The Edge of Honor by P. T. Deutermann Read Free Book Online Page B

in John Bell Hood. Hell, he was already a rich man, especially by Navy pay standards. As the main supplier, Rocky had been dealing dope in the ship for nearly two years, courtesy of another first class radarman by the name of Rackman, who had decided to get out of the seagoing dope business when he made chief and transferred off the ship to shore duty in San Diego.
    Radarman First Class Rackman had been the leading petty officer in OI Division when Rocky reported aboard as a fresh-caught E-6, and Rackman had taken Rocky under his wing after the first month and made him something of a protege. They had been buddies for nearly a year, going out on liberty together and often double dating. Rocky realized later that the fact they had been close friends for so long without the smallest hint of Rackman’s other profession spoke very highly of Rack man’s security system. The revelation had come when Rocky and Rackman had been out on the beach one night to celebrate Rackman’s promotion to chief petty officer.
    They had brought along a couple of beach-bar debutantes, one of whom had produced some grass and started passing the stuff around. Rocky, a reformed smoker, had declined until Rackman pulled him aside and told him that he had something very important to talk to him about, but only if Rocky would first do a joint with him.
    Intrigued, Rocky had tried the marijuana. He coughed a lot but found it to be a pleasant-enough buzz if you could get by the awful smell. Then Rackman had revealed his shipboard avocation and offered to let Rocky take over the business. Rackman would show him the ropes for a month or so before he transferred off and would then become Rocky’s main supplier ashore. Rocky, flying low on the effects of several beers and the joint, had begun laughing hysterically, until Rackman described the profit structure, the secure nature of the distribution system aboard ship, and revealed that he had squirreled away over $150,000 in tax-free money during the three years he had been in business in Hood. Rocky had stopped laughing. Rackman had told him to think it over, and Rocky had.
    Rocky was thirty-three, unmarried, had twelve years in on his twenty, and would be eligible for the chief’s exam in two more years. He had been born and raised in Seattle, the second son of a career fireman whose attachment to rye whiskey had killed him in a car wreck one night as he drove home from his neighborhood bar.
    His mother had carried on, helped out financially by the generosity of her husband s fellow firefighters, raising three large boys in a small house on the north side of the city. Rocky had gone into the Navy after high school, as there had been no possibility of going to college, given the financial situation at home. His older brother, John, had become a fireman. His younger brother, Timmie, had drifted into the growing ranks of professional hippies, war protestors, and dropouts populating greater Seattle toward the end of the sixties.
    Being a high school graduate, Rocky had qualified for radar A-school after boot camp. He had no idea what a radarman was when he signed up, but he had been told that you stood your watches in cool air-conditioned spaces, sitting in chairs instead of standing on your feet all day, and that there was proficiency pay for those who made rate, all of which seemed to him to beat hell out of being a boiler tender or a deck ape.
    He had progressed through a series of seagoing billets to E-6, or petty officer first class, by being good at his job and exceptionally accommodating when it came to pleasing officers and chiefs. To Rocky, the Navy was an extremely simple and even generous proposition: They clearly told you the rules, they trained you exhaustively in your rating, they encouraged you and even helped you to make rate, they gave you a change of scenery every three years or so, and they let you out after twenty years, with a paycheck for life. From what Rocky could see, the only way you