“I don’t complain when they’re early.” McCann replied absently, peeling off his raincoat. “Where’s your radio man?”
“I sent Gibbs to the officer’s mess to get me the ESGN spec sheet. I left it on the table when the X.O. called me to take the conn.”
McCann nodded and watched her take off her navy blue management coat. She was wearing a green flannel shirt under a vest and heavy khaki pants. He couldn’t help but notice that, even in the bulky clothes, she obviously had a nice figure.
“Where’s the rest of her crew?” Cav asked.
“She’s the expert. They’ll come aboard once she determines exactly what it is they need.” McCann was about to leave her with Cav and go hang his raincoat.
“This babe’s going to handle it herself?” Cav asked.
Change of plan. Maybe these two wouldn’t be best left alone.
“The ‘babe’ is an electrical engineer, and she’s just finished a training course with SPAWAR,” he said coolly, recalling what she’d said to him earlier about submarine officers and women. McCann wondered if he’d sounded as bad.
Cav glanced down at his watch.
“We’re ahead of schedule,” the commander reminded his junior officer.
“That’s not it,” Cav said. “Gibbs has been gone five minutes. If you don’t mind, I’m gonna go find out what happened to him.”
“I have the conn, mister,” he said officially, mounting the step to the platform at the center of the control room. The twin periscopes were aft of him. As Cav went aft, McCann checked the status of the systems on the LED displays. When he was satisfied that all was correct, he stood on the port side and watched Amy work.
It was immediately evident that she was competent. She worked quickly and efficiently. The two cases lay open on the floor, displaying an assortment of tools, gadgets, and testing apparatus. The shoulder bag had been unzipped, and a laptop had been connected to the defective unit and to a couple of testing devices in the briefcase. She was on her knees on the deck, her head bent over the equipment. She was in full concentration, monitoring the changing screens on the laptop.
“Anything?” McCann asked, sitting down on the nearby chief of the boat’s swivel chair. The COB had nearly torn the navigator a new butt hole when the ESGN had begun to malfunction.
“You’re the impatient sort, aren’t you?” she asked without looking up.
“No. I’m the hands-on sort.”
She glanced up at him.
“I mean, it’s tough for me to watch someone else have all the fun. Or doing all the work.”
“Well, this is no fun. And so far, it’s no work, either,” she said, darting another quick look at him.
He leaned forward, planting his elbows on his knees. “What do you have so far?”
“Nothing,” she said. “The preliminary scan tells me that everything is running fine. I don’t see any malfunction in the software. It’s checking the unit hardware now.”
“Do you have the rejection report handy?” he asked, crouching down next to her.
She handed him the clipboard. McCann leafed through the documents until he found the initial report.
“Did you test these parameters?” he held the paper before her.
She glanced up briefly. “I sure have. Those were the preset values I started with.”
McCann turned to see if Cav was coming back. He was the one who’d initially signed off the report. It would be good if he were in on this. But there was no sign of him. In fact, there was no sign of anyone. It was too damn quiet. He glanced at his watch.
“I’m only in a primary phase,” she told him. “A lot more could show up once I run a more detailed diagnosis.”
“Is that usually the way it works?” he asked.
She started to say something, then bit her lip and concentrated more on the screen.
“Spit it out, Russell.”
“You say that like I’m a Russell Terrier, choking on a bone,” she said, looking at him sharply. “Everyone calls me Amy.”
McCann couldn’t help but smile. She had a quirky sense of humor.
“Spit it out, Amy,” he said.
“It’d be premature to say anything,” she replied, typing in a couple of commands on the laptop. “You’ll hold it against me if I’m wrong.”
“There’ll be no court martial,” he said lightly. “I’m just looking for your expert opinion.”
He noticed her eyes were dark blue when she looked up at him.
“No,” she said, turning her attention back to the screen.
“No, meaning you’re refusing an order?”
“No, as in, the answer to your first question is no.”
She was too clever. McCann had to think back to the exact wording of his question. “No, meaning…”
“No, that’s not the way it usually works. The system failures should show up with bells and whistles in the primary test phase. We run the more detailed diagnostics after that to pinpoint the specific location, and to make sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed. We want to make sure we’re replacing the right components.”
McCann looked at the GPS screen. Once the COB had finished lighting into the operator, the navigation man and Cav had been the only ones involved with the unit yesterday. The back-up unit had worked fine.
McCann should have gotten involved. This was a new system, but he was fairly familiar with it. Not as familiar as he should have been, though. He knew every valve, pipe, panel, cable and piece of electronics inside this fast attack submarine. But he should have been in Cav’s back pocket.
He’d always been that way. On the wall above the engineering officer’s desk was a large print of the piping and instrumentation systems of the nuclear plant, mapping everything from the core’s main coolant piping to the last condensate pump pressure control valve. As part of one of his EO exams, McCann had to be able to reproduce it from memory, and he still could, he thought, if need be. As C.O., he knew everything about his sub — except some of the minute details of this new system. When they got out to sea, he’d learn the ins and outs of this, too.
“My men didn’t imagine the system malfunction,” he said, hearing his defenses kicking in.
“I’m not saying that your men imagined a problem yesterday,” she said calmly. “What I’m saying is that, whatever the problem was, they might not have had the means of diagnosing it correctly.”
McCann felt a little better about that. It would have been a major problem if he’d curtailed the start of a patrol over a couple of officers and operators misreading navigation screens. “What else could be wrong?”
“Can’t tell, yet. Give me a little time to work on it first.”
She reconnected a couple of probes to the module and started running another program. Her face registered everything going through her head. He could tell the moment she had something.
“What have you got?” he repeated.
“Must be a pain in the ass to work for,” she murmured under her breath.
“What did you say?”
“I said your crew must be fast workers, Commander.”
“Right,” he retorted. “Just tell me what you see.”
“The first possibility is that you might have a local area network failure,” she told him. “Everything looked good before, but as soon as I test for results through the next system, I pick up some malfunctioning.”
“What could cause that? Wiring?”
She shrugged. “Any number of things. Could be faulty wiring. The good news is that, at this point, I don’t think you’ll have to replace the ESGN unit. The bad news is that unless we can retrace what specific functions were being performed when the problem started, we’ll be searching in the dark for the faulty connections… if that’s what it is.”