The Outlaws (Presidential Agent 6)

[FIVE]

The USS Bataan (LHD 5)

The Caribbean Sea

2055 12 February 2007

Former Podpolkovnik Svetla

na Alekseeva was not in sight when Lieutenant Colonel C. G. Castillo entered the stateroom.

He was not really surprised. She had not spoken a word to him at lunch, then had spent the entire afternoon with the Spetsnaz somewhere below deck, presumably checking their equipment and seeing to it they understood their roles in the operation.

They had had a conversation of sorts at dinner.

“May I please have the butter?” she had asked him.

“Of course,” he had said. “My pleasure.”

“Thank you,” she had said, ending their conversation.

Now, alone in the stateroom, Castillo decided that she had run down the old chief and told him she had changed her mind about sharing his quarters. Earlier, Captain Lowe had shown him the Bataan’s sick bay—actually a small, fully equipped hospital—and while doing so, Castillo had noticed there were sleeping quarters for nurses.

She’s probably in one of those.

He took off his Walmart battle dress, and lay down on the lower of the two bunks the room offered.

I’ll take a shower at 0230, he decided, not now.

Taking one then will wake me up.

He closed his eyes.

“If you think we’re going to make love without you taking a shower, think again,” former Podpolkovnik Svetlana Alekseeva announced not sixty seconds later.

He opened his eyes. She was standing beside the bunk bed wearing a thin cotton bathrobe.

“Am I permitted to say I’m a little surprised?” Charley asked, after having regained his breath perhaps ten minutes later.

“In eight hours, the Venezuelans may have the both of us stretched out on a wooden table, the way your Green Berets stretched out Che Guevara,” Svetlana said. “I did not want to spend all eternity knowing that I had had the chance to spend my last hours making love with you, and threw it away.”

“Good thinking,” he said.

“Right now, I don’t like you very much—how dare you talk to me the way you did?—but I love you.”

He had a wildly tangential thought. “Where’s Max?”

She pointed.

Max was lying with his head between his paws on the stateroom’s small desk, nearly covering it, and looking at them.

“How long’s he been there?” Charley asked.

“He was sleeping under the bunk. But you were making so much noise, I guess you woke him up.”

[ONE]

The USS Bataan (LHD 5)