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 torpedoes and missiles, with a total of twenty-four weapons carried aboard… and deadly when skillfully used.
Submarines ― even Russian submarines ― were not that common inside the Black Sea. Treaty constraints restricted the number of subs allowed to pass the Bosporus-Dardanelles waterway each year; more to the point, the Dardanelles were only meters deep in spots, deep enough to hide a submerged sub ― barely ― but with precious little room for error. Subs trying to pass unobserved through the straits did so with the certain knowledge that the waterway was thickly laced with sound detector equipment and other sub-hunting gear… not to mention the less predictable hazards imposed by fishermen’s nets. Since submarines survived in modern warfare by remaining unobserved, the old Soviet Union had never added many submarines to its Black Sea Fleet, and the majority of those stationed there were diesel electric boats out of the secret pens at Balaklava ― Kilos, Tangos, and aging Foxtrots.
There were a few more modern, nuclear-powered boats in the Black Sea, however, and this Victor III was one. Obviously he’d been deployed to keep an eye on the CBG, and it was Orlando’s task to keep an eye on him.
Or rather… an ear. Davies remained motionless, not straining to hear so much as he was losing himself in the hissing, churning cascade of sound coming through his headset.
“Davies?”
He looked up, startled. Commander Peter Lang was leaning against the entrance to the sonar shack. “Yes, Skipper?”
“You’re sure of that heading, son?”
He took a moment more before answering, listening to the churn of the Russian’s eight-bladed screw. Yes… the sound was definitely moving off to the right now as Orlando continued forward. “Yes, sir. I make it between one-seven-oh and one-seven-three. He’s on a straight heading now. It’s not a crazy Ivan.”