by Nina Bruhns
“Julie, eh?” Edwards said with eyebrow still cocked. “Interesting development.”
“No. It’s not.” She glared at Nikolai’s retreating back. “The captain assured me he’ll be a perfect gentleman.”
Edwards’s gaze slid to the front of her coveralls, pausing on the gold Cyrillic lettering on its left side. His steady grin didn’t fade one iota. “Yes, I can see he already is.”
It was her turn to blink. “Excuse me?”
“The name on your poopie suit.”
Poopie suit? She creased her brow, then realized he meant her coveralls. She glanced down at her chest. “What about it?”
“Has anyone on the crew seen it?”
“Sure. Probably all of them. Why?”
“It says ‘Commander Nikolai Romanov.’ You’re wearing his uniform. Therefore, there isn’t a man on this boat who doesn’t know he’s your . . . protector.”
She felt her face flood with heat. He had got to be kidding. Her hand went instinctively to her chest to cover up the name. Then she realized the futility of the gesture and dropped it.
Awkward. “My suitcase was . . . uh, lost . . . when I came aboard.”
“So I heard.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “Tough break.”
“No freaking kidding.”
“I’m sure we can scrounge up some more duds for you. Meanwhile, it’s not such a bad thing to be under the skipper’s protection.”
She made a face. “Are submariners really so dangerous that a woman on board needs protecting from them?” she asked jokingly.
“Submar-ee-ners,” he said, correcting her pronunciation. Right. She’d forgotten about that quirk of pride. Something about them not being “sub” to anything, especially not marines. “And yeah, I guess we do have a bit of a reputation with the ladies,” Edwards admitted with another laugh. He leaned in conspiratorially. “But it’s the scientists you really gotta watch out for. They might look like nerds, but they’re Europe-uns,” he said, drawing out the last word, “if you know what I mean.” He winked.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she drawled.
Just then she noticed that the two men sitting across the table from them were listening with interest to the exchange. Wonderful. So now everyone knew her business.
“Hi,” said the one with short black hair, bronze skin, and an exotic look to his dark eyes. He stuck out his hand. Around his wrist was a woven leather thong with something carved in ivory hanging from it. Native American? “Clint Walker. I’m the UUV driver.”
She shook it and introduced herself, recalling him from her briefing papers. He was the other ex-navy man, in his late thirties—much too young to be retired. The file was silent on his current occupation, but on this expedition he’d be running the two remote undersea vehicles the team members would be using to gather various types of samples. Not unlike the kind of UUV that utilized the Chinese guidance system contained on the hidden SD card.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Walker,” she said.
“Clint, please.”
The second man also put out his hand. “I’m Dr. Joshua Stedman. Call me Josh.” Josh of the ice sheet melt, sea ice, and ice floes specialty. He looked very young, maybe mid-twenties. Canadian. And a bit . . . awestruck?
She gave his hand a firm shake. “Julie Severin.”
“Girl,” he declared, leaning in dramatically, his eyes wide, “how did you manage that so fast? That man is to die for. I am totally jealous.”
Clint and Edwards exchanged a look. Clint edged a fraction away from Josh.
Julie almost choked. “No need. I’m just sharing Captain Romanov’s stateroom. I believe it’s called hot-bunking. And it’s not what you’re thinking.”
Josh made a solemn face. “And I totally believe that.”
She wanted to groan.
“Who cares if it is?” Edwards said with a good-natured shrug. “It happens. No one’s business but your own.”
Good grief. Just kill her now. Please.
Luckily she didn’t have to respond further because Professor Sundesvall stood again and started the team in on their intros. Julie pulled out her notebook laptop and started typing away as each one spoke, taking down the details that weren’t included in the briefing files she’d been given. No one looked twice. Being a reporter truly was the perfect cover for this operation.
