"A shame," she decided after a thoughtful survey of the thirty men and four women who struggled so long and hard to tear apart and move the antenna, their dedication and tireless efforts now seemingly wasted in a magnificent attempt to save so many lives, "that all this may very well come to nothing."
"Don't give up on Jim Sandecker," said Gunn. "He may have been blocked by the White House in securing the Roosevelt, but I'll bet you a dinner with soft lights and music that he'll come up with a replacement."
"You're on," she said, smiling thinly. "That's a bed I'll gladly lose."
He looked up curiously. "I beg your pardon?"
"A Freudian slip." She laughed tiredly. "I meant 'bet'."
Clive Cussler, Shock Wave [1996]
Rudi Gunn knew he was pushing his luck, as the match he was using to lit up the candles sizzled and flared brightly in the dim light of the Glomar Explorer dining room. Staring at the flame, he thought about lighting himself yet another cigarette, but reconsidered the idea and tossed the burnt match into an ashtray. He smoked way too much, anyway.
But, God, how he needed a smoke right now.
Dressed in a blue Oxford shirt and khaki trousers (about the only clean clothes he had left in his suitcase), Gunn looked his very best – which wasn't saying much, he thought with a self-deprecating half-smile.
With his horn-rimmed glasses, narrow shoulders and sharp Roman nose, he knew he was no charmer. His piercing blue eyes, the one feature that could maybe save him from complete anonymity, were hidden behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He looked like an accountant, a schoolteacher, some dull, colorless bureaucrat who slaved away unnoticed in a cubicle behind the water cooler.
He knew that. Hell, he knew that well enough.
And yet, for some unknown reason he failed to understand, Molly Faraday, ravishing, ten-year-younger-than-him Molly Faraday, seemed to like him. Or, well, at least, he thought she might like him. He was probably mistaken, though. Surely mistaken. Absolutely, there's-no-doubt-about-that, mistaken.
When he had bet a romantic dinner that Admiral Sandecker would come up with a ship to deploy the reflector to the convergence zone, so they could reflect the soundwaves back towards Gladiator Island, she had looked at him – him, plain old Rudi, a short, scrawny, bespectacled nerd of a man in his late forties - and she had given him a flirty answer.
… Or maybe (probably, surely), she hadn't, he thought. It's all in your head, man. When he had made the proposal of taking her to dinner, he hadn't been looking exactly dapper: shirtless, sweating from the humidity of the steamy Hawaiian night, dirty and tired and dehydrated, he knew he must have looked like a goddamn wreck of a human being. And yet Molly Faraday, all class and grace and cool composure in her khaki blouse and shorts, had looked at him and said, well, I'll take that bet.
Gunn smiled bitterly. I'm making a fool of myself, he though, shaking his head. Nervously, he removed his glasses and polished the lenses with a small cloth. She wasn't flirting with you, you goddamn moron. She only said that to cheer you up.
Gunn knew he should have insisted Molly went back to Washington with the Admiral and the other members of the NUMA crew. Instead, she had been adamant about staying back with him to arrange the return of the Glomar Explorer to its rightful owners. He couldn't help but wonder if, maybe, just maybe, she had done it on purpose...
I'm about to lose my face in the most catastrophic way, he though. But there was no going back: he looked up at the sound of approaching steps and put his glasses back on.
Molly Faraday walked into the room and an amazed expression crept slowly on her face. She was wearing a sleeveless V-neck black dress that exposed her arms, collarbones and lovely long legs; her toffee-colored hair was pinned back in a soft low bun. Classy. That woman was so classy... And attractive. Damn, was she attractive, Gunn thought, as he looked at her slender, graceful figure coming nearer.
She walks in beauty, like the night, he thought, absent-mindedly. What was it again? A poem? A song? He couldn't remember right now. Odd; he had always been good at remembering things.
She walked forward and waved a hand at the table. "I have to say, Commander, you've surprised me. How did you come up with such a fancy arrangement?" she asked in her soft, soft voice, smiling.
Gunn shrugged, feigning modesty. "A bet is a bet, and I'm a man of my word" he said; his voice was calm, controlled, mildly ironic, but his heart was beating fast and shallow. He tried not to stare at the way her mouth – lovely, lovely lipsticked mouth – was twitched into a smile. He had known Molly Faraday for years, since the day the Admiral had hired her to be his intelligence agency coordinator; but they never had any occasion to exchange more than a few polite words before. Their respective fields of action simply didn't overlap.
"Once we'll be back in Washington, there's gonna be a hell of a lot of work to do to clean up the mess we've made up here." he added. "I don't know when we'll ever be able to have a proper dinner. So" he shrugged again, smiling. "I decided to get it over with here." He made a vague gesture towards the table.
She laughed, a soft, sweet chortle. "But you got the deal wrong, Commander Gunn. Admiral Sandecker pulled the Glomar Explorer out of his hat and you won the bet. The dinner was my prize in case you lost it."
"Well, yes. You're right". He raised his eyebrows and shuffled on his feet. "Then I guess I should blow the candles out and call it a night."
"Don't even try that!" she laughed, putting a hand in front of the candles as if to protect them. "I'm just in the mood for a candlelit dinner. Now, if you were a gentleman, Commander, you'd pull the chair out for me."
