Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

CHAPTER 16
SOUTHERN MEDITERRANEAN SEA
MONDAY; 14 MAY
1609 hours (4:09 PM)
TIME ZONE +2 ‘BRAVO’
Lieutenant Shari Scarlotti leaned her head against the side window and
felt the bass drone of her plane’s engines resonate through her skull. Darkhaired
and small-boned, her slight frame looked out of scale in the pilot’s
seat, like a child swallowed up in her father’s easy chair. The relentless
sound of the turbines never ceased and rarely wavered while the big fourengined
aircraft was airborne.
Her air crew had nicknamed it the hypno-tone, and they frequently
joked that it lulled them into a post-hypnotic state and then forced them to
perform acts that they would never have even considered without its
mesmeric (and undoubtedly evil) influence. Any trouble they got into
when they were off-duty was invariably blamed on fourteen-hour missions
spent listening to the hypno-tone.
Her Flight Engineer, Chief Benjamin Lanier, took the opposite side of
the argument, asserting that the steady thrum of the huge Allison
turboprops was the most beautiful music audible to the human ear. With a
couple of beers in him, he’d even been known to claim that he couldn’t
make love to his wife without a recording of turboprops droning in the
background.
Shari wouldn’t go quite that far, but she liked the sound; she liked it a
lot. The Lockheed Martin P-3C Orion was a big plane and over thirty
years old. But as long as the 4,600 horsepower engines kept pumping out
that deep monotonous tone, she knew that her aircraft had a guaranteed
place in the sky.
Shari’s copilot, Lieutenant (junior grade) Andy Cole, squeezed past her
right shoulder and slid into the right-hand seat. He held out a tall, spillproof
plastic cup. “Coffee, boss? Just the way you like it: fourteen sugars,
nine creams, and then I waved the cup over the pot to give it that good
coffee flavor.”
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