CARRIER 6: COUNTDOWN By Keith Douglass

Even today, long after masts had given way to screws, it was called

captain’s mast.

“I am getting damned sick and tired,” Captain Brandt said evenly, “of

the problems generated by the raging hormones aboard this ship.” He

looked up at the four men facing him from across the podium before him.

Front and center was a young second class, a kid with thick-rimmed

glasses and buck teeth that gave him the look of a skinny, frightened

rabbit. “How old are you, son?”

“Twenty-one, sir,” the kid replied, standing stiffly at attention and

managing to look as awkward in his dress blues as a boot at the start of

recruit training. He was a photographer’s mate from the carrier’s OP

Department, a PH2 named Tom Margolis, and he looked scared.

“Old enough to know better, in other words.” Brandt glanced at the men

flanking Margolis. Master Chief Charles Michener, to his left, was a

powerfully built tower of ugly black muscle who had been the Jefferson’s

Master at Arms for the past six months.

His badge of office, like a police officer’s badge, gleamed in the

overhead lights against his dress blues. Master Chief Mike Weston, on

the kid’s right, was just as big, just as powerfully built. Where

Michener was the closest thing the supercarrier’s city-in-miniature had

to a chief of police, Weston was that indispensable go-between who ran

interference between the enlisted men and the officers, the COB or Chief

of the Boat.

Standing off to the right was a chief warrant officer, CWO2 Kimball

Dupuy. As head of Jefferson’s OP Division, or photographic services, he

was Margolis’s boss. Brandt had also asked Tombstone Magruder to

attend, because the charges against Margolis involved people in the air

wing. Tombstone was standing behind the captain, at parade rest.

“Photographer’s Mate Second Class Margolis,” Brandt continued, “the

charges against you are serious enough that they could warrant summary

court-martial. I am of a mind to deal with this as a mast offense.

However, it is your right to request a summary court, if you prefer,

where you can either request legal representation, or have legal

representation appointed for you by the court. What is your

preference?”

“Uh, no, sir,” Margolis said. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

“I mean, I’ll go with the mast. Sir.”

“Very well,” Brandt said. “That’s a wise decision on your part. A

court-martial could award far heavier punishment than I, under the

articles of the UCMJ, am allowed to give you.” He paused, giving his

words time to sink in. “Son, you’ve made a very, very bad mistake

here.”

Brandt turned his attention to the top of his podium. There was a

slender, silver tube there, as thick as a pencil and perhaps eighteen

inches long, with a complex assembly attached to one end. Next to that

was a manila folder. Pulling the folder to him, he opened it up. He’d

already seen the photographs earlier, but he leafed through them again

now, slowly, and he could feel the kid trembling as he turned them over

one by one.

The top two were contact prints, 8″x10″ sheets on which strips of

pictures had been pulled straight off the negatives, without

enlargement, and the figures there were so tiny a magnifier would be

necessary to make out the faces. Twenty-eight more photos, though, were

enlargements of some of the contacts, crisp and beautifully detailed

black-and-white photographs. All appeared to have been shot from the

same position, inside the junior flight officers’ shower head and from a

high anole, probably from up close to the ceiling.

Each picture showed one or more women, all of them flight officers, all

of them revealed nude or only partly dressed. One photo showed someone

at the far end of the locker area–he thought it might be Lieutenant

Damiano–bending over, her buttocks toward the camera as she picked her

panties up off the deck. Another, at much closer range, revealed a

dripping Lieutenant Commander Conway with one foot up on a bench as she

toweled off her crotch, and another apparently taken moments later

showed Conway pulling her panties up past her knees.

There was one spectacular full frontal shot of Lieutenant Flynn as she

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