Code of Honor

61

The deck of USS Makin Island was alive with sailors and Marines. To a layman’s eye, the Wasp-class Landing Helicopter Dock amphibious assault ship, or LHD, could be mistaken for her larger sister, the aircraft carrier. LHD runways were short, with no catapults and no arresting cables, but the Makin Island did have aircraft on board — helicopters, Ospreys, and fighters like Harriers and F-35Bs that were capable of short takeoff and vertical landings.

Half as wide and slightly less than one football field shorter than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, USS Makin Island (LHD 8) was not exactly small at 843 feet in length, with a beam of 104 feet. Her aviation assets on this trip consisted of six V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, a CH 53, two MH-60 Seahawks, two Bell AH-1 Super Cobras, two Harrier jump jets, and two F-35B Lightning IIs. She could have carried more, but the mix was mission-specific.

In addition to her air power, LHD 8 was armed with, among other things, Mk 38 chain guns, Sparrow missiles, and four .50-caliber BMG machine guns. The USS Preble and the USS Halsey, two Arleigh Burke—class destroyers out of Everett, Washington, flanked the amphibious ship and provided additional big-stick deterrence.

All the deck guns, aircraft, and support ships were impressive, but the most important component of the USS Makin Island was the eight hundred Marines that could be put on foreign shores to fight at a moment’s notice. Sometimes looked down on by line officers of the big-deck Navy, amphibious forces — or Gator Navy — sailors had a tight, if sometimes competitive, relationship with the Marines they carried. Some sailors called their ship a Marine Corps Uber. For their part, the Marine Expeditionary Units were happy for the lift.

All of them — well, most of them — loved to be at sea.

Captain Greg Goodrich, United States Marine Corps FAST Company, Pacific, stood on the foredeck, looking past the V-22s at the waves while he ticked through the list of his responsibilities for this mission. There was a rhythm to the ocean that appealed deeply to the kind of man he was. He loved casting all lines and leaving behind the distractions of shore. At sea, Captain Goodrich could shoot, exercise, train his platoon — and read. Staring out at the wind and waves was better than watching TV any day of the week. The fantail of the ship provided the perfect location to get his Marines range time, and the deck was big enough for some good outdoor cardio. He’d even organized a couple of boxing matches while under way.

Goodrich had been on the runty side through the seventh grade, athletic, but shorter than everyone else in his class, even the girls. Mostly knees and elbows, he endured a certain amount of bullying. He wanted to join the military and thought being a pilot would be good for someone who was vertically challenged — then he grew four inches the summer after eighth grade. He towered over everyone else in his class his junior year, and had reached six-foot-six by the time he was a senior — a little tall to squeeze into a fighter. He stopped growing a hair short of six-eight his sophomore year at Virginia Military Institute. His mother wasn’t completely on board with VMI. She was a surgeon and wanted him to be a surgeon, or at least an engineer. He compromised and went to a military school that taught engineering. She’d blanched when he’d decided to pursue amateur boxing, warning him that repeated blows to the head didn’t pair well with his calculus and physics studies. She was, of course, correct, but Goodrich found that his wingspan was long enough that he hit other engineering students in the head far more often than he got hit himself.

People tended to think of VMI as a bunch of shaved-headed Rats standing over steam vents in wool greatcoats getting hazed by upperclassmen. There was some of that, but Goodrich relished the visceral aspects of military discipline, the barking, the esprit de corps — the boxing. He’d always been a fighter, and knew he wanted to do it for a living. The Marine Corps allowed just that — and FAST allowed him to focus his fight.

Captain Greg Goodrich was highly educated, well read, and well spoken — but he could also be very, very uncivilized when circumstances called for it.

As was often the case, on this mission, Captain Goodrich’s Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team worked directly for the admiral. FAST Marines trained for unforeseen contingencies, short-notice deployments, force protection of U.S. interests, and anti-terrorism around the globe. They went into threatened embassies, protected nukes, did whatever the Fleet told them to do — anytime, anyplace.

