But Brewer wasn’t sure how to go about finding out which it was. What was she supposed to do, walk up to the ship’s Exec and ask him whether or not his shower was hot? Ask to inspect the enlisted men’s shower heads? Or demand a return to the bad old days when men and women had shared one of the carrier’s shower heads on a rotating schedule? God, that had been a nightmare.
Their last overseas deployment, earlier in the year, had been a comedy of inconveniences and logistical headaches. A shared shower head had been just one of the problems. After the Kola Peninsula deployment, Jefferson had returned to Norfolk for refits and resupply in May, while her carrier wing had transferred to NAS Oceana for training. Normally, a Stateside deployment would last for at least six months, but with things going to hell all over the world, the U.S. Navy’s twelve-carrier fleet was stretched to the absolute limit… and maybe a bit beyond. After only four short months, Jefferson had been ordered to sea again; the men and women of CVW-20 had said good-bye to families and loved ones at Oceana, then flown their aircraft out to a rendezvous and trap aboard the carrier as it cruised several miles offshore in the Atlantic.
Some reworkings when the ship had been back in Norfolk over the summer had made things considerably better for the female contingent; they still were forced to take a multi-deck detour from points aft of the hangar deck, but they at least now had one whole, entire shower head that belonged to them and them alone.
She had to keep reminding herself that things were improving for the women aboard… but they still had a long way to go. The women had their own berthing and shower facilities now. Most of the men accepted them, too, despite the inevitable jokes about “Amazons” and “skirts.” In most ways, it was no worse than being stationed ashore; an aircraft carrier was such an enormous place it was sometimes almost possible to forget that you were actually aboard a ship at sea.
A sudden thunder followed by a harsh rattling sound from overhead was an adequate reminder, however. The thunder had been suspended for most of the day by the lull in flight operations that had brought them through the straits from the Aegean Sea, but it was in full force once more, with a full flight schedule resumed almost the instant the Jefferson had left Turkish waters. It was even noisier one level up, on the 0–3 deck, where most of the enlisted men were quartered directly beneath the “roof.”
She released the sprayer’s button and hung it back on the side of the shower stall, still feeling a bit gritty and soap-filmed. Her hair, she decided, would just have to wait for another time. She kept it cut short, the blond tresses reaching only halfway down between ear and shoulder so they wouldn’t interfere with wearing a flight helmet, but even that much was a pain to keep clean when the water was as sluggish as this. The guys had the right idea there; most had crew-cuts, and some wore little more up top than razor stubble, which made washing their hair as easy as passing a washcloth over their scalp. Some of the other women in the squadron had already taken that step and cut their hair so short the skin showed through. Brewer wasn’t quite ready for anything that drastic… but each time she took a shower in here, the day got just a little closer.
Stepping out of the stall, she reached for the towel she’d left on the bench and started drying herself off, sparing only a brief glance for the off-white cork-tile panels of the overhead. During their first deployment, one of Jefferson’s horny male crew members had hidden himself up there with a spy camera; she’d seen the pictures just before the guy went to captain’s mast. Close quarters and lack of privacy were still among the biggest problems with women serving aboard ship, and lonely guys could get pretty inventive sometimes.
The Great Experiment, it was still being called. The problem of female Navy personnel serving aboard ship or in combat had been plaguing the service for decades now. The Navy’s first experiment in women serving at sea had been the result of one of then-Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s famous “Z-grams” in 1972, when 424 men and 53 women had been assigned together to the hospital ship U.S.S. Sanctuary for a four-hundred-day cruise. Officially, the experiment had been a success ? ”success” in this case being defined by those Pentagon bureaucrats whose careers and reputations depended on the mission’s successful outcome. In real-world terms, however, the Sanctuary experiment had been a disaster, with frequent sexual liaisons between members of the crew, several pregnancies, a number of jealous fights over women, and lingering bad morale. In fact, Sanctuary’s cruise had ended after forty-two days, not four hundred, and she’d spent the rest of her career in port before she was finally quietly decommissioned.
