Torpedo! (The Silent War Book 3) Page 12

  Sophia Blovin got out of bed in an easy, fluid motion and walked to the window and scratched at the frost on the pane with a fingernail. She turned and smiled at Igor Shevenko, who was lying in bed with the down quilt pulled up to his chin.

  “You’re an idiot, woman,” he said in an affectionate voice. “It’s like the North Pole out of the bed. Come back.” She smiled and walked slowly toward the bed, completely unconscious of her nudity. Shevenko watched appreciatively as she moved toward the bed, his eyes roaming over her full breasts, her rounded belly and the thick triangle of pubic hair. She slid underneath the covers and reached down and grasped him, giggling as he gasped at the coldness of her fingers.

  “Make my hand warm, fill it, please,” she coaxed. She reached around with her other hand and pulled his head down under the covers and put his face against one of her breasts. He nuzzled happily and she smiled.

  “That’s better,” she murmured. “My hand is filling up with you and I’m getting all wet. Take me, now!” She pulled at him and he rolled over on top of her as she spread herself for him, clamping her long, powerful legs around his waist. She guided him into her and began to thrust with her hips, her breath coming in short gasps. She cried out suddenly and relaxed and he rolled to one side, pulling her with him, her leg over his hips. He lay there, moving gently, until she moaned and then he thrust at her savagely until she suddenly tensed and then sighed and relaxed.

  “You only have to touch me and I begin to orgasm,” she said softly. “If I were your wife I would drain you every night and morning. You would have no desire for Stefan.”

  He pulled his head away and stared at her.

  “What do you mean?” he snapped.

  “Stefan is, how do you say it, a homo, a queer,” she murmured. She pulled his head toward her and tickled his ear with her tongue.

  “You’re crazy!” he said. “He’s not a big strong man, frail, in fact. But not a homosexual.”

  “He is,” she said. “I have two of those kind in my section. Brilliant analysts, both of them. They are jealous of Stefan because they think he has not one but two very powerful lovers.”

  Shevenko sat up in bed, ignoring the chill air on his bare chest and shoulders. “Who are his lovers?” he demanded.

  “You are supposed to be one,” she said. “I never believed that. The way you looked at me when I was assigned to your Directorate gave me doubts about that. Now I know you are not, you like a woman’s body too much to be a pederast.”

  “Who is the other one supposed to be?”

  “You will be angry if I tell you,” she answered.

  “I will be more than angry if you do not. Who is he?”

  “You won’t hit me if I tell you? Promise?”

  “I don’t hit women,” he snapped. “His name.”

  “Admiral Zurahv.”

  He sank back on the pillow and pulled the quilt up to his chin, his mind racing.

  “That’s a very serious charge,” he said slowly. “It should not be said even in jest. It should not be said unless you have solid proof.”

  “One of my boys was the Admiral’s lover,” she said. She eyed his stern face. “He was displaced by Stefan about six months ago. He hates Stefan for that.”

  “That’s not proof,” Shevenko growled. “That’s nothing more than gossip.”

  “It is more than that. I began to check when I first heard the story. I heard little things, that the Admiral likes young men with nice round bottoms.

  “I went to the old files, the military files. I have access to them, as you know, because of my classification. I found several mentions of charges that were to be brought against the Admiral and then were never carried through.

  “I know a girl in the First Department of the Second Chief Directorate. She’s a lesbian. They use her to compromise the wives of American diplomats and military attaches. She checked for me and found that the Admiral was accused of pederasty with young men, some of them officers on his staff. Nothing was ever done about the charges, the Admiral is too powerful.”

  “I suppose you and this lesbian were great friends,” Shevenko said, his voice harsh.

  “No,” she said in a soft voice. “She tried, once, but I like what you have, not what women don’t have. I understand her weakness, she understands my desires. We are just good friends, girl friends.” She reached down and began to caress him gently. He felt the warmth of her tears on his shoulder.

  “Sophia,” he said, fighting to keep his voice gentle. “What a lesbian says is not considered to be responsible evidence. I will have to have her in, to demand the files she said she saw.”

