Schwartz was in his element now. Someone was interested in his little ugly yellow baby, and he could talk forever on that subject. “The Sea Scan is several orders of magnitude more capable than any previous unmanned submersible. We attached a high-resolution side-scan sonar that allows us to do very rapid bottom searches over rather large areas.” He pulled out a spiral notebook and flipped it open to a drawing of the robot sub. He pointed to a box attached underneath the device’s belly. “This magnetometer will help us when we’re looking for a downed sub, too. It detects masses of metal quite well. Once we’ve found something, these video cameras are linked to that monitor over there.” He pointed to a screen among the mass of electronics and jumble of cables sitting on the torpedo stow above him. “Then we can see what Sea Scan has found and drive in for a close-up look. The real problem is knowing where she is in relation to both the Toledo and the sunken sub. We put in a very accurate miniature inertial navigation system and tied it to your sub’s system through the fiber.”

Glass looked at the jumble of wires and the stack of boxes and shook his head. The normally neat and orderly torpedo room looked like a junkyard with all this foreign stuff. He wasn’t sure anything could work in this confusion of electronics, monitors and cabling.

He asked the question he had been thinking about ever since he saw the chaotic mess in the midst of his torpedo room. “How long until you have it all ready to go?”

Schwartz looked up from the monitor, its blue-white glow reflecting in his thick spectacles. “I’ll finish the hookup this evening. Tomorrow we can flood down the tube and give her a test run in the tube. That soon enough?”

“Good. We go under the ice tomorrow evening. I want everything ready once we get in the area. Lives may depend on it, Dr. Schwartz.”

The oceanographer Schwartz showed him a shy little grin. “Don’t worry, Skipper. Sea Scan’ll be ready to go.”

Catherine Goldman had a perplexed look on her face when she looked up from the screen she was reviewing. Something was fishy here. She still wasn’t quite sure what it was, but something just didn’t feel right.

She flashed on to another screen and read down the neat, orderly lines of source code that were displayed there. A little voice in the back of her head was telling her there was a problem here. It was a voice that rarely lied to her. So far, she just couldn’t quite put it together.

Still, Goldman knew from years of listening to her own instincts that whatever was out of whack with this project would be made clear to her. She needed to sink her teeth into it more deeply and shake it out.