Panic Switch полностью

Counter to their expectations, upon returning to Moscow, the Navy had treated them as heroes, despite losing the battle and the submarine. For her quick thinking and action to save the ship, Trusov had been decorated with the Medal for Distinction in Combat, Type 2 Award. She had inwardly considered it ridiculous. Certainly, she’d saved the ship, but only for an hour or two. If one of the other officers had awakened first, he would have won the award, not Trusov. Other officers considered her humble, but she knew that she’d acted out of instinct and training, not some grand heroics.

From time to time, Irina Trusov’s mind returned to that young man she’d met on the Panther. If she were honest, she thought about Lieutenant Anthony Pacino a lot. He reminded her of her father. Intense, but so very kind. Kind and caring, even though, as American submariners, they had been out to sink and kill the Russians. Trusov’s opinions about the Americans changed that day. If life had been different, and Pacino had been born Russian or Trusov had been born American, she could easily see them being together.

But things were radically different now. Because here they were again, on a mission to deploy President Vostov’s Status-6 torpedoes, when an American attack submarine intervened and intended to stop them. When presidential orders came into the Belgorod to attack and sink the American, Trusov was of two minds. On the one hand, she wanted to win this engagement. The loss to the Americans in the Arabian Sea had been humiliating. On the other, she hoped their adversary weren’t the same Virginia-class sub they’d lost to in the Arabian Sea, not because she feared them, but because their crew had included Anthony Pacino.

As she waited for the detonation of the Gigantskiy torpedo, Captain Second Rank Trusov wondered what Anthony Pacino was doing at that very moment.

The blood had soaked through Anthony Pacino’s shirt. He followed Rachel Dominatrix Navigatrix Romanov into the master bathroom in the upstairs level of Jeremiah Seamus Bullfrog Quinnivan’s Virginia Beach house. The noise of the party roared from the basement, two levels down, the crew raucously celebrating the conclusion of the Panther mission. At the awards ceremony that morning, Pacino had been pinned with the silver star, but far more importantly, awarded his gold dolphins, the coveted emblem indicating that he was qualified in submarines, the dolphins pinned on by Rob Catardi, the commander of the submarine force. In the audience that day, Pacino had seen his father standing tall in a dark suit, sending him a rigid salute. It was the best day of Pacino’s life, and it was only the beginning, he thought.

The officers had all kidded Pacino that his dolphins were a gift, that he hadn’t been onboard the Vermont long enough to have earned them legitimately, but XO Quinnivan had shut down the teasing by promising that anyone who chose to could take a punch at Pacino’s dolphin emblem with the backing tabs removed, so that the sharp pins of it were all that kept them on his shirt. Pacino’s fellow officers and friends lined up to punch his dolphins, the hardest coming from Captain Seagraves. When Rachel came up to take her swing, she had just gently caressed his chest instead, and whispered in his ear that now that he was qualified, she couldn’t torment him anymore about him being a non-qual air-breathing puke, but that she’d find something else to tease him about. Squirt Gun Vevera stepped up to take his turn to punch Pacino’s dolphins, and Rachel had said, laughing, “Be gentle with him, Squirt Gun, he has delicate feelings.”

By then, with all the punches, the pins of the dolphins had made twin deep puncture wounds in Pacino’s chest, and Rachel had taken him by the hand upstairs to clean him up, borrowing a first aid kit and a shirt of Bullfrog’s from Quinnivan’s wife. She shut and locked the bathroom door behind them, pulled off his shirt, sat him down on the toilet lid, found a washcloth, and washed away the blood. She dried him off, then carefully disinfected and bandaged the wounds, putting Quinnivan’s shirt on him when she was done, leaving the long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned. She rinsed Pacino’s bloody shirt in the sink and cleaned the dolphins, handing them to Pacino. She sat on the rim of the bathtub opposite him and told him the news that she and her husband Bruno had broken up, that it had been a long time coming, but that the marriage was finally over. She wiped a tear out of her eye then, and stood from the tub edge and straddled him, her soft thighs warm on Pacino’s.

Her left hand stroked his hair and her right hand touched his cheek, her slim fingers soft and cool on his skin. He looked up at her, and she came close. He shut his eyes as her lips met his, her silky, soft, warm tongue in his mouth, making slow circles around his.

When she finally pulled back, she looked at him, her eyes shining brightly.