He sat down again in front of the set. It was a box with several switches and a laptop computer attached to it. After a few strokes on the keyboard, Schwartz leaned back and pointed to the screen. “You see, Skipper? That’s what it should look like. This is a good one.”

Glass looked at the computer-generated graphic. It was indecipherable to him, but if it placated the scientist, all was well.

“So, where are we?” Glass asked.

Schwartz sighed and sat back, leaning against one of the heavy stanchions supporting the upper level of torpedo stows. He took a healthy swig from his coffee cup and sighed. “Well, the ticklish part is over. It’s all grunt work from here on out. This is the first time we’ve tried to use one of these from a torpedo tube, you know. We couldn’t have done it at all with the old-generation underwater vehicles.”

Glass frowned. He couldn’t believe that this Rube Goldberg–looking lash-up had not even been tested before. Or that the potential rescue of stranded submariners depended on it functioning properly.

“Why not, Dr. Schwartz? It seems like that gizmo would be the perfect tool for a lot of uses.”

“Problem was the power supply. The old ones were electric driven, powered through the tether cable from the surface. There was no way to launch from the torpedo tubes without major modifications to the tube door, and even then, it would have limited the range so much it would not have been practical. You don’t have room for several thousand feet of tether cable on board your boat, Skipper. Or a way to retrieve it once we’ve spooled it out. These new ones are powered with fuel cells. They use this little fiber-optic cable.” He picked up a reel and showed him the end of a hair-thin piece of wire. “It gives us over ten thousand yards of range. When we’re finished, we just cut what we’ve unrolled and throw it away once the robot sub is back in the tube. No retrieval needed.”

Glass shook his head. “Slick, real slick. How good is this thing?”