Scorpion in the Sea

FIFTY-ONE

Ben Farmer was almost all the way back to the base when he realized that one of the two classified ASW publications was not in the stack of materials spilled on his front seat. He pulled over into a convenience store parking lot and made a quick inventory to make sure. The wind was whipping up clouds of dust and sand around the parking lot, and the proprietor, an elderly oriental man, was pulling in signs from the front porch area as the afternoon sky darkened.

He knew that he had brought two classified references, both with white, plastic covers. Only one was on the front seat. He remembered putting both of them on the floor under the table on the porch. But the Captain had used one to weight the paper stack. He checked under the seat, and in his briefcase without success, and then looked out the window. The edge of the squall line was visible over the tops of the trees to the west, but that main bang still looked to be about five miles west of the river. He might just have time to go back.

He turned his car around, waited for a white, four door sedan to go by, and pulled out onto the highway back to Mayport. The woman in the sedan had looked familiar, but he dismissed the thought as he kept an eye on the approaching storm. It took him five minutes to get back to the Marina parking lot, and the squall line seemed much closer now that he was back on the waterway itself. The palm fronds were standing straight away from their trees, and there was a lot of sand blowing around the parking lot. The sky looked and sounded ominous.

The white car he had been following had preceded him into the parking lot. As he was gauging whether or not he could make it to the Lucky Bag before the rain started, the woman got out of the car. The wind whipped her summer skirt up around her knees, and she clutched a small overnight bag and a wrapped package under her arms. He watched her make a run for the Marina office; she had a dynamite figure. He could not see her face because she was wearing sunglasses. As she made it to the Marina office door, however, she took her glasses off before going inside, and then Ben recognized her. Mrs. Martinson. The Chief of Staffs wife. What the hell was she doing at the Marina?

The wind began to gust, rocking his car, and the first few fat raindrops cratered the sandy dust in the parking lot. There was a washboard of whitecaps standing up across the intracoastal waterway, and all the boat traffic had disappeared. The sky was dark enough that the buoys had begun to blink in the channel. Ben decided he would make a run for the office and call the Captain. The Captain could bring the pub up from the boat and meet him halfway. He could barely see the Lucky Bag, three piers over from the office. He had just opened the car door when he saw the Captain come running across the piers towards the office. Then to his astonishment he saw Mrs. Martinson make a similar dash from the office. They met halfway, she crouching under the protection of his broad shoulder while they both turned and dashed, laughing, back to the Lucky Bag. The rain swept across the waterway at that instant and drew a noisy curtain over the entire Marina.

Ben Farmer closed the door and sat back in his seat in shock as the rain drummed on the roof of his car. The windows fogged over after a minute, completing the obscuration of everything outside. A flash of lightning speared the waterway to his right, and the clap of thunder made him wince.

The Exec had been happily married since he was a junior Lieutenant. He and his wife had three children, and lived in quarters on the base in the CO-XO housing area near the beach. He had, of course, noticed Diane Martinson. Every adult who lived in CO-XO housing, male and female, had noticed Diane Martinson at one time or another. His wife had caught him looking for just a shade longer than marital propriety permitted and had pinched him just above his belt line for staring. Diane’s arrival at the Marina, on a Saturday afternoon, complete with an overnight bag, was evidence of a situation that he fervently wished he did not know about. The rain drummed louder.

Navy ship wardrooms had a well defined hierarchy among the wives. The Captain’s wife was socially in charge, and organized, usually with the help of the Executive Officer’s wife, most wardroom functions such as the annual Christmas party, charity events, cocktail parties, and homecomings when the ship had been away. The CO and the XO’s wives also handled a myriad of family problems, officer and enlisted, that inevitably cropped up when the ship was out of home port for extended periods.

When the CO did not have a wife, the “duties” of the CO’s wife fell upon the Executive Officer’s wife, as was the case in Goldsborough. The Captain contributed funds for many of the functions, and Ben’s wife, Carol, ably ran the show. The fact that the Captain was a bachelor lent spice to some of the social occasions, as the wives were always eager to see what he might bring along as a date. Some of the bachelors’ dates had found the Captain to be more interesting than their escort for the evening, which usually caused the Captain some acute embarrassment.

As Exec, Ben kept himself in the know about which officer’s marriage was in trouble, who had a chronically sick child, and which of the ship’s bachelor officers was in danger of getting himself hooked. But Ben had carefully eschewed knowing anything at all about the Captain’s private life. The Captain kept all of that to himself, which was just fine as far as Ben was concerned. And now this little discovery. His CO was seeing the wife of the Chief of Staff, and from the way he had sheltered her from the squall, their relationship was well advanced.

He decided to get the hell out of there while it was still raining. The Captain could bring in the pub, and he recognized that the only thing worse than knowing what he now knew would be for the Captain to know that he knew. The bulk of the rain squall was passing, and he could just begin to see across the parking lot again. Just when you think you’ve seen all the problems that an XO tour can throw at you, something bigger and better smacks you in the face, he thought. He started the car, turned the wipers on high, and began to navigate his way through the downpour very carefully across the parking lot and out onto the road back to the base. He wondered how long he could keep this from Carol.