Glass wasn’t about to go into detail, to talk about Edwards’s unjustified reliance on Zillich’s “gut feel,” or the slow response of the fire control party. He wouldn’t share those things with anyone else, not even his old skipper. That kind of information was kept inside the lifelines. Outside the lifelines, any problem with Toledo was a problem with her skipper.

There was a serious tone in Ward’s voice when he went on. “I’m glad you learned it when the lesson was cheap. Next time may not be. That’s why we hold drills, Skipper. Let’s go secure.”

Glass felt a sudden shiver of cold go down his spine as he pushed the button on the secure phone. He listened to the electronics chirp and crackle for a few seconds, until the red light flickered to green. Ward’s voice now sounded oddly distant and hollow.

“Hold you secure, Joe.”

“Hold you the same,” Glass answered. “Now, what’s going on? This ain’t some exercise.”

Ward paused a moment before answering. “Day before yesterday, SUBLANT received a message from Miami. She was on one of those scientific exercises up in the Barents Sea at the ice edge. Had a load of eggheads from Woods Hole on board, listening to narwhals.”

“That’s Brad Crawford’s boat, isn’t it? He was in the same Prospective Commanding Officer class with me. A real good guy.”

“Yeah, Crawford has Miami,” Ward answered. “You’re right. He’s a good one. Real cool under pressure. Great service reputation. He seems to have all the right buttons punched. Anyway, back to the story. SUBLANT gets this message from Crawford. He says he picked up a new type of Akula coming out of Polyarnyy on his thin-line array. It was real quiet and not showing most of the Akula tonals.”

Glass whistled and rubbed his chin. “A new boat out of Russia? They haven’t even been getting the ones they have under way lately. I hear they have no money for upkeep and the boats that they have are rusting alongside the pier. How the hell are they going to build something new?”

“I have no idea, Joe,” Ward replied. “An even bigger question is how they could keep something like that secret from us. Anyway, Miami reports trailing this new boat up under the ice. They get two hundred miles northwest of Novaya Zemlya when the Akula explodes and sinks. Crawford said he talked to survivors on the underwater telephone and they’re in dire straits. They don’t know what happened but they’ve lost their reactor power. They’re on the bottom in a thousand feet of water and under a lot of pack ice.”