Clear and present danger - Tom Clancy [179]
"You bet."
"Captain Wegener?"
"Yep." Riley finished off his beer and Stuart waved to the barmaid for refills.
"Is he as good as they say?"
"Red's a better seaman 'n I am," Riley replied honestly.
"Nobody's that good, Master Chief. Hey, I was there when you took the boat across - what was the name of that container boat that snapped in half… ?"
"Arctic Star." Riley smiled, remembering. "Jesus, if we didn't earn our pay that afternoon."
"I remember watching. Thought you were crazy. Well, shit. All I do now is drive a word processor for the Admiral, but I did a little stuff in a forty-one boat before I made chief, working outa Norfolk. Nothing like Arctic Star, of course."
"Don't knock it, Matt. One of those jobs's enough for a couple years of sea stories. I'll take an easy one any day. I'm gettin' a little old for that dramatic stuff."
"How's the food here?"
"Fair."
"Buy you dinner?"
"Matt, I don't even remember what I said to you."
"I remember," Stuart assured him. "God knows how I woulda turned out if you hadn't turned me around. No shit, man. I owe you one. Come on." He waved Riley over to a booth against the wall. They were quickly going through their third beer when Chief Quartermaster Oreza arrived.
"Hey, Portagee," Riley called to his fellow master chief.
"I see the beer's cold, Bob."
Riley waved to his companion. "This here's Matt Stevens. We were on the Mellon together. Did I ever tell you about the Arctic Star job?"
"Only about thirty times," Oreza noted.
"You wanna tell the story, Matt?" Riley asked.
"Hey, I didn't even see it all, you know -"
"Yeah, half the crew was puking their guts out. I'm talking a real gale blowing. No way the helo could take off, and this container boat - the after half of her, that is; the fo'ard part was already gone - look like she was gonna roll right there an' then…"
Within an hour, two more rounds had been consumed, and the three men were chomping their way through a disk of knockwurst and sauerkraut, which went well with beer. Stuart stuck with stories about his new Admiral, the Chief Counsel of the Coast Guard, in which legal officers are also line officers, expected to know how to drive ships and command men.
"Hey, what's with these stories I been hearing about you an' those two drug pukes?" the attorney finally asked.
"What d'ya mean?" Oreza asked. Portagee still had some remaining shreds of sobriety.
"Hey, the FBI guys went in to see Hally, right? I had, to type up his reports on my Zenith, y'know?"
"What did them FBI guys say?"
"I'm not supposed - oh, fuck it! Look, you're all in the clear. The Bureau isn't doing a fuckin' thing. They told your skipper 'go forth and sin no more,' okay? The shit you got outa those pukes - didn't you hear? Operation TARPON. That whole sting operation came from you guys. Didn't you know that?"
"What?" Riley hadn't seen a paper or turned on a TV in days. Though he did know about the death of the FBI Director, he had no idea of the connection with his Hang-Ex, as he had taken to calling it in the goat locker.
Stuart explained what he knew, which was quite a lot.
"Half a billion dollars?" Oreza observed quietly. "That oughta build us a few new hulls."
"Christ knows we need 'em," Stuart agreed.
"You guys didn't really - I mean, you didn't really… hang one of the fuckers, did you?" Stuart extracted a Radio Shack mini-tape recorder from his pocket and thumbed the volume switch to the top.
"Actually it was Portagee's idea," Riley said.
"Couldn't have done it without you, Bob," Oreza said generously.
"Yeah, well, the trick was how to do the hangin'," Riley explained. "You see, we had to make it look real if we was gonna scare the piss outa the little one. Wasn't really all that hard once I thought it over. After we got him alone, the pharmacist mate gave him a shot of ether to knock him out for a few minutes, and I rigged a rope harness on his back. When we took him topside, the noose had a hook on the back, so when I looped the noose around his neck, all I hadda do was attach the hook to an eye I put on the harness,