Edwards stepped over to look at the computer screen for the BYG-1 fire control system. Pat Durand, the lieutenant operating the system, looked up from the complex display of numbers, dots, and lines. He nodded at Edwards. “XO, we have a curve. Ready for a maneuver.”

Glass watched the young lieutenant’s fingers dance across the keyboard of the system. The kid was as much a magician as advertised. He played the computer keyboard as if it were a concert piano. He even had a pronounced bob of his head as he worked, like some musician playing with feeling.

Edwards was checking the paper geographic plot the team was using to record all of Toledo’s moves and to note any information they could scrape up on the new contact. It was laid out on a small glass-topped table at the rear of the control room, behind the periscope stand. A small X-shaped light, the “bug,” moved beneath the glass to show the sub’s current position.

“Captain, recommend we come left to course one-eight-zero to resolve bearing ambiguity,” Edwards said.

Glass smiled to himself as he turned to face the young officer. How many times had he been in the same situation the young XO was now in? How many times had he told his commander, Jon Ward, how he should steer the old Spadefish? Now here he was, listening to the recommendations from his XO on how to drive his own nuclear submarine. It was what he had been working for since he was a kid, growing up back in Iowa. He had a bedroom wall covered with pictures of submarines, bookshelves full of plastic models of subs and ships he had assembled. Sometimes it was still hard to believe he was here, commanding this sophisticated piece of equipment and her ready crew.

“Helm, left full rudder. Steady, course one-eight-zero,” he ordered.

Glass could hear Edwards muttering into the headset he wore, warning the sonar operators that they were turning. The sonar array was on the end of a two-thousand-foot-long cable. As the sub turned, it played “crack the whip” with the flexible array. Any information gathered during the turn was useless and had to be discarded. When Toledo was steady on the new course, the array would take several minutes to stabilize and integrate so they could once again locate the contact.

During the entire time they would be deaf. Often when the array was once again stabilized, the contact would be gone. There would be no choice but to start the hunt all over again.