Countdown

CHAPTER 7

"Come in."

Master Chief Mike Weston, Jefferson's Chief of the Boat, entered Tombstone's small office. "Afternoon, CAG."

"Hi, COB. What can I do for you?"

"Well, this is kind of the way of an informal invitation, if you know what I mean."

"I'm afraid I don't."

"Well, there's gonna be a little, ah, get-together. Fourteen hundred hours, 0–1 deck aft of the hangar bays, across from the paint locker. I know it's kind of unusual, but some of the boys told me they'd be honored if you could come. Unofficial, like."

Tombstone leaned back in his swivel chair, considering Weston's invitation. The big man appeared almost embarrassed, something Tombstone had never seen as long as he'd known him.

He also knew now what this was all about. "My nose is already blue, Master Chief."

"I know, sir. But it'd help morale if you could come. A lot."

"You think so?"

"One airman told me this morning, 'Hey, COB! We gotta invite Captain Magruder. He's the best officer on the boat!'"

Tombstone smiled. "I'm flattered."

"Between you and me, CAG, morale on the Jeff just struck bottom. This business with having women on board, well, it's got the whole crew pretty damned tight. Especially since the word is we're likely to see combat soon.

Now, this shindig this afternoon'll be strictly contra-regs, but I can't see that it'll hurt anything. And having some of the officers there'll let the guys know the brass hasn't just decided to torpedo them."

"I can't get away right this moment, COB." He waved at the paper protruding from the platen of the IBM Selectric resting on his desk. "I have these quarterly personnel evaluations to finish, my XO's on CAP, and the skipper'll keelhaul me if they're not on Commander Parker's desk this afternoon. But save me some cake. I'll come down the second I'm free."

Weston grinned back. "That'd be fine, sir. Thanks." He reached for the door, then hesitated. "Oh… just one thing. I'm afraid this here do will not be squared away on the Papa Charlie front. Do you take my meaning?"

"Perfectly. I'll be down… oh, make it fifteen-thirty."

"Good enough, sir. See you there."

He left.

Tombstone stared after him for several long moments, and wondered how it had come to this. "Not squared away on the Papa Charlie front" meant not PC, not "politically correct." No women. And there was a damned good reason for that.

Sometime during the night, the Jefferson, continuing on course toward the northeast, had crossed the Arctic Circle. The fact had been duly recorded in the ship's logs, of course, and announced over the carrier's closed-circuit television, but not officially celebrated as time-honored custom demanded.

Tombstone was well aware that there'd been grumbling all day, and that morale, within the air wing and the ship's company both, had plummeted.

The immediate cause of the gloom, it appeared, was the peremptory official cancellation of the initiation ceremony to the ancient and honorable Noble Order of Blue Noses.

Long seafaring tradition had established and perpetuated certain shipboard ceremonies. Most famous, of course, was the Order of Neptune, conferred on officers and sailors alike the first time they crossed the equator. There were other fraternities, less well known to landlubbers: the Domain of the Golden Dragon for crossing the 180th meridian; the prestigious Order of the Golden Shellback for crossing the equator at the 180th meridian.

And there was the fraternal Order of the Blue Nose for men crossing the Arctic Circle for the first time.

That was the problem. Men crossing the Arctic Circle. The attendant ceremonies consisted of some fairly grotesque hazing of the "cherries" being initiated, usually on the flight deck with all free hands in attendance.

Tombstone well remembered his own initiation. He'd seen frat parties that were worse… but a gathering of several hundred men, shivering in their skivvies and with their noses painted blue, kneeling one by one before the Chief of the Boat in his guise as King Neptune as they swore to do various improbable and usually obscene tasks, then bobbing for green apples in tubs of ice water and blue-colored whipped cream, was not exactly a ceremony Navy women could be expected to attend.

At least that was the thinking back in the Pentagon, where the CNO himself had issued an order suspending all such festivities aboard ships with mixed crews.

It wouldn't do, Tombstone thought glumly to himself, to let the women see how men really acted while they were at sea. It might shatter their illusions… or worse, confirm them.

And women sure as hell couldn't be expected to strip to their underwear, promise the COB to perform anatomically improbable acts, or bob for apples at the center of a screaming, chanting mob of half-dressed men, not with the current hypersensitivity to sexual harassment pervading the service. There'd been serious discussion in Washington, he knew, about holding some kind of alternate ceremony that included men and women, with no hazing of the cherries and no indecent exposure, but in some ways that would have been worse than cancelling the thing completely. While silly, the ceremony served a serious purpose, binding the men together, old hands and nuggets, in a fraternity of the sea older than the navy in which they served. To substitute some watered-down congratulations-and-welcome-to-the-club clap-trap would only insult the guys who'd already been through it, and render the whole concept meaningless.