  “You don’t have to do that. She gave me the files and I made copies. I have them here, in my apartment.”

  “Why did you make copies, for what purpose?”

  She moved in the bed so her right breast was against his shoulder. “Because when you had me in for my interview, before you hired me, when I first saw you my heart exploded. I wanted you for my lover. What can I bring a man such as you, a man as powerful as you are except my love, my body?

  “When I first heard the gossip I thought that if I could bring you this, something that you could use to protect yourself against the Admiral — everyone knows that you two are enemies — I thought that I would be serving you.”

  Shevenko laid back against the big pillow, his face rocklike. She looked at him and then ducked her head under the covers and began to caress his chest and stomach with her tongue. Her head went lower and lower and he spread his legs to accommodate her and then her mouth was on him and he began to groan in ecstasy despite himself.

  “And what is it you want?” he asked when she had emerged from beneath the quilt.

  “Just you,” she said. “As often as you can arrange to be away from your wife.” She leaned over him and kissed him, her tongue searching for his.

  “If you wish, I would like to be your chief aide. That would end the dangerous gossip among the pretty boys in the building that you put your manhood in Stefan’s ass.”

  “And Stefan,” he said. “What about him? He has been an efficient aide. He does a great deal of work.” He ground his teeth together and she shuddered at the sound. “A great deal of work, much of it highly confidential.”

  “I leave that to you,” she said softly “I have disturbed you, you are too tense. I am tense as well. Love me as I taught you to do last night.” She pushed gently against his head, pushing it down underneath the covers. As he kissed her soft belly and then the moist area of her groin, hearing her moans of joy, he wondered if Sophia Blovin worked for him or for one of the many enemies he had made since he took over as the head of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. She cried out in ecstasy and he shuddered. The honey trap, as he knew very well, had brought other powerful men down in disgrace.

  Vice Admiral Mike Brannon flipped through his Rolodex, looking for the number of the Commander, Submarines, Pacific Fleet. He dialed the switchboard and gave the number to the operator and sat back and waited for the connection to be made. In ComSubPac’s office at the Naval Base in Pearl Harbor a Chief Yeoman took the call and put it through to Vice Admiral Homer Ross.

  “Hey, Mike,” Admiral Ross yelled into the phone. “How are you? How’s Gloria and the daughter?”

  “Fine,” Brannon answered. “Little Gloria isn’t little any more. She’s given us two grandchildren. How’s your family?”

  “Great. My oldest son just made XO on his destroyer. Phoebe is fine. What can I do for you, Mike?”

  “A damned big favor and I have to ask you to keep it quiet. That is, I don’t want you to tell anyone I asked you to do it.”

  “Fire away,” Admiral Ross said.

  “Can you call a Quiet Alert for all the submarines in your command?”

  “I could. Any reason that you can tell me”

  “That’s the sticky part,” Brannon said slowly. “I can’t tell you at this time. Later.”

  “Okay by me. Time we had a readin
ess drill anyway. When do you want it called?”

  “Now.” Brannon said quietly.

  “Will do,” Admiral Ross said. “Must be important. Something big breaking?”

  “Something very damned big may break,” Brannon said. “I owe you one, my friend. I won’t forget.”

  “Give my love to your lady,” Ross said. “I’m due in for meetings in Washington next month. We’ll have dinner?”

  “On me,” Brannon said. He put the handset back in its cradle.

  CHAPTER 12

  Captain Miller finished sticking the gummed strips of the message the Devilfish had received onto a sheet of paper and went into the Wardroom.

  “Please tell the officers off watch to assemble here,” he said to the Officer’s Cook. He waited, the message face down on the green baize cloth, until the officers came in and took seats.

  “We have been ordered to go on Quiet Alert,” he said. “Our function in the exercise is to patrol just west of the SOSUS array off the Strait of Gibraltar. We will patrol in company with the Orca.”

  John Carmichael, the Executive Officer of the Devilfish, looked at his Commanding Officer and read the warning in Captain Miller’s eyes.