Now all she had to do was come up with a plan for how to locate a piece of the submarine called the “crown” so she could locate the hidden data storage card. Good thing she had a clue. Otherwise it would be nearly impossible to find it among the insane conglomeration of pipes and instruments.
The size of a thumbnail, the microcard would be harder to find than a needle in a haystack. A task made even harder because people would be occupying every available inch of space on the sub as they worked on their projects, and therefore able to observe every move she made. Especially now that she and the captain would be the topic of rampant speculation and shipboard gossip, she’d be under intense scrutiny. But somehow, she had to find that SD card without anyone becoming suspicious. Except that Nikolai already was. More than suspicious. He knew she’d been sent here and by whom.
But did he know exactly what she’d come looking for? Guessing—or even being certain—she was a spy was a far cry from knowing her actual mission.
Damn it! She had to find out how much he really knew about what was hidden on board his boat.
But how? It wasn’t like she could just walk up and ask him. Even though he’d already confronted her, she could never admit what she was or why she was here. Not aloud. Not ever.
She knew better than anyone what happened to American spies caught operating in Russia. They were killed. Murdered by the notorious FSB security service. Cut down on the street, brutally and without pity.
As her father had been.
Julie’s heart squeezed painfully at the memory of her father’s death when she was just twelve. She stopped typing for a moment, closed her stinging eyes, and took a deep, steadying breath. Pushed the memory back where it belonged . . . as the inspiration for her fierce dedication to her job. Not as the source of her life’s biggest sorrow.
“You okay?” Rufus Edwards whispered.
She popped her eyes open. “Yeah,” she said. She plastered a wry smile on her lips and lied. “Just a touch of seasickness. The whole ocean thing . . .”
He nodded, but his concern didn’t entirely melt away. “If you ever, you know, need anything . . . to talk or whatnot . . . just give me a holler.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that,” she returned gratefully, suspecting a deeper, fatherly message in his offer. “But I’ll be okay. Honest. And thanks.”
“We Americans got to stick together,” he stage-whispered with another disarming wink. “All these darn foreigners around.”
Young Dr. Josh pretended to bristle. “Hey!”
“Shit, not you, Doc,” Edwards told him with a laid-back grin. “Hell, y’all up in the Great White North are as American as we are.”
“God forbid,” the Canadian said with only half-mocked horror, and everyone laughed.
Everyone except Clint. His dark eyes searched Julie’s for a moment, then slid away to the female scientist at the next table who was beginning to speak about her project.
A sudden chill trickled down Julie’s spine. She wondered what the UUV pilot had been thinking about to cause such a harsh expression.
Probably nothing relevant, she told herself. How could it be? No one on the submarine knew her true reason for being there. Even Nikolai was only guessing.
She hoped.
Maybe Clint Walker just didn’t like her fraternizing with the Russian commander. Though why he’d think it was any of his damn business, she couldn’t guess.
Not that she disagreed. She didn’t like it, either. None of it . . . Not that Nikolai suspected her of being a spy. Not that he’d essentially blackmailed her into sharing his stateroom—for purposes she suspected ran far deeper than just w
anting to get lucky. And not that Nikolai was Russian—the one nationality she would never, could never, accept as a friend, let alone anything more.
But she especially hated the fact that, despite all the very compelling reasons to doubt and despise Nikolai Kirillovich Romanov, she was still attracted to him. More than she wanted to admit. To herself. Certainly to him.
It was exactly the kind of dangerous, insidious attraction for the enemy that her CIA training had warned her about, over and over. An attraction that could easily cost her the mission and jeopardize her country’s security.
An attraction that could threaten her very life.
Somehow she had to fight it. And win.
If only she knew how. . . .
5
She was taking photos.
Or was it videos? Nikolai couldn’t tell what kind of camera Julie was using. They all looked the same these days. But whatever it was, the images she was capturing were fairly puzzling.