This time, they were guarding a long-range anti-ship missile given to the Navy by Lockheed Martin for the purposes of today’s test. The weapon itself was worth a cool three million dollars, but it was the sensitive artificial intelligence guidance technology inside that made it valuable enough to have FAST standing by to retrieve it should something go awry at launch.

Captain Goodrich’s Marines were young for special operators — mainly corporals and non-rates in their early twenties, but there were only about five hundred in the Marine Corps at any one time. The competition was fierce, and FAST got to be picky about who they chose. A lot of Marines thought they wanted to do FAST, until they found out about the PRP. The personnel reliability program — the Big Brother — like security check where you basically signed over your right to privacy for the privilege of guarding the nation’s nukes. A polygraph was required for the top-secret clearance needed to handle nukes, and virtually any infraction was disqualifying. Any hint of domestic violence, a single DUI, certain foreign contacts, too much porn — all were disqualifying.

Becoming a member of a Marine FAST Company wasn’t easy, but, so far at least, it was the best job Captain Goodrich had had.

Launch would be from one of the F-35s, two hours from now, in the evening, when there were no known Russian or Chinese satellites snooping overhead. The admiral was on the bridge, going over contingencies, and probably on the horn with someone higher up the chain than him at the Pentagon. The reps from the defense company were sweating bullets that their three-million-dollar baby performed as advertised and blew the hell out of the decommissioned Navy ship rigged to look like a Chinese destroyer, forty nautical miles to the south. Makin Island’s two MH-60 Seahawks patrolled the airspace around the target vessel, keeping any surface, submarine, or air traffic out of the area. The jet jockeys and their commanders were in the ready room, briefing. The V-22 Osprey pilots who would stand by on Ready 5 alert status with Goodrich’s FAST platoon and a Navy SEAL team were in their own ready room, doing the same thing.

Goodrich touched a button clipped to the center of his load-bearing vest. “Ski, Ski, Goodrich,” he said, speaking in a normal voice.

Staff Sergeant Sciezenski’s voice came back loud and clear, inside Goodrich’s head rather than in his ear. “Go ahead, Captain.”

“Sitrep?”

“Ten minutes, sir,” the squad leader said.

“Roger that.”

Goodrich nodded to himself. As a rule, he was a little on the stodgy side for a man in his early thirties, preferring technology that was tried and true. He had to admit, though, that this new Sonitus Molar Mic they were testing was turning out to be awfully useful tech. Instead of an earpiece, the Molar Mic clipped over the wearer’s back teeth. Using the same near-field neck-loop utilized by a covert earpiece, the Sonitus device acted as a microphone, sending voice communication from inside the mouth, protected from external noise like gunfire or rotor wash. Instead of being transmitted through the eardrum, incoming signals were felt via vibration in the jawbone. Where earpieces became itchy and uncomfortable the longer they were worn, the body quickly adjusted to what was essentially a mouth retainer with a small mic. To Goodrich’s surprise, it was easy to forget the damned thing was there. So far, battery life was good, most of the day. The ability to hear and speak clearly to a helicopter or V-22 crew chief while you were hanging in the wind on a SPIE rig below it was nothing short of incredible. Staff Sergeant Ski had voiced the platoon’s greatest concern when he asked if they could chew with one of the mics in their mouths. They could, so the tech would get their seal of approval when their portion of the test and eval process was complete.

Goodrich’s two squads of eight Marines each were checking gear and weapons, taking on the last drink of fluid before they would load onto the Alert 5 Osprey, where there was no restroom other than an empty Gatorade bottle. Goodrich was a stickler for readiness and he wanted his squads on board both Ready 5 birds in full battle rattle a half-hour before missile launch. Goodrich laughed and shook his head as he thought about every other time they’d worked with SEALs on one of these missions. He and his men would sit in the stifling tropical heat inside the Osprey, waiting for something to go wrong, stewing in their own juices like good Marines. Outside the bird, also on Ready 5 status, the SEALs would be flopping around doing SEAL shit.