Red Heat by Nina Bruhns Read Free Book Online Page B

And reinstate his rightful command.
    Da . Things were definitely looking up.
    Both figuratively and literally.
    Standing in the central command post on Ostrov ’s main deck, Nikolai glanced skyward through the conning tower’s barrel trunk to the round patch of misty gray that sat heavily above the open hatch. The chilly bite of the northern summer air blasted through the opening, and he could see the mad flutter of his starpom ’s long black coattails snap back and forth across the narrow cockpit. Nikolai grabbed his greatcoat from a rating who rushed up with it, along with his wolf fur ushanka , which only came out for trips up top. It wasn’t really that cold, but wearing the fur hat was his private tradition.
    “Permission to come up to the bridge,” Nikolai called to the starpom —his executive officer, Captain Third Rank Stefan Mikhailovich Varnas, who was currently serving as officer of the deck. As OOD, Varnas held the conn as well. After clearing Avachinskaya Bay, Nikolai had gone below to make sure his passengers were comfortable and his crew was settling into the routine. This was their first real patrol together.
    With a severely reduced contingent of less than two dozen of the usual fifty-two men, and being a strictly scientific expedition rather than a military one and carrying no weapons on board, he’d had to do some shuffling of assigned duties. In the Russian navy, men stayed at one post for life. But not on this patrol.
    There’d been grumbling. Until, that is, Nikolai had given orders allowing everyone four hours on duty followed by a full ten hours off. Unconventional, yes, but it had immediately and dramatically improved morale and ensured the men’s loyalty.
    If that made him a rogue, so be it.
    “Come on up,” Starpom Varnas called down. “Hope you brought your ushanka , Kapitan . The wind from the north is a screaming bitch today!”
    With a grin, Nikolai checked that his coat was buttoned up and fur hat was snug on his head before he ascended the ladder. Stefan Mikhailovich had been transferred from a cushy post on the Black Sea, and he hated the cold breezes of the Arctic latitudes. He’d ended up here because he, too, was on the Main Naval Command’s shit list.
    Of course, so were nearly all the others among Ostrov ’s crew—the three other officers and five senior enlisted and petty officers, and all but a few of the ten ratings. Official Disfavor was the running theme, the reason they’d all been mustered onto this assignment. It reminded him of an old American war film he’d once seen where a platoon of navy misfits was sent out on a garbage scow to deliver a spy to a remote outpost in the Pacific. The parallels were ironic. He only hoped his own ending was as good as Jack Lemmon’s.
    Passing the midpoint landing and bypassing the small flying bridge compartment, Nikolai climbed up the ladder and into the cockpit at the top of the sail. He braced himself against a hard gust of wind as he clipped his safety harness to an attachment point at the rear of the bridge. The storm was still active, making the sea choppy and unpredictable. Normally on the sail they didn’t bother with the harnesses, but during a storm he had given orders that safety procedures be strictly observed.
    He made a quick scan around the horizon, nodding to the rear lookout posted at the aft of the sail, then asked the starpom , “Anything to report?”
    There shouldn’t be, not just an hour out of their sheltered home bay, but with this old tub he figured it was best to ask. After the fall of the Soviet Union, everything run by the government had descended into chaos and disrepair, nothing more so than the navy. Rusting, rotting ships and submarines littered every naval yard in the country, abandoned for lack of funds for upkeep or even proper disposal. The ships and boats left in service were hard-pressed to obtain needed spare parts or even the most rudimentary of required instrumentation. It had been