"Where?"

"In the basement of my home, concealed in some nickel-hydrogen batteries."

Qati didn't like that, not one small bit. The Arab chieftain was not a well man, the German could see, and that did not help him conceal his feelings.

"I need to return to Germany in any case to get the machine tools," he said.

"You have them?"

"Five kilometers from my home is the Karl Marx Astrophysical Institute. We were supposed to manufacture astronomical telescopes there, visual and X-ray telescopes. Alas, it never opened. Such a fine "cover" wasted, eh? In the machine shop, in crates marked ASTROPHYSICAL INSTRUMENTS, are six high-precision, five-axis machines - the finest sort," Fromm observed with a wolfish grin. "Cincinnati Milacron, from the United States of America. Precisely what the Americans use at their Oak Ridge, Rocky Flats, and Pantex fabrication plants."

"What about operators?" Ghosn asked.

"We were training twenty of them, sixteen men and four women, each with a university degree No, that would be too dangerous. It is not really necessary in any case. The machines are "user-friendly," as they say. We could do the work ourselves, but that would take too much time. Any skilled lensmaker - even a master gunsmith, as a matter of fact - can operate them. What was the business of Nobel Prize winners fifty years ago is now the work of a competent machinist," Fromm said. "Such is the nature of progress, Ja?"

"It could be, then again it could not," Yevgeniy said. He'd been on duty for twenty hours straight, and only six hours of fitful sleep separated that from yet another, longer stint.

Finding it, if that indeed was what they'd done, had taken all of Dubinin's skill. He'd guessed that the American missile sub had headed south, and that her cruising speed was in the order of five knots. Next came environmental considerations. He'd had to stay close, within direct-path range, not allowing himself to come into a sonar convergence zone. The CZs were annular - donut - shaped areas around a vessel. Sound that went downward from a point within the convergence zone was refracted by the water temperature and pressure, traveling back and forth to the surface on a helical path at semi-regular intervals that in turn depended on environmental conditions. By staying out of them, relative to where he thought his target was, he could evade one means of detection. To do that meant that he had to stay within theoretical direct-path distance, the area in which sound simply traveled radially from its source. To accomplish that without detection, he had to remain on the top side of the thermocline layer - he figured that the American would remain under it - while allowing his towed-array sonar to hang below it. In this way, his own engine-plant noises would probably be deflected away from the American submarine.

Dubinin's tactical problem lay in his disadvantages. The American submarine was quieter than his, and possessed both better sonars and better sonar-operators. Senior Lieutenant Yevgeniy Nikolayevich Ryskov was a very bright young officer, but he was the only sonar expert aboard who might fairly be matched against the American counterparts, and the boy was burning himself out. Captain Dubinin's only advantage lay in himself. He was a fine tactician, and knew it. And his American counterpart was not, Dubinin thought, and didn't know it. There was a final disadvantage. By staying on top of the layer, he made counter-detection by an American patrol aircraft easier, but Dubinin was willing to run that risk. What lay before him was a prize such as no Russian submarine commander had ever grasped.