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.
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.