Sailors Take Warning by Malcolm Torres, CHAPTER FOUR - DAY 1

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Sailors Take Warning by Malcolm Torres

CHAPTER FOUR - DAY 1



“This better be important, Sternz,” Captain Brandt growled, as he stepped awkwardly away from Seaman Nikki Thompson, who scrambled to button her blouse.

Commander Sternz averted her gaze and studied a portrait of an old sea captain hanging on the wall.  She wished she’d knocked before bursting into Brandt’s office.

The door opened and closed as Nikki Thompson, Brandt’s personal executive assistant, slipped out.

Rattled and blushing, Sternz took the seat across from him.  Part of the problem, Sternz knew, was that Thompson styled her hair, wore cosmetics and a push-up bra.  She herself, pulled her hair back in a tight bun, flattened her breasts with a sports bra and never put on makeup at sea.  Glamorizing herself was unfair, she reasoned, because it caused sexual frustrations for the male sailors.

Brandt’s desktop looked like an acre of lacquered hardwood stretching between them.

“A shipping container crushed a man in the hangar today.  We put him in the morgue and—”

“Not another missing corpse,” Brandt interrupted.

Sternz nodded.

“Dammit!”  He stood and pounded a meaty fist on his desk.  Short-sleeves exposed old tattoos on his brawny forearms; a faded hula girl on the right and a tiger on the left; markings from years as an enlisted man.  “That’s three, Sternz!”

“Correct, sir.”  She prepared for a brutal reprimand.

“Are you certain this one is missing?”

“We locked him in the morgue an hour ago and now we can’t find him—”

“Shit!”  Brandt sat down.  His taciturn face concealed a mind methodically tracking the paper trail he’d created to cover up the first two missing bodies.

 

*   *   *

 

Donna Grogan, a petite brunette from Lawrence, Kansas, died of internal bleeding after she drove her forklift into an open elevator shaft while moving a pallet stacked with five-gallon buckets of imitation maple syrup.  The buckets fell 35 feet to the bottom of the shaft and burst open, creating a sticky mess.  The forklift flipped over, and Grogan fell out of her operator’s seat.  The buckets broke her fall, but the forklift crushed her against the elevator’s mechanical equipment.  In the medical department, they pronounced her dead, zipped her inside a body bag and stuck her in the morgue.  A few hours later, an autopsy team, intent on cleaning the maple syrup off her, found the drawer empty.  A frantic search couldn’t locate her body.

A few days later, Mr. Keef, an undercover detective from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) arrived to conduct a secret investigation.  He posed as a medical inspector and proceeded to examine computer records, interview medical staff and tour the department spaces, including the morgue.  He found nothing amiss.  The phrase “lost at sea” went into the report, and the case remained open with Mr. Keef assigned to stay on board and secretly investigate.

Sternz speculated that a man or a group of men took Grogan’s corpse from the Morgue to perpetrate an unspeakable perversion.  Perhaps they planned to return her body but someone discovered it missing.  With their prank gone awry, they likely slipped her remains overboard—an unceremonious burial at sea.

About a month later, several weeks after the official cloaking exercise started, Larry Burns died of a heart attack while pulling a pan of rolls from an oven in the ship’s bakery.  And several hours later, his body inexplicably vanished from the morgue.  At that point, even though she had no proof, Sternz decided there was a necrophiliac, a cannibal or some other psychopath loose among the crew.  Her suspicions ran to every member of her medical staff.  She shivered when she imagined what might have happened to the corpses.

“What about the next of kin?” Sternz asked.

“You keep track of the bodies,” Brandt replied.  “I’ll keep track of the paperwork.”

Brandt, a master of the Navy’s myriad miles of red tape, had ordered Nikki Thompson to take dictation while he fabricated the story of Donna Grogan’s disappearance.  “High seas during a hurricane, 800 nautical miles west of Hawaii, washed your daughter over the side,” Brandt had said while Nikki Thompson typed, “and after an extensive search and rescue effort, we were unable to recover her body.”  He included instructions to print the letter on fine cotton bond paper, stamped with the United States Navy’s seal in color foil.  He sent along orders for officers in crisp dress uniform to hand deliver the letter to Grogan’s parents in Kansas.  That communication had left the ship right before the 93-day cloaking exercise began.

To Larry Burns’ wife in San Diego, Brandt tactfully explained, “Lawrence died of smoke inhalation while valiantly attempting to rescue a shipmate during a fire in the galley.  In accordance with the instructions in his service record,” Brandt lied again, “Lawrence received high honors before his burial at sea.”

Brandt took a big step toward softening the bad news and allaying suspicion when he had Nikki Thompson backdate Serviceman’s Group Life Insurance policies showing that Grogan and Burns had increased their coverage to $1,000,000; the maximum available to enlisted personnel.  Nikki prepared the policy changes; Brandt signed them and sent them to the Pentagon with the death reports.

Sternz didn’t dare ask how Brandt planned to prevent a congressional inquiry.  She knew that the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Fox, had delegated administrative and disciplinary control over the crew to Brandt, and she knew he could hide the truth with a little administrative sleight of hand.

 

*   *   *

 

Now, with the cloaking exercise paused, message traffic started flowing again.  Brandt would soon find out if the next of kin had made an official inquiry, but he hoped that a check for a million bucks would be salve enough to silence their suspicions.

Although Sternz distrusted Brandt, she had no time to waste with his scheming behavior or his unpredictable shifts between roaring anger and icy calm.  Although she had a department to run, she still wondered if he informed Captain Fox about the two missing bodies—now three she reminded herself.

When he glared at her, she lowered her gaze, but she knew that behind his cold blue eyes, his brain calculated the intricacies of a heartless scheme.

“What’s the missing dead man’s name?” he asked.

“Stanley Comello,” she replied.

“Send over Stanley Comello’s personal belongings,” Brandt ordered.  “I'll see that everything is handled appropriately.”

“Will you notify NCIS?” Sternz asked, suspicious about the investigator left behind after Grogan vanished.

Brandt rounded his desk in two strides and got in Sternz's face.  “For Christ’s sake,” he snapped, “NCIS is why good men like me serve alongside girls and queers.”  He snatched a pack of Parliament off his desk and lit up.  “I’ll handle this my damn self!”

Even though policy called for her to bring serious problems to him, this third moral compromise made her jaw clench and tightened the muscles in her back like ropes.  She worried that simply following the Navy’s process wouldn’t provide her with legal cover if a scandal erupted.

“When we get stateside,” Brandt consoled her, “my man in Washington will get you an operating table anywhere you want, and he'll do it so your record stays clean.”
 
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