“I heard the explosion behind us while we were running from those fish,” Zillich said, talking fast. He was still excited by what he had heard and the wild ride they had just taken. “Then it sounded like flooding to me. I heard what I think was something big hitting the bottom a minute or so after that. Hard to say about the time. I’m afraid I was a little preoccupied with the torpedoes. I got it all on tape, though.”

Glass stroked the stubble on his chin. “So you think we got the slimy bastard, huh?”

“I’d bet so, Skipper. I’ll look at the tapes to make sure, though.”

“Okay, Master Chief. Let’s get your people back to searching just the same. If he’s still out there, I don’t want him to go shooting at us again. I don’t want any more nasty surprises. I still want to find that downed Russian boat if it’s out there.”

Glass turned on a heel and walked out of the sonar room into control. Doug O’Malley stepped over from the periscope stand to meet him.

“Skipper, Dan Perkins is asking to launch the robot sub again. He says they’re all ready to go down there in the torpedo room.”

“Let’s hold off a bit, Eng. I want to make sure we’re alone out here before we go outside and play again,” Glass replied. He reached up to the controls for the sonar repeater and flicked through the screens, checking what Zillich and his team were seeing in the sonar room. “Tommy’s pretty sure we got the bastard that was shooting at us…and likely the one that sank Miami, too…but I want to be positive. I want to make sure he doesn’t have a running mate out there somewhere, ready to come after us, too. Tell Perkins that we’ll do a careful passive search of the area first. Then we’ll see.”

O’Malley was about to relay the message to the scientists down in the torpedo room when a sudden bright spike appeared on the sonar screen. They both stared at it for a few seconds, saw nothing for a second or two, but then another one split the screen. O’Malley grabbed the 7MC microphone.

“Sonar, conn. What is the transient, bearing two-one-two?”

“Conn, sonar. We see it. We’re analyzing now,” Zillich replied.

As Glass and O’Malley watched, another spike appeared, then another. It was odd. The pattern looked to be rhythmic.

“Conn, sonar,” Zillich chimed in. “Sounds like somebody hammering on metal. I think we’ve found the sunken sub. Best bearing, two-zero-nine. Best range estimate is two-one-hundred yards.”