Sea of Shadows - Страница 2

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When he reached the far side of the launcher, Bowie curved left again, back toward the superstructure. Another of the tricky step-duck maneuvers carried him through the port side blast doors and into the port break. This short stretch of enclosed passageway shielded him from the sun, giving him a few seconds of shade and relatively cool air. Then he dashed out into the sun again, running down the port side main deck toward the stern.

At first glance, Bowie was more likely to be taken for an accountant than a naval officer. His long face and narrow cheekbones gave him a clean and efficient look that his neatly trimmed black hair seemed to echo.

His lips were thin and slightly turned down at the corners, creating a permanently thoughtful expression that reinforced the image of humorless efficiency. The laugh lines around his mouth were the only giveaways of the imaginative and playful spirit that hid behind his somber brown eyes.

A shade under six feet tall, he had a compact physique that was neither skinny nor overtly muscular. At thirty-eight, he was in the best shape of his life. He was also at the pinnacle of his career, and he knew it. No matter where he went from here, it would be downhill.

Certainly there were more promotions in his future (barring death or major screw-ups), but this was his one shot at his lifelong dream: command of a warship. He was trying very hard not to count the days, but he knew he had less than four months left to enjoy it. Then Bowie would have to turn command of the Towers over to someone else and move on to the next phase of his career. He didn’t like to think about that, but he knew the Navy’s advancement pipeline all too well. After the Towers, he’d be transferred to a shore duty billet, probably a career-enhancing staff position at the headquarters of one of the major commands — part of the Navy’s plan to give him political seasoning that he didn’t want, in preparation for selection to full-bird captain.

His next chance to command at sea would probably be as commodore of a destroyer squadron, overseeing other people’s ships. Command of a squadron was an important job, but it was too much like being an astronaut’s boss, instead of an astronaut. If he was very, very lucky, he might be able to wrangle command of one of the Aegis guided missile cruisers. But there weren’t very many of the old Ticonderoga Class cruisers left to go around, and the Navy wouldn’t be willing to waste a valuable full-bird captain on a destroyer or a frigate.

He reached the amidships break, where the forward deckhouse ended and a narrow section of open deck separated the forward superstructure from the aft superstructure. He edged closer to the lifelines as he ran, giving himself a cushion of space in case someone opened one of the watertight doors without warning. He’d made that mistake years ago, as a boot ensign on the USS Bunker Hill. A second class Signalman had opened a door right in front of him, and Bowie had slammed into the reinforced steel while running at full-tilt. A sprained wrist and two black eyes had given him a personal reminder of one of the most basic principles of physics: Force = Mass × Acceleration.

Bowie passed an exhaust vent and caught a half-second blast of what seemed to be cooler air. The temperature differential was a sensory illusion, caused by the movement of the air over his skin. In reality, the exhaust from every vent on board was precisely monitored and alternately heated or cooled to match the ambient temperature of the air surrounding the ship. The system was expensive, and a pain in the ass to maintain, but it made the ship functionally invisible to infrared sensors or heat-seeking missiles. And in this age of three-dimensional Battle Space Management, stealth was paramount.

His ship, USS Towers, had been built from the keel up with stealth in mind. She was 529 feet long, 66½ feet wide, and (if the media hype was to be believed) virtually invisible. The fourth (and last) ship in the heavily modified third “Flight” of Arleigh Burke Class destroyers, Towers was an example of cut-ting-edge military stealth technology. She was not, however, the “ghost ship” suggested by news magazines and Internet Web sites. In fact, from his vantage point running circles around her deck, it was difficult for Bowie to imagine how the destroyer even rated her official classification as a “Reduced Observability Vessel.”

The low pyramid shapes of her minimized superstructure and the severely raked angle of her short mast gave her a decidedly strange profile, but she was far from invisible — up close anyway. From a distance of a few thousand yards, however, that began to change. Ninety-plus percent of her exposed surfaces were covered with polymerized carbon-fiber PCMS tiles. Although designed primarily to absorb enemy radar, this newest generation of the Passive Countermeasure System had another handy feature: the rubbery tiles were impregnated with a phototropic pigment that changed color in response to changes in lighting. In bright sunlight, the tiles were a dusty blue-gray that blended into the interface between sea and sky remarkably well. As the light dimmed, the PCMS tiles would darken accordingly, reaching a shade approaching black when the ship was in total darkness.

