Sea of Shadows

Information Center.

Gordon yawned. “What are we looking for, Chief? I’m setting up to do some signal injection tests on Array #4. I’d like to get back to it.”

“Hold your horses,” the chief said. “Just watch the screen. If this works, you can forget about troubleshooting the array.”

“If what works?” Burgess asked. “What are we waiting for?”

Chief Lowery held up his hand. “Just give it a minute. We should start seeing … There!” He pointed to the screen. “Read ’em and weep, boys!”

A jittering wedge of video static glowed bright green on the radar screen. The interference was back.

FC2 Burgess stared at it. “There it is! But it’s only eight in the morning! We’ve never seen it before mid- afternoon …”

The interference vanished after less than a minute.

“Hey! It’s gone!” Fisher said. “That was fast.”

Chief Lowery grinned. “Keep watching, Fish. In about two minutes, you’re going to see something you’ve never seen before.”

They stared at the screen together. Considerably less than two minutes later, the interference appeared again, in a different part of the screen.

Fish nearly jumped. “Holy shit! It’s on the starboard side now!

That’s Array #3. We’ve never seen it in Array #3!”

The chief crossed his arms and looked smug. “It all depends on where you put the potato.”

All three technicians glared at him. Gordon spoke first. “What the hell are you talking about, Chief?”

The chief grinned again. “Fish had it right all along. If you can’t fix your radar, go see the cooks.” He uncrossed his arms and patted Burgess on the shoulder. “Come on, boys. Let’s go track down the Division Officer. He’s gonna love this!”

* * *

An hour later, they were all gathered around the SPY console for another demonstration. This time, the onlookers included Ensign Christopher Lance (CF Division Officer), Lieutenant Terri Sikes (the ship’s Combat Systems Officer), Lieutenant Commander Peter Tyler (the executive officer), and Captain Bowie.

On cue, the sizzling wedge of static interference appeared on the lower left side of the screen. Like the previous time, it disappeared after a minute or so, only to reappear a short time later on the starboard side of the scope.

The XO cocked his head to the side and looked at Chief Lowery. “It’s not a SPY casualty, is it?”

Chief Lowery shook his head. “No, sir. It’s not a hardware problem or a software problem. It’s a potato.”

“A potato?”

“Yes, sir. That’s why we couldn’t find the source of the interference.

It wasn’t in the radar at all. It was completely external.”

“A potato,” the captain said.

Chief Lowery grinned. “I didn’t believe it myself, sir. But it’s true.”

The Combat Systems Officer gave the chief a hard look. “Would you mind telling us how a potato made its way into our SPY radar system?”

“It didn’t, ma’am,” the chief said. “The potato is entirely external. Or I should say potatoes, because there have been several of them. We’ve just been seeing them one at a time.”

“You’ve dragged this out long enough, Chief,” Ensign Lance said.

“You’d better tell them the rest of it before they beat you to death.”

“Yes, sir!” Chief Lowery tried to bring his grin under control. “The potato business has been going on for a long time. It’s sort of a secret thing that the mess attendants keep to themselves. They’ve got these two long bamboo poles. I don’t know where they got them from, but they keep them stashed in one of the dry provision storerooms. Anyway, when one of the mess attendants wants a snack, he drags out these two bamboo poles. They can plug the narrow end of one pole into the wide end of the other pole and make a single pole that’s even longer.”

“Where does the potato come in?” the CSO asked.

“They jam the potato onto the top of the bamboo pole, and then use the pole to hold it up a few inches from the front of the SPY radar array. SPY is pumping out more than four million watts of microwave energy. The intensity that close to the array face is really high. It’s like the giant microwave oven from hell. It’ll cook a potato in about a minute. If the mess attendant brings along a pat of butter and a little salt, presto! Instant snack.”

Captain Bowie half-smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know whether to laugh or hang somebody from the yardarm.”

“Wait a second,” the XO said. “If this potato thing has been going on for so long, why haven’t we seen this interference problem before this past week?”

“Well, sir, the bamboo stick and the potato are transparent to radar.

The microwaves go right through them, so they don’t show up on the screen. That’s how the mess attendants have been able to do this for so long without getting caught. Then, last week, Seaman Apprentice Murphy was assigned to mess attendant duties. One of the other mess attendants shared the secret potato trick with Murphy, and that was when the problem started.”

The captain’s eyebrows went up. “Seaman Apprentice Murphy brought some new twist to the potato-and- stick routine?”

“Yes, sir,” Chief Lowery said. “I guess Murphy’s mother taught him to wrap his potatoes in aluminum foil before he cooked them. And aluminum is not radar transparent. A potato-sized piece of foil hanging three or four inches in front of the array face throws a whole lot of electromagnetic backscatter. Enough to jam the hell out of a big sector of SPY’s coverage.”

Lieutenant Sikes looked at the deck and shook her head. “Two hundred million dollars worth of state-of-the- art electronics, and we were being jammed by a potato?”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am,” Chief Lowery said. “We only saw the interference on the port side, because there’s a small landing at the top of the 01 level ladder, just below the Super-RBOC launchers. It makes a great place to stand when you’re holding the bamboo pole up in front of the array. It can be done from the starboard side too, but there’s nowhere to stand. You have to hang off the side of a vertical ladder and hold the bamboo pole with one hand. The port side is much easier.”

The XO said, “Don’t tell me. I’ll bet I know why the jamming only happened in the mid-afternoon. That’s when Seaman Apprentice Murphy gets his break, isn’t it?”

“You hit the nail on the head, sir. But Murphy got rotated to the night shift. That’s the only reason we found out about it at all. Murphy told the night baker about his improved method of cooking potatoes, and the night baker was smart enough to put two and two together. He came and woke me up.” Chief Lowery looked at the captain. “If you ask me, sir, I think CS3 Zeigler deserves a Letter of Appreciation for this. He single-handedly solved the mystery of the ghost potato.”

The captain snorted, tried to hold it in, and then began to laugh quietly.

The Combat Systems Officer burst out with a laugh of her own, more like the bray of a donkey than anything human. The entire group dissolved into hysterics. It was one of those wild group laugh sessions, where every time it starts to die down, somebody snorts again, and it cranks up for another go-around.

It took five minutes to die down to chuckles. The XO stood, half hunched over, wiping tears from his eyes. “You want to know what’s really funny?” He gasped a few times before gathering enough wind to continue. “Murphy’s potatoes probably took three times as long to cook as everyone else’s because he wrapped them in foil. If SPY wasn’t so damned powerful, they probably wouldn’t have cooked at all.”

The captain shook his head. “No, Pete. I’ll tell you what’s really funny. You get to write the message explaining how the most advanced warship in the world got jammed by a vegetable.” He snorted again.

“Because I wouldn’t touch that report with a ten-foot bamboo pole!”