The Edge of Honor (78 page)

The captain stopped what he was doing, put the tool down, and let his hand fall to his lap. He sat there, his head down, his eyes closed, for almost a minute. The ship took a long roll and hung to port for what seemed like a very long time. Brian realized that she was getting less responsive to the seas outside, a bad sign. The bomb shifted infinitesimally on its pile of debris, startling both of them.

“I suppose …” the captain began, picking up yet another Alien wrench.

“I suppose you probably think it’s some kind of deep, dark conspiracy.”

He paused, as if to mobilize his thoughts, and then he groaned in pain and slowly doubled over, his forehead ending up resting against the cold steel casing of the Russian bomb.

“Captain?” Brian started to move forward.

But the captain straightened up and took a deep breath.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he whispered. “Go to my cabin.

In the head. Bring me my Dopp kit—small brown leather bag. Bring it up here and then I’ll tell you what’s been going on.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get it. Should I call the—”

“They’re busy now. Go get it.”

Brian backed away and then picked his way as fast as he could through surface and D and D to the front door, which was swinging back and forth on its hinges as the ship rolled. The door to the pilothouse was open.

Jack Folsom stood in the darkened doorway as Brian came out of Combat.

“Secure the bridge,” Brian ordered. “Go down to the fo’c’sle and set up shop down there. Make sure you take the deck log and some sound-powered phones. Come up on the One JV phone circuit, and put somebody on the JL, the lookout circuit. Move it. Bring the log up to date as soon as you get down there.”

Folsom nodded and disappeared back out into the pilothouse as Brian hurried down the ladder to the next level. It was amazing to him how everything one deck below was perfectly normal, battle lanterns shining down on highly polished tile decks, the row of stateroom doors looking like the hallway of a hotel. There was only the strong stink of burning oil coiling up from the next level down to indicate that something might be wrong elsewhere in the ship. He banged through the captain’s cabin door and turned right. He found the Dopp kit and headed back for CIC. He slowed down as he approached the area aft of surface, trying not to look at all the gore.

He knelt down on one knee and offered the Dopp kit to the captain, who was sitting motionless next to the bomb, his eyes agape in a vacant stare.

“Captain?”

The captain blinked. “Open it,” he croaked.

Brian opened the leather bag and was stunned to find four medicinal vials and three syringes. He peered at the labels on the vials. Morphine sulfate. Three unopened bottles and one partially full.

“Give me one bottle and one needle.”

Brian passed them to the captain, who with a practiced motion put the syringe case between his teeth, pulled off the protective cap, spit out the cap, and drew back the handle of the syringe, pressing the glinting needle through the membrane of the vial to inject two cc’s of air. Then he withdrew an equal amount of the amber fluid, dropped the vial at his feet, and stabbed the needle into the large muscle of his thigh.

Brian winced when he did it, but the effect was almost immediate. After about a minute, the captain exhaled, a long and weary sighing sound, and discarded the syringe.

He shuddered once and then looked up at Brian.

“So now you know. The captain is a morphine addict.

Sort of, anyway. The difference is that I don’t do this for fun, Brian.

I have a cancer in my guts, and this stuff controls the pain. Only I’m about at the end of my string.” He sat back, resting his left side on the bomb casing.

“At the beginning of the cruise, I needed morphine only twice a day. Not too bad, except for the last couple of hours of each period. But I learned to schedule it, see.

Take it at oh-six hundred so I could see people, do my job, especially in the mornings. Then some pills around lunchtime so I could get through the afternoon, when the ops got heavy in CIC. My second shot around eighteen hundred so I could be up to it on the twenty to twenty four, the night ops stuff.” He held his breath for ten seconds, coughed once, and then continued.

“The doc was my ally. And the exec, of course. They both owed me.

Professional favors. I made a deal with them. If I had gone to the docs ashore, they’d have yanked me off the ship in a heartbeat, stuffed me into a hospital, and taken my plumbing out. If it hadn’t already got loose, I’d spend the rest of my life with a bag of shit under my shirt.”

He paused again before tilting his head up to stare directly at Brian.

