Sea of Shadows

They all scrambled to attention.

“Sorry, Sir,” Chief Lowery said. “We didn’t see you come in.”

Captain Bowie motioned for them to relax. “Don’t worry about it, Chief. Carry on. Please.”

All four men relaxed their postures, but no one made any move to sit down.

“Let’s get back to my question,” the captain said. “If there’s nothing wrong with the radar equipment and nothing wrong with the software, where is this interference coming from?”

“We don’t know, sir,” Chief Lowery said.

“But you agree with your techs that there’s nothing wrong with SPY?” the captain asked.

Chief Lowery shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t. SPY is not designed to lose sixty degrees of coverage every day or two. And, if SPY is operating outside of its design parameters, by definition something is wrong. I don’t know if it’s hardware or software, sir. But something is sure as hell wrong somewhere.”

The captain nodded. “Well said, Chief.” He reached out and patted the side of one of the gray radar equipment cabinets. “Our primary anti-air and anti-surface sensor seems to be in the habit of losing its mind every day or two. There are no two ways about it, gentlemen. That’s unsatisfactory.”

Fisher squinted his eyes and opened his mouth. Then he appeared to think better of it, and he closed his mouth.

“Go ahead, son,” the captain said. “Whatever it is, you can say it.”

Fisher looked at his chief and then back to the captain. “Sir, it’s only for a couple of minutes …” He waited, and when it became apparent that no one was going to say anything, he cleared his throat and continued.

“The … um … the interference only appears for two or three minutes every other day or so. And it’s only a sixty-degree arc. It’s not like we lose the entire quadrant. Just sixty degrees or so, for a couple of minutes.”

He cleared his throat again. “I mean, I understand that there’s something wrong with SPY, even if we don’t have any idea what it is. But we’ve been killing ourselves for four days now, over a two-minute glitch that only eats up sixty degrees of our coverage.”

The captain nodded. “I know you’ve been knocking yourselves out, son. I’ve talked to a couple of the engineers at Lockheed Martin, and they say your troubleshooting efforts so far have been excellent. First rate. But we can’t afford to minimize the impact of this casualty. We’re in some of the most hotly contested waters in the world, and every day or two, a significant sector of our radar loses its ability to scan for ships, aircraft, and missiles.”

No one said anything.

“Suppose it happened to you while you were on the freeway,” the captain said. “You’re driving along, doing seventy-five or eighty, and a slice of your vision goes pitch black. Not all of it. Say it’s just twenty degrees. The rest of your field of vision is fine, but your eyes are totally blind within that twenty-degree arc.” He looked around. “Are you with me?”

Everyone nodded.

“Good,” the captain said. “So, every couple of days — while you’re cruising down the freeway — a twenty- degree sector of your vision goes on the fritz. It’s just twenty degrees. And it’s just a couple of minutes.” His eyebrows went up. “How safe are you?”

“Not very, sir,” Fisher said. “Point taken.”

“Good,” Captain Bowie said. He looked at Lowery. “Chief, you guys have been at this long enough.” He looked at his watch. “I want you and your men to hit your racks for at least the next three hours.”

The chief looked surprised. “But sir …”

“No buts, Chief. That’s an order. Come to think of it, make it four hours. I don’t want anybody getting electrocuted because his brain is too tired to think properly. And, I want you to set up a sleep rotation. One man in his rack at all times, and you can swap out every couple of hours.

That way no one has to work for more than a few hours before he gets a chance to recharge his batteries.”

The chief nodded. “Aye-aye, sir.”

The captain looked at each of the men in turn. “You’re all doing excellent work,” he said. “Keep looking. You’ll find it.” He cocked one eyebrow. “And, if you don’t, there’s always the chicken bones.”

CHAPTER 21

GULF OF ADEN (SOUTH OF YEMEN)

FRIDAY; 18 MAY

0647 hours (06:47 AM)

TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’

Wolfhound Eight-Seven was the call sign for an MH-60R helicopter working the outer edge of USS Kitty Hawk’s formation. The gull-gray helo hovered fifty feet above the water, close enough for the edge vortexes down-drafting from its rotors to whip a swirling mist of salt spray off the wave tops.

The pilot, Lieutenant Ray Forester, checked his instruments and, when he was satisfied with the positioning of his aircraft, he turned to his copilot. “Your show, Ted.”

Ensign Theodore Dillon nodded. Out of habit he scanned the instrument panel himself, and then said, “Down dome.”

From his console at the rear of the cabin, the Sensor Operator responded, “Down dome, aye.” He pressed a fingertip to a highlighted rectangle on the touch-sensitive control screen. The floor of the cabin vibrated slightly as the high-speed winch built into the underside of the fuselage began reeling out cable at a rate of sixteen feet per second.

At the end of the cable, the cylindrical sonar transducer slid out of a formfitting cavity in the bottom of the aircraft and began its rapid descent toward the ocean. A little over three seconds later, the rubber-coated sensor plunged into the water, disappearing quickly beneath the waves.

“The dome is wet,” the Sensor Operator said. “How deep do you want it?”

The copilot looked over his shoulder. “How deep is the sonic layer?”

The Sensor Operator studied his screen. “Just a second, sir. We haven’t hit it yet.”

His eyes stayed locked on the digital temperature readout relayed back from the descending sonar transducer. For several seconds, the numbers on the green phosphorous screen showed only tiny fluctuations, never varying by more than a tenth of a degree. When the depth readout passed 130 feet, the temperature began dropping rapidly. The transducer had passed from the surface duct, a zone of nearly constant water temperature near the surface of the ocean, into the thermocline, a zone of rapidly decreasing water temperature that extended down to about two thousand feet. Below that, the temperature would become nearly constant again at just above the freezing temperature of water.

The drastic temperature differential between the surface duct and the thermocline formed a barrier to sound energy. Submarine hunters called it the sonic layer, or sometimes just the layer. A well-trained submarine captain would know the depth of the layer at any given time — as well as his boat’s position in relation to it. Properly exploited, the layer could make submarines — which were difficult to detect under the best of circumstances — even harder to locate.

The Sensor Operator looked at the readout. “Layer depth looks like about a hundred and thirty feet, sir.”

“Let’s start below the layer this time,” the copilot said. “Take her down to about four hundred.”

“Four hundred aye, sir.” The Sensor Operator watched the descent of the transducer on his screen for another minute and then pressed a highlighted soft-key. The depth readout froze at four hundred. “Dome is at four hundred feet. Request permission to go active.”

The copilot nodded. “Go active.”

The Sensor Operator pressed a soft-key on his screen and was rewarded with a high-pitched ping in his headphones as the sonar transducer fired a pulse of sound energy into the water four hundred feet below the surface.