Although the cumulative effect was a far cry from invisibility, it camouflaged the ship’s outlines enough to make her hard to see at a distance, not only reducing the range at which she could be detected visually, but also making it difficult for any optically based sensor — from the human eyeball to high-resolution video cameras — to determine her size, course, or speed.

A state-of-the-art thermal suppression system performed similar magic for the ship’s infrared signature, while the radar-absorbent PCMS and the carefully calculated geometries of her hull and superstructure gave the long steel warship a radar cross section only a little larger than the average fiberglass motorboat.

Every cleat, chock, and padeye was designed to fold down and lock into its own form-fitting recess in the deck when not in use. Although intended strictly as a means of shaving another fraction off the ship’s radar cross section, the hide-away fittings made for a remarkably uncluttered deck — which in turn made it a pretty good place to run.

The high-tech razzle-dazzle extended to the ship’s acoustic signature as well. Seventh-generation silencing, including an acoustically isolated engineering plant, active noise-control modules, and the venerable (but still effective) Prairie and Masker systems, made Towers a difficult target for passive sonar sensors. Popular rumor held that she, and her sister ships in the Flight Three Arleigh Burke Class, were quieter cruising through the water at twenty knots than most warships were tied to the pier. That was an exaggeration, but not by much.

When he came to the aft end of the superstructure, Bowie curved to his left, dodging a pair of Gunner’s Mates engaged in lubricating Mount 503, the aft-starboard.50-caliber machine gun. The arc of his improvised running track took Bowie around the aft missile launcher and back to the starboard side of the ship. The aft missile launcher marked the halfway point for each lap.

Only four more laps to go. Bowie’s daily routine called for twenty-five and a half laps, which he had worked out to be about three miles. Once upon a time he’d done five miles a day, but then he’d discovered that while on board ship he didn’t eat the right kinds of foods to fuel that sort of regimen. The extra mileage had pushed his metabolism into the catabolic zone, burning up muscle tissue as well as fat.

Maybe when he returned to shore duty he’d need to crank back up to five miles a day to keep away the nearly inevitable swivel-chair spread.

But that was in the future, a future that he wasn’t quite ready to think about. A future in which he would no longer command what he considered to be the finest warship in the Pacific Fleet.

Bowie increased his stride a little as he turned up the starboard side.

The ship’s motion through the water generated relative wind, and running toward the bow, he was headed back into it.

Off to his right, an oil tanker was passing down the starboard side. It was an enormous thing — a supertanker — nearly twice as long as Towers, with an unloaded displacement of about three hundred thousand tons, rising maybe fifty feet above the water and obscuring his vision to starboard. The paint on its orange hull and white superstructure was bright and well maintained. It rode low in the water now, a sure indication that its tanks were full. Based on its size, Bowie estimated that it was carrying somewhere around two million barrels of oil.

The supertanker was about fifteen hundred yards out and nearing its closest point of approach. Bowie already knew that the big ship would pass Towers with a comfortable safety margin, but he couldn’t stop himself from rechecking its position and heading every time he came around the deck for another lap. He knew that the Officer of the Deck had the situation well in hand, but — when it came to collision avoidance — it never hurt to have another pair of eyes open.

In the distance astern of and beyond the tanker, a pair of oil platforms squatted on the horizon, their images wavering like mirages in the desert-heated air. The larger of the platforms belched enormous plumes of fire into the sky as its flare tower burned off the natural gas that accumulated as a natural consequence of the oil-pumping process. It was a routine procedure that the local oil rig crews referred to as “off-gassing.” The Middle Eastern oil fields were so productive that it was marginally cheaper to incinerate natural gas than to containerize and ship it.