Glass nodded. He could not imagine what in hell they had stumbled into the middle of up here.

If everyone in the control room had not been busy, redirecting the sub and getting under way to the thin spot in the ice floe, they might have noticed the hard, firm set to their commander’s jaw. The steely look of determination in his ice blue eyes.

Without even knowing it, the navigator headed Toledo for the same polynya that Miami had used to report Gepard’s sinking. Along the route there, she passed silently a thousand yards from where Volk sat in wait. The sonar man standing watch on the Russian sub had the fleetest instant to see the ultraquiet Toledo before she disappeared from his screen. He had already suffered several days of endless boredom since all the excitement had taken place. Now all they were doing was sitting here, ice-picked under the Barents, and with nothing to listen for but the continual groaning of the ice and the irritating snores of his fellow crew members. On watch or not, he was half dozing himself, his head resting in his hands above the console, a thin rope of spit stretching down from his lips.

Toledo passed by undetected.

Even Igor Serebnitskiv stifled a persistent yawn as he stepped into the control room of the Volk at the very moment Toledo passed. He idly flipped through the screens on the sonar display. Gepard had ceased her underwater telephone pleas earlier in the morning. That was a good sign. His own people were certain the air aboard the vessel would be too foul to sustain life by now, even if the cold had not finished them. He was still mystified why the double blasts from the planted charges had not destroyed the Gepard, how at least some of the crew had survived so long, but that would be a moot point by now. The mission had been accomplished. They were all dead by this time, including Andropoyov.

Still, he decided it would be prudent to wait another day, just to make sure, before surfacing, delivering the news to his uncle, and heading back to Polyarnyy in triumph.

He did see the blip caused by Toledo’s passage, but he disregarded it. It was so quick, so fleeting, it was surely some extraneous sea noise. The sonar man was one of the best in the Russian Navy. If it were something worthy of easing out from their hiding spot, he would have sung loudly and clearly.

Five minutes later, the noise the tired sonar man heard was unmistakable, and certain enough that his eyes popped wide-open. He was quick to wake his commander from the fitful nap he had begun in the seat behind him.

“Captain! I hear the sounds of a sub breaking through the ice!” he reported, then checked the readings. “Bearing zero-eight-three. That is the bearing to the polynya where the American surfaced before.”