first class radarman by the name of Rackman, who had decided to get out of the seagoing dope business when he made chief and transferred off the ship to shore duty in San Diego.

  Radarman First Class Rackman had been the leading petty officer in OI Division when Rocky reported aboard as a fresh-caught E-6, and Rackman had taken Rocky under his wing after the first month and made him something of a protege. They had been buddies for nearly a year, going out on liberty together and often double dating. Rocky realized later that the fact they had been close friends for so long without the smallest hint of Rackman’s other profession spoke very highly of Rack man’s security system. The revelation had come when Rocky and Rackman had been out on the beach one night to celebrate Rackman’s promotion to chief petty officer.

  They had brought along a couple of beach-bar debutantes, one of whom had produced some grass and started passing the stuff around. Rocky, a reformed smoker, had declined until Rackman pulled him aside and told him that he had something very important to talk to him about, but only if Rocky would first do a joint with him.

  Intrigued, Rocky had tried the marijuana. He coughed a lot but found it to be a pleasant-enough buzz if you could get by the awful smell. Then Rackman had revealed his shipboard avocation and offered to let Rocky take over the business. Rackman would show him the ropes for a month or so before he transferred off and would then become Rocky’s main supplier ashore. Rocky, flying low on the effects of several beers and the joint, had begun laughing hysterically, until Rackman described the profit structure, the secure nature of the distribution system aboard ship, and revealed that he had squirreled away over $150,000 in tax-free money during the three years he had been in business in Hood. Rocky had stopped laughing. Rackman had told him to think it over, and Rocky had.

  Rocky was thirty-three, unmarried, had twelve years in on his twenty, and would be eligible for the chief’s exam in two more years. He had been born and raised in Seattle, the second son of a career fireman whose attachment to rye whiskey had killed him in a car wreck one night as he drove home from his neighborhood bar.

  His mother had carried on, helped out financially by the generosity of her husband s fellow firefighters, raising three large boys in a small house on the north side of the city. Rocky had gone into the Navy after high school, as there had been no possibility of going to college, given the financial situation at home. His older brother, John, had become a fireman. His younger brother, Timmie, had drifted into the growing ranks of professional hippies, war protestors, and dropouts populating greater Seattle toward the end of the sixties.

  Being a high school graduate, Rocky had qualified for radar A-school after boot camp. He had no idea what a radarman was when he signed up, but he had been told that you stood your watches in cool air-conditioned spaces, sitting in chairs instead of standing on your feet all day, and that there was proficiency pay for those who made rate, all of which seemed to him to beat hell out of being a boiler tender or a deck ape.

  He had progressed through a series of seagoing billets to E-6, or petty officer first class, by being good at his job and exceptionally accommodating when it came to pleasing officers and chiefs. To Rocky, the Navy was an extremely simple and even generous proposition: They clearly told you the rules, they trained you exhaustively in your rating, they encouraged you and even helped you to make rate, they gave you a change of scenery every three years or so, and they let you out after twenty years, with a paycheck for life. From what Rocky could see, the only way you could screw it all up was to piss off an officer or a chief.

  Being a survivor at heart and an extremely practical man, Rocky had made it a point not only to get along with officers and chiefs but to become something of an expert at it. He took special pains to turn himself out in immaculate uniforms, paying for custom-fitted shirts and trousers. He kept his shoes shined, his hair cut, his demeanor sincere, and his performance of duty scrupulously professional. When he realized that not very many of his enlisted peers had figured out the system, he kne
w he was onto a good thing. He was treated with respect by his superiors and also by the other sailors, even the give a-shit brigade, because as long as Rocky played the game, the rest of them could goof off, serve their time, and get out. Even after all these years, Rocky thought of it all as a big con, but, having adapted beautifully to the system, he was completely secure in the Navy. He was unconcerned about his future, which the Navy would take care of, and casually ignorant about what was happening in the outside world.

  He was by no means a saint; you could not get to E-6 in the Navy or any of the services without being able to play the enlisted game as well as he played the officer’s game. As a divisional leading petty officer, he could read through a junior enlisted man’s scam in a flash and knew by heart the standard liturgy of enlisted excuses, the “my car, it,”

  “my kids, they,”

  “my wife, she” stories by which the white hats worked the system for a little slack. He had worked his own share of scams and deals over the years, but always within the system and always under the protection of the chiefs. As far as the officers were concerned, Rocky was comfortably in the groove, a solid citizen aboard ship, a dependable petty officer who never gave anybody any trouble. He was, in every sense of the term, a certified lifer.

  When the sixties, with the Kennedy assassinations, the civil rights upheavals and killings, the burgeoning Vietnam War protest movements, the advent of rock and roll, free love, and the drug culture, began to roll over America like a wave train of social tsunamis, Rocky had done what most military career people did: ignored it all.

  He had been content to go to sea, go on deployments, and serve his time on twenty. But by 1967, when Rack man first made his pitch, even Rocky’s secure little world in the Navy had begun to wobble just a little bit.

  He had set up a bachelor pad over in Ocean Beach when he made E-6, and it wasn’t long before all the antiwar, antimilitary, antigovernment, and antiestablishment noise began to get in his face. And then there was the money angle: With Johnson’s Great Society programs and the Vietnam War inflating the economy, budget capped Navy pay began to lose its historically secure buying power. Even Rocky, who was no economist, had become acutely aware that the twice-monthly paycheck was covering less and less ground, and he paid attention when he heard the chiefs grumbling as they began to realize how little that pension check was going to cover when they hit their twenty. Rocky had never looked that far ahead, being satisfied to nod agreeably when the older hands talked about hitting that magic twenty-year gate, rolling out, and living on their retired pay. As life began to turn on its ear out there in the world, Rocky had begun to nurture some doubts as to the system’s intentions and ability to take care of him, which lent Rackman’s proposition an immediate appeal, especially the money.