“XO, have you seen Bob Lawson?”
“The congressman? Yes, sir, he was speaking with Commander Jackson about ten minutes ago.”
Hatcher proceeds to the central alcove of sensor consoles that encircle a large high-resolution Plexiglas digital display in map mode, depicting the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea. The carrier battle group’s position and surrounding defense zones are color-coded in fluorescent blue, her aircraft in pulsing green, the topography of Europe and West Africa in steady red. Within the multilayered transparent display, both ocean conditions or atmospheric weather status can be shown.
Commander Rochelle “Rocky” Jackson looks up from her sonar console as her CO approaches, tufts of her short, straw-colored blond hair peeking out from beneath the navy baseball cap. “Nice legs, Hatch.”
The heavy air-conditioning is causing Rocky’s nipples to press against the inside of her tee shirt. Hatcher catches himself staring. “Commander, what are you doing working at a station?”
“Ensigns Soderblom and Dodds are out with the flu. You looking for Congressman Lawson?”
“I take it I just missed him.”
“By a good twenty minutes. I tried to entertain him. Guess he got bored.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t from the view. If you’re cold, Commander, I can get you a sweater.”
She smirks, buttoning her jacket, her hazel eyes sparkling in the console’s glow. “I’m fine. Thank you, sir.”
Hatcher leans down, whispering in her ear. “By the way, Commander, happy birthday.”
Her high cheekbones swell with a smile. She turns back to face the sonar screen. “Go away,” she whispers to her husband, “I’m on duty, and you smell. As for Lawson, try Vulture’s Row.”
“Thanks.”
Rocky watches Hatcher leave the Command Center, the sight of the sweat lines running down the fanny seam of his gray Navy-issue shorts causing her to grin.
Commander Rochelle Megan Jackson made her entry into this world thirty-four years and seven hours ago at the Army Base Medical Center in Fort Benning, Georgia. Fully anticipating the arrival of a son, her father, Michael “Bear” Jackson, then a lieutenant colonel with the elite United States Rangers, nevertheless presented his newborn with a baseball glove, football, and his own father’s first name, Rocky, which her mother immediately changed on the birth certificate to Rochelle.
Rocky would be an only child, the product of an interracial, interservice marriage. Her father, whom she affectionately called “Papa Bear,” was career Army all the way. The Bear was a barrel-chested light-skinned African American with a short-cropped auburn Afro and broad smile, who had earned his nickname during his years as a commando in the Army’s Special Forces. Those who served under him knew his bark was worse than his bite, Jackson’s gruff personality hiding a deep loyalty toward his men. Rocky’s mother, Judy, on the other hand, was as quiet as the Bear was loud. A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Judy had earned her engineering degree at M.I.T., and had been heavily recruited by the United States Navy. She would meet her future husband in Washington, D.C., during a weeklong munitions convention.
Rocky Jackson might as well have enlisted at birth.
Growing up on a military base with other Army “brats,” Rocky soon began displaying her father’s overly competitive spirit. The fair-headed tomboy not only challenged her male classmates on the athletic fields, but more often than not came out the victor. Much of her “need to exceed” attitude was intended to please Papa Bear, who could always be found hooting and hollering from the Little League bleachers, that is, when he wasn’t traveling abroad on some covert mission.
While her father’s “Special Forces mentality” gave Rocky an edge in athletics, her overly competitive attitude did not mix well in her social life. As she blossomed into adolescence, the beautiful blond teen with the cocoa skin and Jackie Joyner-Kersey physique often intimidated guys and girls alike. Even when she did date, her no-nonsense attitude toward sex quickly earned her a reputation as a prude. This was not to say that Rocky didn’t have the usual adolescent desires—it was just that she was picky. Whoever she might eventually give herself to would have to be able to measure up to Papa Bear, and none of the so-called hotshots at her high school ever did. When her prom date, the school’s starting tailback, decided to push things a bit too far on the dance floor, she calmly reared back and punched the high school all-American in the face, her powerful well-practiced tae kwon do jab shattering his nose.
