The Edge of Honor (58 page)

“Which is where we get the so-called radicals.”

“Yeah, I think so. Some of those guys, they aren’t going anywhere because they don’t have what it takes, you know? Maybe they came from the ghetto or from the farm, didn’t have two sticks to rub together coming up, no schooling, no parents pushing on them. They basically come in with almost no hope of a future in the Navy, where everything’s technical and where you have to take exams to get ahead. The Navy makes a big mistake in trying to give these guys an opportunity: They don’t have what it takes to make the opportunity go.”

Brian nodded. These were the professional deckhands or laundrymen. He reflected that all the ship’s laundry men were black.

“But even if the drug ring is black, I still can’t see them confronting you in some kind of effort to make you lay off,” Brian said.

“Right. But I’ll be hearing it from some of my brothers in the chiefs’ mess, and maybe from other people, too.

We start busting chops, and they’re black chops, it’s only a matter of time before I’m gonna get some heat.”

Brian stirred his own coffee. The dining room was thinning out. He looked over at Jackson, choosing his words carefully.

“You’ve made it to chief. Is this the kind of heat that’s going to matter to you?”

It was Jackson’s turn to think, to choose his words.

“It matters in the sense that now that I’ve got my chief’s hat, now that I’ve fulfilled Jackson the Navy man, I feel some responsibility to fulfill Jackson the black man. It’s almost a question of honor.”

Brian nodded. He wasn’t sure he understood where Jackson was coming from, but then he had not had to be a black man in a white Navy. But he understood the idea of it being an issue of honor. “You still want to go ahead, then?”

“It would help to have some top cover, Mr. Holcomb.”

“Meaning me.”

“Meaning you, yes, sir.”

“Well. I’ve got a problem that’s similar to yours, only it’s political—career, not racial.”

“The command. The XO.”

“Yeah. The XO’s kind of made it clear to me that it’s in my best interest to go along to get along, you know what I mean? They sent in a special fitness report that’s going just about to guarantee that I make lieutenant commander. O-Four, that’s a big gate; once you get O Four, you have a shot at selection for an exec’s job, and the XO job leads to command, see? Command of my own ship someday, that’s my chief’s hat. But I’m pretty sure there was a price tag on that Strep.”

“Usually is. Lemme see: Play the game our way. That was the Marcowitz bit.”

“Yeah.”

“But what the hell, they’ve sent it in. When’s the promotion board?”

“End of this month.”

“So you’re set.”

“Except, the way I see it, I accepted their terms, so to speak, if only tacitly. That puts me in the same boat you’re in–I kind of have a duty to go along; it’s also kind of a question of honor.”

“You mean, the XO, he feels since he did the fitrep and you accepted it, you bought in.”

“Right.”

Jackson nodded.

“Now, I guess the thing I have to decide is which duty draws more water—my obligation to go along with the system because I took the king’s penny or my duty to the ship to clean out the dopers. I mean, shit, I’ve already said it: I find another guy doing drugs in my department, I’m gonna write him up. Once I sign a report chit, that makes it official. They can’t just do a Marcowitz. They either have to take the creep to mast or suppress a report chit, falsify the paperwork, and I don’t think Commander Mains is the type to falsify an official charge sheet.”

“Yeah. I see it. So far, he’s seen to it that there aren’t any report chits.”

“Right, so if I write somebody up, that’s a declaration of war of sorts.”

“Can they hurt you?”

“Oh, hell yes. Even if I’m promoted, the XO can poison my career about twenty different ways.”

“Sounds like we both have some thinking to do, Mr. Holcomb.” Brian sipped his coffee. “Yeah, well,” he said. “Yes and no. I’ve about decided that the ship ought to come before my career, because if she doesn’t, I’m not sure I want a career in this outfit. You know, we all play these political games, but when it comes to the ship, the ship’s just there. And all it asks is that we all do our duty.

Simple. Clear as a bell.”

“And one tough motherfucker sometimes.”

“Yes,” Brian said, then grinned.

“But when you take a ship to sea, the gods have this way of getting even when everybody doesn’t do his duty. I think you have the tougher dilemma: We’re all going to move on one day, but you’re going to be a black man forever.”

