It was time to rein this flunky in! Stern unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled from it a videotape. For the first time this day he allowed a small smile to play at his lips. This should do it. The private investigator who had secured the images on the tape had earned his fee well. Maybe he worked hard and made certain he was in the right place at the right time. Or maybe he had set the whole thing up. Stern neither knew nor cared how he did it. The slight grin widened to a full smile as he imagined the wheedling and whining he would soon hear from that pompous Brit ass. It was something he wanted to see in person.

He punched the button on his speakerphone and yelled to his assistant when she answered.

“Get Alan Smythe at OptiMarx on the phone. Tell him to get his ass on a plane out here immediately. Tell him I expect him to be here this evening. That I want no excuses from him or the checks will stop…as of close of business today.”

Joe Glass sat on the bench locker in front of the torpedo tube control console. Despite the mess of new electronics and cabling that had been brought aboard back in Scotland, the torpedo room looked curiously empty considering that they were outbound on a mission. Six orange exercise ADCAP torpedoes filled a half dozen of the twenty-six stowage positions. One green war-shot was lined up behind tube two. The other three tubes were locked shut, with brass signs hanging from the heavy bronze doors. The signs read CAUTION, WARSHOT LOADED.

Tube two’s door hung open, though. It was possible to see all the way down the twenty-one-inch-diameter cylinder to the muzzle door twenty-three feet away. The only thing in the tube was the little yellow robot sub. Its strange, misshapen, dwarfed form seemed out of place in there. This space was meant for sleek, deadly weapons of destruction, not the little toy of some eccentric oceanographer.

“Here’s the difficulty, Skipper,” Bill Schwartz was saying as he pointed to a hockey-puck-shaped blob of plastic. A thick cable protruded out of one side, while the other side contained an orderly mass of short pins. Schwartz was a civilian scientist and a temporary member of Dan Perkins’s DSRV team. The middle-aged scientist pushed back his bifocals and shook his head. The mane of brown hair, streaked with gray, flew wildly, adding to his mad-scientist persona. “Damn quality control! Takes three of these one-forty-eight-pin connectors to get one that works.”

Schwartz tossed the offending connector onto the deck next to the electronic test set he had been using. He grabbed another one out of the green sea bag that lay on the deck behind him and hooked one end of it to the set. He stood and leaned over to push the puck into the mating connector on the tube door.