Sundesvall nodded. “There’s your answer, Captain. Let’s stay on the surface.”
“Very well, I’ll give the order,” Nikolai said with some relief. In the month since he’d been transferred to Rybachiy Naval Base,
Ostrov
’s home port, he’d been so busy scrounging much-needed spare parts, and fixing what they couldn’t get, that he hadn’t taken the boat through more than a few limited safety evolutions in the Sea of Okhotsk, testing the new instruments, and newly welded seams, and fittings. The resulting leaks had been fairly easily repaired, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more serious issues waiting to spring on them at greater depths . . . so to speak. They hadn’t had time to dive to
Ostrov
’s maximum operational depth of two hundred forty meters to test the hull integrity.
Though technically, they shouldn’t be diving any lower than a very safe and cozy ninety meters—indeed, for more than half their journey the maximum depth of the Bering Sea floor would be less than fifty meters—one never knew. Salt water was notorious for eating away at the welds that held the steel hull plates in place and corroding the plates themselves. Project 636 subs had a life expectancy of about thirty years under the best of conditions. This one was at twenty years and counting, under some of the worst maintenance ever. He’d actually seen wooden timbers being used in the frames of a few hapless submarines being repaired that were surely destined for future disaster. It made his hair raise.
He’d informed his superiors of his grave misgivings about
Ostrov
’s readiness, but they hadn’t wanted to hear it. The practice runs had gone fine, hadn’t they? The international expedition was leaving as scheduled. Period.
And they’d called
him
negligent.
“Frankly,” he admitted now, “I’m far happier transiting on the surface until we’ve completed a deepwater fitness dive, which I plan to do while you are all ashore on Attu Island. God knows the last time this vessel was tested at any real depth. The Arctic is not the place to have an emergency.”
Dr. Juneaux paled, but the professor gave a half smile. “Trust me, we’re all grateful for your caution, Captain. And your cooperation. The CO on our last expedition was . . . let’s just say he was not interested in either.”
“Happy to oblige,” Nikolai said. “Dr. Juneaux, I’ll summon
Kvartirmyeister
Kresney to help set up your gear.”
“
Merci, Capitaine
.”
An hour later the whalesong had faded, the air sampling instruments were mounted on the sail, and Nikolai had made his tour of the central post and popped up to the conning tower bridge to be sure the underway was proceeding as it should.
Then he was once again free to devote a few minutes to tracking down his favorite
shpion
. Best check on what she was doing now.
He found her in the torpedo room chatting and peering at a laptop computer with Trent Griff, a tanned surfer-type from New Zealand whose specialty was coral reefs.
That’s when Nikolai made an unexpected, and uncomfortable, discovery.
He did not like the other man’s roving eyes on Julie, nor did he like the clear interest radiating from them.
Nyet
. Not one damn bit.
What the hell? Surely he hadn’t started liking the woman. He couldn’t possibly be
jealous
. But his uncharacteristic reaction told him loud and clear. He did. And he was.
За ебис. When had
that
happened? He had to be out of his fucking mind.
“These are incredible.”
Julie finished scrolling through the two dozen colorful photos of delicate corals and sponges on Trent Griff’s laptop computer for the second time. Every bit as gorgeous as more familiar tropical varieties, the formations were lavish orange, purple, green, and blue, in a multitude of fanciful shapes and sizes.
“I had no idea coral even grew in the Arctic.”
“Yep,” Griff said in his distinctive Kiwi accent, resting his ankle casually across his knee and playing with the end of his shoelace. “Pretty amazing stuff. Takes centuries to grow. And now bottom-trawling fishing boats are coming along and systematically destroying it all. These fishermen’s livelihoods depend on the fish, but what they don’t understand is that the fish are dependent on the coral gardens for their habitat.” He shook his shaggy head. “Kill the coral, kill the fish, starve the fishermen.”
Julie took more notes, seriously getting into her role as a reporter doing an exposé on the burgeoning environmental disasters of the Arctic. The public really should know about this stuff. “Sucks for everyone,” she said with a sigh.
“Yep.”
She returned the laptop to Trent. “So what specifically is your project here?”
“Taking more photos, basically. To support further research funding. You can talk yourself blue in the nose about these things and write a hundred scholarly papers, but two good pictures projected in living color are worth two million words. Show the magical coral gardens, get some oohs and aahs, then show the same garden the next year bulldozed by a trawler. Very effective.”
She winced. “Yeah. I’ll bet it is.”
“I can get you some before-and-after pix if you like. For your newspaper article.”
“That would be great,” she said, feeling uncomfortable for her semi-deception. What was her boss thinking, putting her in this position? He’d arranged to print the articles she sent him, but until this moment writing them had seemed more like an annoyance than anything. Suddenly this had become more than a cover to her. “So how on earth do you take photos that deep in the ocean? Surely you don’t intend to scuba dive in these frigid waters?”
Griff grimaced. “Nah, not quite
that
cold-blooded. I’ll be using the UUVs. One has a built-in digital camera that’s pretty fab, with cool filters and a special spotlight to shine things up down there.”
