One of the men watching the SQQ-89 narrow-band display noticed Ward standing at the door. He stepped briskly over to greet him. The short, slight man wore the anchors of a chief petty officer on the collars of his blue jumpsuit and a name tag that said STROUD.

“Captain, welcome to sonar,” he greeted Ward. He paused for an instant. “Can I help you, sir?”

Ward smiled. He recognized the proprietary attitude that he had observed in most of the best submarine sonar chiefs he had dealt with. This was his space, thank you very much. The rest of the ship might belong to the captain, but sonar was the chief’s territory.

“Just stopped in to see how things were going, Chief,” Ward said. “Any activity out there at all?”

CPO Stroud stepped back toward the narrowband display. Ward followed. The chief pointed to a peak on one of the squiggly lines. “We’ve been getting some intermittent hits at fifteen-point-two hertz. Not enough to call it a contact yet.”

Ward rubbed his chin and thought for a bit. “Hmmm, if that were a closing contact, making, say, fifteen knots in the line of sight…”

Stroud smiled, nodded, and continued Ward’s thought. “Yeah, take the Doppler effect out and it puts the base frequency right at fifteen hertz, one of the best tonals for an Akula. That’s why we’ve been watching it so hard. The problem is, it builds for a couple of minutes and then we lose it. Fifteen minutes, a half hour later, we get another hit on it.”

Ward watched the display with great interest for a minute. Just as Chief Stroud had predicted, the peak disappeared.

“Damn,” Stroud muttered. “Lost it again.”

“Chief, why hasn’t that tonal been reported to CIC?” Ward asked.

Stroud looked hard at the former submarine captain for a moment before he answered, his jaws working as he considered his reply.

“Ship’s policy, sir,” he answered. “The officers over there don’t want their displays all cluttered up with possible contacts that eventually turn into biologics or fish farts. We have been told not to report until we are sure it is a contact of interest.”

The chief’s tone left little doubt that this policy was something with which he didn’t agree. It was clearly a battle he had lost somewhere along the way.

Ward smiled and winked. “Chief, while I’m on board your fine ship, could you humor an old salt? Send over every possible contact so I’ll have something to play with. It gets real boring looking at that big screen and I need to justify this pleasure cruise somehow.”