The Edge of Honor (21 page)

“Powwow—as in my chief boats?”

“Yes, sir, most likely. Word is that the snipe, that Gallagher guy, hasn’t come outta the holes for the past day. Some of the other snipes’re bringing him chow and he’s sleepin’ in the tool crib in Two Firehouse—with one eye open.”

“Probably the sensible thing to do.” Brian paused, wondering how much he should reveal to the warrant.

What the hell, he thought, if this guy isn’t regular Navy, who is? He plunged on.

“But I’m wondering if this is the right way to handle a doper. Engineer told me the BT chief caught this gomer obviously spaced-out. Why not charge his ass, bring him to mast, and let the Old Man handle it, regulation Navy?”

Garuda looked around Combat for a moment before answering. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and blew a cloud of blue smoke into the overhead. He lowered his voice even more, his tone urgent.

” ‘Cause that ain’t how it goes here in the
. B. Hood, Mr. Holcomb. We ever catch the kingpin, the head doper, guy sellin’ this shit, him we’d bring up, regulation style, hopefully before Chief Louie JM feeds him to the propellers.p>

He’d get a court-martial, probably a general court, with hard time at Leavenworth. But for us in’? You can’t do that and still keep this here Red Crown deal runnin’.”

“But wouldn’t we be better off with the druggies gone? Berkeley might have been, from the looks of it.”

Garuda shook his head emphatically. “You’d end up shitcanning a third of the crew, if not more.- And some a these guys’d like nothing better; they want out—outta the Nav and outta these deployments. Be more’n happy to get caught with a little dope, get an admin discharge or a ‘less than honorable’ or even a general-discharge ticket.

They don’t give a shit about what kinda discharge they get. They’ve got no idea how that can hurt ‘em later on.

They just want out. I mean, you look around—mosta these guys are nineteen, twenty years old. To them, anyone’s been in the Navy for more than one hitch is automatically a lifer. I think the XO’s got it right; lower decks justice is the way to go. Let that monster Injun crack some ribs.”

Garuda straightened up and turned back to his console, fingers flying again as he growled at the track supe over the intercom. Brian sat back in his own chair and examined the faces surrounding him in Combat. The two dozen positions in his sight were indeed manned by mostly Very young men. His last XO had described it as going to sea with this year’s high school class. The user consoles, such as the air control, weapons control, and the SWIC, were all manned either by senior petty officers or chiefs—lifers, as the junior enlisted called them. The input consoles were manned exclusively by first-term enlistees, nineteen to twenty-one year olds, most of whom had enlisted in the Navy to avoid the televised horrors of Army life in country. Can’t blame ‘em for that, thought Brian. But he wished to hell that they’d left their damn drug habits on the beach. The bat phone buzzed again.

“Evaluator, sir.”

“Brian, turn the watch over to Mr. Barry and come down here, please.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” He replaced the handset, his stomach tightening, and waited for Garuda to end his telephone conversation with computer control. After a minute, Garuda hung up and shook his head.

“Goddamn guys don’t mind the store. This op program’s beginning to deteriorate, they’ve got a control panel with three system alarms showin’, and I have to call them. We’re gonna hold a little extra instruction when I get off watch.”

“Well, hang in there, because I have to join the stance in the captain’s cabin. You are hereby promoted to evaluator.”

“Oh shit, oh dear,” declared Barry. “Better thee than me-e, as the Quakers say.”

“I hear that,” replied Brian, looking for his cap.

“Mr. Holcomb?” Garuda stood up, pushed his intercom headset down onto his shoulders, and stepped closer.

“Yeah?”

“Remember the white-hat rule.”

“Which one?”

“Don’t volunteer.”

Brian gave Barry a long look. Don’t volunteer. If asked a question, you say, Yes, sir, no sir, but no more than that, sir. But you don’t volunteer information. Brian felt a spike of annoyance.

“My style is to tell it like it is, Garuda.”

“Yes, sir, I roger that. Nobody expects an officer to lie. But if he don’t ask, you don’t gotta say.”

“What are you really telling me?”

“Try not to hurt the ship, Mr. Holcomb. Don’t say something’ for free that’s gonna hurt the command or the Old Man less you gotta.”

