The new book! First chapter

Black Lila- this is a gay mystery set on a nuclear submarine.

Here's the first chapter:


“Hey, did you hear, Commander Gorshkov? Black Lila’s fucked another captain. Found swinging by a rope, just like the….”

Sergei reached across the table and grabbed the man by his uniform collar, his newspaper falling to the floor. “What did you say?”

“Hey! What the fuck’s wrong with you, man?” Sergei let go, and the lieutenant sat back, well out of reach. He jerked his uniform shirt straight and tucked it back in. He was young, still soft under the chin, with mud-brown eyes. He dropped his eyes to the table.

“What did you say about the Black Lila, dickhead?” Sergei was up now, reaching for his phone.

“That guy, Whitefeather, they found him hanging from a pipe in the torpedo room. That’s what I heard.”

“Whitehorse. Captain Clayton Whitehorse. And there are no pipes in the torpedo room. What the fuck’s wrong with you? Haven’t you ever even been on a submarine? Oh, no, look at that. No dolphins, no wings. What are you, a supply officer?” He punched in Clayton’s number, listened to it ring until the familiar voice told him to leave a message. “Clayton, call me when you get this. I’m in Monterey for another week.”

The kid stood up. “I didn’t say he was dead. He’s just in a coma or something.”

Sergei looked at him. “Don’t even think you can fuck with me.”

“Hey! You can’t talk to me like that.”

Sergei had just finished his degree at the Navy’s postgrad school, and was on his way to a teaching assignment at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. He should have been on his way back to sea, but he interpreted his orders correctly to mean no one wanted him as their XO, and he was still considered too junior to pick up a CO’s billet. He was an excellent submariner, but Sergei Gorshkov was cursed with a famous name. His great-uncle, for whom he was named, had been America’s most ruthless enemy during the Cold War, Admiral of the Fleet, and Commander in Chief of the Soviet Navy.

He’d grown up a Laguna Beach surfer, hair bleached silver-white by the salt and sun, nose always peeling. When it was time for college, his father had received a high-ranking visitor in a naval uniform. This visitor let them understand that, in appreciation of the new cooperation between the former Soviet Union and The United States of America, the US Naval Academy at Annapolis would be pleased to offer a cadet’s berth to the namesake of their most formidable former enemy.

Clayton Whitehorse was his roommate their first year in Annapolis. He was Dine’, from Crownpoint, and he also came to Annapolis by the grace of his ancestors. His grandfather and father had both been Medal of Honor winners, the only father and son to both win Medals of Honor in separate wars. Both had been Marine Corps. Both had died during their wars. It was Clayton who had explained to Sergei what they were doing at the Naval Academy. “They used to take the sons of defeated kings and hand them over to the victors to raise.”

“Yeah?”

“You and me, brother, we’re the sons of dead kings. We’re warriors of the defeated tribes. They want us in their uniforms. And they want to keep us close, so they can watch us. ”

Sergei had been a cynical teenager and this betrayal was no great surprise to him. “Well, fuck em if they can’t take a joke. I’m staying.”

Clayton laughed. “You got that right. And fuck the horse they rode in on.”

They might both have floundered and sunk under the weight of their bitter past defeats, Navajo and Soviet, except in their second year Clayton and Sergei climbed aboard a nuclear submarine. And looking around at the cramped, claustrophobic space painted dull, ugly gray, smelling the damp, stale air, stumbling blindly into the sonar shack, with its blinking red fluorescent lights, they both fell madly in love.

“Commander Gorshkov. Captain wants you.”

Sergei looked up from his phone at the yeoman standing in front of him. The young pest of a Lieutenant was gone. He was scrolling down through the numbers, looking for the New Mexico area code for Clayton’s mother. “I’ll be right there.”

Captain Marshall was an academic, a gentle man who had been at the post grad school for more than ten years. His office was covered with walls of books. He hadn’t been able to switch from paper to an ereader. “Commander, sit down.” Sergei took one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Did you hear about Clayton Whitehorse?”

