Toledo leaped ahead as the throttle man poured steam into the boat’s big turbines. Fifteen knots. Twenty. Twenty-five. The sub’s speed climbed. But it was no race because of the velocity of the Russian torpedoes. There was one hope, to get outside the acquisition cone on the two incoming fish so they would lose the scent.

The deck rolled violently as the sub banked through the high-speed turn. Maybe, just maybe, the evasion devices would confuse the torpedoes long enough to allow them to escape.

Glass ran out of his stateroom into the control room. He took in what was happening and realized at once how close they were to death. “Make your depth a thousand feet, forty-down angle! Keep me just off the bottom! Snapshot tube one on the bearing of the incoming weapon!”

He grabbed the metal stanchion by the periscope stand and held on. This was going to be close.

Or maybe not. Maybe they were dead already.

They had to get out of the acquisition cones somehow. Or else they would be little more than another skeleton on the floor, lying dead right next to Miami.

The deck slanted down steeply as Toledo clawed for the safety of the depths.

“Torpedoes bear zero-nine-zero,” Zillich reported, his voice calm and workmanlike. “I have them on the sphere now. They’re active.”

“Weapon ready!” Weps yelled.

“Shoot tube one,” Glass ordered, doing his best to match Zillich’s all-business tone.

Thank God they had the torpedo loaded, the door already open.

He watched the weapons officer throw the brass handle to “Standby” and then to the “Fire” position. At least they would get a chance to shoot back. Glass knew that it would do little more than scare the bastard who had ambushed them. He was probably hiding in the noisy ice near the surface and it would be next to impossible for a normal weapon to ferret him out.

Toledo lurched as the torpedo ejection pump forced three-thousand-psi water up around the back end of the ADCAP torpedo and flushed it out of the tube. Sensors in the torpedo detected motion down the tube so that the Otto-fuel engine started as soon as the weapon cleared the enclosure and was outside. Its steering vanes pushed the four-thousand-pound weapon around until it pointed at a course of zero-nine-zero. All the while, the engine accelerated until the torpedo was traveling at better than sixty knots. It was already busy, searching for its target.

This was no ordinary torpedo. The special underice algorithms built into its software easily picked out the Volk from the surrounding ice. Still, just as it was programmed to do, the weapon looked away and then back, verifying that what it had found was a real submarine target. Its logic now satisfied, the ADCAP drove at maximum speed toward the target, its arming mechanism activated to sense any large metal object nearby, both by sonar and with an interferometer.