Bowie timed it carefully, lifting each foot at just the right second as he ducked through the hatch combing of the open blast door and ran out onto the forecastle of his ship. Twenty-one laps around the deck today and his breaths were still coming evenly, but the air was hot and so humid that it felt like breathing soup. Sweat plastered his short black hair to his forehead, and his sleeveless U.S. Naval Academy T-shirt stuck to his skin, the faded goat mascot logo blending into the perspiration-darkened fabric.
It wasn’t even noon yet, and the sun was already fierce enough to blur the visual horizon with rapidly evaporating water. At least the seas were calm at the moment — not exactly a given in the Arabian Gulf this time of year.
His crew called him Captain Jim Bowie, which was a technical misnomer on two counts. In fact, his name was Samuel Harlan Bowie, and his actual rank was commander. The title of Captain was honorary; by ancient nautical tradition, the commanding officer of a naval warship is always referred to as “Captain,” no matter what actual rank he carries.
The Jim part had been following him around since childhood, a nearly inevitable consequence of having grown up in San Antonio, Texas, with the last name of Bowie. He’d long since given up the battle and accepted his nickname. It beat the hell out of what his buddies had called him at the Academy, anyway.
Bowie curved to his left, cutting between the ankle-high platform of the forward missile launcher and the low wedge of the 5-inch gun mount.
From a visual perspective, the gun was the most arresting feature on the forecastle. Its strange geometric shape and steeply angled sides gave it little resemblance to any of the generations of naval artillery that had preceded it, but the long steel barrel that protruded from the forward slope of the wedge left no doubt as to its purpose.
Situated aft of the gun, the forward missile launcher was not nearly as visually impressive. To the untrained eye, the launcher looked like a grid of square hatches set flush into an ankle-high steel platform. The innocuous-looking hatches were armored with Kevlar-reinforced steel, and every hatch concealed a vertical missile silo, known as a “cell.” Loaded in those cells, and their twins in the aft launcher, were the missiles that comprised the ship’s real destructive force.
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 cutting-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.