"Range?" Dubinin asked his tracking officer.

"Estimate between five and nine thousand meters, Captain! Best I can do with the data."

"Well done, Kolya! Splendid."

"We're below the layer now, water temperature down five degrees!" the Starpom - executive officer - called.

"Bow planes to zero, level out."

"Planes to zero, captain zero angle on the boat."

Had there been enough overhead room, Dubinin would have leaped off his feet. He'd just done what no other Soviet submarine commander - and if his intelligence information was right, only a handful of Americans - had ever done. He'd established contact with and tracked an American Ohio-class fleet ballistic-missile submarine. In a war situation, he'd be able to fire off ranging pings with his active sonar and launch torpedoes. He'd stalked the world's most elusive game, and was close enough for a killing shot. His skin tingled from the excitement of the moment. Nothing in the world could match this feeling. Nothing at all.

"Ryl' napravo," he said next. "Right rudder, new course three-zero-zero. Increase speed slowly to ten knots."

"But, Captain " his Starpom said.

"We're breaking contact. He'll continue this drill for at least thirty minutes. It is very unlikely that we can evade counter-detection when he concludes it. Better to leave now. We do not want him to know what we have done. We will meet this one again. In any case, our mission is accomplished. We have tracked him, and we got close enough to launch our attack. At Petropavlovsk, men, there will be much drinking, and your captain will do the buying! Now, let's clear the area quietly so that he will not know that we were ever here."

Captain Robert Jefferson Jackson wished he was younger, wished that his hair was still completely black, that he could again be a young 'nugget' fresh from Pensacola, ready to take his first hop in one of the forbidding fighter aircraft that sat like enormous birds of prey along the flight line at Oceana Naval Air Station. That all twenty-four of the F-14D Tomcats in the immediate area were his was not as satisfying as the knowledge that one was his and his alone. Instead, as Commander Air Group, he 'owned' two Tomcat squadrons, two more of F/A-18 Hornets, one of A-6E Intruder medium-attack aircraft, another of C-3 submarine hunters, and finally the less glamorous tankers, electronic-warfare Prowlers, and rescue/ASW helicopters. A total of seventy-eight birds with an aggregate value of what? A billion dollars? Much more if you considered replacement cost. Then there were the three thousand men who flew and serviced the aircraft, each of whom was beyond price, of course. He was responsible for all of it. It was much more fun to be a new fighter pilot who drove his personal airplane and left the worrying to management. Robby was now management, the guy the kids talked about in their cabins on the ship. They didn't want to be called into his office, because that was like going to see the principal. They didn't really like flying with him, because a) he was too old to be good at it any more (they thought), and b) he'd tell them whatever he thought they were doing wrong (fighter pilots do not often admit mistakes, except among themselves).