Seawolf Mask of Command (5 page)

She looked at his face and was immediately struck by two glaring anomalies. He was young, far younger than she’d expected. She knew he was currently serving an unprecedented second tour as commanding officer on the
Seawolf,
so she’d expected him to be in his mid-forties. Instead, he looked to be in his mid-thirties at most, his face almost boyish. The other oddity was his hair.

Submarine officers were noted and even rewarded for their conventionalism. Mustaches were considered taboo, and she’d never seen anyone with anything but closely cropped hair. Brodie didn’t have a mustache, but he did have the longest mess of hair she’d ever seen on an officer—any officer. Although not long by civilian standards, what shocked her most was its unkemptness. The bushy hair seemed to just spring from his head with the order of a haystack.

What did this mean? Her natural inclination toward analysis caused her eyes to linger on him, something she wasn’t supposed to do.

She caught herself staring at him in bewilderment, momentarily wondering if this was just another in a long line of practical jokes and hazing rituals she’d endured since entering the Navy. There was no way this man could be her captain. His face was strong, with sharp cheekbones, a square jaw and a crooked nose hinting that it had been broken some time in his past. Then she saw his eyes. Cold. Intense. Steel grey. They were staring back at her expectantly.

Kristen cut her eyes away from him, locking them back on a spot on the far wall. Once more she stood at rigid attention, dripping all over his floor and struggling to regain her composure. There was silence between them, and she briefly wondered how long she’d been standing there when he spoke. “Well?” he asked, apparently already annoyed with her. His tone was not harsh, nor was it friendly or loud. She’d expected him to raise his voice—the commodore had—but Brodie’s tone stayed conversational—a bit unemotional perhaps, but professional and firm.

“Good afternoon, sir,” she managed. “Lieutenant Junior Grade Kristen Whitaker reporting as ordered.”

He said nothing in reply. More silence. She assumed this was a ploy on his part to intimidate her. But Kristen didn’t intimidate easily. If she did, then she never would have made it this far. Instead, the silence allowed her to regain her composure and clear her head. Something about him had unnerved her at first, but the feeling had passed and she was again in complete control.

But the silence continued.

She could feel Brodie’s eyes upon her. Studying her. Analyzing her. Searching for the many imperfections she struggled to hide from the world. Behind her, she heard the barely perceptible breathing of the XO as he stood quietly. Kristen felt like a creature on display; she didn’t like the sensation. She resisted the urge to fidget as she felt a bead of water slowly work its way down her forehead and along her nose.

Great, the silent treatment. I’ve had worse.

“Stand at ease, Lieutenant,” he finally said in the same calm.

Kristen slipped into a modified position of parade rest, but didn’t relax. This wasn’t a joke. This was him. This was Sean Brodie, her captain. The man who would decide her fate aboard this vessel.

“I see the weatherman finally got it right,” he offered, still watching her as if he were a jungle cat sizing up his next victim. His tone stayed relaxed, but she had the distinct feeling it was the calm before the storm.

“Pardon me, sir?”

“The Navy Weather Station in Bangor forecast an eighty percent chance of showers today,” he said offhandedly. Still seated in his chair, he rubbed his chin thoughtfully, his appraising eyes never leaving her. “In the future, you may want to consider checking the weather, Lieutenant, and perhaps investing in an umbrella.”

As her uniform continued dripping on the tiled floor, she clenched her jaw, feeling more foolish by the second. She secretly chastised her fickle memory. Of the many things in her life she wished her perfectly ordered brain would forget, an umbrella hadn’t been one of them.

“Yes, sir.”

His right hand reached out toward her. “Your orders?”

Kristen had forgotten about the official orders still in her briefcase. She fumbled for a few seconds, trying not to spill its contents onto the cabin floor and make an even bigger fool out of herself. She removed her orders and record book then handed them over. He resumed his previous posture and went through her orders.

More silence.

She watched him methodically read through her orders as if searching for any flaw that might allow him to send her away. She assumed he—like everyone else—didn’t want her on board. As a result, she expected him to use any excuse to be rid of her. Just what game he was playing she wasn’t certain, but she wasn’t going to let him get to her. Over the past few years she’d become immune to the hazing, the ridicule, the taunts, and threats issued by her superiors and peers. But the silence was grating on her nerves. She listened as he slowly went through every page of her orders and then her record book.

