Ohio Class

4

Sonar technician second class Roger Caswell wasn't entirely sure what he was getting into. His buddies had told him they were just going out on the town, and asked if he would like to come along. But after a few drinks at the Torpedo Tube outside the main gate, they'd brought him here — to "round out the evening," as Doc Kettering had put it.

He'd never been inside a strip club.

Technically, EM1 Rodriguez had told him, it was a pasty club, but apparently in this neighborhood "pasty" meant tiny flecks of metallic glitter artfully enhancing — rather than concealing — the nipple. Besides the glitter, the dancers wore dental floss G-strings and the most ungainly shoes he'd ever seen: great, clunky plastic things with nine-inch heels that the girls wielded like deadly weapons when they lay on their backs and swung their legs about in something approximating time to the music.

The music. God, the music! It pounded and hammered, the beat so heavy Caswell wasn't even sure there was a tune to it. As a Navy sonar man, he was proud of his hearing, of the keen discernment of his hearing, and he much preferred classical music and light jazz to this… this noise.

"Oww… dig it!" Moone cried as they walked inside. "Now that's what I mean! They got music here, not that elevator mu-zak you can't even feel!"

"You mean the stuff that's all beat and no harmony?" Caswell replied. He had to raise his voice, and even then he doubted that Moone had heard him over the racket.

BJ's was a popular watering hole and ogling spot for enlisted men stationed in the Bremerton area. Half of the room was taken up by the bar, which featured a large-screen TV hanging from the ceiling, while the other half was devoted to a big, kidney-shaped stage on which the girls did their routines, complete with pole and trapeze. The big game between the Dodgers and the Angels was playing on the TV.

On weekend evenings the place could be packed. Wednesday nights, though, were slower, and the five of them had gathered on chairs along the edge of the stage — Caswell, Rodriguez, and the Doc, plus TM1 Moone and MM2 Jakowiac. House rules said they had to have a drink in front of them at all times. Jak was driving and had ordered a Diet Coke, but the rest were nursing overpriced beers, making them last as the dancers performed one after another.

"Hi, there," a big-breasted redhead said, crouching at the edge of the stage with her head close enough to Caswell's that her breathy voice carried above the background thumping. "Welcome to BJ's! What's your name?"

"Rog— Roger," he managed to say. He was finding it tough to pull his eyes away from her breasts. Her nipples must have been a good inch long apiece and sported very little in the way of glitter that Caswell could see.

"Hey, Roger! I'm Crystal!" She lowered herself onto her back, spread her legs with her crotch a couple of feet from Caswell's face, and began writhing on the stage with urgent, copulatory movements of her pelvis.

"Man, oh, man!" Moone said from Caswell's side. "Lookit them Mark one mod-zero detonators on her torpedoes!"

"I'll give her a torpedo, man," Rodriguez said, gripping his crotch suggestively. "I'll give her my torpedo right up her number one tube!"

"Whatcha think, Cas?" Moone asked, clapping him on the shoulder. "Howdja like a little I-and-I with that?"

Kettering hoisted his half-empty bottle. "Intercourse and intoxication! Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead! Aye aye!"

"I'm not sure Nina would understand," Caswell said.

"Aw, Nina doesn't have to understand!" Moone said. He downed a swig from his bottle.

"What do you think, Roger?" the dancer asked him. It was a bit disconcerting; Caswell hadn't realized the dancers in places like this actually talked to the customers.

"Uh… very nice," he said. He held up his hands, palms out. "I'm being good. I'm not touching."

"He's drooling," Kettering added. "But he's not touching!"

"Drooling is okay," Crystal said, rubbing her breasts slowly. "You're allowed." Deftly, she moved her hand down to her crotch and tugged the black triangle of her G-string just far enough to the side to reveal a bit of clean-shaven pubic mound. As Caswell gaped, Crystal abruptly scissored her legs, sending her heavy right shoe inches above his head and past his right shoulder before rolling to the side and saucily sticking her tongue out at him.

"Awright!" Rodriguez called, clapping his hands. "Awright, baby!"

