A man's duty…a woman's passion…The Edge of Honor cuts both ways.
In this sweeping novel of the Vietnam War at sea and on the homefront, Lieutenant Brian Holcomb, smart, ambitious, honorable, and up for promotion, discovers that his ship-the USS John Bell Hood-hides a dangerous secret. What Brian does about it may end his career, or threaten the lives of hundreds.
A fully-imagined tale of passion, adventure, and betrayal, The Edge of Honor features a cast of characters whose public vows and private motives drive the plot.
Release date:
April 1, 2011
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
626
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Brian Holcomb stood naked at the darkened bedroom window, staring out at the park across the street. The pale bark of the gray eucalyptus trees was daubed in orange from the glow of the new sodium-vapor lights along Balboa Park Drive. At least something around here had a glow on; he sure as hell did not. Maddy, his wife, spoke to him from the bed.
"Brian, it's all right. Brian, come back to bed."
"It's not all right. Nothing's all right. It's deployment day, and I'm going away for seven months, and you're miserable, and I can't even--"
"Brian, please. It's our last time to be together. Please, let's not fight. I'm sorry I'm being such a bitch about the deployment. But come back to bed."
Brian sighed and turned around. The sight of Maddy in the soft light of the bedroom, that mass of blond hair, her lovely face, her glorious breasts bared above the sheet, was still enough to take his breath away, even after almost four years of marriage. So then why the hell on this, their last night, morning, whatever, together, couldn't he perform?
As if reading his thought, Maddy patted the bed next to her.
"Come on, Brian. I hate it when you're right there but not right here beside me. We should have just cuddled, like we agreed. We both know this is a lousy time for sex. Please?"
He walked back over to his side of the bed. She was right--as usual. He sat down on the edge of the bed and she slid across, folding her arms around him, her hair enveloping the side of his face. Her skin was warm against his back.
"Hey?" she whispered. "We'll get through this; everyone else seems to manage. This isn't the first ship that has to go to WESTPAC. I've got my job, and the rest of the wives--"
"Whom you don't like very much."
"I do like them. It's more a question of not having very much in common with them, Brian. I work, most of them don't, and we have no--"
"Yeah."
He felt her stiffen slightly, and the blade of anger from the night before slipped between them again. They had gone out to dinner at Mr. A's, an expensive restaurant overlooking the San Diego skyline, whose tall windows gave a cockpit-level view of the jetliners as they swooped down into Lindbergh Field below. Brian had thought of going out to dinner as an activity, something to do that would eat up three or four hours of the "last night." As Maddy had fretted more and more about the ship's departure, everything they did had acquired the adjective last: the last supper, the last night, the last morning--the last everything, because it was now deployment day.
He had made the mistake of mentioning children again, and the last evening had gone right off the last tracks. And now, in just a few short hours, he would get up, shower, button and zip into his whites, and as Lt. Brian Holcomb, USN, Weapons officer in USS John Bell Hood, go down to the ship at the Thirty-second Street Naval Station and sail away to the Vietnam War for the next seven months.
And Maddy, his beautiful young wife of three-pointsomething years, was not taking it too well. The ship's schedule had not helped. The thirty days prior to deployment were called POM: Preparation for Overseas Movement. Perversely, as far as families were concerned, the closer a ship got to deployment day, the more time it demanded of its officers. The POM preparations were seemingly endless as the avalanche of supplies, repair parts, new people, the latest tactical manuals, and a flurry of final grooming and repairs on the ship's weapons and operations systems all conspired to produce twelve-hour workdays at precisely the time that the wives tendedto become clinging vines, desperately anxious for every moment of contact. Brian's nights at home during the last thirty days had been punctuated by dramatic mood swings on Maddy's part, from loving wife who poured on the affection to shrill harridan who railed against the deployment, the Vietnam War, and his Navy career in general.
The hell of it was that he was excited to be going. He was beginning a prime assignment aboard a modern guided-missile ship, and they were bound for the Red Crown station up m the Gulf of Tonkin, to the heart of the carrier-air-war action on the one ship that controlled the skies over the Gulf. Damn it, he shouldn't have to feel guilty about that. And more than that, this assignment was a make-or-break tour of duty: His promotion to lieutenant commander depended on his doing very well in this ship. Maddy was not helping. As a matter of fact, Maddy was on the verge of doing some damage. On the other hand, he fully recognized that she was acting this way only because he was going away.
He turned to her then, putting his arms around her, breathing in her sweet, familiar fragrance, his face pressed against her throat as she hugged him. He knew that all the noise was not aimed at him, but at what was coming for her--the empty apartment, the empty bed, long-delayed letters in place of a touch in the night. He would be in the thick of fleet operations in the Gulf of Tonkin and she would face the same empty routine day after day. His heart ached, not for the first time, at the thought of being away from her for seven long months. At moments like this, even he was willing to think of the Navy as the goddamned Navy, lately her favorite expression. And then there was that enormously sensitive nerve about children upon which he had just touched. He wanted kids; she did, too, but she had set what he felt was an impossible condition: "We'll have a family only when you're going to be home to help." A successful career in the seagoing Navy did not necessarily lend itself to that proposition. They had both finally realized that the whole subject of starting a family was becoming a dangerous minefield, a complication that neither of them needed, especially just now. He sighed again.
"What time is it?" he asked, his voice muffled in her hair.
"It's not time yet," she whispered, hugging him tighter, pulling his face down to her breasts. He felt the familiar stirring of desire and wondered whether it was worth another try. She leaned down, violet eyes huge in the semidarkness, and kissed him deeply. He decided that it was.