Sea of Shadows

and precisely aligned. Despite her chipmunk cheeks, there were no bulges at the hips of her khaki trousers, and the buttons of her shirt lay flat against her belly. She was winning the battle, for now at least. And maybe that was all she could expect: to win one battle at a time. She straightened her belt buckle a fraction and stepped away from the mirror.

Two quick steps brought her to the wardroom. She rapped on the door-frame and then opened the door far enough to stick her head in.

Captain Bowie was sitting in his customary spot, the middle seat on the far side of the table that ran down the center of the room. He looked up and motioned to a chair. “Come on in, Chief. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and have a seat.”

Chief McPherson skipped the coffee and took a chair near the middle of the table.

The captain turned back to a stack of papers laid out on the table in front of him. “I hope you’ll excuse me,” he said with the ghost of a smile.

“I want to make sure that my homework is finished before the thundering hoard arrives.”

The chief nodded automatically, despite the obvious fact that the captain wasn’t looking at her. “Of course, sir.” She checked her watch.

“I’m early anyway.”

She resisted the temptation to give the room the once-over. She’d been to meetings here at least two dozen times, but the wardroom was so unlike the rest of the ship that just walking through the door was always a bit of a shock. Towers was a warship, and that meant she was built for utility rather than aesthetics. Outside of the wardroom, the bulkheads and overheads were crowded with pipes, valves, ventilation ducts, cable runs, electrical junction boxes, and damage control equipment — so much so that it would have been difficult to locate two square feet of exposed wall space. If such an empty spot had existed, some naval engineer would undoubtedly have found a way to shoehorn in a fiber optic relay terminal or a casualty power transformer.

Inside the door of the wardroom was a different matter. The walls were paneled in richly grained walnut. (Yes, wall was the right word; bulkhead was a shipboard term, and the dark wooden paneling bore no resemblance to the utilitarian white-painted steel bulkheads found elsewhere on the ship.) In place of the cable runs and pipes that lined the overheads on the rest of the ship, the wardroom boasted an acoustic tile ceiling that would have looked at home in a restaurant or business office.

Equal parts conference room, classroom, dining room, and social parlor, the wardroom on Towers (as on every warship) was the nexus of all officer activity. Here, the commissioned officers held training sessions, conducted high-level briefings, and entertained the occasional civilian dignitary or head of state.

A score of other details made the wardroom — and to a lesser degree the officers’ staterooms — markedly different from the rest of the ship. Up here, the officers dined on real china — inlaid with the ship’s crest. Down on the Mess Decks and in the Chief Petty Officer’s Mess, the enlisted crew members ate their meals off fiberglass trays. The officers’ eating utensils were of finely patterned silver — also engraved with the ship’s crest. The enlisted crew used unpatterned stainless steel flatware. The wardroom napkins were starched linen, in place of the paper napkins used by the rest of the crew.

Chief McPherson didn’t begrudge the officers the few perks they received, and she didn’t think that most of the crew did either. General consensus treated the wardroom as an upscale version of the Chief Petty Officer’s Mess, but Chief McPherson knew that it was more than that. It was, among other things, a symbol: a line drawn in the dirt that clearly delineated the distinction between the enlisted crew and the officers who commanded them.

In ages past, the line between commissioned officers and their enlisted subordinates had been so obvious that it had needed no elaboration.

Officers had been the military’s version of the aristocracy: educated, frequently wealthy, and well mannered to the point of gentility. By contrast, enlisted men had often been illiterate, ill mannered, and so nearly destitute that the majority had lived from payday to meager payday.

Over the years, such distinctions had faded far enough to blur the line between officers and their subordinates. The typical twenty-first — century petty officer was college-educated, technically skilled, well mannered, and financially solvent. In point of fact, the wealthiest man currently stationed aboard Towers was a second class Electronics Warfare Technician with a bachelor’s degree in economics and an uncanny flair for predicting the ups and downs of the securities market.

The extravagant (by comparison) trappings of the wardroom served as a subtle reminder to the crew, and to the officers themselves, that the line between officer and enlisted was still in place — and that it was there for a reason.

* * *

Chief McPherson focused her attention on the trio of oil paintings that hung in a neat row on the wall behind the captain’s chair. The center, and largest of the three, was a portrait of the ship’s namesake, Vice Admiral John Henry Towers. Obviously based on a photograph taken early in the man’s career, the face staring out of the portrait had the sort of square-jawed, wavy-haired good looks that were more readily associated with motion picture heroes than with actual warriors. But the man had been an actual warrior; only the third airplane pilot in the history of the U.S. Navy, Towers had been designated Naval Aviator Number 3 in 1911. Present at the very birth of military aviation, he had guided the development and growth of the Navy’s fledgling air wing through two world wars.

To the left of the admiral’s portrait was a painting of the first ship to carry the name of Towers. Shown plowing through heavy seas under a storm-darkened sky, the old Adams Class guided missile destroyer looked resolute and powerful, and yet — at the same time — tiny and frail against the thrashing might of the waves. Fluttering from the old ship’s starboard yardarm were the signal flags November and Yankee: the tactical signal for

“I Stand Relieved.”

On the opposite side of the admiral’s portrait hung a painting of the current USS Towers. Also shown slicing through a stormy sea, the new ship flew the signal flags Charlie and Lima from the short yardarm on the port side of her shark-fin mast, and the flags Bravo and Zulu from the starboard yardarm. The four flags formed two tactical signals: “I Assume the Watch,” and “Job Well Done!” —the new ship’s answer to the message sent by her older sister.

The low, angular profile of the stealth destroyer looked more like something out of a science fiction movie than the sister of the older ship.

But, appearances aside, sisters they were. Despite the fifty-odd years of technological development that separated them, both ships shared the same DNA. As guided missile destroyers in the United States Navy, both ships had been designed with the tin can Sailor’s credo in mind: Go anywhere, do anything, battle any foe.

With thirty years of service spanning the Vietnam War and the Cold War, the old Adams Class DDG had more than met the challenge raised by those words. With fewer than eighteen months of duty under her belt, the new Towers had a long way to go before she could begin to live up to her name.

* * *

The wardroom door opened, and the executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Pete Tyler, filed in, followed in short order by the ship’s Operations Officer, Lieutenant Brian Nylander; the Combat Systems Officer, Lieutenant Terri Sikes; and the Navigator/Administrative Officer, Lieutenant (junior grade) Karen Augustine. Each of the officers greeted the captain and found a seat at the wardroom table.

The XO leaned over in Chief McPherson’s direction and whispered,

“Where is your boss?”

The chief glanced at the door. “On the way, sir. He won’t be late. He never is.”

“He’d better not be,” the XO said out of the side of his mouth. “He’s your ensign; it’s your job to train him.”

There was a hint of amusement in the XO’s eyes, but Chief McPherson knew that the man was only half-