Seawolf End Game (13 page)

“I’m sorry,” she offered, “it’s none of my business, sir.”

For the next few minutes, the wind and the sea were the only sounds reaching her ears. She regretted saying anything to him now, feeling she’d overstepped the line between them. But then he spoke, his voice calm as it normally was, but at the same time it sounded almost distant, as if he were somewhere far away. His face was shrouded in darkness except for his eyes which were still visible as he stared out into apparent nothingness. “My old man,” he told her, “was an oilrig worker. A roughneck, if you know the meaning.” Brodie glanced at her. She nodded without comment. “He’d go into the oil fields for weeks at a time and when he finally came home his favorite pastime, when he wasn’t swilling beer, was using my mother as a punching bag.”

Kristen could hear the pain lingering even now after so many years. His distant, almost ghostly voice continued, “By the time I was in junior high school he’d learned better than to do it in front of me. But every now and then I’d come home from ball practice and find her banged up pretty bad and him long gone.”

Kristen could feel physical pain within her as he told the story, empathizing with him, and wishing she could take some of his pain away. Without his saying it, she knew he was sharing a particular memory from his past he’d never shared with anyone else.

“One afternoon, I came home late. He’d been there. I guess there wasn’t enough beer in the fridge or some other foolish thing. Well, he’d beaten her so badly she was never the same.” Brodie paused for a few seconds, and she could almost feel him struggling to keep his emotions in check. He took a deep cleansing breath to calm himself before resuming. “She spent a few weeks in the hospital, but they said he’d caused some sort of cerebral something or other and after then it was just a matter of time.” He cleared his own throat and finished, “I lost her a year later during my first semester at the Academy.”

“I’m sorry.” Kristen could think of nothing more useful to say. Given a different time and place, she might have embraced him, willing him to lean on her. But that option was not available to her, despite how she felt. The walls of etiquette that they’d briefly allowed to slip between them had been rebuilt and she would not allow them to slip again. She’d convinced herself it was the best thing, the logical thing to do.

Brodie shrugged his shoulders and looked toward her, ending his tale with a perfunctory, “Anyway, I guess in too many ways I’m a lot like him.”

Kristen stood stoically, ignoring the chill wind and aghast at the glib way he compared himself to his wife-beating brute of a father. She carefully formed her words, trying to hide her emotions, “You,” she began sternly but paused as her voice cracked slightly. She felt her anger growing, and she forced calmness she didn’t feel into her voice. “You are nothing like that.” She swallowed her anger and allowed her sympathy to replace it. “Please don’t even think it for one second.”

Brodie didn’t appear to believe her, but he said no more about it, concluding a few moments later with simply saying, “Well, that’s my demon. I live with it every day and do my best to keep it locked away.”

Kristen heard his statement, but also heard a gentle invitation as well.

She’d never spoken about her father to anyone, not even the counselors who’d stayed with her until her mother came and got her after his death. Grief counselors and two different psychiatrists had tried to get her to talk about the event, hoping that through talking and venting her emotions of the terrible night, she might be able to find some release from the horrific images plaguing her. But no one had ever heard a word pass her lips regarding the long night when she’d sat calmly in the bathroom with her father’s body.

Could she tell him? Could she dare bare her soul to anyone? Even him?

No!

But no sooner had she determined she would stay silent about the subject, she heard herself speak, “My dad,” she whispered softly, “was a great guy.” It was a strange sensation as a part of her she had denied for too long began speaking. It was as if the rest of her was just an unwilling participant. “He took me sailing, hiking, backpacking; we did everything together whenever he was in port. He took me on base and gave me tours of whatever submarine he was stationed on. Some of my earliest memories are playing with some of his fellow shipmates on board. He was just wonderful.” She turned her face to the breeze, feeling it might somehow cleanse her of the grief and pain she’d carried for so long. “He was a chief petty officer and was gone a lot, and I guess the few months a year my mother had with him weren’t enough for her.”

