Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

166 JEFF EDWARDS
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.