At the age of 27, Trusov was still a virgin, the nastiness with her stepfather poisoning any chance of successful dating. At Frunze Academy, when she was a second-year cadet, she’d gone out for drinks with three other female cadets, and a first-year male had tried to slip something into her drink. When he wasn’t looking, she’d dumped it into the bar sink and gotten a fresh one, but she wondered what would have happened if he’d been successful in drugging her. Her mind had danced with the fantasy of dispatching him as she had with Borya, but she had walked away, and never seen a man romantically since. Some of the male cadets labeled her a man-hater, others frigid, and still others insisted she was a lesbian. She wasn’t, she knew, she just wanted to meet a man like her father.
She’d been assigned to the Project 971 Shchuka-B submarine K-154 Tigr as the sonar officer. Three years later, after a successful assignment, she turned down a shore duty teaching assignment at N.G. Kuznetsov Naval Academy to join the crew of the Pacific Fleet’s new Yasen-M class attack submarine K-573 Novosibirsk, reporting aboard as the weapons officer.
On Novosibirsk, she’d avoided the advances of the other officers, who obviously considered her beautiful — she’d grown out her hair again, but usually kept it tied up in a bun or a ponytail. There was not much she could do about her expansive chest or her bright blue eyes, but she avoided makeup and kept her mannerisms all business, shutting down all romantic approaches.
For a time she’d had a romantic admiration for Novosibirsk’s commanding officer, Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov, a trim, tall and handsome officer, but he was on the rebound from another woman, and hadn’t returned her feelings. It didn’t matter, since Novosibirsk’s mission became a horrible maritime disaster in the Arabian Sea in a freak confrontation with an American Virginia-class submarine that was hijacking the Iranian nuclear submarine Panther, which Novosibirsk had been charged with guarding and escorting, and had failed. An American cruise missile had nearly destroyed the ship, knocking out the entire crew, and the vessel was sinking. Trusov had been the first to wake, and had taken action to save the ship, bringing it to the surface, starting the emergency diesel generator, and ventilating out the smoke, but though the ship had limped on for a few hours, it was doomed. Eventually Captain Orlov had ordered the crew to abandon ship, and that was when the mission became surreal.
The escape chamber of the Novosibirsk, big enough to allow rescue of the entire crew, had successfully detached from the hull of the sinking submarine, and had rolled sickeningly in the swells of the Arabian Sea. To Trusov’s terror, the Americans had surfaced the stolen submarine Panther right alongside and taken them aboard, hostages and prisoners. Irina noted that before the sinking of the Novosibirsk, she had been as anti-American as anyone she knew. Captain Orlov had even scolded her for it at one point, saying that rage and hatred were illogical. She wondered how he would see her rage and hatred toward Father Borya, because that was certainly logical in her mind.
But as it turned out, the crew of Novosibirsk weren’t hostages or prisoners of the Americans. The Americans — dreaded and hated for decades — fed and clothed the Russians and repatriated them at the first opportunity, not even interrogating them. There was one officer in particular, an American Navy lieutenant, a stunningly handsome young man named Pacino, who had patiently spoken to Irina and calmed her down, insisting they weren’t taking the Russians prisoner, and who had fed them and escorted each of them to the showers and given them fresh coveralls and called for a hospital ship to treat their radiation-sickened engineering personnel, and to evacuate them.
Counter to their expectations, upon returning to Moscow, the Navy had treated them as heroes, despite losing the battle and the submarine. For her quick thinking and action to save the ship, Trusov had been decorated with the Medal for Distinction in Combat, Type 2 Award. She had inwardly considered it ridiculous. Certainly, she’d saved the ship, but only for an hour or two. If one of the other officers had awakened first, he would have won the award, not Trusov. Other officers considered her humble, but she knew that she’d acted out of instinct and training, not some grand heroics.
From time to time, Irina Trusov’s mind returned to that young man she’d met on the Panther. If she were honest, she thought about Lieutenant Anthony Pacino a lot. He reminded her of her father. Intense, but so very kind. Kind and caring, even though, as American submariners, they had been out to sink and kill the Russians. Trusov’s opinions about the Americans changed that day. If life had been different, and Pacino had been born Russian or Trusov had been born American, she could easily see them being together.
But things were radically different now. Because here they were again, on a mission to deploy President Vostov’s Status-6 torpedoes, when an American attack submarine intervened and intended to stop them. When presidential orders came into the Belgorod to attack and sink the American, Trusov was of two minds. On the one hand, she wanted to win this engagement. The loss to the Americans in the Arabian Sea had been humiliating. On the other, she hoped their adversary weren’t the same Virginia-class sub they’d lost to in the Arabian Sea, not because she feared them, but because their crew had included Anthony Pacino.
As she waited for the detonation of the Gigantskiy torpedo, Captain Second Rank Trusov wondered what Anthony Pacino was doing at that very moment.
The blood had soaked through Anthony Pacino’s shirt. He followed Rachel Dominatrix Navigatrix Romanov into the master bathroom in the upstairs level of Jeremiah Seamus Bullfrog Quinnivan’s Virginia Beach house. The noise of the party roared from the basement, two levels down, the crew raucously celebrating the conclusion of the Panther mission. At the awards ceremony that morning, Pacino had been pinned with the silver star, but far more importantly, awarded his gold dolphins, the coveted emblem indicating that he was qualified in submarines, the dolphins pinned on by Rob Catardi, the commander of the submarine force. In the audience that day, Pacino had seen his father standing tall in a dark suit, sending him a rigid salute. It was the best day of Pacino’s life, and it was only the beginning, he thought.
The officers had all kidded Pacino that his dolphins were a gift, that he hadn’t been onboard the Vermont long enough to have earned them legitimately, but XO Quinnivan had shut down the teasing by promising that anyone who chose to could take a punch at Pacino’s dolphin emblem with the backing tabs removed, so that the sharp pins of it were all that kept them on his shirt. Pacino’s fellow officers and friends lined up to punch his dolphins, the hardest coming from Captain Seagraves. When Rachel came up to take her swing, she had just gently caressed his chest instead, and whispered in his ear that now that he was qualified, she couldn’t torment him anymore about him being a non-qual air-breathing puke, but that she’d find something else to tease him about. Squirt Gun Vevera stepped up to take his turn to punch Pacino’s dolphins, and Rachel had said, laughing, “Be gentle with him, Squirt Gun, he has delicate feelings.”