He’d been observing her for the past half hour, hanging well back as she wandered through the rabbit warren of the motor and engineering spaces at the rear of the submarine pretending to take pictures of the scientists and crew. In reality, she was aiming her lens at every piece of Ostrov’s pipes, instruments, and hardware, as well as the small metal plates that labeled them.
The entire boat had been stripped of any sensitive or classified equipment, so it didn’t really matter what she was taking pictures of. But labels? Surely, after forty years the Americans had plenty of detailed photos and schematics of Project 636 Kilo-class submarines and all the equipment on board. As vessels went, Ostrov was a limping dinosaur. What could possibly be Julie’s purpose in photographing these things?
“Shall I take one of you?” he asked, coming up behind her and grasping the camera.
She spun, surprise letting it slide from her grip. “What? Oh, no, I—”
Too late. He’d already started shooting. “Smile, dorogaya. No, smile, love. Not a frown. Yes, like that.”
“Nik—”
“I love your outfit, by the way. The blue coveralls with those red high heels, very fetching. You must e-mail me your photograph so I can put it on my Facebook page.”
Her eyes widened incredulously. “You have a Facebook page?”
He took another photo and gave her a dry look, murmuring, “For an intelligence officer, you are very gullible, dorogaya.”
“Why do you keep calling me that?” she asked. “What does it mean?”
“Surely you know what an intelligence officer is.”
“No. Dorogaya,” she ground out, trying to snatch her camera back.
He blocked her hand. “Just a term of affection. It means darling, sweetheart.” He pressed the button on the camera to change the setting to “view” as she grabbed at it again. “Stop. First I want to see. Is this still or video?”
“Both,” she muttered. “And I’m not your—”
“Ah. I get it now.” He flipped through several of the photos she’d taken. Nothing looked of any interest whatsoever. Just jumbles of pipes and stretches of metal equipment housing, with the name of each clearly visible. He shook his head. “You have a very peculiar sense of subject matter, milaya.”
Her cheeks flushed. “You need to use my name, not terms of— People will get the wrong idea.” This time she succeeded in snatching the camera away from him. “And for your information, I’m taking pictures for a friend of mine. She’s an art photographer and thought it would be cool to mix Russian and Ameri—” She saw the look on his face and abruptly snapped her mouth shut.
He weighed her answer. Art photos? It was just dumb enough to be the truth. However, the U.S. government would hardly have sent her here for that.
“Really?” he queried skeptically, pleased that he was flustering her. “That’s the story you’re going with?”
Her jaw set. “What do you want, Captain Romanov?”
“I want you to call me Nikolai.”
She glanced around. Several of the crew had turned at their lengthy conversation and were now watching with avid curiosity. “That would be inappropriate.”
He lifted a shoulder. “You are wearing my clothes and sharing my bed. I think calling me by my first name will not make much difference to anyone’s opinion.”
Her pretty lips pressed together. “Don’t you have a submarine to run or something?”
He tutted. “Always trying to be rid of me.”
“Shame you don’t seem to take a hint.”
He suppressed a smile. She liked him. He could tell.
“Actually, I’ve come to find you,” he said, seizing on an impromptu idea. “To ask if you’d like to come up on the bridge with me.”
“The bridge? You mean the room where you steer the ship?”
“Boat.”
“Whatever.”
“But no, that is the central post, on the main deck. The bridge is up on top of the sail.”
There was that incredulous look again. “Submarines have sails?”
He grinned and shook his head. “Nyet. The sail. The fair-water. The conning tower.” When she still looked blank, he drew the profile of a sub in the air with his finger. “The big thing that sticks out of the top.”
“Oh.” Comprehension dawned. She perked up. “It’s also called the crown, right?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of. There are actually two bridges, the bridge and the flying bridge. The bridge is on the very top, up in the open. The flying bridge is a small compartment in the conning tower just below, with windows for a lookout to be posted. No crown.”
“Oh.” For some reason that seemed to disappoint her.
“So how about it?”
“What?”
“The bridge. With me.”