  “I figured when they told us to get out here on the double and then threw that damned electronic dummy target at us that old Iron Mike was going to work our asses off,” Carmichael said in an offhand tone. “Maybe when the drill is over we’ll get to go in to a good port in Spain or Portugal.”

  “Electronic dummy target?” Lieutenant Rory Delahanty, the Sonar Officer, shook his head, “John, I listened to that target. I watched the screens. That was a damned submarine that we and the Orca were after or I’ll eat my hat.”

  “You prefer salt and pepper or maybe some salad dressing on the hat?” Captain Miller said.

  “Well, sir,” Delahanty said, “I mean, I’ve worked with all sorts of electronic dummy targets and I’ve never heard anything as realistic as what we were listening to out there. It changed speeds, it even reversed course when we went to full speed to run it down and get a shot at it. At one point our computers were giving it a speed of more than fifty knots! I never heard of a dummy target that could go that fast.

  “Just as the Orca’s missiles hit the water the target’s sonar transmitter started up. If that had been a submarine the sonar operator would have keyed his transmitters when he heard the missiles striking close aboard to try and confuse the missile’s electronics, sir. But it wasn’t a submarine so I don’t know what to think.” Delahanty’s round Irish face was almost cherubic as he looked at Captain Miller.

  “We’ve been away from the States for what, six months?” Captain Miller said. “We really don’t know what new gadgets they’ve developed for us to practice with. All we have to concern ourselves with now is carrying out the rest of the exercise. I want you to tell your people in the crew that we’re on the exercise and that we’re in competition with Orca. She beat us to the target and I don’t want Orca beating us again, at anything. And I don’t want Iron Mike Brannon breathing down my neck if we fuck up. That’s all, fellas.”

  He left the Wardroom and went to his cabin. There was a buzz of conversation after he left that Carmichael stopped with a warning frown. Carmichael finished his coffee and stood up.

  “A word to the wise, gentlemen. Don’t talk about this to the crew, don’t talk about it among yourselves. This is an exercise, that’s all. Don’t speculate.”

  A few minutes later, sitting in Captain Miller’s cabin, he looked at his Commanding Officer.

  “How much longer can we keep up the charade, Captain? Damn it, Delahanty knows we were chasing a submarine. He’s no fool. He can guess that the other submarine was a Russian. What’s more, you don’t waste two SUBROC missiles on a dummy target.”

  “I know,” Miller said. He rubbed his chin. “I just don’t know what to say. We’re supposed to keep this to ourselves, between you and me. I went down to the Sonar Compartment to tell the Chief and his people that they’d done one hell of a job and the Chief looked at me and the way he looked at me I know that he knows that was no dummy target. We may have to tell the Wardroom people the score. I have to think about that. I hate to think of what Iron Mike would do to me if he found out I told them.”

  “What do you think this Quiet Alert means, sir?”

  “Oh, hell, Iron Mike is making sure that if the other side decides to strike back we’re in a position to blow them out of the water,” Miller said. “The Quiet Alert went out to all units, Atlantic and Pacific.” He sat back in his chair, his face dark.

  “I’ve been thinking about Captain Reinauer,” he said slowly. “The Russian attack subs must carry a crew about the size of ours, a few over a hundred. I’ve never fired a torpedo or a missile at another ship. Neither has Reinauer. I wonder what it feels like to know you’ve killed that many people?”

  “Submarine skippers in World War II sank a lot of ships, killed a lot of people,” Carmichael said. “I don’t think they worried about that.”

  “That was during a regular war, after Japan had pulled the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and killed about two thousand of our people,” Miller answered. “We’re not at war. There’s something damned funny going on, John. I wish I knew what it was.”

  Aboard the U.S.S. Orca Captain Reinauer read the message he had run through the decoding machine and looked at his Executive Officer.

  “Get all the officers into the Wardroom. Tell the OOD to turn the watch over to the Chief of the Boat.”

  Eckert looked at him. “You going to tell the Wardroom what the score is?”

