"Mr Shaw, let's see your TMA records."

"Here, sir." Ensign Shaw, who'd graduated sub school at Groton less than two months before, was standing in the corner, the chart and his notes grasped tightly in his tense hands. Ricks snatched them away and spread them on a work table. The Captain's eyes scanned the pages.

"Sloppy. You could have done this at least a minute faster."

"Yes, sir," Shaw replied. He didn't know how he might have gone faster, but the Captain said so, and the Captain was always right.

"That could have made the difference," Ricks told him, a muted but still nasty edge on his voice.

"Sorry, sir." That was Ensign Shaw's first real mistake. Ricks straightened, but still had to look up to meet Shaw's eyes. That didn't help his disposition either.

" 'Sorry' doesn't cut it, Mister. 'Sorry' endangers our ship and our mission. 'Sorry' gets people killed. 'Sorry' is what an unsatisfactory officer says. Do you understand me, Mr Shaw?"

"Yes, sir."

"Fine." The word came out as a curse. "Let's make sure this never happens again."

The rest of the half hour was spent going over the records of the exercise. The officers left the room for a larger one, where they would relive the exercise, learning what the Red Team had seen and done. Lieutenant Commander Claggett slowed the Captain down.

"Skipper, you were a little hard on Shaw."

"What do you mean?" Ricks asked in annoyed surprise.

"He didn't make any mistakes. I couldn't have done the track more than thirty seconds faster myself. The quartermaster I had with him has been doing TMAs for five years. He's taught it at sub school. I kept an eye on both of them. They did okay."

"Are you saying the mistake was my fault?" Ricks asked in a deceptively gentle voice.

"Yes, sir," the XO replied honestly, as he had been taught to do.

"Is that a fact?" Ricks walked out the door without another word.

To say that Petra Hassler-Bock was unhappy was an understatement of epic proportions. A woman in her late thirties, she'd lived over fifteen years on the run, hiding from the West German police before things had simply become too dangerous, precipitating her escape to the East Zone - what had been the East Zone, the Bundes Kriminal Ami. investigator smiled to himself. Amazingly, she'd thrived on it. Every photo in the thick file showed an attractive, vital, smiling woman with a girl's unlined face framed by pretty brown hair. This same face had coldly watched three people die, one after several days of knife-work, the detective told himself. That murder had been part of an important political statement - it had been at the time of the vote on whether or not to allow the Americans to base their Pershing-2 and Cruise missiles in Germany, and the Red Army Faction had wanted to terrify people into seeing things their way. It hadn't worked, of course, though it had made the victim's death into a gothic exercise.