Strickland's ministrations grew rougher as he moved his face to her breasts, taking first one nipple into his mouth, then the other, sucking 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
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 on watch wore rubber shoes, and unnecessary machinery ― the ice maker in the galley and the soda machine in the mess among others ― had all been shut down.
"Very well, Diving Officer," Montgomery said. "Maintain depth and trim."
"Maintain depth and trim, aye, sir."
Four hundred twenty feet seemed like a lot of water, but in fact that depth was only sixty feet deeper than the Galveston was long. She was capable of diving to twelve hundred feet or more, and working this far inshore always posed extraordinary difficulties for a submarine. The chances for discovery were increased a hundred fold, and if they were discovered, there was no place to run or hide. Somewhere astern, perhaps ten miles off, was a new addition to the carrier battle group, another improved Los Angeles attack sub, the Morgantown. Together, the two nuclear subs had been steadily working their way toward the Murman coast, moving with extreme stealth through one of the deadliest arrays of antisubmarine defenses on the planet.
They were now far inside the twelve-mile limit claimed by Russia as her territorial waters. The Kola Inlet was opening up directly ahead, and the small island called Ostrov Kildin was less than seven miles to starboard.
Their position was complicated by the fact that they were moving south down one of the busiest shipping channels of the former Soviet Union, the sole shipping lane to the busy ports of Murmansk, Severomorsk, and Polyamyy.
Attack subs were arguably the single most useful tool in the U.S. Navy's inventory… though aviators or skimmer crews would never have admitted the fact. When something went wrong with diplomacy anywhere in the world, sending a carrier battle group was a great way to send a message, a very loud message, to the offending party: "Behave or we'll flatten you." Time after time, as regional conflicts and brushfire wars had broken out across the face of the globe, the planners in Washington had repeated that time-honored phrase, "Where are the carriers?"
But far more often it was necessary to take a more diplomatic tack ― or a more covert one ― and an aircraft carrier with ninety planes sitting off the coast in question was not exactly a comfortable statement in the language of diplomacy. If a CBG penetrated this far into foreign territorial waters, it was an act of war.
But a submarine, on the other hand… that was different. A Los Angeles attack sub could slip silently into enemy waters, listening to radio traffic, counting ships and radar sources and aircraft, then slip away without anyone knowing it'd been there. Throughout the Cold War, American attack subs had repeatedly penetrated such closely guarded Soviet fortresses as the Shelikhova Gulf, the Tatarskiy Strait, the White Sea, and the Gulf of Finland. The nature and specifics of those penetrations were all still highly classified.
"Control room, Sonar."
"Control room. What is it, Ekhart?"
"I've got an ID on Sierra Two. Riga-class frigate. Still at one-seven-five. Estimate he's making turns for one-five knots."
A Riga-class frigate, a sub-hunter for sure. She'd be a hair under three hundred feet long, with a displacement of about twelve hundred tons. Either a Herkules or a Pegas high-frequency sonar mounted in the hull. ASW weapons including RBU-2500 rocket launchers, depth charges, and 533mm torpedoes.
Ping!
Every man in Galveston's control room froze, eyes turning toward the overhead.
"Control room, Sonar. Sierra Two has gone active on sonar."