Crystal sat up, her right foot hovering a few inches in front of Caswell's face. A wad of folding money — mostly ones, but a few fives and tens — were tucked into the strap of her oversized shoe.

Caswell reached for his wallet, but Moone stopped him. "Uh-uh," he said. "The party's on us tonight. This boy is getting married on Saturday!" Moone snapped a dollar bill taut, then slipped it under the strap.

"Hey, congratulations!" Crystal said brightly.

"Thanks!" Caswell said. "Hey, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure." She looked as though she were bracing herself. Caswell imagined the girls in joints like this must get all kinds of propositions from the customers.

"How the hell do you walk in those damned shoes?"

Crystal rolled her eyes. "Carefully!" She scooted over and began writhing anew, this time in front of Rodriguez.

"Hey, Ohios!" someone yelled at them from the bar a few minutes later. "Listen up! It's hot poop!"

"Put the TV up, BJ!" someone else added.

Men around the stage began drifting away toward the bar, craning their necks to see the big-screen TV hanging overhead. A special news bulletin was coming over the channel that a few moments ago had been showing a baseball game. A TV news reporter faced the camera at his desk, his words lost beneath the boom of the dance music. The larger-than-life face of a bearded man in a turban making a televised address glared down over his right shoulder.

The words IRAN CRISIS were prominently displayed across the bottom of the screen.

Her audience gone, Crystal shrugged, stood up, and walked — carefully — to the steps leading down to the back room, as the man at the DJ control board lowered the music's volume.

"… and Iranian authorities claim the U.S. Navy vessel was well inside their territorial waters when the incident occurred. Iran's President Rafsanjani said from his office earlier today that the attack was deliberate and calculated, and a clear violation of international law… "

"What's going down?" Caswell asked.

"Navy ship got sunk in the Gulf yesterday," a burly sailor at the bar told him. "We sent in an air strike and took out a missile launcher and some radar sites."

"Which ship?"

"They haven't said. Shut your hole and let me hear this."

"… Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference at the Pentagon today," the announcer continued. "He said that America 'remains committed to maintaining free passage through the international waters within the Straits of Hormuz, and to the security of our many allies in the region… ' "

"Meanin' fuckin' raghead oil!" someone in the audience yelled. He sounded drunk. "Get back to the fuckin' game!"

"Shaddap, Lou! Gulf championships're more important, know what I mean?"

There were several brief sound-bite interviews with various talking heads, but Caswell was no longer listening. Another crisis in the Gulf, so what else was new? There'd been saber-rattling over Iran since the invasion of Iraq, and a number of cries and confrontations that had made it to CNN. Actually, and for the most part, things had been pretty quiet out there for several years now, so maybe it was time for another one.

The chances were, it wouldn't affect him. The U.S. Fifth Fleet was in the Gulf, based at Qatar. Caswell and his buddies were crew members of the USGN Ohio, and therefore part of the Third Fleet and based in the eastern Pacific. Scuttlebutt had it that the Ohio would be spending the next year or so conducting training missions with the froggies — the Navy SEALs — in Hawaii and in San Diego.

As for him, well, he was getting married in another week and a half — Saturday, June 7. He already had it figured how he could take some leave time while Ohio was at Pearl. Nina would fly out to meet him, and they'd have a few days of honeymoon together on exotic and romantic Maui.

The news report ended with the inevitable promise of more to come at eleven. The music came back up… but something special was happening. There were five dancers on tonight, and all five were on the stage now.

"We have a soon-to-be ex-bachelor in the audience," the DJ announced over the sound system. "Let's get him up here and let him say farewell to the bachelor life! Roger Caswell? Get your tail up here, Roger! Someone get the man a chair!"

A chair was produced and put in the middle of the stage, just in front of the vertical pole, and a couple of lovely, mostly naked young women took him by the hands and led him up the steps. The others were waiting for him there. They sat him in the chair with his back to the pole, and as the music thumped and pounded, they began their energetic gyrations around him.