“See, John Bell Hood was my big ship command. This was the battleship I was never going to have, because there weren’t any more battleships.

I’ve been in the Navy a long, long time. White hat to four-striper. Done everything. Only in the American Navy is that possible these days. Hood was my big ship. No way was I going to trade that for a plastic bag.

Miss. my wartime WESTPAC cruise. My ship, the crew I trained up, the wardroom nurtured. So I made a deal. The doc would keep me in meds for the cruise. When we got back, I would turn myself in.”

Brian nodded. “Only the cancer got ahead of you.” A battle lantern nearby expired, its relay buzzing for fifteen seconds before the light dimmed out.

“It sure as hell did. These last days, since we left Subic, it’s been terrible. They can give me only so much morphine. The body can take only so much, and they couldn’t hit the ship’s supply so hard that we wouldn’t have any for, well, for what we have on our hands tonight. The doc faked some of it—turned in reports saying stuff had expired, had been destroyed, got some more. When we were in Subic, I checked into a private clinic up near Baguio, the resort city.”

“Ah. I saw you when you returned, when we got underway for the storm.

You looked—”

“I looked like death warmed over, I suspect. They did an exploratory at the clinic. Closed it right back up. Too far gone. The Filipino doc there said I had maybe a month or so. Said I ought to tell my wife.”

“Mrs. Huntington doesn’t know?”

“I haven’t told her. That’s not the same as saying she doesn’t know. Navy wife. They know everything, after a while. You may not necessarily want to know how they learn in every case, either.”

Brian nodded, understanding that comment perfectly.

“And the druggies in the crew: Yes, I knew the scope of the problem. At first, the XO told me everything. It was his idea to use the chiefs to keep the dopers in their boxes if we could.”

“You couldn’t stand to expose the problem because it would expose you.”

“Right. Simple as that. When you came aboard and started asking questions, I wondered if it was all going to blow up. The XO suggested we checkmate you with the fitrep. Worked for a while, didn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. But dopers on the missile systems—I just couldn’t stand that anymore.”

The captain fell silent, looking across the wrecked module, looking at each piece of twisted equipment, at the bloodstains and human bits showered across the bulkheads. He shook his head.

“You were right,” he whispered finally. “The Navy way, the regulation way—always the best way. Always. I knew that. We thought we could hold it together. We thought the problem here was no better or worse than that in any other ship out here. That’s what other skippers were doing—getting by, getting the job done, getting the ship back home in one piece and with our careers intact. Should have known better, I guess.”

Brian nodded slowly. “We almost pulled it off, actually.”

“What was the problem with System Two? The one that cost you time?”

“I don’t know, sir. FROM Three Warren was on the console down below. The chief thinks the kid panicked when it got hot and heavy. Maybe he did, maybe not.

One of the first class was with him, but he was probably sitting System One. Maybe if we had had a more senior man on the console … I just don’t know.”

The captain nodded. “You realize that’s just what the XO is going to say—you come along, stick your nose in, and decide to clean house, and then when the shit hit the fan, we had novices on the consoles.”

“I guess he has a point,” Brian said, his voice low.

“No, he doesn’t. Look at me. Look at me. You did the right thing. He and I did the wrong thing. Look, there’s going to be a serious investigation, probably a court of inquiry, on this incident. Those things have a tendency to stray beyond their immediate objective. The drug thing is going to come out. There might even be a court-martial or two. You just tell the truth, from start to finish. I’ll back you up. If I can.”

“If you can?”

The Captain gave a twisted smile and tipped his chin at the bomb. “If I don’t screw this up. And if I live that long. Now, you get out of here.

But first get me a set of phones. If I succeed, I want to be able to tell somebody it’s clear in here. Keep everybody out until I call.”

Brian scrounged a set of sound-powered phones from the darkened and deserted bridge and took them back to the captain, who was moving his tools on a foul-weather jacket spread across the deck plates. Brian plugged the jack into the JL circuit. He went back out into the passageway and unscrewed two battle lanterns and brought them back, positioning them so the yellow spots of light shined directly on the plate.

“Good,” the captain said. “Now shove off.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Good luck.”

