The Edge of Honor (37 page)

“Why wasn’t the captain called when the first Mig came up?” The exec’s voice was taut. Brian took a deep breath.

“That was my fault, sir. When the first bandit showed up, we got into a discussion of whether or not to bring back the BARCAP, but Hoodoo said they didn’t have enough fuel to make a run on him. That’s when Garuda reminded me to call the captain, and I was reaching for the phone when the second bunch appeared on the scope.”

“And?”

“Well, at that point, Garuda had the system in auto and I was concentrating on the engagement as it was shaping up. Garuda reminded me again to call you, which is when I pushed the button to the captain’s cabin. Then I realized he was probably in the wardroom, since it was movie time. As I pushed the button for the wardroom, the other bandit, the bandit to the north, was reported turning inbound, and I was trying to decide whether or not to call GQ, since we seemed to have a full-scale air raid on our hands and only two directors to deal with four targets.”

The exec exhaled audibly, visibly trying to control himself. The captain continued to sit in his chair, his face neutral, as if bemused by all the sudden excitement in his cabin. Brian found the captain’s detachment unsettling, but he was waiting to see where the exec was going with this. Austin had his usual disapproving look on his face, but he, too, appeared to be waiting to see which way the exec was headed with his interrogation. Brian stared down at the tabletop and tried not to crumple the paper cup any more. The exec got up and began to pace around the table.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. You realize that this was totally unsat. But what we need right now is light, not heat. Let me see if I have the sequence right. First, you guys detected a single bogey, headed north.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Actually,” Garuda, “it was Mr. Holcomb who detected it. He saw the video first on my scope, and then the rest of us got on it.”

Brian felt a small wave of gratitude for Garuda’s input.

Austin sighed. “Sounds like the Cave was asleep; detection and tracking is not the evaluator’s job.”

The exec acknowledged the comment. “Right. Okay,” he said. “That’s very interesting. You got the first guy, then got into a discussion of what to do about it. He was well out of missile range, and the BARCAP were out of position, on their way to be tanked. Now, Brian, you understand that right then and there the CO should have been called?”

“Yes, sir,”

said Brian and Garuda together.

“Okay. But you didn’t. And when you were about to, three new bogeys showed up out of nowhere, and suddenly you were in a world of shit, three hostiles inbound from the beach, and only two directors. Right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Garuda took engagement action, which was entirely correct, and again reminded you to call the CO, and you did but pressed the wrong button.”

“Well, I hit the CO’s cabin button. When there was no answer, I hit the wardroom button. Then you picked up, sir.”

He wondered briefly why the exec had answered the bat phone in the wardroom—the captain never missed the evening movie. If he had not been in the wardroom, why hadn’t he picked up in his cabin when Brian first buzzed? The exec sat back down.

“Okay. That’s the first thing we can fix. Count, I want the bat phone’s call system rigged so that all three phones—the one on the bridge, in the captain’s cabin, and in the wardroom—sound anytime either the bridge or Combat pushes any one of those buttons.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Austin made a note in his notebook.

“Now, Brian, I hate to say this, but I think you clutched up a little when everything started to happen simultaneously. Do you agree?”

Brian stared down at the table. Clutched up: the old Naval Academy expression for freezing under stress. An extremely serious failure for a line officer. But there was no real getting around it. His brain had failed open, as the engineers liked to say. He had frozen.

“Yes, sir, I guess I did.”

Austin looked away, a disdainful expression on his face. The captain even looked a little embarrassed, as if something scatological had come up at dinner, but said nothing. The exec pressed on.

“Okay, that’s the second fix required, only this one is procedural.

Brian’s problem here was that he was trying to absorb the tactical situation while also trying to find the captain. I think we need a panic signal.”

“How about three buzzes, one, two, three—means Captain to Combat, right now. Or we can pass the word on the One ME. We have a One ME mike right there in D and D,” offered Austin.

“Yes, I think so. Something like that. Something that means, I don’t have time to talk about it, but please get up here most skosh. I like the Onemc option. Okay.