After what felt like an hour, he set her record book and orders aside. He then leaned back in his chair with casual grace, his eyes once more falling upon her. She resisted the urge to wipe the rainwater from her chin.

“Why are you here?” His voice was barely audible, almost soft. Certainly not what she expected.

It had been so quiet in his cabin while he’d read through her orders and file, that the sound of his voice startled her. “Sir?” she asked as if she hadn’t expected the question.

He repeated himself, speaking a little slower and pausing between each word as if she were a child or hard of hearing, “Why…are…you…here?”

Painful thoughts flashed through her mind, and her jaw tightened. “To be part of something bigger than myself, sir,” she lied. It was a canned answer. Far better than the truth, and she assumed it would suffice. But she’d never been a good liar. She had many talents, but deception wasn’t one of them.

She stood blankly before him, and another agonizing period of silence ensued.

“I mean the real reason you’re here,” he explained after several moments of uncomfortable stillness.

Kristen hesitated again. The answer she’d given had been sufficient since her earliest days at Annapolis, yet here it had fallen short. She dismissed the possibility of honesty, knowing she couldn’t resort to it, but this caused her to hesitate, and apparently her captain saw something… a weakness he now wanted to exploit.

Brodie changed tack. He asked six questions in rapid succession regarding the ship’s reactor. No sooner did she answer one then he fired another, giving her no time to think, no time to truly develop her answers. They were relatively simple questions any graduate of Navy Nuclear Power School (NNPS) should know. Kristen answered each of them as fast as they were asked. But the rapidity of his verbal assault was unexpected and had somehow unsettled her. She suddenly felt like a first year midshipmen back at the Academy being grilled by a dozen upper classmen.

Then, without any hesitation in his tempo of questioning he again asked, “Why are you here?”

Again Kristen hesitated, no satisfactory answer coming to mind. Another pause of uncomfortable silence settled in the cabin. Kristen bit her lip unconsciously and heard the XO shift slightly behind her.

Once more Brodie unleashed a barrage of queries, each more difficult than the last. He gave her no time to think. Answers she hoped were correct rolled off her tongue. She felt herself struggling as the intensity and difficulty of the questions increased. After what seemed like an hour of grueling questions, he again asked, “Why are you here?”

Memories she’d successfully locked away for years threatened to overwhelm her. Her unflappable exterior, the thin façade of calm she’d created and cultivated over the years was crumbling. She could feel it. This man, this stranger and his cold, steady voice was trying to break her.

“I want to serve my nation, sir,” she managed, not believing it herself.

Apparently intrigued by her inability to answer such a simple question, the captain, who’d remained seated the entire time, now stood. He stepped to the side of her, his hard eyes boring into her. Once more, with the rapidity and grace of a jackhammer, he assaulted her with questions of ever increasing complexity regarding her job. She knew the reactor down cold, having actually taught at the Reactor Prototype School for a year as her petition for joining the submarine forces was considered.

Realizing he wouldn’t trip her up on the reactor, he pummeled her with questions about more obscure systems on board. Kristen could feel sweat joining the rain drops running down the small of her back as she answered question after question. Initially, she’d answered his questions confidently. Her incredible memory had been her shield, and she’d used it to protect herself from his intensity, but she felt her confidence slipping, her defenses weakening.

The interior temperature of the submarine was maintained at a comfortable sixty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, and she’d been a little cold in her wet clothing when she’d first entered his cabin. Nevertheless, she felt sweat on her forehead.

“Why are you here?” he asked. His voice hadn’t changed in volume or tone, but there was now an edge in it. Sharp. Cutting. Relentless. He was like a cat playing with a mouse, slowly torturing it. But, like before, Kristen couldn’t—wouldn’t—answer the question. No one would ever know, because no one could possibly understand why she had to be here.

