The audience was cheering, catcalling, and clapping in time to the brutal rhythm.
Caswell was a quiet guy who hated being the center of attention, and right now he felt miserably foolish. The worst part about it was not knowing what to do with his hands. All of that naked female flesh so temptingly close, but he knew he wasn't allowed to touch. He was afraid he was going to get called for groping one of them by accident….
Turning his head, he looked past a bare breast and locked eyes with Moone. "I'm going to get you for this, Moonie!" he called, but he didn't know if he'd been heard.
The torture ended with Crystal doing a lap dance, squatting over him with her arms reaching past his head and her hands on the pole, those magnificent naked breasts bobbing up and down just inches from his face. The other girls huddled close around, swaying to the music, stroking his arms, chest, and the back of his head.
And then, mercifully, the ordeal was over. The girls, grinning and patting his shoulders, walked off the stage.
Well, perhaps the ordeal wasn't quite over. He still had to stand up and leave the stage himself, and the past several minutes had been somewhat… arousing. He managed to pick up the chair and hold it in front of him as he carried it off the stage, the best cover he could arrange on short notice. He stumbled a bit on the steps, but recovered his balance. Damn, he was having trouble walking! Somehow, he made it back to his seat, still wearing the panties around his neck.
"Which one of you clowns put them up to that?" he demanded, pulling the underwear off over his head. "You, Moonie? Doc?"
"Well," Kettering said with an evil grin, "I might have had a word or three with the DJ. It's their traditional bachelor's send-off, y'know?"
"Howdja like it, Cas?" Jakowiac asked him. "Man, they were all over you!"
He stuck a finger in his right ear and dug at it, as though trying to clear his hearing. "Didn't care for the music…. "
"Aw, you and that freakin' highbrow intellectual shit of yours!" Moone said, shaking his head with mock sadness. "We gotta educate you, newbie!"
"Tell you what, Moonie. You can teach me about that rap-crap you like if you let me teach you about Bach and Mozart!"
"And I will see you your Mozart, m'man, and raise you some Eminem!"
They got up and made their way toward the exit not long after. Crystal, modestly clad for the moment in a dressing gown, came up to him while Moone and Doc were in the head. "Aw, you guys aren't leaving already, are you?"
" 'Fraid so, honey," Rodriguez said with a pleasant leer. "When you get off, anyway?"
She pointedly ignored him as she turned to Caswell. "You seem really nice," she told him. "Good luck with getting married and everything!"
"Thanks, Crystal," he said.
Jakowiac exploded with a guffaw as she walked away, buttocks shifting delightfully beneath her sheer gown. "Hey, Cas! You've got a friend! She was really comin' on to ya!"
"Ah," Rodriguez said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Fuckin' bitch just liked how much money we dropped on 'em!"
But Caswell didn't think it was like that at all. Some of the girls dancing up there tonight had seemed, well, a bit fake, somehow. Posturing. Pasting on a smile along with the sparkles, to make the customers happy. Crystal, though, had seemed like the most genuine of the lot.
Nina, he thought, definitely wouldn't understand.
The phone shrilled on the nightstand, as insistent as a bucket of cold water. Commander Keith H. Stewart groaned and pulled away from his wife. Their lovemaking an hour ago had been passionate and intense, leaving him deep in a pleasant, sex-induced coma.
Sixteen years as a naval officer, however, the last two of them as XO of the SSBN Maine, and two more before that as exec of the SSN Pittsburgh, had instilled in him the singular ability to come wide-awake in an instant, whatever the physical circumstances. "Stewart."
"Sorry to call so late, Commander," the voice on the other end of the line said. "This is Tom Garrett."
That name brought him even wider awake. He sat up in bed, swinging his legs over the side. "Sir."
Captain Garrett had been his skipper on the Pittsburgh. More recently, the man had been working on the Ohio project for months; had been, more than anyone else, the driving force behind the SSGN conversion program as it reached its final stages. There were still those in Congress and in the Pentagon who would kill the Ohio conversion if they could, despite the fact that four billion dollars had already been spent on the program and the physical conversion was complete.
The fact that Garrett was calling now…
Stewart fumbled for his watch on the nightstand. God… 2340 hours? That meant 0240 Eastern Time. Didn't the guy ever sleep?
"It looks like your op eval is getting moved up a bit, Bob," Garrett said. "We're deploying you."
An active-duty patrol? Ohio had been scheduled for a year-long operational evaluation, which meant lots of tests, drills, and exercises designed to see just what she could do. If LitWar was bypassing that crucial phase… "Sounds like the big time."
"You could say that. Straits of Hormuz."
"Ah. I was wondering. I've been watching the reports on CNN. What's going down?"
"Your orders will be arriving aboard sometime later this morning," Garrett told him. "The details are still being chewed on at this end. All I can tell you at the moment is that we're going to try to get you out of port ASAP. Think you can have Ohio ready in all respects for sea by Saturday?"
Saturday! Hell and damnation! "Yes, sir. She will be ready."
"Good man."
"Are we going out solo, sir? Or being assigned to a task force?"
"As I said, the details are being worked out. Likeliest scenario is you'll head straight for Oahu, pick up your subs and a SEAL component, and then make for the Gulf. Meanwhile, we'll have a submarine already on-station checking out the lay of the land ahead of your arrival. You'll remember her…. "
"The Pittsburgh?"
"The same. She's at Qatar now, offloading the SEALs she picked up after the Sirocco went down. We're going to have her off Bandar Abbas just as quick as we can turn her around. She'll reconnoiter the AO, and you'll coordinate your intel gathering with her."
"That's good news, sir. The 'Burgh is a good boat."
"That she is. Oh, and one more thing."
"Yes, sir?"
"You're going to have a VIP on board tomorrow."
"Sir?"
"Marine General Andrew Vintner."
"A jarhead? Are we going to be working with the Marines?"
"General Vintner is retired, Bob. Forcibly retired. I want you to listen to what he has to say."
"Certainly, sir." Inwardly, Stewart groaned. Retired leatherneck generals didn't pay social calls on submarine skippers. If Garrett wanted him to talk to the man, there was a damned heavy reason for it. Garrett's emphasis on the word forcibly, and his unwillingness to discuss the topic openly over the phone, together suggested politics. Nasty politics.
But… a retired Marine general serving as a briefing officer? That didn't sound likely. Things definitely were out of kilter somehow.
Not a pleasant thought when the boat you skippered was about to be the pointy end of the stick.
"I'll look forward to meeting him, Captain."
"Don't. You won't like what he has to say."
"Yes, sir." Stewart hesitated. "Captain?"
"Yes?"
"Why the hell are you still at your desk at zero-dark-thirty hours? You're not pulling night duty at the Pentagon information desk, are you?"