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.
1635 hours (Zulu +3)
Sonar, U.S.S. Orlando Black Sea “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