Behind her, Jason Graves, the ship’s XO was no longer watching with amusement. He’d seen Brodie intimidate men with just a glance, a slight gesture of his hands, or with a few choice words. Brodie had never been a screamer or a man who liberally used profanity. Instead, Brodie possessed an ability to read people and discover their particular weakness, their specific ghost he could use to test them. Sometimes, he found the weakness after thirty minutes of questioning. But with this new officer, Brodie had discovered her Achilles’ heel immediately, and he’d shaken her from the very beginning. Whether or not Brodie had learned something during the normal research he conducted on all new officers, Graves couldn’t be sure. But what was certain was that Brodie now had the woman staggered, almost punch drunk.

It was obvious something was preventing her from answering the question he kept asking. It was an incredibly simple one, a question that any fool should be able to answer, and she was certainly no fool. Graves had seen her record and knew she’d been a Trident Scholar at the Naval Academy, an elite group of truly gifted midshipmen. Her file rated her IQ at over one hundred seventy, and she’d answered every one of Brodie’s increasingly difficult questions without fault, something Graves had never witnessed before. But he now watched, more out of curiosity’s sake than anything else, as Brodie continued.

“Come now, Lieutenant,” Brodie asked, “surely someone as smart as you knows why you’re here?”

Graves watched impassively as Brodie began to slowly circle her, almost as if stalking her.

“Why are you here, Lieutenant?” he asked again, his hard eyes seeming to see right through her. “Perhaps you think you’re the twenty-first century’s Susan B. Anthony?” he asked. “Are you going to start the next wave of feminism?”

Whitaker found her voice again. “No, sir! Not at all, sir.”

“What then?” Brodie asked and paused, still staring at her, watching every minute movement of her facial muscles. “Oh, I know what it is....” Brodie said accusingly, suddenly nodding his head as if in understanding. He leaned in close to her, the hint of a smirk on his face. “You want to be famous. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“No, sir,” she insisted. “I don’t care anything about that.”

Brodie rolled his eyes, clearly not believing her. “Come on, Lieutenant,” his tone was filled with doubt. “Your face was on the cover of
Navy Times
. Hell, you met the President and the First Lady. I watched it all on CNN.” He resumed circling her, but his critical eyes stayed on her. “I saw you seated in front of Congress testifying about how you’re being oppressed! How the whole world is against you! Those fools swallowed it all, hook, line and sinker, didn’t they?”

“That’s not true, sir,” she insisted, and Graves heard something unusual in her tone, something he’d never heard any new officer use toward Brodie: anger.

“Bullshit,” Brodie snapped crisply with a whip-like voice. “I saw you,” he reminded her. “The whole world saw you sitting there giving your pitiful little ‘woe is me’ tale to those congressmen. You enjoyed every minute of it. Didn’t you?”

Graves was beginning to feel a little sorry for her. He’d seen Brodie turn full-grown men into pools of emotional jelly, and for a few moments it seemed like Brodie had her on the verge of tears. Graves hadn’t been too happy about having her on board. It had nothing to do with her being a woman; he could care less about her sex. But the sub was on an incredibly compressed turn around schedule. Nearly a third of the enlisted men on board were fresh out of basic submariner training and were just learning the ropes. Added to these difficulties, the Commodore, the Admirals, and the CIA were screaming louder every day for the
Seawolf
to put back to sea, and they didn’t have time to deal with this “female experiment.” Now, despite the pressure they were all under, Graves was no longer comfortable watching Brodie’s almost brutal interrogation of her.

Brodie stopped circling and was now beside her, staring at her, watching for her reaction. Graves could see Brodie had made her angry and he knew it. She seemed on the edge of either breaking down or slapping him. Brodie looked almost curious as to which response she would choose.

Then, she turned her head to look at him. Her eyes no longer showed any hint of nervousness or intimidation, only cold fury flickering in her own icy glare. “Are you mad?” she asked him bluntly and turned her head back to look straight ahead.

Graves watched in fascination as a slightly pleased smile crossed Brodie’s face, knowing he’d hit his mark. Graves knew this was what Brodie had been waiting for. Not the prim and proper, well-rehearsed new officer, but the real person underneath the skin. Brodie was a fighter, and detested weak-kneed officers who were easily cowed.