“Tell me about it, Mr. Holcomb. Tell me about it.”

It was Monday noon when the weather warning came in.

Brian was CDO and thus was the first to see the message, which was serial 001 on Typhoon Mary, now positioned on the back side of Mindanao.

The storm was expected to come northwest, crossing over Luzon Island and into the South China Sea, and then probably continue northwest to smack the upper coasts of Vietnam. Brian took the message up to the chart house and plotted the present position and expected track of the typhoon on a wide area chart. The projected track of the eye came within sixty miles of Subic. Shit. If that held, they would be chased out of port. No ship wanted to be caught in a harbor if a typhoon came. Safety, such as it was, lay out in deep water. He called the exec, who came up to look at the chart. He shook his head.

“That’s too close. We’re probably going to have to sortie. Get word to the engineer to start buttoning up his job orders.”

He took a set of dividers and measured the distance.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “At a forward advance speed of twenty knots, that sucker could be here day after tomorrow.

Tell Vince to make preps to light off his ready plant by tomorrow morning. We’ll plan to beat feet around eighteen hundred tomorrow.”

“Uh, will you inform the captain? I’m not sure where to contact him,”

Brian said. He had not seen the captain for days, nor had the other department heads.

“Yep.” The exec brushed aside the implied question.

“But right now, we gotta move. You get the word out to the rest of the department heads. This thing may come on fast. Thank God we got all the stuff on board that first week. Oh, and alert the chief bosun early—he’ll need to do a lot of lashing down between now and then.”

“You really think we’ll have to go?”

“Oh shit, yes. Go get that chart of prior past typhoon tracks; any of these cyclones that start out there off Mindanao this time of year almost always comes over Luzon, trashes Manila, and then tears up the South China Sea for forty-eight hours before impaling itself on Cochin China. What the hell, we were about done here, anyway.”

“Will we still go to Kaohsiung after we do storm evasion? We’re not due back in the Gulf for another two weeks.”

“Right. But first we gotta do storm evasion. Out there, not in here. You don’t have typhoons in LANTFLEET, do you?”

“No, sir, we have hurricanes, but they mostly stay down in the Caribbean. Worst I’ve seen is the North Atlantic in winter, which can be medium shitty.” The exec smiled. “As the man says, you ain’t see nuttin’ yet, bwah. Let’s get the word out—we’re blowing this pop stand.”

Word of the ship’s unscheduled departure created a whirlwind of activity, most of it business but some of it personal. All the machinery sent off to the Subic ship repair-facility shops had to be returned, fixed or not.

With every ship in the basin having to sortie in the next thirty-six hours, the Base Supply Department dispatched a wagon train of fresh stores down to the piers for all the ships, creating a working-party circus on the piers as the Supply officers fought for their fair share of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Everyone knew that a storm evasion did not automatically mean the ships would get to come back into port when the danger had passed. The fleet schedulers would often take advantage of the fact that the ships were at sea to return them to the gun line or to carrier escort duty.

The Exchange procrastinators hustled over to the Foreign Merchandise Building to lay in treasures, creating a small mountain of boxes on the pier the next morning. The chief boatswain had watched it all with a cynical grin from the forecastle, where he, Folsom, and Brian had been taking a tour to check on the lash-down of topside gear.

“We git out there, all that shit’s gonna go flyin’ around the berthing compartments. You’ll see more broken dishes and busted stereos than Carter’s got little liver pills,” he predicted.

Brian returned to his own stateroom with a couple of hundred feet of twenty-one-thread manila line to do some lashing down of his own. The chief had warned him that the ship was going to be tossing around like a cork if they were not able to outrun the typhoon, and Brian took him seriously. He also took twenty minutes to compose a quick letter to Maddy, telling her about the crocodile invasion and the reason they were bailing out of Subic.

He also told her he had tried to call again but had missed connections with her. He decided to gloss over the discussion he had had with Jackson. If the dopers kept themselves out of sight and out of trouble, there might not be an issue at all. Even as he thought about that, he recognized that this was probably wishful thinking. But she had been quick to see the potential for folly in his stand on the druggies, so he minimized the issue in his letter. He got the letter into the last outgoing mailbag, hoping along with the rest of the crew that the postal clerk would come back with a final bag of incoming mail for the ship, but there was nothing. Hood got underway at 1830, the third ship in the line of destroyers abandoning the harbor for the safety of open water.