"At your service, Ms. Faraday." Swiftly, Gunn stepped forward and pulled the chair so she could sit at the carefully arranged table. He had somehow managed to get his hands on a white tablecloth that was clean enough and not too wrinkled. Glasses and plates had been easy to find - Howard Hughes had been an eccentric, and the Glomar Explorer was an eccentric ship to match him, equipped with fine china, delicate – if a bit worn - silverware, and wine glasses; the candles, though, had been harder to get. After maybe an hour of useless search in the kitchens, he had finally found a couple of emergency candles in the engine room: they were awfully dirty and smelled like engine oil, but after quite a bit of scrubbing and rubbing, they had gone back to their original yellowish white. They were now burning proudly on the table, stuck into the neck of two old wine bottles. Their dim, orange light now danced on Molly's face in the most endearing way.
He studied her dress with surprised admiration. "Do you always pack a cocktail frock in your suitcase when you go on a mission at sea, Ms. Faraday?"
She chuckled and smoothed an imaginary crease on her leg. "Well, Commander, I'm a Washington girl. You never know when a fancy occasion might arise."
He smiled. "That's hardly the fancy occasion. It's just a single table laid for two" he waved a hand around "set into the deserted dining room of a decrepit drillship platform, sailing in the middle of the sea."
She laughed softly. "Well, it's fancy enough for me."
He smiled again. "If you say so."
She smiled back. "So, now that everyone's gone back, it's just the two of us, Commander." Her voice was low and lovely. Everything about her was lovely: lovely face, lovely voice, lovely frail vertebrae at the base of her neck. Gunn had to avert his eyes from the tempting curve of her throat.
"The two of us, and half a dozen mechanics working downstairs" he joked, to break the tension that was starting to build inside of him. It had seemed like a good idea in the afternoon, to invite her to dinner, and set up the table and prepare the food and all that. It was supposed to be some kind of joke, something to have a good laugh at when they were back in Washington. Hey, remember that time we bet a dinner and I prepared it in the middle of the ocean? That sort of thing.
But now that Molly Faraday was there in front of him, in a low-cut dress and looking absolutely stunning, he was quite at a loss about what to say, what to do. As cold and collected as he could be while at the helm of a ship, as legendary his analytical skills could be while working at his desk in Washington, he was painfully, desperately shy with women. All of his degrees in chemistry and finance were about as useless as electric windows on a submarine when he needed to have a conversation with a girl.
Molly Faraday seemed to sense his unease; she nodded towards a bottle of wine and smiled. "Should we open that?"
"Of course." Glad to have something to do, Gunn grabbed the bottle and fumbled with the corkscrew. It gave him an excuse not to look at her for a moment.
"What is it? Chardonnay?" she inquired, curiously.
Without looking up, Gunn chuckled. "You wish. It's some weird Hawaiian wine nobody ever heard about; it's the only thing I could find in a pinch. If it tastes like gasoline, you have my explicit permission to spit it in my face."
She laughed. "All right, pour me the stuff. I'm feeling adventurous, tonight."
"Are you?" Gunn smiled, pouring the wine into her glass with a firmer hand than he expected, given how nervous he was. He filled his own glass and looked at her. "Should we – I don't know - have a toast?"
"Absolutely" she agreed, and raised her glass. There was a soft gleam in her eyes. "To us saving the world?" she said, not without a touch of irony.
"Is that what we did?" he asked, with a snort and a little laugh.
"If it isn't, I say it was damn well close enough, Commander."
He twitched his lips in a smile. "To saving the world, then" he said, and raised his own glass.
"To us saving the world." she corrected him.
Their glasses clinked quietly as they touched. Molly took a sip of wine and swished it in her mouth. "You know, it's not that bad." She wrinkled her nose and nodded. "Not bad at all. Good choice, Commander Gunn."
"Blind luck." Gunn gave her a lopsided smile. "As I told you, I grabbed the first bottle I could find."
She turned her glass over in her hands and stared at him. "You must be kind of used to this whole 'saving the world' business, by now" she joked.
Gunn frowned. "What do you mean?"
"I mean" she took another sip from her glass and looked at him over the rim. "Your field trip in the Arctic, to save those hostages from the terrorists. That bloody job in the Mediterranean... The way you handled the Sahara crisis."
He took a long swallow from his own glass and winced. "Dirk is the man you're thinking about." He waved a hand dismissively. "That was all him, and our pal Al Giordino."
But she was looking at him intently. "No, it was you. If I remember correctly, you almost won a Nobel for your research in Mali."
He gave her a thin smile. "Almost being the key word, there. Being a candidate is not exactly the same as winning, is it?" He put his glass back on the table and shrugged. "Compared to Pitt and Giordino, I'm a shabby second best - if that." he added, with a short laugh.
"I think you're being way too hard on yourself, Commander." Molly tilted her head to the side and stared straight in his blue eyes with the trace of a smile on her lips. "You're as good as second bests come, if you ask me." She looked relaxed and at ease, quick with a laugh or a clever reply. She was also, Gunn thought, absolutely, maddeningly enchanting.
"If that's what you think." he shook his head and laughed.
She raised an eyebrow. "It is" she declared.
He stared at her for a moment (was she teasing him?) then smiled and rose from his chair, eager to change the subject. "Well, what I think" he said "is that it's high time I bring some dinner on that table."