So the ceremony was officially proscribed… and yet inevitably, some of the men, at least, were going ahead with the initiations anyway. By tradition, the ship's captain ― and by extension, a carrier's CAG ― usually pretended ignorance of any Domain of Neptune proceedings. Aboard Jefferson, the pretended secrecy had just become a bit more true-to-life; the people involved in this could technically be brought up on court-martial charges. In theory, the gathering on the 01 deck could constitute a mutiny.

But they wanted him to attend, and he'd be damned if he'd let them down, even if it meant he got tailhooked for it.

Tail-hooked. The expression had become widespread in the Navy after the notorious Tail-hook scandal of 1991, when Navy aviators just home after Desert Storm had gone ballistic at the Tail-hook Convention in Las Vegas. The partying that year had been… spirited. Some of the women present ― including several Navy officers ― had been made to run a gauntlet in which they'd been groped, fondled, and undressed. Such goings-on had typified other Tail-hook Conventions, but somehow, this one had gotten out of hand.

The charges of sexual harassment and threatened lawsuits had rocked the entire Navy establishment. Several careers had been wrecked in the scandal's aftermath, promotions for hundreds of junior officers had been held up just on the possibility that they'd been involved, and the rounds of male-female sensitivity training for all hands had begun in deadly earnest. The term "tailhooked" had quickly come to mean any potential scandal or hassle involving women and the Navy.

Tombstone couldn't escape one glaring contradiction, though. If he winked at breaking Navy regs here, even condoned it with his presence, how could he object to sexual activity in defiance of those same regulations?

The initiations were being held to bolster sagging morale. Which would hurt worse, sex aboard ship, or draconian regulations forbidding sex aboard ship?

There was no easy answer. "Women and salt water don't mix" ran the ancient maritime saw, and Tombstone was beginning to agree, Papa Charlie or no Papa Charlie.

He returned to his typewriter, read what he'd already written to remind himself of his place, then continued typing.

The COB was right. Having the ceremony, even if it was against regs, would do the ship's company a hell of a lot of good.

"God damn it, Marge, watch where you're putting your feet!"

PH2 Margolis clutched at a metal joist, then reached inside for a water pipe, his head and shoulders already through the hole created by removing one of the soundproofing tiles in the overhead. "Hey, man, get outa my face! I'm no damned acrobat! Gimme a leg up."

He felt Kirkpatrick's hand steadying his left foot as he boosted himself off the top step of the ladder. His head came up, whacking into the pipe and eliciting a muffled curse.

"You okay up there?" Kirkpatrick asked.

"Yeah, yeah." Margolis flattened himself out, looking around the narrow crawl space. There wasn't much room here, and most of that was taken up with wiring and the water pipes feeding the shower. But there was room enough, and the boards they'd already shoved up there took his weight without knocking the insulation tiles out.

Looking down through the opening in the tiles, he could see Kirkpatrick's anxious face, looking up at him from the top of the ladder. Like Margolis, he was clad in dungarees. On the tile deck below, a mop and a large bucket filled with dirty water rested by the lockers and benches outside the showers.

Margolis and Kirkpatrick were supposed to be in here on a cleaning detail ― the only possible excuse for their presence in a head reserved for officers ― but they had something more in mind just now than shipboard routine.

"Okay," Margolis called down. "Gimme the stuff."

Kirkpatrick handed him a canvas bag, and Margolis hauled it up. He'd have to work fast to assemble the gear.

"Psst! Hurry it, you guys!" That was Hernandez, standing watch at the shower head's entrance. He was scared about their being caught. It wasn't likely anyone would be coming in here for a while, though. A fair number of the aviators were still at the strictly unofficial and unauthorized Blue Nose initiations aft; those who weren't were on duty or were scheduled to fly tonight and were asleep now.

"Stay frosty, man," Kirkpatrick called back to Hernandez. "We're almost there." He raised the ceiling tile they'd removed, fitting it carefully back into place. Margolis helped guide it home.

"Everything look okay from out there?" Margolis asked.

"Yeah." Kirkpatrick's voice was muffled. "Just like new."

"No bits of insulation or shit on the desk?"

"All clear."

"Here goes, then."

They'd already used an awl to pierce the soft, white material of the insulation panel, cutting a small, sharply angled hole. Now Margolis took a pencil-thick, silver tube with a complex-looking attachment at one end from the canvas bag, carefully fitted the small end of the tube into the hole, then used duct tape to secure the tube in place. Next, he removed a Nikon 35mm SLR camera from the bag, unfastened and carefully stowed its lens, and attached the body of the camera to the attachment end of the tube. Squinting through the SLR's viewfinder, he found he now had an excellent, camera's-eye view of the inside of the head. He could clearly see Kirkpatrick folding up the stepladder and checking again to make sure that no sign of their activities was left lying on the deck.

"Hey, Kirkpatrick!" he called. "See anything unusual up here?"