Oh, no. Please don’t tell me….

“He’s in Portsmouth in the ICU. Still in a coma. You were roommates at Annapolis, right?”

“Yes, sir. What happened?”

“I don’t have any information other than he was found on board the sub, and it appears that he tried to hang himself.”

“Bullshit. He’d never….”

“I said I don’t have any information about what happened. NCIS is working on it. I do have some news for you, however.” Marshall hesitated, looked out his office window. There was nothing in the parking lot to keep his attention. “They’re going to send you to replace him. I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what you were hoping for your first command.”

“They’re sending me to skipper the Black Lila? That boat’s the joke of SUBLANT.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the boat. It’s just story, legend. Sailors love to bitch and if they don’t have anything to bitch about….”

Sergei held up his hand. The Black Lila wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t a story. It was a ghost, collecting submariner’s bad luck and bodies. The first Black Lila had been a Soviet sub, K-108. It had broken to pieces and hit the bottom of the sea after a collision with USS Tautog. All hands were lost in the icy black waters off Petropavlovsk. Rumors had flown for years that the Black Lila had somehow limped back to port, her sail gashed open. One of her screws was embedded in the black steel hull of Tautog. It was a legend, and it was untrue. Black Lila had been lost in 1970.

Sergei wasn’t sure who the genius was who decided to give the new hybrid reactor boat the bad-luck name. The liquid-metal cooled nuclear reactor had failed every trial. A Washington politician must have had his hands deep into some Admiral’s pockets to get that boondoggle pushed through despite all the failures and bad press. But even Washington couldn’t quiet the rumors of a perpetually failing nuclear reactor, a torpedo tube explosion, a battery fire at depth that cost four hands, and now two Captains, one dead from suicide, one in a coma. That boat was murder.

Sergei had never doubted Captain Jack Halloran had hung himself on the Black Lila. The man had been trying to drink himself to death since he was seventeen. He was perpetually depressed and angry, usually in the middle of an ugly divorce or a complaint of assault. But Clayton? Never. He’d never believe it. When Clayton called him and told him the brass was sending him under the polar ice on the Black Lila, he’d laughed and said the bastards were still trying to kill him. Sergei hadn’t thought it was very funny. It was the kind of boat where they sent the screw-ups and the egg-head scientists. The missions didn’t really matter to anyone with power or authority. It was a side-step out of the rotation for sub captains on their way up, and Sergei could hear the bitterness in Clayton’s laughter.

And now they were sending him. He sat back, stared at the parking lot through the window in Marshall’s office. Sergei didn’t believe in ghosts. He didn’t believe in curses. And he didn’t give a fuck about bad luck. Whoever had tried to kill Clayton Whitehorse was on that boat.
Marshall was still talking. “I’m not surprised they’re sending you.”

“Really? Why is that?”

Marshall stared at him for a moment, not speaking.

“Because my family name is Gorshkov? Or because I’m gay? Or what, exactly?”

“Because you’re a bad-tempered asshole, and you don’t even try to get along. You didn’t have to announce you were gay to the world, Sergei. You knew exactly what would happen when you decided to come out of the closet. The sub community is very small and a nuclear submarine is even smaller. You were just spitting on them before anybody had a chance to spit on you. You don’t always have to throw the first punch, you know.”

“I guess I won’t ask the XO to suck my dick, then.”

“Spare me.” Marshall looked down at the papers on his desk and winced. “Your XO is Patrick Wheeler. Jesus, that’s an image I don’t want in my head.”

“Oh, fucking hell. Old Bitch-n-Moan.”

“You know him?” Marshall didn’t seem surprised by Sergei’s reaction.

“I was a few years behind him at the Academy. I have to go to New Mexico before I pick up the ship.”

“Why? There’s no time.”

“To see Clayton’s mother.”