Jon Ward eased back in his chair and watched the tactical display as it played out on the flat-panel screen. The picture was getting cluttered. A dozen merchant ships were tracking up and down the Norwegian coast. The Aegis radar was keeping up with a hundred aircraft, some commercial flights, several military planes, and helicopters moving back and forth between the oil platforms and the coast. It was a lot of information and most of it was extraneous.

Ward concentrated his thoughts on three of the hundreds of symbols crowding the big screen. A P-3C Orion aircraft was five miles out in front of the Akula submarine they had found. It was down low, dropping lines of SSQ-53D DIFAR sonobuoys. Anzio’s SH-60B helicopter flew at two thousand feet, monitoring the line of sonobuoys the mystery sub had just passed through. The chopper was data-linking the information the sonobuoys heard back to the computers on the Aegis cruiser.

The two aircraft coordinated their sonobuoy patterns, leapfrogging each other as the mystery submarine tried to sneak down the Norwegian coast. They were being very careful not to spook the sub, circling high up in the clouds whenever they could. They couldn’t afford for the skipper of the Akula to see them if he came up to periscope depth. Anzio was staying just over the horizon. The Russian boat had no idea they were anywhere close.

The sonobuoys parachuted down to the water and dropped their hydrophones four hundred feet into the depths. The sensitive listening devices were set to catch the fifteen-hertz noise tonal this sub was emitting. They could listen for several hours before their batteries died. When they detected the sub, a tiny transmitter floating on the surface radioed the information up to the circling aircraft. The aircraft relayed the information and it was combined with the data from the cruiser’s own SQQ-89 towed array. It was a piece of teamwork that was well planned and often practiced.

They needed to figure out where this guy was going. He was staying very close to the Norwegian coast, trying to hide amid all the coastal shipping and biologic noise.

“Good thing he’s got that strong fifteen-hertz tonal or he’d be near impossible to track this near the coast,” Ward said to no one in particular.

He punched a few keys on his keyboard and spun the trackball. At this speed, the Akula would enter the Kattegat tomorrow night. If Ward’s guess was right, the sneaky bastard would be off the Baltic coast of Russia, near St. Petersburg, in two days.

Bob Norquest stepped through the hatch into the CIC. The Anzio’s skipper had been very attentive, if somewhat cool, since their disagreement about calling in the P-3s. He walked over to Ward’s command chair and bent down to whisper something.