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out of this nightmare.
    When she didn’t follow right away, Kvartirmyeister Kresney peered back at her through the opening. Her panic must have shown in her face.
    “Eto horosho,” he told her in a thick accent. “Is okay. She is not pretty, but Ostrov is good boat. We do not sink, I promise.” He grinned. A young sailor hurried past, eyeing her skirt.
    Jetting out a breath, she hunched down and stepped gracelessly over the shin-high threshold of the round opening. The top of the door ended at her chin. She was only five foot six, but she felt like an afghan hound climbing through an agility hoop—all long limbs and ten kinds of awkward. Kvartirmyeister Kresney was a gentleman and pretended not to notice. She decided she liked him.
    They went through two more watertight doors, passing several instrument-filled side compartments, a galley with attached open dining room, and a dozen coverall-clad submariners busy at various tasks, before slip-sliding down another vertical ladder to the deck below.
    “Three decks,” Misha explained. “Control room is on main deck. Now we are on lower deck, where are living quarters. Small deck below has batteries and such things. Not so nice.” He made a face.
    Here they traversed a very narrow section of passage, the wall of which was punctuated by three real doors. The doors were made of metal, as was everything else on board the submarine, and painted yellow, which seemed to be the Ostrov designer’s favorite color besides dingy or rusty beige. Metal signs labeled each of the three doors in red Cyrillic lettering.
    “Officer country,” Kresney explained. He opened the last door and gestured her in. “Here. Where you sleep.”
    She stepped into the compartment. Good Lord . She’d seen bathrooms that were bigger! Into the microscopic room they’d somehow crammed a narrow bunk, a row of built-in cupboards above it, two tall lockers, a fold-down desk, and a pull-down aluminum sink, along with a wall safe and several communication devices attached to the scant inches of bare wall space left over.
    On the plus side, most of the furnishings were done in honey-colored wood instead of metal. It was tiny, but nice. Nothing like what she’d expected.
    “You make comfortable,” the quartermaster said, his r ’s and l ’s rolling like thick ocean swells, punctuated by the dip of throaty extra y sounds. “Officers’ head is down passage.” He pointed back the way they’d come. “We serve welcome lunch after two hours, but coffee always in mess for everyone. Okay. I go now to find . . .” He made blow-dryer motions with two fingers. “You need anything, you ask me,” he said. “Da?”
    She nodded. “Yes. Thank you, Kvartirmyeister Kresney.”
    She must have mangled the pronunciation of his rank because his grin popped out again. “Please. Call me Misha. You most welcome, Gospozhá Syev’ryin.”
    “Julie,” she said with an answering smile at his two-syllable-with-extra- y ’s-stuck-in-there pronunciation of her name. She kind of liked it.
    “Julie,” he repeated, his hazel eyes merry. “Beautiful name for beautiful lady. Kapitan very lucky man.”
    She blinked. What?
    Before she could correct any mistaken notions the quartermaster might have gotten about her relationship with his commander, he was gone, closing the door behind him.
    Whatever. She let out a sigh and looked around the minicabin. Nice that she’d have it all to herself. She’d been warned how cramped submarines were, and to expect to share a cabin with two or three others, possibly sleeping in shifts. Maybe the crew had been instructed to give the best cabins to the passengers.
    Last night she’d still been too shell-shocked about being sent on an actual field mission to meet with the scientific expedition team she was supposed to be covering as a reporter. She’d seen them gathered at a table in the hotel bar. She’d gone down there thinking a shot or two would calm her frazzled nerves and allow her