Now, the third thing: You and Garuda had a discussion on whether or not to call general quarters. By our doctrine, we’re set up to fight the ship from Condition Three, which is our normal watch condition when we’re out here on Red Crown station. I’m kind of interested, Brian: Why did going to GQ even come up?”

Brian hesitated for a moment. The exec was clearly in charge here, but he seemed to have converted his anger to intense professional interest.

“Well,” he began, “I do know the doctrine, and I know we can defend from Condition Three—in fact, we engaged the missile systems right away, as soon as we saw the three popups.”

“You mean Garuda engaged them, don’t you?” asked Austin.

Brian bristled at the cheap shot. “Well, I thought that was our doctrine, too—command by negation. If the combat system is doing the right thing, the evaluator stays silent. Or am I mistaken?” Austin shrugged but said nothing.

“GQ?” prompted the exec.

“What raised the GQ question in my mind was the fact that we had more targets than directors—four to two, to be precise. From the geometry, it looked to me like at least one, if not two Migs had a chance to get into their weapons release point.” He looked around the table. The exec and Austin were listening closely. Austin was slowly shaking his head back and forth, like one student trying to show the teacher that another student was coming up with the wrong answer. The captain seemed to be only mildly interested. What was the matter with him?

“Well,” Brian continued, “I thought GQ would button the ship up, put the first-team guys on the consoles, and have the damage-control parties at their stations when and if we got hit.” The exec sighed. “Okay,” he said. “I hear you. But in reality, at those ranges, you’re talking sixty to ninety seconds from start to finish. If you had sounded GQ and some of the bad guys had burned through our missile defenses, what you’d really get would be the whole crew running through the ship trying to get to their GQ stations at about the time the surviving bad guys went bombs away on us. You’d have the entire crew in motion, the GQ team pouring into Combat, yelling questions, trying to take over the consoles, distracting the guys already sitting the consoles, at the precise instant when max concentration was required. And instead of having the ship buttoned up, you’d have damn near every door and hatch open as four hundred people tried to get to their GQ stations.”

He leaned back in his chair and raised his eyebrows at Brian. Austin had a triumphant smile on his face.

“See, Brian,” the exec continued, “you’ve said this yourself: We’re in a tough tactical position here. By attack jet-aircraft standards, we’re about one hundred twenty to one hundred eighty seconds from their coast out point, especially if they can build up velocity out of sight of pur radars in those coastal canyons. Now, if we had a prior indication that a raid was shaping up, yes, of course, we’d go to GQ.”

“Like perhaps when that first Mig came up and started drifting north,”

offered Austin in an

“I told you so”

voice.

“Well, no,” said the exec, in a tone that indicated he was tired of Austin’s sniping from the sidelines. “The Migs have never come feet-wet before, and we’ve never even considered going to GQ for just one Mig—even when we shot at one.”

“Well, they surely came feet-wet tonight,” mused the captain, speaking for the first time. “Maybe CTF Seventy-seven will have to change his procedures. Four enemy aircraft making what was obviously a coordinated feint-and-attack maneuver, right when the BARCAP were out of position for routine refueling. I wonder if they’re practicing for something.”

“Mr. Holcomb had an idea about that earlier,” offered Garuda. “He said we ought to do a fakeout on ‘em, like hide a tanker in with the BARCAP, make like they were going off-station, then double back on ‘em if they show their faces.”

rn The exec nodded enthusiastically. “I like that. Count, let’s write something up on that,” he said. “I suspect we’ve all gotten into a rut about taking the CAP off station. They were off-station when we took that shot at ‘em, weren’t they?”

“Yes, sir.” Austin made a second note, frowning.

“Captain, if I may suggest,” said the exec, leaning forward. “Maybe we ought to exercise getting to GQ once in a while. If the North Vietnamese are getting ready to try us on with an air attack, we should maybe tighten up the reflex a little.”

“When was the last time we called GQ for a drill?”

“No notice? I mean, not as a scheduled GQ? I can’t remember, exactly—before Subic, anyway.”

“Yes. Okay. Maybe you’re right.”

“And I’d still like to exercise the gun mounts, Captain,” Brian interjected. “Admittedly, I didn’t think of it tonight, but I could have assigned the gunfire-control radar to one of those bogies.”

