he was a pig.
Besides, proving sexual harassment in a situation like this was hard, verging on the impossible. After all, what had he actually said or done?
Asked if there was anything he could do to warm her up, in a tone that only suggested something sexual? Agreed with her when she'd thoughtlessly given him a classic straight man's line? Called her 'baby,' or grinned as he told her to 'make a hole,' which had been a part of every sailor's lexicon for generations. It meant, 'Get out of the way,' or, 'Let me through.' Only on the lips of someone like Slider, and when directed at a woman, did it take on a different, salacious meaning.
What she disliked the most was Arrenberger's twisting of her call sign.
She was Brewer, damn it, not 'Brew' or 'Brewski.'
Among the popular myths of the history of American arms, the story of Lucy Brewer was one of the most enduring. She'd been a prostitute who, during the 1800s, had published a widely read series of pamphlets describing how she'd passed herself off as a male Marine serving aboard the U.S.S.
Constitution during the War of 1812. Lucy's claims had long since been disproved by Marine Corp historians. Her accounts of battle were too precise, drawn nearly word-for-word in some cases from the captain's published after-action reports or from newspaper accounts at the time.
In any case, Lucy's claims that she'd escaped detection for three years in cramped quarters occupied by 450 men, where the toilets were a couple of open-air perches at the ship's beakhead, and where the regulations of the day required all Marines to strip, bathe, and dress in the presence of a commanding officer responsible for checking frequently on their physical condition, were patently ridiculous. There were cases of women serving aboard ship during that era, usually prostitutes or wives smuggled aboard without the officers' knowledge. 'Jeannette,' the wife of a seaman aboard a French warship who was plucked from the sea after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, was a well-known example. The story of Lucy Brewer, however, was almost certainly a complete fabrication, one given new life only recently by books with feminist agendas and titles like Jeanne Holm's Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution.
That hadn't stopped Conway from adopting 'Brewer' as her call sign.
She'd read Holm's book while she was in flight training at Pensacola, and that had led her to research Lucy's history, as well as accounts of other American women in combat, from Molly Pitcher serving a cannon at Monmouth to the now-nameless Confederate girl who, dressed like a man, had died by her husband's side during Pickett's Charge. If Lucy Brewer's story hadn't really happened the way she said it had, it still could have, even should have, for it reflected the attitudes of other Americans who felt that women ought to have the same right to defend their homes and loved ones as men.
Not many of the men Conway had served with knew the origin of the call sign. Most, typically, assumed it had something to do with beer, which explained why a few like Arrenberger twisted it into 'Brew' or 'Brewski.'
Usually, she didn't mind, not really, not when she'd long ago learned that fighting every possible slight, put- down, or innuendo did nothing but wear her own nerves to a frazzle.
Conway was fond of claiming that she was not a militant feminist, but a military feminist; she referred to herself and others as 'girls,' just as she sometimes called the men she served with 'boys' or 'the guys,' and she'd laughed as hard as any man the first time she'd heard the story of the sailor, the Marine, and the admiral's daughter. Thirty-one years old, with eleven of those years in the Navy, she was in every sense a professional, intensely proud of who and what she was, and of her success in what for so long had been an exclusively male- dominated bastion. All her life, since long before the notion of women serving in combat units had been seriously addressed, she'd wanted to be a Navy aviator. Her older brother had been a Tomcat driver in VF-41, the Black Aces, stationed aboard the Nimitz during the late eighties, while her father had flown Navy F-4B Phantoms off the Forrestal in Vietnam.
The day she'd first stepped onto the flight deck of the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson had been a dream come true.
Now, just two weeks later, she was wondering if the dream hadn't already begun to take on the shades of nightmare.
Her defenses, she told herself with a sigh, were way, way down. As she turned a corner and entered a companionway, quick-stepping down a ship's ladder to the 0–2 deck, she thought that the worst of it was the environment, the tight, gray-bounded shipboard atmosphere that was part of life at sea and stretched on unchanging for day after day after day. Privacy next to zero; regulations governing everything from when she could take a shower to how she took that shower to where she could use a toilet; the inevitable presence of a few bastards like Arrenberger, who insisted on turning each exchange of pleasantries into a hormone-charged sexual encounter of some kind; the language, God, the language…
It wasn't that she minded the profanity; if she did, she'd definitely made one hell of a bad career choice. Shit, she'd stopped being shocked by mere words sometime during her first week at Annapolis. No, for Conway, the worst aspect of the language used by Navy men came from the accidental verbal harassments, the expression on some guy's face when he slipped and said something he thought he shouldn't have said in her presence. Things like, 'He's got real balls,' or, 'It just went tits-up,' or, 'Make a hole.'
She'd only been aboard the Jefferson for two weeks and it was starting to get to her. Hell, if she was this stressed out already, what would it be like in a month? In three? In seven? This was a war patrol, and no one knew when they'd be setting course for Norfolk again. Smart money said the cruise would last at least six months… and eight or nine was far more likely.
'Girl,' she murmured to herself, 'it is just barely possible that you have made one hell of a big mistake.'
Turning right at the next cross passageway, Conway reached the block of compartments that had been set aside for women officers aboard. A female electrician's mate third class, a stocky, plain-faced girl wearing the bright silver police badge of Jefferson's MAA force pinned to her uniform blouse, stood guard. 'Evening, ma'am.'
Conway eyed her name tag. 'Hey, Shupe. How're they hangin'?'
Shupe's eyes widened. 'I… beg your pardon, ma'am?'
'Nothing. Forget it. I'm just tired.' She reached the compartment she shared with Lieutenant Commander Joyce Flynn and walked in.
Flynn, call sign 'Tomboy,' was a petite redhead, a radar intercept officer who'd served with a reserve squadron flying out of Oceana before being transferred to VF-95. She was sitting at the room's tiny wall desk, reading a Hughes factory manual on the F-14's AWG-9 radar weapons-control system. 'Ho, Brewer. Glad you made it. Some of us thought you were going to have to swim back.'
'Shit, Tomboy, did everyone on this bird farm see me pull that bolter?'
'Only the ones on duty, and just about everybody else aboard who wasn't asleep at the time. You put on quite a PLAT show.'
'I'll just bet.'
'What's the matter, Brewer? You okay?'
'Nah. Just feeling unusually bitchy tonight.'
'The PMS blues?'
'Navy blues is more like it. I came that close to cashing in on a real-estate deal for me and Damiano both tonight. I guess I'm just a little shook, is all.' She plucked at her uniform blouse, feeling it cling unpleasantly to her skin. The inside of her flight suit had been soaked with sweat when she'd changed to her uniform up in the ready area a few minutes ago. 'God, Tomboy, I stink. You're going to make me sleep in the passageway.'
'I can stand it if you can.'
All she really wanted right now was a scalding hot shower and bed… and she couldn't even have that shower tonight because Jefferson's women had to share the shower head with the men, rotating with them according to a posted schedule. It was damned inconvenient, though not, she reminded herself, as inconvenient as it would have been to redesign and rebuild the entire aircraft carrier just to include separate and private plumbing for women. In any case, water discipline was strictly enforced aboard the carrier for all hands, and showers could only be taken at specified times during the day. With the women sharing the facilities on the 0–3 deck forward, shower times for female personnel were from 1800 to 2000 hours each evening, and again from 0500 to 0600 each morning.
Since she'd been on CAP until well past 2100, she'd missed her chance at a shower tonight. True, there was a small shower up by the ready room for the use of aviators with the duty, but someone had been in there when she'd been changing out of her flight suit and she hadn't felt like waiting. There was also a small head down the
