Several careers had been wrecked in the scandal's aftermath, promotions for hundreds of junior officers had been held up just on the possibility that they'd been involved, and the rounds of male-female sensitivity training for all hands had begun in deadly earnest. The term 'tailhooked' had quickly come to mean any potential scandal or hassle involving women and the Navy.
Tombstone couldn't escape one glaring contradiction, though. If he winked at breaking Navy regs here, even condoned it with his presence, how could he object to sexual activity in defiance of those same regulations?
The initiations were being held to bolster sagging morale. Which would hurt worse, sex aboard ship, or draconian regulations forbidding sex aboard ship?
There was no easy answer. 'Women and salt water don't mix' ran the ancient maritime saw, and Tombstone was beginning to agree, Papa Charlie or no Papa Charlie.
He returned to his typewriter, read what he'd already written to remind himself of his place, then continued typing.
The COB was right. Having the ceremony, even if it was against regs, would do the ship's company a hell of a lot of good.
'God damn it, Marge, watch where you're putting your feet!'
PH2 Margolis clutched at a metal joist, then reached inside for a water pipe, his head and shoulders already through the hole created by removing one of the soundproofing tiles in the overhead. 'Hey, man, get outa my face! I'm no damned acrobat! Gimme a leg up.'
He felt Kirkpatrick's hand steadying his left foot as he boosted himself off the top step of the ladder. His head came up, whacking into the pipe and eliciting a muffled curse.
'You okay up there?' Kirkpatrick asked.
'Yeah, yeah.' Margolis flattened himself out, looking around the narrow crawl space. There wasn't much room here, and most of that was taken up with wiring and the water pipes feeding the shower. But there was room enough, and the boards they'd already shoved up there took his weight without knocking the insulation tiles out.
Looking down through the opening in the tiles, he could see Kirkpatrick's anxious face, looking up at him from the top of the ladder. Like Margolis, he was clad in dungarees. On the tile deck below, a mop and a large bucket filled with dirty water rested by the lockers and benches outside the showers.
Margolis and Kirkpatrick were supposed to be in here on a cleaning detail ? the only possible excuse for their presence in a head reserved for officers ? but they had something more in mind just now than shipboard routine.
'Okay,' Margolis called down. 'Gimme the stuff.'
Kirkpatrick handed him a canvas bag, and Margolis hauled it up. He'd have to work fast to assemble the gear.
'Psst! Hurry it, you guys!' That was Hernandez, standing watch at the shower head's entrance. He was scared about their being caught. It wasn't likely anyone would be coming in here for a while, though. A fair number of the aviators were still at the strictly unofficial and unauthorized Blue Nose initiations aft; those who weren't were on duty or were scheduled to fly tonight and were asleep now.
'Stay frosty, man,' Kirkpatrick called back to Hernandez. 'We're almost there.' He raised the ceiling tile they'd removed, fitting it carefully back into place. Margolis helped guide it home.
'Everything look okay from out there?' Margolis asked.
'Yeah.' Kirkpatrick's voice was muffled. 'Just like new.'
'No bits of insulation or shit on the desk?'
'All clear.'
'Here goes, then.'
They'd already used an awl to pierce the soft, white material of the insulation panel, cutting a small, sharply angled hole. Now Margolis took a pencil-thick, silver tube with a complex-looking attachment at one end from the canvas bag, carefully fitted the small end of the tube into the hole, then used duct tape to secure the tube in place. Next, he removed a Nikon 35mm SLR camera from the bag, unfastened and carefully stowed its lens, and attached the body of the camera to the attachment end of the tube. Squinting through the SLR's viewfinder, he found he now had an excellent, camera's-eye view of the inside of the head. He could clearly see Kirkpatrick folding up the stepladder and checking again to make sure that no sign of their activities was left lying on the deck.
'Hey, Kirkpatrick!' he called. 'See anything unusual up here?'
Kirkpatrick's face turned up, facing him. 'Nah. I can just see the tip of that fancy lens of yours, man, but I wouldn't notice it unless I was lookin' for it. Hey, it's almost time. I'm outa here.'
'Okay. You guys promise to come back for me now, y'hear me?'
'Don't you worry, Marge,' Kirkpatrick said with a laugh. 'We'll be back!
Shit, we're gonna want to see what you get!'
'Well, this'll prove what I said, man,' he said, instantly ashamed of the whine he heard in his own voice. 'I ain't no fag!'
'Hey, I never said you was, man! Some of the guys, they just get carried away, y'know? They don't mean nothin' by it.'
'Ha! Just you wait till you get an eyeful of what I'm going to be lookin' at!' Margolis said. 'Pussy, man! Miles and miles of soft, sweet pussy!'
'My mouth's watering, my man. See you in a couple hours!' Gathering the ladder under one arm, and wheeling the mop and bucket with the other, he left the field of Margolis's view. The bucket's wheels gave a mournful squeak-squeak-squeak on the deck tiles. Then he heard the head's door slam and he was alone.
The air was dusty up here, and he rubbed a tickle in his nose that might have led to a sneeze. Rocking the camera back and forth slightly, he felt his heart hammering in his chest. He had a real good view of the lockers and benches, right there on the fifty-yard line. Should he have set up facing the other way, looking toward the showers? he wondered. No, from this high up, at this angle, he wouldn't have been able to see that much. This was a lot better. He pulled his face back from the camera and checked his watch. It was pitch dark in the crawl space, but his watch had a touch-light feature.
Hot damn. It wouldn't be much longer now.
A thump sounded at the door, and Chris Hanson reared up, snatching at the blanket crumpled at the foot of the bunk. The mattress was so narrow that she and Steve Strickland more than filled it in a tangle of bare arms and legs.
Both of them were naked, and if someone did walk in, there sure as hell was no place in the tiny compartment to hide.
Her heart raced, and she felt herself blushing.
'Hey, Lobo, it's okay,' Strickland told her. 'Relax. Just someone going down the passageway.'
'What if someone comes in?'
'No one will. I told you, my roommates know to give us some space.
They're hanging out down in the Dirty Shirt Mess and aren't going to come back until 2400 hours. We've got until then, okay?'
She turned in the bunk, clutching the blanket to her chest and looking down at him with wide, brown eyes. 'Good God, Steve, you didn't tell them what we're doing, did you?'
'I told them I needed some time to be with you.' He slipped his hand between her thighs, squeezing her gently. 'They can form their own opinions about what we're doing in here. Does it matter?'
She sighed. The small, digital clock on the compartment's tiny desk read 2211. 'I guess not.'
Lieutenant Chris Hanson did not think of herself as a shy person. She'd joined the Navy, quite frankly, hoping to meet a man, the right man…
someone like her father, who'd been a Navy chief with twenty years in.