And this with men and women who’d been carefully screened beforehand, in order to ensure that nothing would go wrong!
But the Navy had kept trying. Federal District Court Judge John Sirica in 1978 had held that banning women from serving aboard ship violated their Fourteenth Amendment rights, a ruling that had led directly to several more experiments… and an increasing number of Navy vessels referred to by an amused news media as “Love Boats.” Despite this ? and despite the civil rights ruling eventually being overturned by the Supreme Court ? the Navy had taken the final step in 1993, when it lifted its ban on female combat pilots; less than a year later, female aviators and enlisted personnel had reported for duty aboard the carrier Abraham Lincoln.
The first time in combat for female aviators had come a few years later, when the Thomas Jefferson met neo-Soviet forces off the Kola Peninsula, and Brewer still thought herself lucky to have been in on that op. She’d proven herself in combat then, racking the six kills to become the Navy’s first female combat ace. Right now, right here, she was at the very top of her own personal career pyramid… and she was poised to keep on climbing as the opportunities kept opening. Not for her the glass ceilings that women in mid-level management still complained about in civilian life. Not for her an executive’s position in some corporation Stateside, where if she dressed and acted feminine her coworkers would think she was weak, and if she acted tough she was a bitch, and where success, any success at all, was assumed by her male compatriots to be her reward for sleeping with the boss.
Well, screw that. She was the very best at what she did, which was flying Navy combat aircraft. She loved flying, loved it with a passion she felt for nothing else in the world. The opportunity to be here, a pioneer for female naval aviators, made everything ? the lack of privacy, the harassment and innuendo ? all worth it.
But, damn, what she wouldn’t give for a hot, high-pressure shower right now.
“Contact is turning right, Captain,” Sonarman First Class Brian Davies said. He spoke softly into his lip mike, as though fearful that the target out ahead of the American submarine would hear. “Still turning… Okay. Contact on new heading, course one-seven-one.”
“Very well, Davies,” the voice of Captain Lang replied over the intercom.
“Stick with him.”
“Sounds like transients,” Sonarman Second Class Wilbur Brown said, hesitant at first, but then growing more confident. “Like a… clanking sound?”
“Someone left a cable dangling,” Davies told him. “An Irish pennant.
When he changes course, it hits the bulkhead. Sloppy, Ivan. Sloppy.”
They sat side by side in the alcove just off the Orlando’s control room, hunched over the array of electronics that were the Los Angeles-class submarine’s primary sense at eight hundred feet. The cascade of light on the screen in front of him, the “waterfall” in submariner’s parlance, gave a visual signature to the contact frequency by frequency, but Davies trusted his own ears and brain. His eyes were closed, his fingertips lightly pressing the headphones against his ears. Sometimes it was almost as though he could see that other vessel up ahead through what he was hearing now on Orlando’s passive sonar. Loudest was the gentle thrum of his prop, a tandem eight- bladed screw… but Davies, like a blind man who’d learned to see with his ears, could distinguish countless other noises as well, from the hiss of water flowing over the submarine’s skin to the slight fluttering sound of a minor cavitation due to one of the screw’s blades being slightly out of alignment to the intermittent clink of something ? a loose cable, perhaps ? swinging free inside the pressure hull and transmitting the sound of each contact with metal through the water.
They’d picked this sub up only three hours after entering the Black Sea yesterday, slipping in behind him as he, in turn, slipped into the wake of the Aegis cruiser Shiloh. It was like a return to the bad old days of the Cold War, when U.S. and Soviet submarines would play endless games of tag and double blind man’s bluff, a game that American sub skippers ? and their sonarmen ? were especially good at. The Russian’s signatures ? sonar fingerprint unique to each different vessel ? was already in Orlando’s electronic library. He was one of twenty-six submarines of the class known to the Russians as Project 671 RTM, and to the West as the Victor III. The oldest class of nuclear-powered attack submarines still in the Russian arsenal, it was nonetheless reasonably quiet, capable of making thirty knots submerged, and mounted four 650mm and two 533mm tubes firing a variety of
