The Edge of Honor Read Online Free

“Shame we ain’t gonna stay in for liberty this time.”
    “BSF, Chief. Brief stop for fuel and the Task Force Seventy-seven briefings. Then back under way at eighteen hundred and up to the Gulf to relieve Long Beach. But I understand we come back here after the first line period.”
    “Sure as hell hope so,” said the chief fervently. Then he turned around and roared to the forecastle crew at large, “Hey, dickhead, we’re outa goddamn coffee up here!”
    Two sailors in ratty-looking dungarees sprang forward from the capstan to retrieve their empty mugs.
    “Seem to know their names,” observed Brian as one of the men trotted aft to find coffee.
    “Yeah, well, they all been dickheads one time or another or they wouldn’t be deck apes, so they jump. Safer that way.”
    “Roger that,” said Brian. He had almost jumped himself.
    The chief lumbered aft to supervise bringing the tug alongside, and Brian walked back out of the way to the base of the missile launcher to observe the workings of the forecastle crew. He glanced up at the windows of the bridge two levels above the forecastle, but the green tinted outward sloping windows spreading across the front of the superstructure revealed nothing but reflections of the pier lights ahead.
    At twenty-eight, Brian Holcomb was a tall, spare man with an unruly shock of corn-straw hair and blue eyes in an unlined boyish face. His youthful features had long been a secret source of insecurity in a Navy culture where craggy, weather-beaten features seemed to command more respect than blue eyes and a ready smile.
    Deceived by his boyish looks, officers who were his contemporaries in age and experience would often dismiss him, only to be surprised later to find out that he had almost seven years commissioned service in the Navy and was in the promotion zone for lieutenant commander.
    As he watched First Division get ready to come alongside, he reflected on the past few months that had brought him to his first WESTPAC deployment and a critical juncture in his career, a department head tour in a frontline guided-missile ship headed for Vietnam operations.
    He had reported aboard in San Diego six weeks ago, as John Bell Hood was completing final preparations for return to the western Pacific after a brief seven months back in home port. As a senior lieutenant relieving a lieutenant commander, it was clearly expected that he would be on the next promotion list in December. But the words of his detailer still echoed in his mind: “Your first department head tour fitness reports were not as good as they should have been; we’re going to have to retour you in a second department head job. You apparently pissed somebody off.
    You are prpmotable, but just barely; if we didn’t have this war going, you’d have a problem. So, you’d better ring a bell in Hood. And given the timing, with the lieutenant commander promotion board meeting in November, it would be helpful if they’d write you a special fitness report before the board convenes.”
    He would really have to impress his new captain to get a special. Make or break time, hotshot.
    The news that he had not done well in his previous department head billet had come as a surprise. His skipper in Decatur had given no indication that he was anything but pleased with Brian’s performance as Weapons officer. In retrospect, though, Brian thought he knew what the problem had been. He had reported aboard from the Navy’s new Destroyer School up in Newport, where they trained up-and-comers to take on any of the three line department head jobs in the tin-can Navy— Weapons, Operations, or Engineering. He had hit Decatur as maybe a little too cocky, a little bit too much of the know-it-all. Brian knew he was smarter than the average bear; his top standing in all the Navy schools, starting with the Naval Academy, demonstrated that. He had spent his first year in an elderly destroyer that had been decommissioned, and then had two and a half