Though Rocky’s physical prowess and leadership style may have reflected the personality of her father, her academic pursuits were strictly guided by her mother, herself a former engineering student. After graduating with honors from the Naval Academy, Rocky entered M.I.T.’s engineering school, her advanced degree eventually leading to a high-ranking position in the Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Center (NUWC), in Keyport, Washington.
The military was Rocky’s life, but she had no desire to command in the field. As the Gulf War had demonstrated, technology was the key to America’s dominance as a world power, and Rocky wanted to ride the wave that guaranteed her country’s freedom for decades to come. Her ego-driven career goal was simple: She would immerse herself in as many new hyperadvanced technologies available, learning all she could from the country’s top engineers, and rub elbows with all her father’s “muckety-muck” friends in the Pentagon until the opportunity came to oversee one of the Navy’s new high-tech weapon systems.
Her opportunity would come following several long years working on the Navy’s new SSN Virginia-class attack sub. George W. Bush’s victory had pushed the space-based missile defense shield to the top of the White House’s military wish list. Only six months later, the defection of Vermont senator Jim Jeffords from the Republican Party returned control of the Senate to the Democrats, threatening to send the high-tech, high-cost defense initiative back into development hell. A new project was needed, something more feasible and easier to digest financially, while still packing a wallop regarding America’s national security.
Enter the GOLIATH Project, a top-secret venture carrying a price tag in excess of $10 billion. Unlike SDI, this would be an offensive machine developed by NUWC, a machine capable of altering the strategy of America’s Armed Forces for decades to come—and she was the top candidate in line for the directorship.
Three months later it was made official: Rochelle Jackson had become the most powerful woman in this man’s armed forces.
Less than a year later, her father, now a general in the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), would introduce her to his finest recruit, U.S. Army Captain Gunnar Wolfe, a detachment commander in the elite U.S. Army Rangers. It was in this dark-haired, gray-eyed commando that Rocky Jackson would finally meet her match. Gunnar, an engineering major from Penn State, had been given leave from the field to complete his work on an original design for a remotely operated minisub. Believing the vessel’s design was compatible with his daughter’s program, the Bear had arranged for Gunnar’s transfer to NUWC.
For the first two months, they had fought like cats and dogs, Navy engineer versus Army commando—Rocky always hell-bent on keeping the new recruit under her thumb, Gunnar refusing to bend under his beautiful OIC’s fiery will. Project deadlines pushed them closer together, the long days eventually softening the blows, allowing their mutual attraction toward one another to take root. The lab quickly became the forum for late-night dinners, their romance becoming more physical with each encounter. Competition took a backseat to passion, their lovemaking becoming a game of one-upmanship, more lust than love.
Somewhere along the journey, something much deeper blossomed.
Gunnar Wolfe had bridled the Bear’s bucking bronco, an ego-driven woman whose beauty and passion matched her strength and competitive desires. A spring wedding was announced, plans hastily accelerated after Rocky discovered she was six weeks pregnant. The happy couple even found their dream house—a four thousand five hundred-square-foot waterfront home a few miles west of Seattle.
It was shortly after their engagement that her fiance began acting strangely, as if he was harboring some dark secret. Their free time together lessened as Rocky’s trips to the Pentagon increased, Gunnar spending many a lonely night in his lab.
And then, two weeks before their wedding date, Gunnar committed an unforgivable act of treason that broke her heart and changed both their lives forever.
Arriving home from an extended stay in D.C., Rocky learned a computer virus had been downloaded into the terminals housing all of her project’s top-secret schematics. Years of work and countless man-hours had been eradicated in an instant. Worse, David Paniagua, the boy-genius in charge of the project’s nanotechnology (and Gunnar’s best man) reported that $2 billion worth of biochemical nanocomputer circuitry was missing, along with a five-year harvest’s worth of bioengineered silicon-coated bacteria.
