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 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."