Kirkpatrick's face turned up, facing him. "Nah. I can just see the tip of that fancy lens of yours, man, but I wouldn't notice it unless I was lookin' for it. Hey, it's almost time. I'm outa here."

"Okay. You guys promise to come back for me now, y'hear me?"

"Don't you worry, Marge," Kirkpatrick said with a laugh. "We'll be back!

Shit, we're gonna want to see what you get!"

"Well, this'll prove what I said, man," he said, instantly ashamed of the whine he heard in his own voice. "I ain't no fag!"

"Hey, I never said you was, man! Some of the guys, they just get carried away, y'know? They don't mean nothin' by it."

"Ha! Just you wait till you get an eyeful of what I'm going to be lookin' at!" Margolis said. "Pussy, man! Miles and miles of soft, sweet pussy!"

"My mouth's watering, my man. See you in a couple hours!" Gathering the ladder under one arm, and wheeling the mop and bucket with the other, he left the field of Margolis's view. The bucket's wheels gave a mournful squeak-squeak-squeak on the deck tiles. Then he heard the head's door slam and he was alone.

The air was dusty up here, and he rubbed a tickle in his nose that might have led to a sneeze. Rocking the camera back and forth slightly, he felt his heart hammering in his chest. He had a real good view of the lockers and benches, right there on the fifty-yard line. Should he have set up facing the other way, looking toward the showers? he wondered. No, from this high up, at this angle, he wouldn't have been able to see that much. This was a lot better. He pulled his face back from the camera and checked his watch. It was pitch dark in the crawl space, but his watch had a touch-light feature.

Hot damn. It wouldn't be much longer now.

A thump sounded at the door, and Chris Hanson reared up, snatching at the blanket crumpled at the foot of the bunk. The mattress was so narrow that she and Steve Strickland more than filled it in a tangle of bare arms and legs.

Both of them were naked, and if someone did walk in, there sure as hell was no place in the tiny compartment to hide.

Her heart raced, and she felt herself blushing.

"Hey, Lobo, it's okay," Strickland told her. "Relax. Just someone going down the passageway."

"What if someone comes in?"

"No one will. I told you, my roommates know to give us some space.

They're hanging out down in the Dirty Shirt Mess and aren't going to come back until 2400 hours. We've got until then, okay?"

She turned in the bunk, clutching the blanket to her chest and looking down at him with wide, brown eyes. "Good God, Steve, you didn't tell them what we're doing, did you?"

"I told them I needed some time to be with you." He slipped his hand between her thighs, squeezing her gently. "They can form their own opinions about what we're doing in here. Does it matter?"

She sighed. The small, digital clock on the compartment's tiny desk read 2211. "I guess not."

Lieutenant Chris Hanson did not think of herself as a shy person. She'd joined the Navy, quite frankly, hoping to meet a man, the right man…

someone like her father, who'd been a Navy chief with twenty years in.

But something like this…

She caught the chime of someone's laughter in the passageway and voices, too low for her to make out. "I'm not sure why I let you talk me into this, Steve," she said, her voice a husky whisper.

"Hey, I thought you wanted this, babe! As much as I did!" Reaching up, he tugged the blanket from her fingers, letting it slide off the rack and onto the deck. With one hand, he touched her left breast, lightly circling the nipple with his finger. She closed her eyes as a warm shiver rippled down her spine.

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe I should just go-"

"Aw, c'mon, Chris," Strickland said smoothly. "This'll really relax you.

You've been working hard these last couple of weeks. You should let your hair down and unwind a bit, okay?"

"But if we're caught…"

"Ah, nobody cares! I mean, everybody knows it's gonna happen, right?

You can't crowd grown men and women together aboard ship for months at a time and expect them to just ignore each other! It just ain't natural!"

She laughed, and leaned into his hand a little more.

"Of course," he continued, still stroking her breast, "if they sound General Quarters right now, we're gonna look damned silly charging around starkers in the crowd trying to find our stations."

They both laughed at that, and Hanson felt her fear evaporating. She knew that several of the other women in the department were making it with various guys. Rose Damiano for one. And Cynthia Thomas. It was all well and good to talk about professionalism and staying aloof and concentrating on the job at hand, but damn it, people were going to act like people, no matter what. In fact, it seemed like the more extreme the situation ― with danger, overcrowding, and a continuing, no-holds-barred tension that would put any high-powered business executive to shame ― the more they tended to act like…

well, like people. The rules, the lectures, even the difficulty in finding an hour's privacy aboard ship, didn't seem to deter them a bit.

Besides, there was something delicious about that danger, the thought that at any minute Steve's roommates could walk in and catch them in the act.

Just thinking about it made her feel warm and tinglingly aroused. She'd always had a crazy, unpredictable streak in her; her handle, "Lobo," had been short for "lobotomy" back at Pensacola.

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."