Gonzales squinted at the display in front of him, thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “No way. We won’t be able to stay down here in the mud with it turned off.” He reached over and nudged a slider on the touch panel display. “I’ll drop the signal strength to the minimum, though. I can’t go any lower without risking bumping into the bottom. Besides, even if someone up there picks up our sonar, he’ll think he’s listening to a whale with a bad case of gas.”

Donlan chuckled, envisioning some hapless sonar man listening to a whale farting in the depths. That had to be an interesting sound.

“Well, they know something’s down here now,” Donlan said. “They may not know yet if anybody was in the BTR when they torched it, but they’ll figure that was the extraction point and that somebody was running around in their little fjord to grab those guys. They’ll be listening real hard.”

Bill Beaman had stuck his head through the hatch into the command module. He listened to the two pilots’ easy give-and-take but knew enough about what was going on to sense there was a problem. “Trouble?”

“Not really,” Gonzales answered, still without looking up. “We just have some company heading out to wish us bon voyage. How are our passengers doing?”

“The boys are destroying the chow you brought out. These new boats are great. I can’t imagine hot chow on a mini-sub in the old days. Broughton is okay. Hall gave him a shot for the pain.”

“Glad you like our ferry service,” Gonzales said, his eyes still on the display in front of him. “Please recommend it to all your friends. Sorry we’re all out of champagne. How’s Smitrov?”

“Still out. Hall hooked him up to a saline drip. That’ll help stabilize things some, but we need to get him some real medical help quick.”

“We’ll do what we can, but—”

“Guys, our friend is active,” Donlan interrupted. “Sounds like an Elk Tail sonar. I’ll bet you a buck our friend is a Grisha V patrol boat. He’ll be armed to the teeth. Torpedoes, guns, missiles. He’ll even have a rocket mortar. An RBU-6000. Nasty little piece of gear. Tosses twelve mortars in a circle pattern around you. It’s designed to detonate simultaneously so the effect is additive. It’ll ring your chimes. This guy is not someone we want to argue with.”

Beaman looked over Donlan’s shoulder at the tactical display. The screen showed someone behind them was actively pinging. The 14.7-kilohertz sonar was unmistakable. The signal level was increasing. Every time Beaman heard a ping over the speaker, he saw a bright line shoot out from the center of the display. That line showed a bearing from the mini-sub to the hunter that was quickly coming from above and behind them.