“Oh, honestly,” said Austin. “What good is a five inch gun against a Mach One air target; that’s just a waste of time, and the vibration does more damage than the gun can do good.”

“A GQ drill would be a perfect time to do it, XO,” said Brian, ignoring Austin.

The captain put a stop to it. “Okay, yes, let’s schedule some GQ drills and shoot at least the five-incher. The three-inch guns are the ones that do the most vibration damage. I’m not sure what we’re seeing here, whether it’s just a reaction to three days of round-the-clock strikes or maybe something a little more sinister. Although, politically, I still can’t see them actually attacking the ships out here.”

“But they could,”

said Brian quietly. The others turned to look at him. “They could do it.”

The captain looked at Brian for a moment. Brian thought he detected a flash of annoyance in the captain’s eyes, or was it pain? But then the captain slumped back in his chair and once again seemed to withdraw from the discussion.

The exec pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose they do have the capability to mount an air raid out here in the Gulf. I suppose we need to think about that. But we’ve got some in-house problems to sort out first. Okay, I think that’s enough. This could have turned into a mess tonight, and it’s best to review an incident like this right away. The good news is that we’ve exposed some holes in our procedures and the captain’s phone system. Now you two go back on watch and we’ll talk some more about this later.”

The rest of the watch seemed to drag after the North Vietnamese feint.

Brian and Garuda avoided any more discussion of the incident. Brian was still embarrassed by the exec’s declaration that he had clutched up.

Garuda appeared to be embarrassed by Brian’s embarrassment.

Thirty minutes after the meeting in the captain’s cabin, the exec came up to Combat, without Austin, and summoned the ship’s chief electrician, whom he directed to rewire the bat phone’s buzzer system.

The chief electrician looked pointedly at his watch.

“Tonight, XO? It’s almost taps.”

“Tonight, Chief. The electrical gang seems to get plenty of sleep. I want it done now—like before midnight.” The Chief sighed and left Combat to round up some troops. Electrician mates were not known to be an energetic rating, and the exec seemed to take pleasure in demanding some after-hours work from them. He then told Garuda to take the watch and invited Brian out to the bridge wing.

Even with the low lighting levels in Combat, they were both night-blind for the first few minutes. They felt their way through the dim shapes in the pilothouse to the starboard bridge wing, after the bosun had announced, “XO on the bridge.” The OOD joined them for a few minutes, glad for any kind of diversion from the tedium of steaming from one end of the Red Crown box to the other, but then he sensed that they wanted some privacy and retreated to the other bridge wing, taking the JOOD with him.

“I’m always amazed at how long it takes to get my night vision back,”

began the exec. The night air was oppressively warm, without the relief of a breeze usually provided by the ship’s own motion. The starboard running light cast a bloom of green light into the misty night air and there was an occasional whiff of stack gas from the forward stack. Brian felt his uniform shirt begin to wilt. He had been spoiled by Combat’s air conditioning.

“Brian, I don’t want you to think we were ganging up on you down in the cabin tonight,” the exec began.

“Especially about clutching up when the Migs came.”

Brian let out a long breath. “I felt more superfluous than clutched up, XO. Garuda had the systems doing their thing, and there wasn’t anything I could do about the arithmetic—two directors, three, four targets. And when the Old Man didn’t answer his phone—”

“Yeah. Well, he wasn’t feeling well tonight. I think the doc maybe gave him something, I don’t know. But that’s why I picked up in the wardroom.

And we learned something important tonight about the captain’s call circuit.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I guess what I wanted to say is don’t take this as too big a deal. The captain’s not really mad. And he’s not one to stay mad even when he does get pissed off, so don’t sweat that angle.”

Brian was not worried about the captain being mad at him. He was more worried about the captain’s apparent indifference to the whole incident.

Not indifference, exactly; there was something else—distracted, maybe that was the word. The exec was still talking.

“Let me tell you that you’re doing all right for someone who’s brand-new to this combat system and the whole Red Crown business. What we’ve got to focus on now is what the hell the North Vietnamese are up to, sending Migs feet-wet.”