But something like this…
She caught the chime of someone's laughter in the passageway and voices, too low for her to make out. 'I'm not sure why I let you talk me into this, Steve,' she said, her voice a husky whisper.
'Hey, I thought you wanted this, babe! As much as I did!' Reaching up, he tugged the blanket from her fingers, letting it slide off the rack and onto the deck. With one hand, he touched her left breast, lightly circling the nipple with his finger. She closed her eyes as a warm shiver rippled down her spine.
'I don't know,' she said. 'Maybe I should just go-'
'Aw, c'mon, Chris,' Strickland said smoothly. 'This'll really relax you.
You've been working hard these last couple of weeks. You should let your hair down and unwind a bit, okay?'
'But if we're caught…'
'Ah, nobody cares! I mean, everybody knows it's gonna happen, right?
You can't crowd grown men and women together aboard ship for months at a time and expect them to just ignore each other! It just ain't natural!'
She laughed, and leaned into his hand a little more.
'Of course,' he continued, still stroking her breast, 'if they sound General Quarters right now, we're gonna look damned silly charging around starkers in the crowd trying to find our stations.'
They both laughed at that, and Hanson felt her fear evaporating. She knew that several of the other women in the department were making it with various guys. Rose Damiano for one. And Cynthia Thomas. It was all well and good to talk about professionalism and staying aloof and concentrating on the job at hand, but damn it, people were going to act like people, no matter what. In fact, it seemed like the more extreme the situation ? with danger, overcrowding, and a continuing, no-holds-barred tension that would put any high-powered business executive to shame ? the more they tended to act like…
well, like people. The rules, the lectures, even the difficulty in finding an hour's privacy aboard ship, didn't seem to deter them a bit.
Besides, there was something delicious about that danger, the thought that at any minute Steve's roommates could walk in and catch them in the act.
Just thinking about it made her feel warm and tinglingly aroused. She'd always had a crazy, unpredictable streak in her; her handle, 'Lobo,' had been short for 'lobotomy' back at Pensacola.
Strickland's ministrations grew rougher as he moved his face to her breasts, taking first one nipple into his mouth, then the other, sucking them to bullet hardness. His hand kept probing restlessly between her thighs, and she gave a small, involuntary gasp, then allowed herself to be drawn back down onto the bunk.
God, she thought, but she needed this, needed the closeness and the warmth of one special man in this crowded, floating city of men. When she'd first volunteered for carrier duty she'd thought it would be a real kick, but the novelty of being one of a handful of girls among six thousand guys had swiftly worn off.
She slipped her hand between them, running it down his belly. Urgently, needfully, she touched him, cradling him. 'Fuck me, Steve,' she murmured in his ear. 'Fuck me hard.'
CHAPTER 8
Sometimes the boredom seemed to mount like the pressure on the outer hull, building pound upon crushing pound until it seemed that mere flesh and blood, like the strongest steel, must finally crumple and collapse. Of course, the boredom had ended five hours ago, when the Galveston first began penetrating the Russian coastal submarine defenses.
Commander Richard Montgomery was captain of the American Los Angeles-class submarine Galveston, SSN 770. He was new to the boat, having taken her over just two months earlier. Though still officially attached to Carrier Battle Group 14, during the past few weeks Galveston had been on patrol here, north of the Kola Peninsula, monitoring the Russian giant and its slow, bloody suicide.
Nearly ten hours earlier, the sub had come to periscope depth, extending the slender tip of a radio mast long enough to pick up a set of coded messages relayed by satellite from the Aegis cruiser Shiloh, even now approaching North Cape in company with the Jefferson and five other warships. The transmission had included a verification of his operating orders: work as close into the Kola Inlet as possible and watch for the departure of Russian boomers, their big, nuclear missile boats.
'Bridge, Sonar.'
Montgomery picked up a microphone. 'Bridge, aye. Go ahead.'
'Sir, sonar surface contact, Sierra Two, bearing one-seven-five. Twin screws, making slow revs. Sounds like a skimmer coming out of the slot.'
'Skimmer' was a submariner's slang for any surface vessel. 'Sonar, this is the captain. Can you make him?'
'Not yet, sir. We're running it through the library now. But my educated guess would be a sub-hunter. A Riga, or possibly a Mirka II.'
'Stay on him, Ekhart. Engineering! Come to dead slow.'
'Engineering, aye, sir. Come to dead slow, aye, sir.'
'Diving Officer. What's the depth under our keel?'
'Depth to keel eight-zero feet and shoaling, sir.'
'Steady on the helm. Take us down to four hundred twenty feet, nice and gentle.'
'Steady on the helm, aye, aye, sir. Planesman, give me five degrees down bubble. Make our depth four-two- zero feet.'
'Five degrees down bubble, depth four-two-zero, aye, sir.'
The nuclear sub's crew, thirteen officers and 120 enlisted men, functioned with an effortless precision that was almost machine-like, through a litany of orders and orders repeated. Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the American nuclear navy, had laid down each detail of the procedure of multiple echoes of each order almost forty years before, a guarantee against that one mistake that could kill the boat and everyone on her.
Four hundred twenty feet would put Galveston within a scant few feet of the bottom. With her single screw scarcely turning and riding at a precisely balanced neutral buoyancy, she was relying on her forward momentum to carry her down, leveling off when her keel was just skimming the cold black mud a few miles off the Kola Inlet.
Montgomery felt the slight cant to the steel deck beneath his feet, then felt the submarine leveling off.
'Depth four-two-zero,' the enlisted man at the diving planes forward announced.
'Very well. Captain, depth now four-two-zero. We have ten feet beneath the keel.'
They spoke in hushed voices, scarcely louder than whispers, observing silent routine. All personnel not at battle stations were in their bunks, partly to avoid unnecessary noise, partly to help maintain trim fore and aft, which could be affected by men moving about the boat. Men on watch wore rubber shoes, and unnecessary machinery ? the ice maker in the galley and the soda machine in the mess among others ? had all been shut down.
'Very well, Diving Officer,' Montgomery said. 'Maintain depth and trim.'
'Maintain depth and trim, aye, sir.'
Four hundred twenty feet seemed like a lot of water, but in fact that depth was only sixty feet deeper than the Galveston was long. She was capable of diving to twelve hundred feet or more, and working this far inshore always posed extraordinary difficulties for a submarine. The chances for discovery were increased a hundred fold, and if they were discovered, there was no place to run or hide. Somewhere astern, perhaps ten miles off, was a new addition to the carrier battle group, another improved Los Angeles attack sub, the Morgantown. Together, the two nuclear subs had been steadily working their way toward the Murman coast, moving with extreme stealth through one of the deadliest arrays of antisubmarine defenses on the planet.
