Clear and Present Danger

of the state bar association. Edward Stuart's professional duty to his clients, added to his personal distaste for capital punishment, made the decision an inevitable one.

They didn't call it Happy Hour at the base NCO club anymore, but nothing had really changed. Stuart had served his time in the U.S. Navy as a legal officer aboard an aircraft carrier - even in the Navy, a mobile city of six thousand people needed a lawyer or two - and knew about sailors and suds. So he'd visited a uniform store and gotten the proper outfit of a Coast Guard chief yeoman complete with the appropriate ribbons and just walked onto the base, heading for the NCO club where, as long as he paid for his drinks in cash, nobody would take great note of his presence. He'd been a yeoman himself while aboard USS Eisenhower , and knew the lingo well enough to pass any casual test of authenticity. The next trick, of course, was finding a crewman from the cutter Panache .

The cutter was finishing up the maintenance period that always followed a deployment, preparatory to yet another cruise, and her crewmen would be hitting the club after working hours to enjoy their afternoon beers while they could. It was just a matter of finding the right ones. He knew the names, and had checked tape archives at the local TV stations to get a look at the faces. It was nothing more than good luck that the one he found was Bob Riley. He knew more about that man's career than the other chiefs.

The master chief boatswain's mate strolled in at 4:30 after ten hot hours supervising work on various topside gear. He'd had a light lunch and sweated off all of that and more, and now figured that a few mugs of beer would replace all the fluids and electrolytes that he'd lost under the hot Alabama sun. The barmaid saw him coming and had a tall one of Samuel Adams all ready by the time he selected a stool. Edward Stuart got there a minute and half a mug later.

'Ain't you Bob Riley?'

'That's right,' the bosun said before turning. 'Who're you?'

'Didn't think you'd remember me. Matt Stevens. You near tore my head off on the Mellon awhile back - said I'd never get my shit together.'

'Looks like I was wrong,' Riley noted, searching his memory for the face.

'No, you were right. I was a real punk back then, but you - well, I owe you one, Master Chief. I did get my shit together. Mainly 'causa what you said.' Stuart stuck out his hand. 'I figure I owe you a beer at least.'

It wasn't all that unusual a thing for Riley to hear. 'Hell, we all need straigthenin' out. I got bounced off a coupla bulkheads when I was a kid, too, y'know?'

'Done a little of it myself.' Stuart grinned. 'You make chief an' you gotta be respectable and responsible, right? Otherwise who keeps the officers straightened out?'

Riley grunted agreement. 'Who you workin' for?'

'Admiral Hally. He's at Buzzard's Point. Had to fly down with him to meet with the base commander. I think he's off playing golf right now. Never did get the hang of that game. You're on Panache , right?'

'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, so we was hoistin' him by the harness, not the neck. We didn't really wanna kill the fucker - well, I did,' Riley said. 'But Red didn't think it was a real good idea.' The bosun grinned at the quartermaster.

'The other trick was baggin' him,' Oreza said. 'We put a black hood over his head. Well, there was a gauze pad inside soaked in ether. The bastard screamed bloody murder when he smelled it, but it had him knocked out as soon as we ran his ass up to the yardarm.'

'The little one believed the whole thing. Fucker wet his pants, it was beautiful! Sang like a canary when they got him back to the wardroom. Soon as he was outa sight, of course, we lowered the other one and got him woke