There’d been no word about the missing Russian submarines. Just what the Russians might be planning — if anything — was still a mystery, but Brodie and Graves were driving the officers and crew with the compassion of taskmasters. Every six-hour watch saw at least one battle drill or damage control exercise, which meant no one on board got much uninterrupted sleep, and Kristen was growing concerned that her captain might be going too far as more and more of the crew began to show the stress they were feeling. Haggard faces greeted her in the narrow passageways. On the mess decks, normally innocent snipes at one another were now causing brawls between sailors — a sure sign of mounting stress.
Following a two-hour damage control exercise that had interrupted her sleep period, Kristen resisted the urge to go directly to her quarters and instead went for a quick shower. The XO had just finished, and they exchanged brief, perfunctory greetings as they passed one another in the captain’s cabin. Kristen entered the small bathroom and a few moments later slipped into the shower, plunging her head under the water in an attempt to relieve the tension headache she’d had for days.
She finally shut off the water, pulled the shower curtain back, and began toweling off, unable to shake the unsettling feeling of forgetfulness. The incomprehensible yet palatable sensation that the answer was on the tip of her tongue had plagued her for days, yet she felt no closer to the answer. “Come on,” she whispered as she toweled herself off, “think!”
But no answer presented itself. Instead, the sound of the handle on the bathroom door startled her as she dried her back. She turned in horror, realizing too late that, in her lassitude, she’d failed to lock the door. The door opened and Brodie stepped in. He’d barely made it over the threshold when he saw her.
Kristen was partially covered from his view by the towel across her back reaching down to the top of her thigh. She instinctively pulled the towel tightly about her in a mixture of surprise and dismay. She saw him, briefly frozen in shock, standing inside the threshold of the head. For an agonizingly long moment, they stared at one another, each surprised and embarrassed. A million thoughts ran through her head as she considered what she might possibly say, but her usual quick mind had turned to mush, and all she could do was gasp.
The split second of realization passed. He turned his head away, averting his eyes automatically to save each of them any further embarrassment. “Good heavens,” he gasped softly as he retreated hastily and closed the door behind him.
Kristen stood, her expression of shock seemingly now a permanent fixture as she stared at the door she’d been through a couple of hundred times before and had never forgotten to lock. She closed her eyes, cursing her lack of attention to such a small and insignificant detail. “You idiot,” Kristen whispered and gently banged her head against the wall of the shower.
He’d seen nothing more of her than he might have seen if she’d been wearing her one-piece swimsuit, but the unexpected intimacy of seeing him before her as she stood in the shower with a closely grasped towel between them had caused shivers to course through her body. She’d seen his reaction, the initial expression of extreme fatigue wiped away in an instant as if he’d been slapped across the face.
She stepped softly from the shower stall onto the cotton floor mat providing her some traction on the otherwise slippery tile floor. With the towel still wrapped around her, she carefully, and as silently as possible, turned the locking latch. To her extreme dissatisfaction, it snapped shut with a click that sounded to her like a manhole cover dropping into place. She shook her head, wondering if she could possibly do anything more to embarrass herself and make the situation between the two of them any more awkward. “Idiot,” she whispered again.
She hadn’t seen him more than in passing since that night on the sail as they entered the Sea of Japan nearly two weeks earlier. She didn’t know if he was avoiding her or if the grueling work schedule simply prevented any regular contact. She knew he was spending an inordinate amount of time in the control center running battle drills with the tracking parties. But one look at his drawn face was all she needed to know that the burdens of command were weighing especially heavy now. He hid it well outside the cabin, but once inside his inner sanctum, his defenses weakened and the weariness became evident.
She stared at the door, still cursing herself for her stupidity. The idea that he was on the other side of the door and she had to see him as she exited his cabin was something she preferred not to consider. There was nothing she could say to lessen her embarrassment or alleviate the discomfort between them. But, with nothing more to be done, she finished drying off and dressed. Trying to sound as silent as a ghost, she wiped the water off of the shower walls and the fixtures to leave it as pristine as she always found it upon entering. As she went through this routine ritual, Kristen prayed for the power to teleport just this one time so she might forgo the possibility of running into him in his cabin. But she settled for finding the cabin empty.
Once safely in her own cabin, she began brushing the tangles and knots out of her hair while looking at her reflection in the mirror. She continued to shake her head in disgust as she pulled the brush punishingly through her wet hair, sending water droplets flying through the air and onto the bulkhead and mirror in front of her. She ignored this as she continued to brush, frustrated at her stupidity over forgetting the door lock.
Since Sasebo, the long hours of work, the daily eighteen hour grind on board, and the incessant drills had combined to give her — mercifully — little time to ponder him, or anything that had happened between them. In fact, Kristen was convinced she had again gained control of her wayward emotions.
But the incident in the shower had shattered that naïve certainty.
She cursed her weakness and her undisciplined emotions. They were nothing to her but an impediment. She took several deep cleansing breaths, struggling to force the unwanted thoughts and images back in line. There were real-world problems to deal with. The Russians were up to something, and odds were they weren’t alone. She was certain she had the answer somewhere amidst the trillions of memories locked away in her head. She just had to find it.
Chapter Thirteen
“New course,” Captain Ahadi ordered his helmsman softly, “two-seven-five.”
“Yes, sir,” the helmsman responded automatically as he began to turn the submarine.
The massive supertanker was hardly a challenging target, but it would have to do. Ahadi waited patiently as the Borei settled on her new course. His sonar operators, although still relatively inexperienced with the Borei’s advanced acoustical suite, were able to track the slow-moving, heavily-laden tanker with ease. It took them less than fifteen minutes to provide a second bearing.
Ahadi turned his attention to his tracking party. They immediately used the second bearing to estimate a range to target. “Distance, two thousand meters, Captain,” his weapons officer reported dutifully.
“Load tubes one and six with Shkval torpedo,” he ordered. Behind him, watching quietly, was his Russian counterpart, who was still technically in command, although Ahadi was assuming more and more duties as their cruise continued.
Ahadi waited patiently as his sonar room continued to give updated information on the lumbering giant moving south through the Persian Gulf toward the Strait of Hormuz. The huge tanker was over five hundred thousand dead weight tons, and was completely unaware it was being hunted. It took nearly ten minutes to load the two torpedoes. Hardly satisfactory, but Ahadi knew his men would grow more proficient as they gained experience with the new equipment.