She could still hear her mother’s plaintive wailing all these years later. Irina had moved in with her father’s former first officer’s family, who were childless and lonely, and they finished raising her with affection, dealing with her lingering anger as best they could. Fortunately for Irina, she was the number one student in her school, and with that and the legacy of her father, she was accepted into the M.V. Frunze Military Academy in Moscow for undergraduate studies, then continuing her education at the Komsomol Submarine Navigation Higher Naval School, graduating first in her class.
At the age of 27, Trusov was still a virgin, the nastiness with her stepfather poisoning any chance of successful dating. At Frunze Academy, when she was a second-year cadet, she’d gone out for drinks with three other female cadets, and a first-year male had tried to slip something into her drink. When he wasn’t looking, she’d dumped it into the bar sink and gotten a fresh one, but she wondered what would have happened if he’d been successful in drugging her. Her mind had danced with the fantasy of dispatching him as she had with Borya, but she had walked away, and never seen a man romantically since. Some of the male cadets labeled her a man-hater, others frigid, and still others insisted she was a lesbian. She wasn’t, she knew, she just wanted to meet a man like her father.
She’d been assigned to the Project 971 Shchuka-B submarine K-154 Tigr as the sonar officer. Three years later, after a successful assignment, she turned down a shore duty teaching assignment at N.G. Kuznetsov Naval Academy to join the crew of the Pacific Fleet’s new Yasen-M class attack submarine K-573 Novosibirsk, reporting aboard as the weapons officer.
On Novosibirsk, she’d avoided the advances of the other officers, who obviously considered her beautiful — she’d grown out her hair again, but usually kept it tied up in a bun or a ponytail. There was not much she could do about her expansive chest or her bright blue eyes, but she avoided makeup and kept her mannerisms all business, shutting down all romantic approaches.
For a time she’d had a romantic admiration for Novosibirsk’s commanding officer, Captain First Rank Yuri Orlov, a trim, tall and handsome officer, but he was on the rebound from another woman, and hadn’t returned her feelings. It didn’t matter, since Novosibirsk’s mission became a horrible maritime disaster in the Arabian Sea in a freak confrontation with an American Virginia-class submarine that was hijacking the Iranian nuclear submarine Panther, which Novosibirsk had been charged with guarding and escorting, and had failed. An American cruise missile had nearly destroyed the ship, knocking out the entire crew, and the vessel was sinking. Trusov had been the first to wake, and had taken action to save the ship, bringing it to the surface, starting the emergency diesel generator, and ventilating out the smoke, but though the ship had limped on for a few hours, it was doomed. Eventually Captain Orlov had ordered the crew to abandon ship, and that was when the mission became surreal.
The escape chamber of the Novosibirsk, big enough to allow rescue of the entire crew, had successfully detached from the hull of the sinking submarine, and had rolled sickeningly in the swells of the Arabian Sea. To Trusov’s terror, the Americans had surfaced the stolen submarine Panther right alongside and taken them aboard, hostages and prisoners. Irina noted that before the sinking of the Novosibirsk, she had been as anti-American as anyone she knew. Captain Orlov had even scolded her for it at one point, saying that rage and hatred were illogical. She wondered how he would see her rage and hatred toward Father Borya, because that was certainly logical in her mind.
But as it turned out, the crew of Novosibirsk weren’t hostages or prisoners of the Americans. The Americans — dreaded and hated for decades — fed and clothed the Russians and repatriated them at the first opportunity, not even interrogating them. There was one officer in particular, an American Navy lieutenant, a stunningly handsome young man named Pacino, who had patiently spoken to Irina and calmed her down, insisting they weren’t taking the Russians prisoner, and who had fed them and escorted each of them to the showers and given them fresh coveralls and called for a hospital ship to treat their radiation-sickened engineering personnel, and to evacuate them.
