Chapter 54

04:15 Friday, December 6^th, 1991
SEAL Beach (Silver Strand) west of Building S-18
NAB Coronado, San Diego, CA 92155

"Breathe, Shiplett." Lenore frowned at Delafuente, and jerked her head as indication the platoon should go.

A few moments later, the second formation that had been doing PT on the beach ran – not trotted or jogged – by, none of them giving a second look to the redhead tending an obviously hurting man in the pre-dawn light.

What is it about surf that makes it look like it's lit up from within at night? Or that there's a giant black light – the Dark Moon no one ever talks about – lighting it up. Lenore snorted.

"You ... You ... made ... your ... point..." Shiplett wheezed.

"Just sit there, Shiplett. Look at the surf, and wonder why it seems to be translucent for a few minutes until you can talk." Lenore wanted to laugh for the absurdity of what she'd said, but knew that was not what Shiplett needed to hear.

"Stealth," he wheezed, "Technology. SEALs."

I will be... "Shiplett, did you just make a joke?"

"Don't tell ... anyone, 'kay?"

Lenore frowned at him. "Can you run?"

"On a good day? Barely."

Shaking her head, she said, "You're going to have to, you know."

Lenore led him up the beach for half a mile, and then back to the platoon's building, shaking her head the whole way.

06:35 Friday, December 6^th, 1991
Guadalcanal Jetty, Coronado NAB
San Diego, CA

"Today, we're going to install radio cages and antennas. We'll test them into dummy loads, and with pads on them, wired, and then take the radios back out." An attenuation pad is a 'resistor-for-radio' signals that allows the safe absorption of high-strength radio signals. It is typically used to both protect the transmitter (by not reflecting power back to it if there is an impedance mismatch), and to protect the sensitive receiver from too strong a signal (which would often drown out the signal of interest in overdriven noise).

Electrician's Mates Novotny and Schreyer nodded. A thin, wiry man, balding, with large teeth and a weak chin, Schreyer didn't look much over five-foot-nine, and maybe a hundred and forty pounds, but Lenore had seen the corded muscle on the man and knew he was tenacious, a bulldog. Schreyer reminded her of a lieutenant on a cop show she used to watch once, but Lenore was damned if she could remember which cop show.

Lieutenant Osterweiss nodded. "Where are we putting them, Collins?"

"On the boat, sir, on the boat." After the laughter died, Lenore said, "Under the chart table drawers is a cabinet I can move the stuff that's in there out. With a long-enough cord and a strain relief for our cans, we should be able to move around the pilothouse and rear deck. If we run coax and install ship jacks, we should probably put jacks at the corners, and on the bridge, sort of a four-MC circuit-with-radio." She could feel surprise radiating from Shiplett, surprise that she would so casually jest with an officer.

Schreyer nodded, "Makes sense. No need to switch circuits at the remote jacks. Pilothouse can set the squawk or the channel."

"While you're at it, who's a good machinist's mate or hull tech?"

"Your other boyfriend, Almost Lady," Novotny laughed.

"You?" she asked, batting her eyelashes at him.

"No, no, your other other boyfriend. The one who likes to leave you gifts with your beer."

Lenore told Shiplett seriously, "Never take a beer from Ansari unless I'm with you, okay?" To Novotny, she said, "I have a fuel-transfer control station I need installed, by the portside fill tube. We'll conduct fuel ops from that side ... if we don't we'll never get the Joy Redux filled at sea without seriously pissing some Blackshoe OOD off."

Seeing the baffled look from Shiplett, she told him, "I need to have some mods made to the boat. Today's a really good day to do that." Seeing he was now somewhat mollified, turned her attention back to Lieutenant Osterweiss. "I'll need Ansari to make me a panel to fit in a weather box, with a positive closure and a gasket."

"Okay, Collins. Schreyer?"

"I can scrounge the box and the conduit. Novotny can pull while Boats here ... excuse me, Candidate Collins, mounts the apparatus." Lenore was wearing her SDBs, until the Uniform Shop opened, and she could send Shiplett (since he only had SDBs) for dungarees, a utility shirt, and boondockers.

Lenore screwed up her nose at him. "I'm only wearing the damned pips because he," and she jerked her thumb behind her at Shiplett, "didn't know any better than to not enlist before enrolling in college."

She watched in satisfaction as Shiplett turned a bright shade of red, while the other three men laughed.

"Do you always eat like that?" Lenore was sickened, but fascinated, watching Shiplett eat a breakfast burrito from the Navy Exchange Food Court.

"Limph whmph?" he said, which Lenore translated around the food in his mouth to mean, "Like what?"

