Jon Ward sat up high in the command seat in the Anzio’s CIC, bored out of his seagoing mind. He yawned as he watched the intelligence picture develop on the large-screen display in front of him. Their best estimate of the position of Joe Glass and Toledo and the precious ASDV they carried showed up on the screen as a green, inverted U, the symbol for a friendly submarine. Two similar symbols, only these glowing red, gave the intel weenies’ best guesses at where the two escaped Russian subs could be.

Ward shook his head and smiled. He knew what a guesstimate those were. The actual positions of the Russian subs could be anywhere within five hundred miles of that symbol, and they could be getting farther away every hour.

The western boundary for the first Russian sub had passed beyond Anzio’s current location several hours ago. That’s why Ward was sitting here in this seat while the Anzio steamed back and forth with her long SQQ-89 towed-array tail deep down in the cold Norwegian Sea, fishing for Akulas.

Besides that, there wasn’t much else to do right now. Joe Glass had his orders and the Toledo was running off to the Barents to carry them out. Glass didn’t need any long-distance coaching from his old captain.

Bob Beaman was flat on his stomach on some frozen mound of dirt above Polyarnyy, no doubt freezing his ass off while he watched the occasional Russian submarine slink out to sea. Everything was in motion. Now all Joe and his guys had to do was to sneak in close, send the mini-sub off to take a nice, long look into the barn, then pull Beaman and his Boy Scout troop out of Russian territory.

That’s all.

Ward sat back and took a sip from his cup of coffee. He spat it back.

Damn stuff was cold! He stood, stretched, and sauntered over to the coffeepot. As he dumped the cold joe in the sink and poured fresh, steaming liquid into the china mug, Ward decided to step across the passageway and take a peak inside Anzio’s sonar shack. He could justify leaving his post for a moment. He knew it always seemed to improve the guys’ morale when they knew the boss was taking a personal interest in what they were doing.

He stepped out of the darkened CIC and blinked several times in the bright light of the passageway. The sonar shack was a few steps forward. Ward walked into a room much larger than what he was accustomed to from his time in cramped submarine sonar spaces. But the banks of equipment looked very familiar. Young sailors stared, trying to pull information out of waterfall displays on CRTs, hoping to see the broadband noise from a submarine painted on the screens. Others watched wavy lines build on the narrow-band displays, trying to find the telltale discrete frequency signature of an Akula-class Russian submarine.