“And we can continue our other discussion,” he added in a low voice for her ears only.
So much for impersonal
.
Before she could set him straight, Romanov touched the brim of his uniform hat, turned, and strode away. He disappeared through a narrow opening in the seemingly solid maze of hanging pipes and crowded instrument panels that filled nearly every square inch of the claustrophobic space. It was as though the escape hatch ladder had deposited her in a closet cluttered with the debris of a hundred years.
Escape
. Now there was a good idea. She gazed up at the hatch and thought longingly of her pristine desk back at Langley.
A half second later Nikolai’s head reappeared amid the pipes. He gave one more unintelligible order to
Kvartirmyeister
Kresney, then vanished again, this time for good.
For a brief moment she really wished she spoke Russian. Understanding the enemy always gave one an advantage. In
The Art of War
, the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” She was fluent in three other languages. How hard would it be to learn one more? Then again, no way did she want those words in her head. She wanted nothing to do with the country that had killed her father. Not its language. Not its secrets. And
certainly
not one of its navy captains . . . no matter how sexy or awesome a kisser he was. Thank goodness she’d had the sense and fortitude to turn him down last night.
Sun Tzu had also said, “Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy.”
No damn kidding.
Already this mission was turning into a battle—of knowledge, of wits, of temptation. The lines had been clearly drawn between her and the attractive Russian navy captain. She just hoped to God she could keep up her resistance to him. Because as bait went, Captain Nikolai Kirillovich Romanov was far too enticing—and far too dangerous.
Julie followed Kresney’s stout, compact form into the same narrow passageway where Nikolai had vanished. The quartermaster slipped easily through a round opening that punctuated the end of the passage. She’d seen enough World War II movies to know this was one of the watertight doors that sealed off one compartment from the next in case of flooding.
Or sinking
.
The door was wide open, but seeing it was a rude reminder she was now several meters underwater, two thin, rusting husks of metal the only thing separating her from certain death.
Her chest squeezed, and she had to grab the hard edge of the watertight door to keep from sprinting back to the exit ladder and out of this nightmare.
When she didn’t follow right away,
Kvartirmyeister
Kresney peered back at her through the opening. Her panic must have shown in her face.
“Eto horosho,”
he told her in a thick accent. “Is okay. She is not pretty, but
Ostrov
is good boat. We do not sink, I promise.” He grinned. A young sailor hurried past, eyeing her skirt.
Jetting out a breath, she hunched down and stepped gracelessly over the shin-high threshold of the round opening. The top of the door ended at her chin. She was only five foot six, but she felt like an afghan hound climbing through an agility hoop—all long limbs and ten kinds of awkward.
Kvartirmyeister
Kresney was a gentleman and pretended not to notice. She decided she liked him.
They went through two more watertight doors, passing several instrument-filled side compartments, a galley with attached open dining room, and a dozen coverall-clad submariners busy at various tasks, before slip-sliding down another vertical ladder to the deck below.
“Three decks,” Misha explained. “Control room is on main deck. Now we are on lower deck, where are living quarters. Small deck below has batteries and such things. Not so nice.” He made a face.
Here they traversed a very narrow section of passage, the wall of which was punctuated by three real doors. The doors were made of metal, as was everything else on board the submarine, and painted yellow, which seemed to be the
Ostrov
designer’s favorite color besides dingy or rusty beige. Metal signs labeled each of the three doors in red Cyrillic lettering.
“Officer country,” Kresney explained. He opened the last door and gestured her in. “Here. Where you sleep.”
She stepped into the compartment.
Good Lord
. She’d seen bathrooms that were bigger! Into the microscopic room they’d somehow crammed a narrow bunk, a row of built-in cupboards above it, two tall lockers, a fold-down desk, and a pull-down aluminum sink, along with a wall safe and several communication devices attached to the scant inches of bare wall space left over.
On the plus side, most of the furnishings were done in honey-colored wood instead of metal. It was tiny, but nice. Nothing like what she’d expected.
“You make comfortable,” the quartermaster said, his
r
’s and
l
’s rolling like thick ocean swells, punctuated by the dip of throaty extra
y
sounds. “Officers’ head is down passage.” He pointed back the way they’d come. “We serve welcome lunch after two hours, but coffee always in mess for everyone. Okay. I go now to find . . .” He made blow-dryer motions with two fingers. “You need anything, you ask me,” he said.
“Da?”
She nodded. “Yes. Thank you,
Kvartirmyeister
Kresney.”
