Sea Strike

6

The Hau Tree Lanai was at the same time both a premier and a pleasantly understated restaurant. American-style prime steaks and seafood were offered, with outdoor seating, a sea breeze, and superb view of both Mamala Bay and the Honolulu beachfront.

It was a wonderful place to lounge with a cool drink on a warm night and watch the lights of the city. Especially in good company.

Amanda took a sip from her after-dinner sherry and soda, lightly pressed Arkady’s hand against her thigh beneath the shelter of the table.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“Hmmmm? For what?”

“Scuttlebutt has it that we aced our exams today. We keep the E.”

“That isn’t official by a long shot … but I think we did all right.” Amanda allowed herself to preen just a little.

“As if there would be any doubt.” Arkady grinned at her.

Rakishly handsome and with dark hair pushing the Navy’s length standards, the helo pilot looked a little more pirate than naval officer tonight. His appearance was enhanced by the casual safari shirt he wore tucked into his brushed denim slacks.

“I never promote overconfidence, Arkady,” she replied, “in either myself, or in anyone else. And that brings up something I need to talk to you about.”

“Okay, shoot, babe.”

Amanda set her glass down and sighed. “It’s no big deal, really, but you got a little sloppy on the ship today.”

“Sloppy?” He frowned. “Was there a problem with air division?”

“Oh, no.” Amanda shook her head emphatically. “The air group was fine. No problems. It’s just that when we were talking in the hangar bay during the conflag drill, you got a little familiar. You reached out and patted me on the shoulder.

It was just a little deal. And God knows I didn’t have a problem with it personally, but I did have an inspection officer on my tail. It wouldn’t have been a good thing if he’d seen that.”

“Hell, I know that, babe. But we were in zero-zero visibility. Nobody saw anything. I’m sure of it.”

“I hope not. But we can’t afford to get lax. Especially aboard ship. You know how the Navy feels about relationships inside a chain of command. I could get you in so much trouble over this—” She was by a snort of laughter. Arkady bent forward over the table, trying to control his spontaneous explosion of mirth.

“I’m pleased that you find the imminent disintegration of your career so amusing,” Amanda said with pointed irony.

“Babe, that’s not it at all. It is just that you are so damn predictable in some ways.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Others have told me that on occasion. But what do you mean exactly?”

The aviator lifted her hand to the tabletop and squeezed it gently between his. “It’s like this. It takes two to run a romance, and if I remember right, I was the one who wanted to push the point when we first met in Rio.

“For two, the Navy always comes down a lot harder on the senior member of a liaison like this than they do the junior. You’re the one who’s putting her neck on the line because of me.

“Nonetheless, there you go, dragging all the blame over onto your side of the bed. For God sakes, lady, can’t you just sit back and enjoy an illicit love affair without taking the weight of the world on your shoulders?”

Amanda gave the minutest shake of her head. “Nope.” It felt very good to laugh with her young lover just then. During some of her introspective moments, Amanda had tried to analyze what Vince Arkady’s role was in her life. Possibly it was that he made her remember there was a world beyond the parameters of naval regulations.

That, plus other things. Amanda drew his hand to her face, lightly nuzzling it for a moment. It was a good hand, strong when it needed to be, but likewise gentle, and roughened by honorable service.

“Babe, there’s a question I’ve never asked you before.”

“What?”

“What made you decide to become a naval officer?”

That was an interesting question. Amanda reached for her drink and took another thoughtful sip.

“I really couldn’t say exactly,” she replied. “I can’t recall making any kind of concrete decision about it. I’ve always loved the sea more than just about anything else I can think of. And around our house, you just sort of absorbed Navy through your pores.”

“Your dad, the rear admiral?”

“Um-hmm.” Amanda nodded. “Thirty years on the line, including the Persian Gulf Tanker Wars and Desert Storm. And then there was my grandpa Marshall. He served aboard just about everything from the China river gunboats to the USS Missouri.

“I wish you could have met him, Arkady. Grandpa did Neutrality Patrol duty in the Atlantic before World War Two, the Doolittle Raid, the Aleutians, the Solomons, the Philippines, and Korea. He had seen it all and done it all, and when I was a kid I was sure that he was just one pay grade below God. I would sit and listen to him and Dad yarn for hours.

“Somewhere along the line, I just started knowing that I wanted to be like them. And that someday I wanted a ship of my own.”

She looked out across the beach below the restaurant lanai, watching the waves angle along the sand.

“I suppose,” she said after a few moments of reminiscent silence, “that it was something of a shock to my father when he found out that his baby girl wanted to be a hairy, smelly sailor, just like he was.”

The corner of Arkady’s mouth quirked up. “I don’t know, it seems to me that he was pretty proud of his ‘ girl’ when he pinned the Navy Cross onto her back at Norfolk.”

“Yeah.” She smiled to herself in the twilight. “I guess he was.”

Suddenly, there was a shrill electronic trilling. Diverted, Amanda reached into her shoulder bag and the cellular clipped to it. She had the professionalism back in her voice by the time she had flipped open the phone.

“Garrett here.”

“Hey, Boss Ma’am. This is Chris. Sorry to interrupt whatever I’m interrupting, but I think we have a kind of situation developing.”

“What’s happened, Chris?” Amanda tried to identify the odd murmur of sound she heard behind her intelligence officer’s voice.

“Do you have your encryption on?”

