Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

STRAIT OF GIBRALTAR
SUNDAY; 13 MAY
0132 hours (1:32 AM)
TIME ZONE 0 ‘ZULU’
CHAPTER 12
The bridge of HMS York was rigged for darken-ship: all unnecessary
lights turned off to preserve the night vision of the watchstanders. What
little illumination there was came from the soft red glow of instrument
lamps, and even those feeble lights were turned down to minimal intensity
to preserve the night vision of the bridge crew. As was often the case on
evenings when the moon was out, it was actually darker on the bridge of
the old British destroyer than it was outside under the night sky.
Second Officer of the Watch, Sub Lieutenant Michael Kensington, felt
the front panel of the radar repeater until his fingers located the dimmer
knob. He turned the brightness up for a few seconds, just enough to get a
good look at the sweep. Still just the one contact, aft and off to port. He
turned the dimmer back down. That would be HMS Chatham, the Royal
Navy frigate that formed the other half of their little task force.
The young officer raised his binoculars and peered out the window into
the night. The seas were calm, and the moonlight coated the gently rolling
wave tops with liquid silver. “Good moon tonight,” he said, in what he
hoped was an authoritative voice. “Shouldn’t be very hard to spot a
periscope.”
Somewhere behind him, Ian Bryce, a seasoned lieutenant and First
Officer of the Watch, exhaled sharply through his nose. “I keep telling
you, there aren’t going to be any periscopes. Fact of the matter is there
aren’t going to be any submarines. No submarines—no periscopes. Can’t
very well have one without the other, now, can we?”
Sub Lieutenant Kensington continued his binocular sweep of the
waves. “I’d say Her Majesty’s Navy thinks otherwise, or else we wouldn’t
be here.”
The other two crew members on the darkened bridge, the Helmsman
and the Bo’sun of the Watch, performed their respective jobs in near
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