She must have mangled the pronunciation of his rank because his grin popped out again. “Please. Call me Misha. You most welcome,
Gospozhá
Syev’ryin.”
“Julie,” she said with an answering smile at his two-syllable-with-extra-
y
’s-stuck-in-there pronunciation of her name. She kind of liked it.
“Julie,” he repeated, his hazel eyes merry. “Beautiful name for beautiful lady.
Kapitan
very lucky man.”
She blinked. What?
Before she could correct any mistaken notions the quartermaster might have gotten about her relationship with his commander, he was gone, closing the door behind him.
Whatever. She let out a sigh and looked around the minicabin. Nice that she’d have it all to herself. She’d been warned how cramped submarines were, and to expect to share a cabin with two or three others, possibly sleeping in shifts. Maybe the crew had been instructed to give the best cabins to the passengers.
Last night she’d still been too shell-shocked about being sent on an actual field mission to meet with the scientific expedition team she was supposed to be covering as a reporter. She’d seen them gathered at a table in the hotel bar. She’d gone down there thinking a shot or two would calm her frazzled nerves and allow her to get some much-needed sleep . . . instead of staring at the ceiling all night struggling to get her irrational terror of the ocean in check before having to face it in the living, breathing flesh. But the only thing the alcohol had effectively deadened was her judgment—proven by her imprudent behavior with Nikolai Romanov. It hadn’t done a damn thing for her jittery sense of impending doom. Nor her ability to get to sleep.
At breakfast this morning she’d finally introduced herself to the others on the team and established her cover. They were an eclectic bunch, a mix of young and old, five men and two women, formidable academics and environmental scientists from a half dozen countries. There were even two retired U.S. military men among them. Several knew each other already, from previous expeditions, she presumed. They’d treated her with casual politeness but no real interest. She was merely there to observe their important work and inform the world of their findings.
Or so they believed.
And boy, did she ever wish that were true. But no. Julie’s presence on
Ostrov
was a bit more complicated than that.
Two days ago she’d been innocently delivering a report to James Thurman, her section chief at Langley, along with his boss, when he’d gotten a phone call about the undercover officer who’d originally been assigned to this mission. A car accident had put the man in the hospital. Thurman’s boss had taken one look at Julie and pointed his finger at her, and less than twenty-four hours later she’d been on a terrifyingly small charter plane taking off from Nome, Alaska, to some godforsaken place on the Russian coast across the Bering Sea, posing as a reporter writing about the international scientific team that was studying the effects of global warming on the Pacific Arctic. On a Russian submarine.
Wrong place, wrong time. Insanely wrong mission.
She’d never been to the Arctic, knew nothing about global warming other than what Al Gore had taught her, and hell, she’d never even
seen
a real submarine before now, let alone ridden in one. Okay, yeah, she’d had the standard CIA field ops training for undercover case work, but she’d opted out of that end of things after being sent on her first mission. Hel-
lo
? They’d started
shooting
at her! Didn’t matter that it had only been warning shots aimed over her head. Okay, over the head of the guy she was supposed to be meeting. Who could blame her for skipping the meet?
Nope. Everyone agreed, she just wasn’t cut out for the danger of case work. Or the subterfuge. Good grief, she even blushed every time she told a lie. Some 007 she’d make. Not.
Unfortunately, as her boss had pointed out when she’d balked at this assignment, she
had
been a reporter in her former life as a civilian. Her beat had been Asia, as it still was. It had been her insightful, in-depth articles that had caught the attention of the CIA and prompted them to invite her to join the China desk a few years back.
Which meant she also knew how vital it was to U.S. national security to recover the tiny data storage, or SD, card that, through an unlikely series of events, had been stashed somewhere on
Ostrov
by a desperate, now-deceased Russian double agent—a Rybachiy submarine naval yard worker based in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy—leaving only a one-word clue:
crown
. The SD card held top-secret plans for a breakthrough long-range guidance system for China’s newest unmanned underwater vehicle, or UUV. Information that was crucial the United States acquire, for the protection of the North American coastlines. UUVs were fast becoming the new submarines out there in the world’s coastal waters—except they were smaller, cheaper, more maneuverable than their big manned brothers, and therefore much deadlier. The government didn’t like talking about it, but they were becoming a huge security threat. This guidance system would put China in the front lines.
To find the miniature storage card hidden on
Ostrov
, all she had to do was figure out what this mysterious “crown” was. Something on the sub. Maybe even part of it. It
should
be close by. But good grief. She’d had no idea what a chaotic maze of confusing equipment, pipes, wires, and control panels made up the interior of a submarine. Finding the microcard would be like seeking out a particular, small seashell at the bottom of the vast ocean.
