Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

SEA OF SHADOWS 171
become an oven. I don’t want the crew sleeping down there when it gets
like that.”
“It will be uncomfortable, sir. But the crew can learn to live with it.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” the executive officer said. “But it’s hard to sleep
when it gets that hot. And when the crew loses sleep, they make mistakes.
We’re about to take on a pack of hostile submarines that have stomped the
shit out of every surface ship that has crossed their path. Mistakes are
something we cannot afford.”
“I agree,” the captain said. He looked at the Supply Officer. “SUPPO,
make sure the engineers get whatever parts they need to fix that
compressor. And if they need something we don’t carry on board, send
out a logistics request, and we’ll have it sent out by helo. We just jumped
to the top of the Navy’s logistics priority list.” He looked around the table.
“All of you, get your wish lists to the SUPPO before evening chow. It just
became Christmas on Happy Warship Towers, and the Navy supply
system has been designated as your official Santa Claus.”
The captain looked at the XO. “Pete, assign one of our bright junior
officers to come up with a plan for moving the enlisted personnel out of aft
berthing, just in case we can’t get three AC to play right.”
The XO nodded. “Sounds like a good job for the Admin Officer.”
Lieutenant (jg) Augustine made a thumbs-up gesture. “Piece of cake,
sir. We can spread the personnel out to other berthing spaces with empty
racks. Move a few into officer and chief petty officer overflow berthing.
If worse comes to worst, we can drag mattresses and sheets down to some
of the electronics spaces. Those spaces are nice and chilly.”
“Good,” the captain said. “Now, OPS, what have you got for me?”
The Operations Officer looked up from his copy of the new orders.
“Operations department is clean and green, Captain. The biggest problem
I have to report is a sticky cipher lock on the starboard door to CIC. Other
than that, we’re just ducky.”
“Just ducky,” the Combat Systems Officer said under her breath in a
mocking tone. “We’re just ducky here. Ducky, I tell you.”
“You’re next, CSO,” the captain said. “You’re the one with all the cool
bullets and bombs. What’s broke and what ain’t?”
The Combat Systems Officer sighed and consulted her palm-top
computer. “We’ve got that bad Tomahawk in VLS cell twenty-two.
Should be zero tactical impact, at least while we’re hunting submarines.
The Aegis backup computer has a bad high-volt power supply. Tactical
impact is just loss of a redundant system. Supply department has a
replacement on board, but we’ve been holding off, because we don’t have
sixty thousand dollars left in this quarter’s repair budget. But if we really