Amanda glanced at the switch and the check light of her cellular’s security option. “Yes, I’m secure. Go.”

“Here it is. There has been a major national security event somewhere within the Seventh Fleet zone of operations. Seventh Fleet and naval Special Forces elements are being mobilized, and the Duke can expect an alert-to-deploy notification in the immediate future.”

Again that odd burst of noise interrupted Christine.

“Chris, where are you? Aboard the ship?”

“Uh, well, no. Actually, I’m speaking to you from the ladies’ John of Haole Joe’s Sports Bar.”

Amanda knew that Christine Rendino, unconventional though she might be, was not prone to making prank phone calls to a superior officer. Nor was she in the habit of becoming dysfunctionally intoxicated. There would be an explanation, and Amanda waited for it.

“We’ve got a lot of base people over here watching the night game from stateside. The Mariners are dying in agony in the seventh inning, in case you’re interested … ”

“I’m not. What’s your point, Chris?”

“Anyway, starting about forty-five minutes ago, pagers and cell phones started going off all over the place. Four people from the Seventh Fleet Operations Center, a couple of guys from NAVSPECFORCE, even a couple of civilian ONI analysts, all of’ scorched out of here like tomcats going over the wall at a neutering clinic.

“Shall we say that this aroused my curiosity. I retired to the ladies’ relief facility here and set off a few pagers of my own. I can confirm that this isn’t a localized phenomenon. Command and operations personnel are being pulled in from all over the island.”

As she followed Christine’s words, Amanda gestured across the table to Arkady, motioning him to come around and listen in on the conversation. Swiftly, he circled the table and hunkered down beside her chair, leaning close to listen in.

Christine continued. “Finally, I called a friend of mine who is standing a port watch out aboard the Yellowstone tonight. They can see both Seventh Fleet Ops Center and NAVSPECFORCE HQ from their moorage. Both places are lit up like a dance club on Saturday night and have a steady stream of traffic going into their lots. Fa’ sure we have an event on.”

Amanda nodded slowly. “Is there any chance at all that this could be some kind of readiness exercise?”

“No,” Christine responded decisively. “I don’t think so, Boss Ma’am. The vibes coming off this are wrong.”

Amanda nodded again. Christine’s “vibes” were something that she trusted implicitly. She was not only a friend, but she was also one of the rising stars of her field. Behind that carefully cultivated Valley Girl persona, there was a cool and crystal-clear intellect of formidable capacity. A perusal of personnel records would have shown that Christine Rendino had the highest IQ of anyone aboard the Cunningham. And that, Amanda had to admit, included the captain.

“What’s your best guess on the crisis point?”

“I don’t have to guess; I know. I had them switch over to CNN during the seventh-inning stretch. They’ve just announced that the Nationalists have dealt themselves into the Chinese civil war. Taiwan has launched an invasion of the Chinese mainland.”

“You are kidding me!”

“Kidding not. They went across the beach this morning. And fa’ sure, this is going to have some people freaking out.”

“And you think we’re going to get a piece of it?”

“Our new lords and masters over at NAVSPECFORCE are already getting a piece of the action. We’re the only stealth hull they have in the Pacific just now, and we’ve just passed our requals. Add it up, Boss Ma’am.”

“I see your point, Chris.”

“I just thought you’d like the word. Do you want me to keep digging on this?”

Amanda stared unseeing across the restaurant lanai, her thoughts accelerating. As always, Christine’s logic was impeccable.

If there was a flare-up looming in the Pacific, the Cunningham, as one of the fleet’s most capable surface combatants, would be going. She had gained a few hours, possibly a day, on her deployment notice. How to spend it best?

“Negative, Chris. Go on back to your ball game. I’ll take it from here.”

“Okay, Captain.” Christine’s voice grew intent again. “I trust that I didn’t interrupt anything too critical?”

“No.” Amanda suddenly became aware of Arkady’s body warmth pressing close. “Not yet.”

She signed off. At her side, her Air Division leader rocked back on his heels.

“Well, what’s the word. Captain?”

“Nothing,” she replied thoughtfully. “We re going to let it ride for tonight.”

Noting his raised eyebrow, she continued. “Even if we did start pulling the crew back aboard now, we probably couldn’t get all that much done before morning. If the Duke is due for a crash deployment within the next couple of days, the best thing we can do is to let our people get a little shore time It might be their last for a while.”

“Makes sense to me.” Arkady nodded. “Right.”

Amanda crisply snapped the phone shut and returned it to her purse “Damn, damn, damn! We had a deployment preparations schedule all roughed out, but that’s shot to pieces now. I’m sorry, Arkady, but I’d better get back to the ship and see what I can start piecing together.”

“Okay, babe. But before you do, can you do me one favor?”

“Of course. What?” She looked at him inquiringly. He was still kneeling beside her chair, meeting her gaze levelly with a spark of affectionate humor dancing in those damnably blue eyes.

“Would you please repeat all that stuff you said about shore time for the crew and everything. Only this time around, just for fun, substitute ‘Garrett’ for ‘I’ just like to hear how it sounds.”

In her moment of distracted confusion, she almost started to do it. Then she found herself dissolving into something close to a giggle. She collapsed back into her chair and reached out to caress his cheek “Vincent Arkady, you are a sin. My sin.”

“Like you said, babe It might be the last time for a while “

“So it might”