them to bullet hardness. His hand kept probing restlessly between her
thighs, and she gave a small, involuntary gasp, then allowed herself to
be drawn back down onto the bunk.
God, she thought, but she needed this, needed the closeness and the
warmth of one special man in this crowded, floating city of men. When
she’d first volunteered for carrier duty she’d thought it would be a
real kick, but the novelty of being one of a handful of girls among six
thousand guys had swiftly worn off.
She slipped her hand between them, running it down his belly. Urgently,
needfully, she touched him, cradling him. “Fuck me, Steve,” she
murmured in his ear. “Fuck me hard.”
CHAPTER 8
Friday, 13 March
0430 hours (Zulu +2)
Off the Kola Inlet
U.S.S. Galveston
Sometimes the boredom seemed to mount like the pressure on the outer
hull, building pound upon crushing pound until it seemed that mere flesh
and blood, like the strongest steel, must finally crumple and collapse.
Of course, the boredom had ended five hours ago, when the Galveston
first began penetrating the Russian coastal submarine defenses.
Commander Richard Montgomery was captain of the American Los
Angeles-class submarine Galveston, SSN 770. He was new to the boat,
having taken her over just two months earlier. Though still officially
attached to Carrier Battle Group 14, during the past few weeks Galveston
had been on patrol here, north of the Kola Peninsula, monitoring the
Russian giant and its slow, bloody suicide.
Nearly ten hours earlier, the sub had come to periscope depth, extending
the slender tip of a radio mast long enough to pick up a set of coded
messages relayed by satellite from the Aegis cruiser Shiloh, even now
approaching North Cape in company with the Jefferson and five other
warships. The transmission had included a verification of his operating
orders: work as close into the Kola Inlet as possible and watch for the
departure of Russian boomers, their big, nuclear missile boats.
“Bridge, Sonar.”
Montgomery picked up a microphone. “Bridge, aye. Go ahead.”
“Sir, sonar surface contact, Sierra Two, bearing one-seven-five. Twin
screws, making slow revs. Sounds like a skimmer coming out of the
slot.”
“Skimmer” was a submariner’s slang for any surface vessel. “Sonar, this
is the captain. Can you make him?”
“Not yet, sir. We’re running it through the library now. But my
educated guess would be a sub-hunter. A Riga, or possibly a Mirka II.”
“Stay on him, Ekhart. Engineering! Come to dead slow.”
“Engineering, aye, sir. Come to dead slow, aye, sir.”
“Diving Officer. What’s the depth under our keel?”
“Depth to keel eight-zero feet and shoaling, sir.”
“Steady on the helm. Take us down to four hundred twenty feet, nice and
gentle.”
“Steady on the helm, aye, aye, sir. Planesman, give me five degrees
down bubble. Make our depth four-two-zero feet.”
“Five degrees down bubble, depth four-two-zero, aye, sir.”
The nuclear sub’s crew, thirteen officers and 120 enlisted men,
functioned with an effortless precision that was almost machine-like,
through a litany of orders and orders repeated. Admiral Hyman Rickover,
the father of the American nuclear navy, had laid down each detail of
the procedure of multiple echoes of each order almost forty years
before, a guarantee against that one mistake that could kill the boat
and everyone on her.
Four hundred twenty feet would put Galveston within a scant few feet of
the bottom. With her single screw scarcely turning and riding at a
precisely balanced neutral buoyancy, she was relying on her forward
momentum to carry her down, leveling off when her keel was just skimming
the cold black mud a few miles off the Kola Inlet.
Montgomery felt the slight cant to the steel deck beneath his feet, then
felt the submarine leveling off.
“Depth four-two-zero,” the enlisted man at the diving planes forward
announced.
“Very well. Captain, depth now four-two-zero. We have ten feet beneath
the keel.”
They spoke in hushed voices, scarcely louder than whispers, observing
silent routine. All personnel not at battle stations were in their
bunks, partly to avoid unnecessary noise, partly to help maintain trim
fore and aft, which could be affected by men moving about the boat. Men