“Wait. You’re asking me to go up there?” She shook her head vigorously. “Good God, no. Thank you.”
“It’s still a bit windy, but the sun is finally out and shining off the ice. It’s a beautiful sight no one should miss,” he tempted.
“I’m sure it is, but . . .” She couldn’t finish her excuse.
“You’re afraid of the ocean,” he completed for her with a solemn nod. “I heard you tell the master chief.”
“Yeah. Silly, I know.” Her cheeks colored again. It was charming how she kept blushing. Not at all like a hardened shpion.
“I understand,” he said. “Still. Eventually you will have to forget your fears and go up there.”
She snorted softly. “Hell, no. Not gonna happen.”
He regarded her curiously. “Then how are you going to file your stories?”
Her forehead twitched. “What stories?”
“To your newspaper, or magazine, or whatever it is. You are a reporter, da?”
She blinked. “Yes, of course I am.” She cleared her throat, looking peeved. “But, um, freelance.”
There. He’d caught her. A transparent lie. Obviously she hadn’t considered that little detail. “I assume you didn’t lose your satellite phone with your suitcase?”
Hesitantly, she shook her head. “No. I still have it.”
“Well, the only place it will work is up on the bridge. The rest of the boat is too well shielded to get any kind of signal.” He shrugged.
She said a bad word under her breath.
He smiled. “Change your mind?”
She tipped her face heavenward. “God, give me strength.”
“It’s not so bad,” he assured her. “You’ll have a safety harness. And me. I’ll hold you tight.”
She glared at him. “Are you always this persistent, Captain Romanov?”
“Nikolai. And yes. At least, regarding a woman I want. And my career, which I wish to keep.”
She huffed out a breath. “And which category do I fall under?” she asked tightly.
He suddenly felt a lot more in control of this whole situation. Finally, a battle he was winning.
He smiled benignly and answered, “Both.”
Unfortunately, that sense of control did not last long.
“I’m sorry, Nikolai,” Julie said. “I’m just not up to it.”
Nikolai wasn’t sure to which part of the equation she was referring, personal or professional, or if she was back to the invitation. Before he could ask, the 1MC came on with a squeal of static.
“This is Dr. Sundesvall,” the main overhead loudspeakers announced scratchily. “Mr. Edwards has received a hail he thought you might all enjoy hearing.”
Nikolai frowned at the breach of protocol. “What the—”
Of course, why should this be any different? This whole poganaya patrol was one giant breach of protocol as far as he was concerned.
The air was suddenly filled with the eerie sound of a plaintive, foghornlike call. Instantly Julie broke out in a huge smile.
“Whales!” she exclaimed. Her entire face transformed with pleasure. It had been pretty before, but now it was glowing. So beautiful!
All along the length of the submarine, cries of delight were heard from the scientists and crew alike.
Earlier, when the American master chief had requested to launch his towed sonar array, Nikolai hadn’t realized it was in order to listen in on wildlife. On his previous commands, the sonar techs had been too busy tracking U.S. and Chinese submarines to bother listening to cetaceans. He had to say, it made for a nice change. He’d always liked the mysterious-sounding love songs of the whales. Protocol be damned.
Nikolai grinned. “Humpbacks.”
Julie glanced at him, looking impressed. “You can tell?” “One can’t be a submariner and not have heard whalesong. Humpback calls are fairly easy to recognize. Although unusual this time of year . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Fall and winter are more common. The males sing when they want to mate.” He waggled his brows.
She rolled her eyes. “Lord, you have a one-track mind.”
More like two-track. But who was counting? “Hey, it’s just what I’ve read,” he protested with a laugh. “At least you needn’t worry about going up on the bridge,” he added. “It’s probably overflowing with folks trying to catch a glimpse of him.”
They stood and listened for a few minutes, then made their way forward to the sonar shack for a peek at the monitor. Nikolai followed her, trying not to get distracted by those sexy red high heels.