At Romanov’s insistence, Pacino had terminated his lease and gone in with Romanov and three other of Vermont’s officers on a four-bedroom house near the beach, their roommates Dieter Dankleff, Mohammed Varney, and Duke Vevera. Romanov had claimed the master bedroom by virtue of being the senior officer, Pacino taking the room next door that shared the common master bathroom, Vevera and Dankleff down the hall, with Varney taking the makeshift bedroom in the basement. Vevera had christened the house “The Snake Ranch,” the time-honored term for a Navy bachelor pad, presumably due to lonely “snakes” inhabiting boxer shorts. Romanov had objected, what with a female as one of the roommates, but the name had stuck so hard that even the captain and executive officer — the XO — had taken to referring to the house as the Snake Ranch.
There had undoubtedly been speculation as to the relationship between Pacino and Romanov, but they remained platonic friends. At least she told herself that. There had been a drunken ship’s party after Operation Panther wrapped, and the two had shared a momentary embrace that led to a short but intense affair, but Romanov had recovered, realizing that she was on the rebound from Bruno and her jangling nerves only now calming from the Panther run. She’d already lost her marriage, and she’d be damned if she’d also lose her career for having a romantic relationship with a fellow officer on her submarine, a more junior officer at that. Besides, she was eight years older than Pacino, and any fling they would have would eventually, inevitably end. She’d go on to the next assignment, hopefully as an executive officer of a submarine, Anthony would go on to be a department head, and there was no guarantee they’d even be on the same coast on those future assignments. The certainty was that if a relationship ever started, its ending would be embedded within it, and that was no way for either of them to live, she thought.
It occurred to her that since she was his roommate, she might have to suffer seeing him meet and date another woman, and she knew that would bother her. She reminded herself that there were even bigger issues. Even in the oddball fantasy that they started a relationship, and for the sake of argument, it became serious to the point that she’d quit the Navy to be a wife, she couldn’t become a mother. Her sterility had stressed her marriage with Bruno, who had desperately wanted a son, and had wanted her to stay home to take care of the baby. Old-fashioned, she knew. She’d actually agreed with Bruno, but nature had had different plans. Two years of fertility treatment had gone nowhere. So it was hard to believe young Pacino would want to end up with a barren woman who couldn’t give him children.
Pacino’s voice startled her out of her thoughts.
“Training run, maybe,” Pacino said.
“Say again?” Romanov said, bringing herself back to the mission.
“Maybe Belgorod is just going out for training without the deep-diver sub. Maybe he’ll shoot some exercise torpedoes or conduct maneuvers with the surface fleet.”
“Maybe he’s headed out to rendezvous with Losharik to see if they can dock submerged, undetected. The op-brief mentioned that they haven’t tried that yet.”
“Could be,” Pacino said.
Pacino stole a glance at the navigator. Lieutenant Commander Rachel “Dominatrix Navigatrix” Romanov was tall and slender, only a few inches shorter than he was. She was compellingly beautiful, with nearly perfect features. She had wide brown eyes that could peer all the way into someone’s soul, he thought. Her shining long dirty-blonde hair came down past the middle of her chest, although today she’d put it in a ponytail. He’d met her at a ship’s party the day he’d reported aboard Vermont, and in that moment he’d been so stunned by her that he could barely speak. People always talked about the lightning bolt striking when meeting a soulmate and he’d always maintained that was ridiculous. There were no lightning bolts and there was no such thing as a soulmate. But after laying eyes on Rachel Romanov, Pacino began to understand.
