Glass read the words again, trying to search for any meaning hidden between the lines of the terse message. Something was up, and whatever it was, it was important. There hadn’t been any mention of a submarine disaster in the message traffic. That would be the most probable need for the rescue vehicle. Glass closed the cover.

Well, he decided, there was no good to be served by trying to guess the situation. Not until COMSUBLANT decided to tell him more.

He hurried back to the control room. He almost bumped into Edwards as he stepped through the door. He handed the message board to the XO. Edwards read it once, then read it again. He whistled as he looked up at his skipper. “Wow! Wonder what’s going down.”

“No idea, but you better go grab the nav. Tell him to put that second dessert aside and get his butt up here. There’s work to do.”

Edwards chuckled as he slid down the ladder to the middle level. It appeared Perez’s fondness for sweets had not escaped the skipper’s attention.

Glass stepped up to the navigation chart that was spread out on the port-side plotting table. Dennis Oshley, the leading quartermaster, was stooped over the table, plotting Toledo’s latest position fresh from the GPS receiver above his head. He looked up when he realized Glass was standing there.

“Help you, Skipper?”

Oshley was always serious, rarely joining in the usual onboard camaraderie. Like everyone else on Toledo, he did his job well. Exceptionally well. Glass vowed once again to have a chat with him one day, see what made him tick. Maybe he could find out why the young man was so solemn all the time.

“Just seeing how long it would take us to get to Faslane,” Glass said.

Oshley grabbed a pair of dividers and walked them across the chart from the position he had just plotted all the way to the Royal Navy Submarine Base on the west coast of Scotland. “I get a hundred and fifty-five miles, Skipper.” He picked up a circular slide rule, a relic from an earlier time but sometimes still the fastest way to solve certain problems. “Let’s see, at twelve knots, it would take thirteen hours.”

“You hankering for a pint or two of stout, Skipper?” the quartermaster asked.

“That would taste good, but I don’t think we’ll have time to imbibe. Oshley, you better start plotting the most direct transit in. We can’t wait around for the Brits to give us a submerged transit lane, so plan on a surface run all the way.”

Oshley looked up at Glass. When he got no further amplification on the strange order, he shrugged and began maneuvering the parallel motion protractor to start drawing a course.