“I’ll try not to, Garuda.” Brian found his cap, put it on, and left Combat through the front door. He walked across the chart room’s vestibule and headed down the ladder, the chill of apprehension spreading in his stomach.

This would be his first loyalty test in his new command, and he was undecided on how to play it. He knew the Hood way wasn’t the right way to deal with the drug problem. But the practical consequences of prosecuting the dopers were serious: The ship could never stand the hemorrhage of people that would ensue.

And besides, the captain apparently did not believe there even was a drug problem. He stepped into the athwart ships passageway on the next level down and headed for the captain’s cabin.

There was also the question of his upcoming fitness report. Because he had been on board for less than ninety days, the captain was not obligated to write one. But Brian had made the exec aware that he needed a good ticket from Hood, even if it was for a short reporting period, to bolster his chances for promotion. It would be the only fitness report in his record that could overcome the not-so-good reports from his last ship. Not so good because he hadn’t paid enough attention to lining up with the system, maybe. The whole point of retouring in a department head job, going on deployment, suffering through another separation from his unhappy wife was to achieve lieutenant commander and a shot at an exec’s job. He had a feeling that, up to now, he’d still been the new guy. Whatever happened in the next few minutes, he would no longer be the new guy.

As he raised a fist to knock on the captain’s door, it \ opened and Lieutenant Commanders Austin and Benedetti stepped through. Austin paused for just an instant, as if to say something, but he settled for giving Brian a ‘ look, then passed by. Benedetti had his head down and gave no indication that he had even seen Brian, who then stepped into the captain’s cabin.

The captain and the exec leaned forward in the room’s two upholstered chairs. The staff officer sat at the dining room table, a small black notebook spread out before him. The captain pointed to the sofa, which put Brian between the two ship’s officers and facing the dining room table, his back to the hazy afternoon sunlight coming through the portholes.

The staff captain wrote something in the notebook. He was a tall, thin officer with a narrow, pinched face. Steel rimmed glasses with prominent bifocal lenses accentuated his no-nonsense expression. Captain Huntington waited for the staff officer to finish his notes, then made introductions.

“Bill, this is Brian Holcomb, our new Weapons officer.

He was in Combat at the time of the incident. Brian, this is Capt. Bill Walsh, from the Cargru staff.”

Brian got up to shake hands with Captain Walsh, then returned to the couch. The exec appeared to be studying the carpet, his face neutral.

The captain continued.

“Brian, Captain Walsh wants to ask a few questions about the incident yesterday. This is just a debriefing, if you will; nothing formal, like an investigation. Okay?”

Brian nodded. “Yes, sir.” The captain did not appear to be on edge or trying to warn him in any fashion.

Captain Walsh looked down at his notes and then back up at Brian, fixing him with a businesslike stare. Heat, Brian thought. Definitely heat.

“Mr. Holcomb, what was your station during the Sea Dragon incident?”

Walsh’s voice was surprisingly high; he sounded more like a clerk than a captain, USN.

“Sir, I was at my GQ station in Combat, which is weapons control. I stand physically between the FCSC and the EC.”

“I am an old steam engineer, Mr. Holcomb. Haven’t spent a lot of time in CIC, and certainly not in an NTDS CIC like you have here. Could you explain what these FCSC and EC people actually do?”

“Yes, sir. The names correspond to console positions in the NTDS system.

FCSC assigns missile and gunfire control radars to potential air targets when directed by the SWIC; that’s ship’s weapons coordinator, SWIC.

v&l Once a fire-control radar channel is locked on and tracking a radar target and the captain wants to shoot a missile, FCSC tells the engagement controller, that’s EC, to load the launcher with two surface-to-air missiles. Once the birds are on the rail, the EC assigns the launcher to whichever fire-control channel has the target locked up in track. The main computers watch the tactical geometry as it shapes up, and when the target enters the lethal envelope, it tells the EC to shoot. The EC then fires the missiles.”

“And your job?”

“Well, sir, if the NTDS system is in automatic, I don’t really have a direct console role. All the engagement commands come from SWIC via the computer network and appear as symbology orders on FCSC’s screen.

