It was wrong — pure and simply wrong.
The door to the admiral’s quarters opened, and a navy captain stepped out. Staring into the officer’s stern, impassive face, Airman Smith realized how ludicrous the idea that he could ever have been an officer was.
The master-at-arms standing behind him poked him lightly in the back. “Remember what I told you. Keep your cover on. I want to see you marching smartly up to stand in front of the admiral’s desk. Hand salute and sound off. You got that?”
“Yes, Chief.”
“Then get going.”
Smith’s muscles protested at first, but it was a relief to be able to take the weight of one foot at a time, anyway. The navy captain was holding the door open now, and Smith paused for a moment, instinctively uncomfortable at the idea of preceding a senior officer into the admiral’s quarters.
“Go on, son. I’m not going to bite you.”
Smith’s rigid concentration broke. He actually turned his head and stared into the captain’s face. Stern, yes, but he saw a trace of something else there. Not friendship, no — just a warmth that didn’t make sense. No, the captain wouldn’t bite him, but the captain’s boss was about to send Smith to a court-martial, and that was close enough.
“Go on,” the captain urged, his voice gentle. The master-at-arms poked him in the back again.
Stunned beyond belief, Smith operated on reflex. He stepped into the room, saw the admiral’s desk, and made his way forward at a brisk pace, squaring his corners. He stopped two paces in front of the desk, and snapped into a salute position. He waited until the admiral looked up, then said “Airman Smith, reporting as ordered, Admiral.”
A single sheet of paper lay on the desk in front of the admiral. Smith was too scared to try reading it upside down. Admiral Magruder gazed at the him for a moment, and pointed at the chair. “Sit down, Smith.”
There was dead silence in the room. Of all the things Smith had been expecting, starting with an ass-chewing then working its way up to a physical beating, an invitation to sit down was not among them.
“Go on, it’s all right. You and I need to talk.” Admiral Magruder looked up at the navy captain and the master-at-arms. “Thank you, gentlemen. That will be all.”
Gentlemen. He called the chief a gentleman. Anywhere except here, coming from someone more junior, that would have earned the speaker the traditional, “Don’t call me a gentlemen, I know who my parents are,” from the chief.
Smith heard them walking away behind him, and the snick of a door shutting. He sat rigidly at attention, one hand resting lightly on each leg.
The admiral tapped the paper on the desk in front of him. “You’ve heard what’s happening in the world, haven’t you? That our allies the Greeks turned out to be not such good allies?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, what do you think of that?”
What did he think? Was the admiral actually asking the opinion of a very junior airman? Smith tried to find his voice, tried to think of something that didn’t sound stupid to say. “That was bad, Admiral,” he finally said, aware as he spoke how lame that sounded. “They shouldn’t have done that.”
The admiral nodded. “But they did. And it’s made a lot of people look very foolish. Powerful people, ones that really hate looking stupid. You can understand that?”
By now Smith’s throat was so dry that he could hardly speak. His hands were sweating profusely, and he could feel the moisture bleeding through the cotton pants to his legs. “I guess so, Admiral.”
The Admiral nodded once again. “What I’m going to tell you stays between the two of us, you understand. No talking about it with anyone else. Because you’re getting a very, very good deal, and it wouldn’t take much to screw it up.”
Smith couldn’t force words out of his throat, so he simply nodded. It was rude, yes, but it was all he could manage.
The admiral leaned forward and fixed him with a stare. “A lot of people probably think you did the right thing,” he said. “What do you think?”
“I… I…” Smith tried to speak, but his voice simply wouldn’t work. The admiral stood. Smith jumped to his feet as well. The admiral waved him back into the chair then walked over to a credenza and poured a glass of water. He crossed the room again to stand in front of Smith, towering over the airman like a dark god. “Here. Drink.”
Smith’s hands were shaking so badly he almost dropped the foam cup. He tried to sip on the cold water, coughed as it went down the wrong pipe, then tried again.
The admiral waited until he’d finished, then asked, “Want more?”
“No, thank you, Admiral.” Smith found his voice was working again.
“As I was saying — do you still think you did the right thing?”
Smith thought for a moment, then said, “It seemed like the only thing I could do, Admiral. Things were going wrong, real wrong. I thought about it a lot before, and even more afterward. I guess there might have been ways — maybe request Captain’s Mast or something like that. The lawyer said I should have tried that.”
Magruder nodded. “But it’s always easier to think of alternatives afterward, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. I guess it is.”
“Which brings us to my point,” Admiral Magruder continued. “The charges against you are being dismissed. You understand why?”
Dismissed? How in the world could that happen? He had disobeyed a direct order, hadn’t he?
“It all goes back to people looking stupid,” the admiral said. “If they court-martial you now, your defense attorney is going to thrash this out in every newspaper and on every television station in the world. Bad enough that we made the wrong call on the Greek forces. Even worse to be seen persecuting some young sailor over it. People will think that you knew this would happen and that we’re trying to cover it up. So you see, there’s not much else they can do to make this go away.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“But I don’t want you thinking that it was the right thing to do,” Magruder continued. “I keep wondering, what if you were on the flight deck while I was getting ready to launch? What if you decided you didn’t want to obey an order from the catapult officer? Would you simply walk away? Because that’s the heart of the problem, Airman Smith. There are times it is correct to disobey orders, but those times are damned few. If the order’s illegal, unlawful, something like that. But what you did was make a judgment call. And I’m not sure that’s something we want our airman doing until they get a little bit more senior, you understand?”
From somewhere deep inside, courage trickled back into Airman Smith’s heart. “But what if you’re on the cat and something was wrong, sir? But everyone else said it was okay, you should launch anyway. What if I was the only one who saw something bad, wrong, something that might kill you?” He hesitated for a moment, searching for an example. “Like I think the steam pressure on the catapult is wrong, that somebody’s made a mistake. You would want me to speak up then, wouldn’t you, sir?”
A thin look of amusement crossed Tombstone’s face. “Indeed I would. So, as you see, sometimes there aren’t any simple answers. For what it’s worth, I think you were wrong this time. And I also think it took a hell of a lot of courage to take the stand you did. The wrong stand, but a stand nonetheless. So the question is not really what we’re going to do with these charges — that’s already decided. The question is what the Navy does with you now. What do you want?”
As Tombstone watched the young sailor leave, he tried to decide how he himself felt about the entire matter. Allied missions were nothing new to him, and he wasn’t bothered at all by the possibility of working with the Greeks again someday. Indeed, shifting political alliances so often proved that today’s enemy was tomorrow’s friend. That’s why it was always better to plan out the desired end state in any conflict.