Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
NORTHERN ARABIAN GULF
THURSDAY; 17 MAY
2239 hours (10:39 PM)
TIME ZONE +3 ‘CHARLIE’
CHAPTER 20
Chief Lowery pushed a technical manual to the side, sat on the
workbench, and waited for the rest of his technicians to straggle into
Combat Systems Equipment Room #2. The three men came in slowly, one
at a time, exhaustion weighing them down like lead.
The chief yawned. The compartment was nearly the temperature of a
meat locker; it had to be to keep the rows of electronic equipment cool.
Like all high-powered radars, SPY generated a tremendous amount of
heat. It took the majority of the output of an industrial air conditioning
skid to cool it off.
The shelves above the workbench were lined with technical manuals,
and the stretch of bulkhead immediately adjacent was given over to largescale
color schematics of the air, water, and power systems that fed the
radar. They had been through every one of the manuals at least once, and
some of them two or three times. So far, to no avail.
His techs were wiped out. One glance at their faces was enough to tell
Chief Lowery that Fisher was the worst, or at least he looked it. Fish,
whose clean-cut Boy Scout handsomeness could have ordinarily been used
to sell Mother’s Farm Fresh Bread, looked like a crack addict on a threeday
comedown. His eyes were nearly slits, half-closed with fatigue,
bloodshot and underscored with dark circles. Burgess and Gordon weren’t
going to win any beauty contests either. The chief yawned so hard that his
ears rang. How long had they been going now? Four days?
Fish flipped absently through one of the tech manuals without
bothering to look at the pages. “We need some fucking chicken bones,
Chief. We need to go down to Supply Berthing, wake up one of the cooks,
and make them get us some chicken bones from the galley.”
The chief yawned again. “Chicken bones?”
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