“Of course.” She glanced over at the torpedo racks where Clint Walker’s two UUVs were resting. They looked just like torpedoes, designed to be launched from the same tubes. Nikolai had said there weren’t any real torpedoes on board. Was that true? She didn’t see any, but they could be stashed away—
All at once she remembered she should be searching for the hidden SD card, or at least for the mysterious crown of the clue. She’d gotten too caught up in Griff’s photos. She stood and went over to the UUVs, touching the end of one gingerly. “Is this called the crown?”
“The cone, I think.”
“Do you happen to know where the crown of a submarine is?” she asked nonchalantly.
“Never heard of it. But then, I’m not a submariner. Strictly a passenger. Why?”
“Just ran into the term in my research. Wondered what the heck it was. Even Google doesn’t know.”
“Ask Rufus Edwards. He’s an old salt.”
“Yeah. Good idea.” If she could ever get him alone. The master chief always seemed to be in the middle of a crowd.
“Or Captain Romanov . . .”
“I’m sure the commander’s got better things to do than answer my stupid questions.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Griff ventured, jiggling his foot as he spoke. “So. You and the captain . . .”
“Not you, too,” she muttered and pulled out her camera. Obviously
nothing
was going to make these rumors go away.
“Heard you and he are hot-bunking it.”
Especially when they were true. Technically. “Yes, well,” she said, “I haven’t gotten in his pants yet, if that’s what you’re asking. So go for it. He’s all yours.”
Griff’s eyes bugged out. “
Hell
, no. That’s
not
what I mean—”
She
so
did not want to know what he
had
meant. She interrupted, “Can you tell me how these things work?” She pointed at the UUVs.
“Hey, that’s
my
job,” Clint said, stepping through the watertight door into the compartment.
Griff glanced at him and summoned a smile that appeared almost genuine. “Be my guest, mate,” he said.
Walker gave him an assessing look, but smiled cordially back.
Julie started snapping pictures of the UUVs and the labels around them. It had been her idea to load special software into her notebook computer that would be able to digitally analyze the photographs and detect and identify the tiny SD card in the mass of unfamiliar pipes and instruments much more efficiently than she could with her own eyes. Her boss had been impressed with the idea and given the okay. Frankly she didn’t know how she would have been able to pull this off without it.
“So how
do
the UUVs work?” she asked Clint.
“Mind if I listen in?” Nikolai’s voice sounded from the doorway as he, too, ducked in through it.
The two Russian crewmen standing at their posts moved aside and cleared a space for their captain when he entered.
Damn
, it was getting crowded in here. Julie could practically smell the testosterone flying around the cramped compartment.
“Sure thing, Skip,” Clint answered. “The more the merrier.”
Nikolai sauntered closer, nodding to his two men and to Trent Griff before propping himself against the torpedo rack.
“Well, to answer your question, Miss Severin,” Clint began, “UUV stands for ‘unmanned underwater vehicle,’ and these two are controlled remotely, from this console here, sort of like a wireless robot.” He indicated a setup that looked similar to the sonar station, with monitors and keyboards, plus several joysticks.
She listened attentively to his explanations as she casually continued to snap photos, squeezing in between and behind the racks and pipes, pretending to get interestingly angled shots of Walker as he demonstrated the controls.
Nikolai had chosen to stand in a place with a better view of her than of Walker. He watched her every move with a half-lidded gaze that made his interest seem very personal. But she knew better. He was carefully observing what she was photographing. To her, his suspicion was crystal clear.
But not to the others. Griff was giving them both the eye, a slight smirk curving his lips. It was crystal clear what
he
was thinking, too.
Damn it! She might as well just give up and sleep with the captain. Everyone thought she was doing it anyway. The way he followed her around playing the role of possessive lover to perfection didn’t help matters any.
At the thought, a frisson of unwilling arousal shuddered through her body.
Wait.
That wasn’t her, it was the
boat
shuddering!
All at once the deck tilted sharply to the left, throwing everyone off balance. She wheeled to keep from falling on her stupid high heels. In less than a second, Nikolai was there with his strong hands wrapped around her upper arms, holding her upright from behind. She opened her mouth to protest, but was cut off by what sounded like a giant sledgehammer striking the hull. A big ca-
lunk
reverberated through the deck right up into her bones.
Oh, my God. What was that?
She and Griff both froze in alarm. Clint paused and looked up but didn’t appear worried. The two crewmen didn’t even seem to notice. Behind her, Nikolai murmured, “Hold on. There may be more.”
“More what?” she croaked, fighting her instinct to wriggle free of his grasp. This was one time she didn’t mind his hands on her.
“Sea ice,” he said.
Another giant
clunk
resounded through the deck.
“Icebergs?”
she squeaked, looking over her shoulder at him, her pulse jumping madly. “This far south?” Visions of the
Titanic
sinking flashed through her mind. Good Lord, she hadn’t thought of
that
possibility. Great. Yet
another
danger to be paranoid about.
