passageway outside, reserved for women only. If she wanted, she could give herself a sponge bath from the sink.
Too much trouble. Unbuttoning her blouse, she pulled it off, then tucked it in with her dirty laundry. She'd grab her shower in the morning during the 0500 to 0600 slot.
'You sure there's nothing the matter?'
'Ah, I ran into Arrenberger up on 0–3.'
'The guy's an asshole.'
'This is news?'
'Hardly. He's been hitting on me a lot lately too.'
'You going to report him?'
Tomboy shrugged. 'Hardly worth the hassle, is it? Counterproductive.
Especially if I get assigned as his RIO someday. You can bet I will if he gets too far out of line, though.'
Stripped down to her panties, Conway pulled on the oversized T-shirt she liked to sleep in, working her head through the hole. 'Sometimes I want to kick the bastard in the nuts so hard they pop out his ears. So much for the camaraderie of men at war, right?' She climbed into her rack and flicked out the reading lamp attached to the bulkhead nearby.
Tomboy watched her from the desk. 'Am I going to bother you if I stay up and read a bit?'
'Hynn, right now Valentin Krasilnikov and the entire KGB could break down that door in pursuit of my maidenly virtue and I don't think I'd hear a thing.
Stay up as long as you want.'
But sleep didn't come immediately. As Conway lay there, feeling the corkscrew pitch of the carrier plowing through worsening seas, she wondered about this test-case role she found herself trapped in. Women serving aboard ship. Women in front-line combat. These were causes she'd passionately believed in ever since she'd first made up her mind to be a naval aviator like her dad and like Robert. Did she still believe?
Wrong question. The real question should be, was she going to let a few horny sewer-brains like Arrenberger kill that dream?
No… no way. She could handle Slider. She'd flame his ass if she had to. Again she considered following the regs to the letter and reporting Arrenberger to CAG. She had that right and that responsibility, and he'd definitely been breaking the rules. It wasn't so much any single exchange of words or unwanted touching with that guy, but his overall pattern of behavior.
He always acted like an asshole… except when he strapped on an F-14. She hated to admit it, but that son of a bitch could fly.
Besides, there was no way to regulate or legislate against anybody's God-given right to be an asshole.
Eventually, she fell asleep.
CHAPTER 4
Admiral Ruslan Zakharovich Karelin stood on the dockside, his coterie of staff officers and guards clustered at his back as he surveyed the bustle of activity echoing and re-echoing throughout the length and breadth of the vast, rock-hewn chamber. Workers clustered everywhere, and the piercing gleams of a dozen welder's torches dazzled and hissed from the flanks of dark, quiescent monsters. Steel clashed, and an officer bellowed orders, the words ringing from rock and hull metal, then swiftly vanishing into the steady background rumble of heavy machinery. High overhead, the massive tackle of a traveling bridge crane crawled ponderously along its latticework tracks beneath the rough-hewn rock of the ceiling, casting weirdly shifting shadows from the banks of fluorescent lights as it moved.
They called the place Tretyevo Peschera, the Third cavern, but such a colorless name scarcely seemed adequate to describe the thrilling, Socialist workers' glory of this place. It had taken an army of engineers, construction workers, and levies of forced labor imported from the mining camps beyond the Urals seven years to pierce this granite sea cliff, tunneling into solid rock for hundreds of meters. Though that initial construction had been complete by 1984, work on the deeper chambers and storerooms continued to this day.
During the past decade, construction on this and three other, similar caverns scattered along the rugged western coast of the Kola Inlet between Polyamyy and Sayda Guba had been interrupted only intermittently during Russia's brief flirtations with democracy.
'Is the work here proceeding on schedule?' Karelin demanded of his host.
'Da, Tovarisch Admiral,' a short, dark-haired man with the epaulets and insignia of a kapitan pervovo ranga, a captain first rank, snapped back with military precision. Every man at each base he'd visited, Karelin reflected, had been eager to show his zeal.
And well they might. Karelin's retinue included two men in civilian clothing, anonymous, yet obvious in their anonymity as agents of the Third Directorate, that arm of the KGB responsible for guaranteeing the loyalty of military units all the way down to the company level. Around them were eight men in standard, green-camouflaged army uniforms, but with peaked caps and the collar tabs bearing the Cyrillic 'VV' identifying them as Vnutrennie Voiska, the MVD's interior army. All had the flat, expressionless faces of Central Asians, men favored for MVD assignments because, as one Soviet army officer had once observed, they were 'known for their obedience, stupidity, and cruelty.'
They particularly enjoyed hurting Russians for some reason, which was why they were so useful for internal security work. The AKM assault rifles they held were not carried slung or held at port arms. Instead, the weapons' muzzles seemed to probe restlessly in all directions about the tight-knit group, finding and tracking each potential threat.
Clasping his hands behind his back, Karelin let his eyes run the length of the nearest of two titanic mountains of steel rising like islands from the sea cave's oil-black water. 'Excellent, excellent,' he said. Despite being completely enclosed, the cavern air was cold, especially here by the water.
Karelin's words launched puffs of white vapor before his face. 'And what is their current status, Comrade Captain?'
'Leninskiy Nesokrushimyy Pravda is ready for sea now,' the officer replied. He gestured across the dark water toward a more distant island identical to the first. A hammerhead crane was positioned above it, a blunt-tipped, white cylinder sixteen meters long dangling from its tackle. A crew was positioned on the long deck beneath, guiding the cylinder past an open hatch in the deck. 'As you can see, Comrade Admiral, Slavnyy Oktyabrskaya Revolutsita is still taking missiles aboard. It is his captain's intent to work through the night and have him ready to deploy to sea by this time tomorrow.' As a Russian, he referred to ships with the masculine pronoun, rather than the feminine.
'They are true monsters,' Karelin said. It never failed. Each time he saw these black-armored behemoths, especially within the confines of one of the caverns, he found himself a boy again, gaping up at their rounded flanks and towering sides like the greenest raw recruit. These were the centerpiece of the Motherland's defense, the very embodiment of her technical and nuclear might: Tyfun.
One hundred seventy-one meters long, an imposing twenty-four meters wide, with a submerged displacement of almost thirty thousand tons, Typhoon was by far the largest submarine in the world. There were eight in all, two home-based at each of four specially designed and constructed underground shelters along the Kola Inlet.
Quite apart from their size, Typhoons were unlike any other submarine in the world. They were designated as PLARBs ? Podvodnaya Lodka Atomnaya Raketnaya Ballisticheskaya ? a nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarine, what the Americans called a 'boomer.' Each carried twenty SS-N-20 missiles in two rows down the long, long deck forward of the squat, two-tiered sail. Each missile, in turn, mounted six to nine independently targeted MIRV warheads and had a range of 8300 kilometers. If her captain so ordered, Lenin's Invincible Truth could slip
