Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

120 JEFF EDWARDS
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” Burgess said. “We just want to half close
a couple of valves in the cooling loop that feeds the array. That will slow
down the movement of chilled water through the modules and reduce the
effectiveness of the cooling loop. Then, when the array starts to warm up
a bit, we run over-voltage tests on the emitter-receivers and heat things up
a little more. If this malfunction is being triggered by some sort of thermal
component failure, we should be able to force the array to reproduce the
interference pattern.”
The chief nodded. “I see … If you can make the problem appear by
turning up the heat, then it just becomes a matter of finding out which
components are breaking down under high temperature.”
“Right,” Fisher said. “We’ll have the problem localized to the array,
and we can chase it down a module at a time. Plus, we can get the
engineers to rig us a couple of fan units inside the array housing to blow
extra air across the back sides of the modules. That might help us hold the
heat down enough to keep the array from shitting all over itself while we
look for the bad modules.”
“Sounds good,” FCC Lowery said. He looked at the third technician,
who hadn’t said a word yet. “Gordo, these clowns may be onto something,
but we can’t afford to get tunnel vision here. This could still be a
processor error, or a software glitch, or God knows what. I want you to
reload the entire Aegis software package from your archive disk packs.”
Fire Controlman Second Class Bruce Gordon nodded. “Will do, Chief.
And the next time we get a satellite window for Internet access, I’ll log
onto Navy Knowledge Online and post a note on the troubleshooting
forum for SPY. It’s possible that somebody has seen this particular
casualty before, and there might already be a fix for it.”
“Good idea,” the chief said. “All right guys, you’ve got your marching
orders. I don’t need to tell you how serious this is. If we were joyriding
off the coast of Southern California, this kind of casualty wouldn’t be
much more than an inconvenience. Unfortunately, this is the Arabian
Gulf, and the natives out here don’t run around in roller blades and thong
bikinis. There are an awful lot of people out here who would love to stick
a cruise missile up our ass while we’re not looking. We can’t afford to
have our primary sensor go blind at a critical moment.”
The three technicians all nodded.
“Right,” the chief said. “Now, let’s go find this bug and kill it, before it
kills us.”