Sea of Shadows

But, despite its impressive track record, the screen concept was not flawless. To provide effective protection, a screen formation required seven or eight escort ships per carrier. Anything less left gaps in the screen, exposing the carrier to attack. But the U.S. Navy no longer had enough ships to provide that kind of coverage.

Kitty Hawk was making do with five escorts, and at that was better off than half the carriers in the Navy. Admiral Joiner’s tactical staff used aircraft to plug the holes in the screen, a common tactic in an era of few ships and numerous taskings.

MH-60R Seahawk helicopters played leapfrog with the screening ships, hovering low over the wave tops at strategic moments to lower sonar transducers into the water and ping for enemy submarines. For now, the dipping sonars were especially important because the ships’ sonars were virtually deaf when they were moving at high speed.

Thousands of feet above, maintaining careful vertical separation from the helos, the carrier’s F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter/attack jets patrolled the sky. The twin-tailed Super Hornets were multi-role aircraft, and their flexibility saddled them with two missions: CAP (Combat Air Patrol) and SUCAP (Surface Combat Air Patrol). Any ship or aircraft close enough to threaten the carrier strike group had to get past the missiles and guns of the Hornets first.

Flying well in front of the formation, E-2C Hawkeyes scanned the sea and sky for potentially hostile radar contacts. The disk-shaped radome mounted on the back of each Hawkeye was so hugely out of proportion to the rest of the aircraft that a running Navy joke accused its designers of trying to mate a twin-engine commuter plane with a flying saucer. The sensitivity and power of the strange-looking radar dish were no joke, though. The Hawkeyes really were the eyes of the fleet.

* * *

In Flag Plot, aboard the carrier, Admiral Joiner stared up at the large-screen tactical displays, evaluating the positioning of the colored symbols that marked the ships and aircraft under his command. Between them, the aircraft he had deployed extended the carrier strike group’s sensor and weapons ranges well beyond the coverage envelopes of the ships. But he would have gladly traded one of the stars on his collar for another pair of frigates or destroyers.

CHAPTER 20

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)

NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF

THURSDAY; 17 MAY

2239 hours (10:39 PM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Chief Lowery pushed a technical manual to the side, sat on the workbench, and waited for the rest of his technicians to straggle into Combat Systems Equipment Room #2. The three men came in slowly, one at a time, exhaustion weighing them down like lead.

The chief yawned. The compartment was nearly the temperature of a meat locker; it had to be to keep the rows of electronic equipment cool.

Like all high-powered radars, SPY generated a tremendous amount of heat. It took the majority of the output of an industrial air conditioning skid to cool it off.

The shelves above the workbench were lined with technical manuals, and the stretch of bulkhead immediately adjacent was given over to large-scale color schematics of the air, water, and power systems that fed the radar. They had been through every one of the manuals at least once, and some of them two or three times. So far, to no avail.

His techs were wiped out. One glance at their faces was enough to tell Chief Lowery that Fisher was the worst, or at least he looked it. Fish, whose clean-cut Boy Scout handsomeness could have ordinarily been used to sell Mother’s Farm Fresh Bread, looked like a crack addict on a three-day comedown. His eyes were nearly slits, half-closed with fatigue, bloodshot and underscored with dark circles. Burgess and Gordon weren’t going to win any beauty contests either. The chief yawned so hard that his ears rang. How long had they been going now? Four days?

Fish flipped absently through one of the tech manuals without bothering to look at the pages. “We need some fucking chicken bones, Chief. We need to go down to Supply Berthing, wake up one of the cooks, and make them get us some chicken bones from the galley.”

The chief yawned again. “Chicken bones?”

Fisher nodded. “Chicken bones. We need to do the secret voodoo ritual.”

“I see,” the chief said. “And what, pray tell, is the secret voodoo ritual?”

“We had some on the Paul Foster,” Fish said. “Dried up chicken bones. We kept them in one of those purple velvet bags like Crown Royal bottles come in. Whenever we came across a radar problem that was kicking our asses, we’d get out the chicken bones. We’d turn on one battle lantern and shut off all the lights, so things would get real dark and spooky looking. Then, we’d shake up the bag really good and dump the chicken bones on the deck.”

Chief Lowery grinned. “This helped somehow?”

“Hell yeah,” Fish said. “One of the bones was bigger than all of the others, and one end of that bone was bigger than the other end. See?”

“Like a leg bone?” Gordon asked.

“Yeah,” Fish said. “Like a drumstick. Anyway, whichever way the big end of the big bone was pointing, that’s where the problem was. We would go to the nearest piece of equipment to where it was pointing and start troubleshooting.”

“Bullshit,” Gordon said.

Burgess grabbed the crotch of his own coveralls and squeezed theatrically. “Yeah, Fish. I’ve got your big bone right here!”

Fish grinned and gave Burgess a wink. “No thanks, Cowboy. I’ve seen your bone, and it didn’t look very big to me.”

Chief Lowery tried not to grin. “Knock it off, you knuckleheads. We’ve still got a radar to troubleshoot.”

Fish held his hands palm up and let them drop. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Chief. There’s nothing left to troubleshoot. There is nothing wrong with this fucking radar. We’ve run every on-line test, every off-line test, and every dynamic and static load test ever invented. We’ve swapped every circuit card in Array #4 with every circuit card in Array #3. If the problem was in one of those cards, or even several cards, the interference should have moved to Array #3 with the cards.”

Burgess nodded. “We’ve checked video processing, wave guides, primary and alternate power, and all of the digital multiplexers. We’ve checked for thermal problems, phase angle calibration errors, electromagnetic cross-talk between cable runs, signal shedding, and digital sync pulse errors. We’ve also tested the sweep raster initiators, and every clock pulse and digital incrementer that’s even remotely related to SPY.”

“Fish and Shit-for-Brains are right,” Gordon said. “We’ve swapped every disk pack, and reloaded the software from scratch three times. I’ve used the secure sat-phones to make four tech-assist calls to the engineers at Lockheed Martin who built the system, and the software bubbas who wrote the program code. None of them have ever heard of anything like this problem. They’re going to fly a tech rep out to help us troubleshoot it, but they’ve already pretty much said they don’t have a clue of how to tackle this. In fact, one of the engineers as much as told me that we’re full of shit. He said we can’t have this problem, because the system isn’t capable of generating this type of sector-specific interference.”

The chief snorted. “What? Does he think we’re making this shit up?”

“I don’t know what he thinks,” Gordon said. “But I’ll tell you what I think. There is nothing wrong with this radar, Chief. Not a fucking thing.

It’s clean as a whistle.”

“So where is the interference coming from?” It was the captain’s voice.

Chief Lowery leapt off the workbench. “Attention on deck!”