The approaching typhoon made its presence felt as soon as Hood came out of the lee of Luzon Island. As the ship pointed due west, she picked up a deep long-period swell from the southeast that heaved her into a slow roll. The swells came in a steady line, deepening as Hood left the protection of Luzon. They looked like an endless series of glass foothills that moved under the ship without a sound, lifting her port quarter effortlessly, sending Hood first into a deep heel to starboard and then rolling her back to port as they swept by on their march to the China coast. There were no whitecaps, just the unending progression of swells, eighteen feet from trough to crest and probably a quarter mile in breadth.

Brian watched the train of swells from the port bridge wing, wedging himself between the mahogany bull rail and the port pelorus to keep upright against the ponderous rolls. The quartermasters were plotting the track of the storm on the large-area South China Sea chart. The most recent weather report had the eye just entering the South China Sea as Hood ran west toward Vietnam, six hundred miles distant. The typhoon’s predicted track was northwest, which would aim it at Mainland China, but no one could tell where these monsters would go.

“Wherever it wants to,” the exec had answered when asked the question at an all-officers meeting to plan the sortie. “Our best bet is to get across the South China Sea into the western semicircle of the typhoon before the eye overtakes us. These things rotate counterclockwise. If the thing is headed north and you end up in the eastern half of it, the wind velocity is added to the storm’s own track velocity. If you can get into the western half, the vectors subtract and you can cut twenty, thirty knots off the wind speed. That can make a big difference.”

Brian, looking at the chart, had observed that the South China Sea did not seem to offer much maneuvering room, containing only six hundred miles within which to outmaneuver a storm that spanned two hundred miles from edge to edge.

“You’ve got that right. We’re in for a blow, any way you look at it.

Some of the ships currently in port are probably going to head due north and then back east behind Luzon. But if this thing recurved, they could be in deep shit. Like I said, best bet for us is to run for the western semicircle. If we can run twenty, twenty-two knots for the next twelve hours, we have a chance of getting across its track before it catches up with us, assuming we can maintain speed. Once these swells get big enough, we’ll have to slow down. I hate these goddamn things. They scare my ass to death.”

Brian had experienced two winter storms in the North Atlantic, but the legendary typhoons of the western Pacific were something new. Looking back now across the ship’s port quarter, he could see a thin black wedge shaped line of solid cloud enveloping the entire quadrant of the southeastern horizon. The late-afternoon sunlight had developed a bronze hue and the sea air seemed oppressively dense and humid, as if the atmosphere was being compressed ahead of the storm behind them. Even though the ship was driving along at twenty-two knots, Brian could feel no relative wind coming over the bow, which meant that the true wind was coming from astern at around the ship’s own speed. The hull throbbed every time the stern lifted far enough out of the water to expose the propeller tips.

Brian looked into the pilothouse and saw the captain in his chair over on the starboard side. Despite the heat, he wore a foul-weather jacket and slumped into the big chair, a Hood ball cap pulled low over his forehead. The captain had returned to the ship the night before their departure, arriving in a Navy sedan, looking pale and wan and not walking too well. On the quarterdeck when he returned, Brian had been almost shocked by his appearance.

At first, he thought it was a hangover, but then he decided that this must be something medical. The exec had whisked him off the quarterdeck almost at once, issuing a flurry of orders to all the officers nearby, as if he wanted to distract them. Brian had said something to Vince Benedetti, wondering aloud where the captain had been during the port visit and why he looked the way he did.

“Beats me, man,” Vince had replied. “But he looks like he got shot at and missed, shit at and hit.”

After coming out of his cabin this afternoon when the ship left port, the captain had been up in his chair on the bridge for the past two hours, staring silently through the green-tinted windows. The exec had conferred with him a few times about the weather and the track, but otherwise he was acting as if nothing was wrong. The rest of the bridge watch officers had been keeping their distance, as had Brian. He remained out on the bridgewing, soaking up some of the thin sunlight, as other officers circulated through the pilothouse to report their preparations for the storm to the exec and to look at the typhoon track chart or to watch the seas build.