"It's no goddamned wonder you're fat," she told him.

"I am not fat!"

"Okay, then, soft." The two of them had just bought him a dungaree uniform that he would only wear shipboard, since there was no rank he could wear on its sleeve. Lenore was of the opinion that size 36 for a twenty year-old's waist was too big, and had been needling Shiplett since he'd come out of the changing room.

He glared at her, until they got into the rental car. "Look," she said. "You believe that an officer should be different than an enlisted man, right? And that a basic principle of command is that you have to live what you preach, that you can never ask a sailor to do what you are unwilling to do yourself?"

He looked down at his hands, and she was sure he had lost his appetite. He didn't speak again until they were at the end of the jetty, by the quay where the runabout they'd use was. "Wait here," she told him, and then, exasperated, "It's okay to ask 'why'."

"Okay, then, why?" He seemed a little angry, but the mask of stone wasn't there.

"Because the office I'm going into is too small to hold both of us, Shiplett. I've been here before." She smiled at him, and left the car.

"Shiplett, can you get us over to that motor yacht over there?"

"Uh..." He looked doubtfully at the outboard motor, chuffing quietly. He'd been fairly uncertain when he climbed into the boat, she saw.

Lenore nodded. "It's okay. You can do it really skillfully with only a few weeks' practice, and you can still do it pretty clumsily the first few times you try it. The key is to practice when no one you're trying to impress is around."

"Oh, thanks," he groaned.

Lenore grinned at him. "I'm taken, and you know it. So, you can't be trying to impress me. Take us over, Mister Shiplett."

He did, clumsily.

"That's why we lock it out and tag it out both. The tag is visual, but also has who locked it and why, on it, and pretty much where to find that person. Don't remove the tags unless you know the poor sonofabitch is already fried or he's there to do it himself, it's a Green Felt tea party." Seeing Shiplett didn't understand, he clarified. "Captain's Mast. The table in his cabin is covered in green felt to keep objects from sliding."

Shiplett had looked a little green himself at the thought, Lenore saw, and she filed that away for later reference.

Novotny and Shiplett were down in the engine bay. Lenore had to feed the conduit Schreyer was running the coax for the jacks at the stern corners of the gunwale since she was the only one small enough to squeeze past the diesels. She shuddered when Schreyer pushed the one-inch spade bit through the fiberglass hull of the Joy Redux. She consoled herself with the thought that the Chief had bought the boat because he believed in the mission – evolution, she corrected herself – that he'd sold the Navy on, and that he would have been even more ruthless at drilling the Joy Redux' hull than Schreyer was.

It was slim consolation. Lenore wondered if she could feel the ghost of Kostowe's presence in the engine bay, and decided it was wishful thinking. You're too practical, she knew.

After talking it over with Schreyer and Novotny – whose family owned crab boats in Alaska, and were used to needing communications under horrible conditions and situational pressure, Lenore and Schreyer agreed to only place one jack in the forward pilothouse wall for the foredeck.

The radio equipment racks went in quickly, and were grounded and the grounds sealed before Novotny and Shiplett had rigged and pulled the wire for the gauges and control panel for the fuel transfer pumps.

Schreyer and Lenore were thus free to offer 'helpful' advice to the two of them for ten minutes.

"You'd think he was used to pulling small wiry strands out with tweezers by now," Schreyer told Lenore, as Novotny attempted to pull the loose end of a wire out of a box of wire by using needle-nosed pliers.

"I know of a few places where he could just get a wax job," Lenore answered. "Leave him baby-smooth..."

"Do you suppose he's never tried to push his snake down a hole?" This was Lenore, a few minutes later, when Shiplett was feeding the electrician's snake down the conduit in preparation for pulling the wire through it.

"Or maybe it's just he's never ever felt bottom before," Schreyer said.

Shiplett gave them both a dirty look, but continued.

Later, when they'd finished and Schreyer was calling the radio gang on base to come check out the signal strengths, Lenore bandaged the gouge Shiplett got on his right index finger from the rough-sawn edge of the conduit. He didn't seem either pissed off or stony-faced, but pleased that he'd finished the job with Novotny.

"Okay, Sparks, hit it!" The call came from one of the radiomen working on installing the radios and verifying they were getting enough signal from the antennas. The coax they'd put in the boat to the stations was called 'RG-6' for "radio-guide type six", and had "N-type" connectors. The radio sets that they'd use the remote jacks for were RF-interfaced, meaning the cable network was passive. The equipment in the cabinet under the chart table was removable, and slid into racks with quarter-turn fasteners above and below the small handles used to pull the equipment out.