The captain twisted around to look at him. “Good luck to you, young man.

One day, you’ll have a command of your own. Just make sure you play by the rules.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Thirty minutes later, Jackson headed back up after officers’ passageway, navigating the passageway by keeping one hand out to touch a bulkhead.

The visibility in the smoke-filled area was down to about zero. He stopped when his foot slipped on something on the deck and he felt a breath of rising air against his hand. He groped around in the murk and put his flashlight on the bulkheads, trying to figure out where he was.

The passageway was almost totally obscured by smoke now, but he had definitely felt moving air, cooler air, from below his knees. He groped around with his right hand and found a step-aside alcove. Here, definitely here. He felt the brass wheel with his fingers, and as he did, the hatch undogged and bounced up on its springs, once again blowing away the smoke for an instant. He looked down into the trunk and saw the hatch to the shaft alley wide open at the bottom of the ladder leading down from the passageway.

There was a flashlight probing around down there. Somebody there. An investigator from Repair Three? Looked like there was some flooding down there, water sloshing around, almost over the deck plates. But would a DC guy leave hatches open? Suspicious, Jackson latched the scuttle hatch fully back. He started down the hatch, only to have his EEBD begin to give out, forcing him to climb back out to unwrap another EEBD and change the hood.

Then he started down again.

He climbed down the first ladder carefully, having trouble seeing through the hood as the cooler air fogged the plastic. He thought about taking it off, but there was still smoke present, and he didn’t want to waste the pure air in the cylinder, which, once fired, discharged until it was depleted. He took the spare EEBDs out of his pockets and laid them out on the deck. He could hear water spraying in the pump room below, and from the sound of it, there was a pretty good leak going down there. He tried to wipe the hood clear, but it only smeared. He knelt down on one knee and peered into the shaft alley pump room, twisting the hood to find some clear plastic.

He was stunned to see Rockheart collecting a large pile of money from a bag of what looked like rags. Rockheart?

He leaned back, away from the hatch, in case Rockheart happened to look up. With a sinking feeling in his gut, he figured it out. Goddamn Martinez had been right—there had been a second guy. Rockheart in the passageway outside their door the night they had visited Garlic.

Rockheart devising the setup on Bullet. Rockheart the MAA, with access to his office and effectively anything in it. Jesus H. Christ. An MAA!

Down there with a huge bag of money. Drug money—it had to be. That son of a bitch! Deserting his station in Combat to rescue his drug money. He peeped over the edge again, staring in disbelief at the amount of cash—hundreds, thousands of dollars in cash—that Rocky was stuffing back into the rag bag. And he wasn’t wearing a hood.

Enraged at the betrayal, Jackson lost it. He ripped the EEBD hood off his own head, put his feet carefully on the ladder, and then started down, facing forward on the ladder, being careful not to make any noise that could be heard above the spray from the broken pump coupling.

When he reached the next to the last rung above the propeller shaft’s cage, he collected himself and sprang halfway across the pump room, landing on the metal deck plates with a loud clang and hitting Rocky on the side of his head at the temple with his clenched fist as Rocky started to turn around and look up. The blow knocked Rocky backward, fetching him up against the tilted body of the fire pump, where he slumped into a moaning heap, the rag bag spilling its contents into the bilges.

Jackson straightened up, his right hand stinging. He walked over to where Rocky was lying and kicked him in the stomach. Rocky gasped and doubled up into a tight ball, his eyes shut, his face white with pain.

Jackson reached for him, grabbing a handful of shirt.

“You motherfucker!” he shouted. “You son of a bitch!

You’re a fucking MAA! I trusted you—the whole fucking ship trusted you, and look at you.” He slapped Rocky across the face with his left hand.

“All this fucking time, we’re lookin at Bullet, and it’s you\ Guys dying up there, guys drowned next door in the fire room, ship’s on fire, and you’re down here getting your fucking drug money! You bastard!”

Rocky opened his eyes and tried to speak, but Jackson continued to slap him in the face, screaming at him, incoherent in his rage at the depth of Rockheart’s betrayal.