Nobody actually has to say anything. The FCSC and the EC acknowledge and execute the orders by button actions, which are echoed back to the SWIC so he knows they’re doing what he told them to do. I’m there because I’m the Weapons officer. I’d get into it if something went wrong.”

“Like what, exactly?”

“Well, like if one of them performed an incorrect button action, or if there was a computer fault in missile plot, or one of the radars drops track at a critical instant … I know the missile systems well enough to order corrective actions.”

“What kinds of people sit these consoles?”

“FCSC has a chief; EC will have either a second chief or one of the first class petty officers from the guided missile division.”

“And you know these fire control and launch systems better than these people do?” The staff captain’s voice held an audible note of skepticism.

The exec looked up as if to interject something, but Brian spoke first.

“That’s a fair question, sir. They know their individual equipments much better than I do, but I know the whole system better than most of the troops.

The FROM chief knows his fire-control radars, and the GMM chief knows his launcher and the birds better than I will ever know them. But I’ve been trained to know the missile system as an integral part of the ship’s overall combat system. It’s more a matter of being one step back from the action, sir. There’s a hell of a lot of pressure when you’re stepping down through a launch sequence against a target that’s coming in at you at two thousand feet per second. Of course, the guys on the console know lots more than I do about how the systems are wired up and where to go to fix things, but if something goes wrong, they may not see the operational fix to the problem as fast as I will, because I’m not concentrating on button actions and I’ve had more training in that role than they have. That’s the main reason I stand there during a shoot.”

“I see. So it’s not like a destroyer, where the gun boss stands out on the bridge with the CO and orders up each step of the engagement process.”

“No, sir, not at all. We’re more like overseers, watching the computer systems do their thing. And if we want, we can put the system in full -auto, designate an air contact as hostile, and tell the system to take him. The master computers will assign the fire-control radar, load the launcher, assign it, and shoot it.”

“I find that a scary concept, Lieutenant. But it must take some time to learn all this.”

“I was a Weapons officer in my last ship, and I was sent to the Navy’s guided-missile school enroute to this ship. That was three months of concentrated study. What I’m learning now is the ship’s entire combat system, of which the missile system is one part. I’m not there yet, but I will be.” Brian though he detected the ghost of a smile on the exec’s face. Captain Huntington nodded approvingly.

“No doubt,” said Walsh. “And on the day in question, nothing went wrong with the weapons systems?”

“No, sir. We had the gun in shore-bombardment mode, which means that it was under the control of the gun system computer in Main Battery Plot down below, which is a separate system from the missile system. The people in the surface module established the navigation track and an initial gun-target line and sent that down to plot. The gun system computer checks were held and

{then the gun was assigned to the computer for the shoot.

It was standard NGFS, sir.”

Walsh nodded and made a note in his book.

“And what happened when Hood lost the load?”

Walsh looked up from his notebook at Brian.”Well, sir, we all heard the blowers winding down and the guys in Combat began shutting down their gear as the power failed. It’s kind of an unmistakable sound.”

“Oh? Do you lose the load that often?”

Brian sensed a trap. “No, sir, it’s just a sound anyone who’s been around steamships recognizes.”

Captain Walsh frowned. Brian wondered whether he had struck a nerve. “As an engineer,” Walsh said, “that comment should hurt my feelings. But yes, I guess it is an unmistakable sound. Now, the entire gun system failed when the power went out?”

Brian didn’t like the connotation of the word failed. “Well, not really, sir. We stopped firing when the gun system lost electrical power. The gun system didn’t really fail, per se.” After answering, Brian felt a moment of hesitation. His answer sounded a bit sea lawyer-ish. But Captain Walsh was nodding again, as if accepting the point. He looked down at his notebook for a moment before resuming his questions.

“Do you know why the power was lost, why the ship lost the load at such a critical moment, Mr. Holcpmb?”

Captain Walsh stared at him again, the size of his eyes exaggerated when seen through the thick lenses of his eyeglasses.

Brian was taken aback by the question. This is where we’ve been going with all these questions. He sensed that Captain Huntington was watching him carefully, but he kept his eyes on Walsh’s face.