Brodie watched her in the darkness. His sharp eyes upon her normally unsettled her, but she no longer felt the piercing gaze she’d always found so debilitating. “He came home from an Atlantic patrol and found out that my mother had left him.” Kristen paused for a moment, remembering the utter devastation on her father’s face when he learned his wife had deserted him. “I was staying with him for a couple weeks while they were going through the divorce. I knew my dad was hurting, but I didn’t know how to fix it. I thought it was my fault they were breaking up and really didn’t understand it… I mean, I always thought marriage was this permanent thing and parents stayed together forever. But I guess my mother didn’t quite see it that way.”

There was another long pause. She looked off into the black night, remembering every detail of the event as if it had just happened. Brodie said nothing, nor did he move. It was as if she weren’t even aware of him any longer as her soft, distant voice continued to speak to the wind. “I’d been at one of those day camps. You know the type where they have activities and swimming for the kids while their parents are at work during the summer.” Kristen hesitated as she felt the anguish rising up within her and the pain washing over her. But unlike the past, she didn’t fight it. She let the pain and anguish come. Her voiced cracked as she resumed, “I came home and saw my father’s car in the driveway and knew he was home. But when I came in the house and called to him… he didn’t answer.”

She could feel the same sense of loss come over her, the same feeling of confusion and fear, the sense of total loneliness she’d experienced on the terrible day so many years earlier. “I could smell something,” her voice was now barely audible, “a sickening, strange, metallic odor. It was like nothing I’d ever smelled before. It filled every room in the house.”

Kristen paused again, her thoughts remembering every detail of each room, seeing his lunch pail in the kitchen, a briefcase, a note on the kitchen table telling her he was sorry. “Then I went into his bathroom and found him…” she closed her eyes tight, trying to blot out the images flooding her thoughts. They were still too real, too painful.

She felt the gentle hands touch her side tentatively, and she leaned forward into the arms she longed to feel around her. Kristen felt the cold fabric of his foul weather jacket. The jacket was not zipped—he never zipped it up—and her head found the warmth of his uniform beneath as his arms enfolded her. She could feel the awesome strength lying just beneath the fabric of his uniform. But the raw power she’d seen unleashed on Fitzgerald was now just incredible tenderness encircling her with the promise of her never having to feel alone again.

Kristen felt her insides splitting open as the grief, the pain, and the sadness she’d always kept bottled up finally burst forth. And with the sudden outpouring of grief, the tears she didn’t think she could shed came in a seemingly endless flood. But along with the outpouring of pain for her father, came the rest of the emotional baggage she’d kept damned up for nineteen years. Raw memories of her mother drinking and leaving her alone for days on end, more recollections of being ostracized as a teenager because she was weird and unattractive, more tears for the torturous and painful years she’d spent fighting what felt like the whole world to serve her nation. Grief and shame for Chief Grogan and Alvarez, whom she’d left behind in North Korea. Their families wouldn’t even have bodies to bury. Two decades worth of bottled up pain and suppressed emotion came out in a great torrent.

Kristen trembled slightly as his arms held her gently. “He was just lying there,” she cried, “still in his uniform and staring at me.” She trembled as she struggled even now to make sense of it.

“Go ahead, Kris,” he offered warmly, “let it out. Just let it all out.”

“Why?” Kristen asked, her hands on Brodie’s chest. “I kept asking him why he did it. I wanted to know what I had done wrong. How had I made him so mad he would hurt me like that? I begged him to tell me, but he just stared at me all night…”

Kristen felt a gentle shudder in the man holding her and felt his arms tighten slightly, rocking her gently. “It wasn’t you,” he whispered understandingly. “It wasn’t you.”

Kristen cried into his chest until she felt there couldn’t possibly be any tears left in the whole world. But with each tear shed, she could feel her father’s memory releasing her from her self-imposed obligation to be good enough for him. Her whole life had been about trying to make up for what she’d failed to do to please him. She’d been forced to be the best. She had to not just be in the Navy but go to Annapolis. She simply couldn’t graduate or finish near the top, she had to be number one. She couldn’t simply serve, but she had to do the one thing she couldn’t do: be in the submarines he’d loved. She couldn’t let anything stop her from proving to her long-gone father she was deserving of his love.

