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