Talk about mission impossible.
She puffed out a breath and turned her attention back to the cozy cabin she found herself in. At least this part wouldn’t be so bad. The inside of the sub was surprisingly warm and toasty, so she’d finally stopped shivering. But she was still freezing in her wet clothes. And dripping all over the floor.
Kicking off her heels, she removed her sopping raincoat and hung it up to dry on a hook she found on the back of the door. Thank God she wouldn’t be needing a coat anytime soon. After securing the door lock so Misha wouldn’t accidentally walk in on her when he returned with the hair dryer, she slipped off her skirt and peeled her blouse off, looking around for a clothes hanger. She opened one of the tall lockers, figuring that was what passed for a closet.
She was right. Several dark uniforms hung neatly from the rod. Okay. That was weird. Had she taken someone’s room?
Behind her, the door handle rattled. Damn. It must be the
kvartirmyeister
returning already. “Hang on, Misha,” she called, casting about for a towel, or anything to cover herself with.
She heard a click, and the door opened. She swung around with a startled gasp. She felt her face go instantly hot. It wasn’t Misha.
“Nikolai! How did you—?”
The handsome captain stepped into the compartment, his large frame filling the space. “Miss Severin.” His gaze brushed over her nearly bare body, raising a whole different kind of goose bumps on top of the goose bumps she already had from the cold. He held up a key.
She jolted out of her inertia, grabbed the first uniform jacket she touched in the locker, and jerked it in front of her body. “What are you doing here? Get out!”
At the sound of approaching footsteps, he leaned his head backward to check who it was, then shut the door, locked it, and propped a negligent shoulder against the door frame. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. You see, this is my stateroom.”
“What?”
He tossed his large black captain’s hat, along with a small hair dryer, onto the bunk. “And this is my bunk. However”—he lifted a shoulder—“I am happy to share both with you.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he held up a hand. “It’s called hot-bunking. You sleep while I’m awake, and vice versa. Not together. Unless, of course . . .” This time his brow lifted.
Her jaw dropped. Was he
serious
? Suddenly his easy capitulation last night—and the stir his orders to Misha had caused earlier—made perfect sense. It was obvious what he had in mind.
Outrage swept through her. “You’re crazy if you think I’ll—
Hell
, no! Give me a different cabin.
Now
.”
“Stateroom,” he corrected, stepping away from the door and opening one of the cupboards above the bunk. “This is not a cruise ship.”
“Cabin, stateroom, I don’t care what you call it. I need to be somewhere else.”
Pronto.
She started to shiver again.
He pulled out a towel and handed it to her, then slid his uniform jacket from her fingers. “Well, we only have half a crew, so there are several empty racks around the boat,” he said, inspecting the jacket and brushing stray drops of water from the front of it.
The towel was too small to cover her whole body, but she did her best. “Good. Now please leave while I—”
“In the forward torpedo room, for instance,” he continued as though she hadn’t ordered him out, “since we’re not carrying any live ordnance on this patrol. Of course, you’d have to share the space with two of the male scientists.”
She scowled. “There has to be somewhere else.”
He pursed his lips. “Sure. Several racks on the lower deck—but, again, with the crew. And the engines.” He wrinkled his nose. “Not very pleasant down there. Diesel fumes.”
“I meant another
stateroom
,” she gritted out.
“Yes, well, that poses a bit of a problem,” he said. “There are only three other staterooms, and they’re all full.” He ticked off on his fingers. “My senior officers have one, the male expedition leaders another, and the last is assigned to the two scientist ladies. Everyone else is in general berthing.”
“Why wasn’t I put in with the other women?” she demanded, starting to worry.
“Only two bunks in that one. Until yesterday we were expecting a male reporter. I’m still not sure why he was replaced. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. But this is the only remaining bunk on the boat appropriate for a lady.”
She ground her teeth.
Of course.
She hadn’t thought about the injured field officer being a man. Irritated, she wondered if her boss had made the switch deliberately . . .
She didn’t know what to do. She certainly didn’t want to bunk in an open area with a gang of Russian sailors. But
this
arrangement was unacceptable. “You’ll have to sleep somewhere else, then,” she told him briskly.
Instead of answering, he reached for another towel from the overhead cupboard. “Turn around,” he said. When she didn’t react, he did it for her with a firm hand to her upper arm.