How long the tears flowed she wasn’t certain, but he held her as the years of pent up emotion were released and with it the guilt for something she’d never done. Slowly the tears stopped and a blessed peace came over her. Only like no peace she’d ever imagined. She was finally free. Free of the self-doubt that ruled her life. Free of the constant need to prove herself worthy of a father’s love she’d never lost. The pain, the remorse, the regrets of so many years sacrificed no longer plagued her. She had cried it all away. She hadn’t realized the weight she’d been carrying until she was finally free of it.

She wanted to stay on the bridge with him forever. She wanted to ignore the rest of the world, to ignore their duty, ignore everything but him. She didn’t want to let go. She never wanted to let go. Her head rested against his chest as comfort she’d never believed possible engulfed her, filling her and chasing the demons away. But, the fantasy was one they couldn’t embrace. Kristen reluctantly moved her hands away from his chest, and as she did, he released her and slipped a clean handkerchief into her hands.

Kristen stepped back, feeling the cold walls of the bridge behind her and the icy wind against her face. The same errant lock of hair swept across her face, and she brushed it aside with one hand as she looked across the few feet separating her from the dark silhouette facing her. She briefly considered telling him what he’d come to mean to her. But although the physical distance between them was less than four feet, the chasm existing between who they were felt larger than ever.

Kristen loved him, but the love came at a terrible price. She could see him, she could be around him, she might briefly brush against him and catch his scent. But there would be—could be—nothing more.

“They’re going to think we fell overboard,” she muttered softly as she wiped her eyes free of tears. The brief, precious moment they’d shared passed. Whatever fantasy world she might desire was pushed aside by the cruel reality of their situation.

 He didn’t reply. Instead, he gave an understanding nod of his head. He then knelt down and lifted the hatch for her. Kristen saw the red glow of the tunnel and stepped toward it, bending down to the hatch.

“Watch your step, Lieutenant,” his voice was once again as cold and professional as it had been the first day they met.

“Yes, sir,” she replied dutifully.

K-335 Gerpa, Sea of Japan

S
enior Captain Andre Konolov was puzzled. He’d spent his adult life studying American submarine tactics. He knew their ships and senior officers. He’d read everything the Russian Navy had on their operations, and he was considered an expert on everything involving American submarine operations.

As captain of the
Gerpa,
the only
Akula III
class submarine yet built, Konolov had much to be proud of. His submarine was—in his opinion—the finest yet built by the Russian Navy and, he believed, capable of handling anything the Americans might throw his way. It was because of this fact that he was here. His boat had been dispatched to the Sea of Japan as part of the major deployment by Russian submarine forces around the globe. But unlike most of those submarines, his mission was more than quiet observation.

The
Gerpa
was here because the
Seawolf
was here.

Russian intelligence had reported the
Seawolf’s
presence when she’d arrived in Sasebo over a week earlier carrying a heavily damaged Dry Deck Shelter. The
Gerpa
had been redirected from her patrol area in the Sea of Japan to shadow the
Seawolf
when she left Sasebo. They’d waited patiently for the American boat to emerge, and he’d spied her hull number earlier in the day and began his careful pursuit. The challenge of taking on the American was one he welcomed. He knew the
Seawolf’s
characteristics and had even read an intelligence report on the American captain. A bit eccentric, Konolov considered the American commander to be like a cowboy in the American movies—a bit reckless. But the boat, like the captain, was considered the best the American Navy had, and Konolov was anxious for the encounter to test himself against the best. Regardless, Konolov was supremely confident in his boat and crew. He had the advantage of surprise, and was determined to latch onto the
Seawolf’s
acoustic signature and not let her go. He’d anticipated every move and planned his countermoves far ahead and had been certain he was ready for whatever the American tried.