  “I think I have to,” Reinauer said. “ComSubLant has ordered all attack and missile submarines on a Quiet Alert. ComSubPac has done the same thing. Admiral Brannon or someone else must think the Russians might retaliate to what we did. If we’re about to go to war I’m not going to keep up the pretense that we fired at a dummy target.”

  Captain Reinauer sat at the head of the Wardroom table, his face grim. He waited until his officers had seated themselves around the table and the Officer’s Cook had served coffee.

  “Leave the coffee pot on the table, Emil,” he ordered. “I want the Wardroom area sealed off. No one is to go through the compartment until I say so. That includes you.”

  “Gentlemen,” he said after the Officer’s Cook had departed. “We did not fire those two missiles at a dummy target. Let me give you the background and bear in mind this is highly secret.” He recited the facts succinctly and then watched the faces of his officers, looking for signs of alarm and seeing none.

  “All submarine units of the Navy are now put on Quiet Alert,” he said in a low voice. He looked down the table at Lieutenant Bill Reiss.

  “Your suspicions about our target were well founded, Bill.”

  “We destroyed them,” Reiss said in a low voice. “How many people aboard, a hundred or so?”

  “About that, I’d think,” Reinauer said.

  “What happens now?” Reiss asked.

  “I don’t know,” Reinauer answered. “All I know is that we have been assigned a patrol area off the western edge of the SOSUS network off Gibraltar. Devilfish will be patrolling with us. We’re senior so the XO will work out the patrol area positions and co-ordinate with Devilfish.” He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “My direct orders from ComSubLant were to keep this information between the XO and myself. I have disobeyed those orders because I can’t go into what might be a nuclear war with you people in ignorance. All I ask is that you give me your word that you won’t blow the whistle on me when we get back to port.”

  Lieutenant Reiss looked at the officers around the table. “Captain,” he said slowly, “I think I can speak for the rest of us and say that none of us will ever say a word about what you’ve just told us.

  “The point is, sir, we knew. All of us here knew that wasn’t any dummy target out there. None of us ever saw anything maneuver like that target did. Only another subma
rine could go through those maneuvers. That’s all we’ve been talking about since we secured from General Quarters.

  “I might add that the crew knows this, too, or at least they suspect it pretty strongly. Our sonar people are awfully sharp, you know. They’ve had too much experience with all sorts of electronic targets and with other attack submarines in drills. They know damned well that we fired at another submarine and that we hit it and they have to know that the other submarine was a Russian.

  “The Chief of the Sonar Gang told me that the target was so sophisticated that its sonar operator hit his transmitting key after the missiles impacted on the surface to try and throw off the missile electronics. That’s exactly what the Chief would have done if he heard missiles hitting near us, he would have keyed his transmitters at full decibel rating.”

  Captain Reinauer nodded his head. “I know,” he said. “But I’ve disobeyed a direct order from ComSubLant in telling you what we, the XO and myself, knew before we arrived on station. All I’m asking you is to keep it to yourselves. As far as the crew is concerned, keep up the pretense that it was a very sophisticated target that we fired at.”

  Lieutenant Reiss looked steadily at Reinauer. “Are we at war, sir?”

  “Not that I know of,” Captain Reinauer said. “I think that if we were at war all ships on station and in port would have been notified. There would have been messages for the ballistic missile submarine to unlock their missile safeguards. There have been no such transmissions. I don’t know what this is all about, I don’t know why the Russians sank the Sharkfin but I do know that we have avenged Sharkfin.”

  Down in the Orca’s torpedo room Turk Raynor had supervised the loading of two SUBROC missiles into the torpedo tubes. He turned to one of his torpedomen.

  “Old Man and the officers ain’t sayin’ nothin’ but I’ll bet a payday that we didn’t fire at no damned electronic target. Did you hear the Sonar people talking over the phone circuit? Damned target was maneuvering at forty-five, fifty knots, jinking all over the fucking ocean.” He turned as Lieutenant Reiss came into the torpedo room.