He squeezed her gently. “We’re on our way to the Arctic Circle,
dorogaya
,” he reminded her. “Just a few weeks ago this whole area was frozen over. Quite a few lingering ice chunks are still floating around on the surface.”
She shivered. And no, it
wasn’t
because his body was brushing up against hers. Well. Not completely, anyway.
A series of lighter bumps and clangs pinged through the sub. Panic started zinging in her veins, growing with every noise.
The overhead speaker came on and a voice announced something in Russian, then said in broken English, “Not to worry, everyone. Just little ice. Small pieces. We are past in minute.”
“See? Not icebergs,” Nikolai said. “And not dangerous.”
He loosened his hold on her and she quickly extricated herself. “But still,” she countered worriedly, “couldn’t one of them rip a hole in our side?” She turned to face him. He was watching her with a gentle smile. Like he understood how terrified she was of all this.
“It would take a very big piece indeed to put even a dent in our pressure hull,” he said reassuringly. “And a very careless lookout.” He reached out and tucked an errant lock of her hair behind an ear. “And if that did happen, which it won’t, there are two hulls, an inner and an outer one.
And
on top of that, this sub is made up of six watertight compartments. If the breach pierced both hulls and we couldn’t fix it, we could just seal it off. We’d be fine.”
She rubbed behind her ear where her skin still tingled from his touch. It all sounded so matter-of-fact when he said it. But the idea of all that freezing seawater rushing into the submarine and suffocating everything in its path terrified her. “Please promise me you won’t let that happen,” she pleaded. She had to work at not allowing her voice to shake.
“I promise,” he said, looking so sincere she actually believed him. And for a second, as she met his warm blue eyes, all her fears just melted away. He
would
keep her safe. Somehow she knew he would.
Which . . . upon closer reflection, was a patently absurd notion to have about a man bent on exposing her as an enemy spy.
Feeling flustered and chagrined, she glanced away and turned back to Clint Walker. “Okay, then,” she managed, determined to get hold of herself. “What were you saying about the UUV?”
One look at his disapproving face and she knew the former navy man had missed nothing that had just passed between her and Nikolai. What was his problem?
“I was pretty much done,” he said.
“Oh. Okay.” She regrouped, making a note to ask her boss to run a check on him when she called in. “So what project are you working on?”
Clint spread his hands. “This is it.”
“You don’t have a project of your own?”
“I wouldn’t have time to do one,” he replied. “I’ll be spending every minute either flying or prepping the two UUVs for the scientists. It’s a full-time job.”
All right. That made sense. “I’d love to watch one of the launches,” she said. “Would you mind?”
“Sure, anytime.” Clint glanced at Griff. “You’re scheduled for the first run in the morning, right?”
Trent Griff nodded. “Yep. First me, then Arja.”
Dr. Arja Lautenen from Finland, Julie recalled, was working on mapping solid pollution migrating into Arctic waters from the south. Things like plastic water bottles and foam coffee cups.
“We’ll be firing up right after breakfast,” Clint told Julie.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be there. Now I think I better go find Dr. Lautenen and get the details of her project.”
“Then I’ll be getting back to work,” he said. “There’s a ton to do before tomorrow’s launches.” He glanced over her head at Nikolai. “Skipper.” His expression was neutral, but she could feel the tension stretch taut between the two men as he turned away. What was going on?
Nikolai was still standing behind her shoulder. She felt his warm breath stir in her hair and wished it didn’t make her want so desperately to lean back against his chest. She had chosen her solitary lifestyle, deliberately avoiding romantic entanglements because of the nature of her work and her dislike of deception. Men who didn’t work for the Agency didn’t understand her reticence to talk about her job. And her male colleagues at CIA were either total geeks or men who had no problem lying to a woman’s face. No, thanks. She was pretty sure her mom had found the last honorable spy. And look where
that
had gotten her. And him.
Still. The loneliness was hard sometimes.
“Have you taken all the photos you need here?” Nikolai asked her.
“Yeah.”
But being lonely was better than the alternative.
She turned to leave, but he didn’t move. He blocked her path, and for a long moment he just stood there, an indecipherable look in his eyes as he gazed down at her. Almost like he wanted to say something.
But he didn’t. At length, he stepped aside and let her pass, then followed her out the watertight door. She walked past the control room, kicked off her heels and stuck them in her coverall’s pocket opposite her notebook, then climbed down the ladder barefoot to the deck below—praying she didn’t lose her grip and fall off. Nikolai was right behind her.
Putting her shoes back on, she went forward through another watertight door and into the narrow passageway that held the officers’ staterooms. When they were finally alone, she stopped and whirled around to face him.
“Do you plan on following me all day?”
He smiled. “Perhaps.”
“I want you to leave me alone,” she said.
“Yes, I know.”
“Good. Then I’ll see you later.
Much
later.”
He folded his arms across his broad chest. “Julie. On what planet do you live to imagine that I would let a spy roam freely around my boat without at least trying to ascertain what she is up to?”