The whole routine was pretty much a blur for Caswell… very pleasant, but hard to take in. At one point he had a woman perched on each knee, another at his back reaching down and pinching his nipples through his shirt, and two more pressed up close, one to either side. One of them produced a pair of white panties, which she pulled down over his head, arranging it so it covered his mouth but left his eyes free.

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?"

Garrett chuckled. "Not yet, Keith. Suffice to say that the Sirocco incident has a lot of people in Washington very unhappy right now. And nervous. There is a… perception that we may be coming down to a final showdown with Tehran."

"Meaning?"

There was a long hesitation. "Spear-to-spear."

"My God."

"There is that possibility," Garrett told him. "Just listen to what General Vintner has to say. He'll bring you up to speed."

"Yes, sir."

"Again… sorry to call you so late. I hope you hadn't already turned in."

"No, sir. Not a problem."

"Good. I'll talk to you later today. I just wanted to give you a heads-up on General Vintner's visit. Good night, Keith."

"Good night, sir."

He stared at the telephone in his hand for a long moment before quietly hanging it up. Spear-to-spear. The phrase, he knew, had been floating around the Pentagon and in various Navy headquarters for some time now as a deliberately misleading and unexciting euphemism. "Broken spear" had long been the code phrase for an incident involving a nuclear weapon or warhead that could lead to a nuclear accident. That phrase had led to the use of the more colorful "spear-to-spear" as a term for a nuclear showdown, a confrontation between two nuke-armed adversaries, each expecting the other to blink.

Nuclear confrontation. Washington's number one nightmare scenario.

He lifted his legs and rolled back into bed, trying to gently reestablish the warm spoon-embrace from which he'd been awakened. Kathy — somehow she'd slept through the phone's ring — stirred and mumbled something, but didn't wake up all the way.

Iran had nuclear warheads. There was little enough doubt about that. Tehran hadn't publicly announced the fact, or conducted a test, but they'd been spreading the word across the Middle East on an unofficial basis for at least the past two years, and getting a fair amount of political leverage for their effort throughout the region. North Korea had been selling them the equipment, the raw materials, and the know-how for ten years at least. Possibly they'd finally sold them a bomb as well… or possibly their own home-grown nuclear research had finally paid off.

Either way, Tehran had a long history of working closely with Islamic terrorists, as well as an even longer history of seeking military, political, and religious dominance throughout the Gulf. They might easily decide that nuclear confrontation with America would make them the heroes of the Muslim world.

And North Korea had also been giving them a lot of help with their ballistic missile program lately. There were intelligence estimates floating around inside the Washington Beltway now to the effect that Iran might be capable of hitting the continental U.S. with a nuclear ICBM within another five to seven years. Scary, scary stuff.

And there wasn't a lot that could be done about it, either. Ever since the invasion of Iraq had failed to turn up the WMDs that were the purported excuse for the invasion, the news media, Hollywood, and the more liberal segments of the U.S. population had been particularly outspoken in their stand against what they called American militarism. In his opinion, if those jokers could be believed, Iran had a perfect right to develop its own nuke weaponry.

Stewart wondered sometimes if the United States was going to have to lose a city or two before she woke up to the realities of a very dangerous modern world. He'd thought the loss of a couple of Manhattan skyscrapers had awakened the nation seven years ago. Evidently, it was going to take something more.

New York City, perhaps? Or Washington, D.C.?

As a U.S. naval officer and as the CO of a Navy warship, Stewart was oath-bound to stand between America and any enemy who sought to inflict that kind of harm on her. Unfortunately, there was only so much he could do, only so much any man could do.

But, by God, if there was a way the refurbished Ohio could make a difference out there in the narrow shallows of the Straits of Hormuz, then he would see to it that she made that difference.

Perhaps an hour later he knew he was not going to get back to sleep. Carefully easing his way out of the bed, he got up, dressed, wrote a note for Kathy on the computer for her to find when she got up, and left the house.

There was a hell of a lot of work to be done if the Ohio was to be ready for departure by Saturday.