"What do you think of them?"

"The sonar guys? They're good. So's the tracking party. The guy Ricks replaced was Jim Rosselli, right?"

"That's right."

"He trained them well. Can we go off the record?"

"Sure."

"Ricks is not a good skipper. He's too tough on the troops, demands too much, too hard to satisfy. Not like you were at all, Bart."

Mancuso dodged the compliment. "We all have different styles."

"I know that, but I wouldn't want to sail with him. One of his chiefs asked for a transfer off. So did half a dozen petty officers."

"They all had family problems." Mancuso had approved all the transfers, including the young chief torpedoman.

"No, they didn't," Jones said. "They needed excuses, and they used them."

"Ron, look, I'm the squadron commander, okay? I can only elevate my COs on the basis of performance. Ricks didn't get here by being a loser."

"You look from the top down. I look from the bottom up. From my perspective, this man is not a good skipper. I wouldn't say that to anybody else, but we were shipmates. Okay, I was a peon, just a lowly E-6, but you never treated me that way. You were a good boss. Ricks isn't. The crew doesn't like him, does not have confidence in him."

"Damn it, Ron, I can't allow stuff like that to affect my judgment."

"Yeah, I know. Annapolis, old school tie - ring, whatever matters to you Canoe U. grads. You have to approach it a different way. Like I said, I wouldn't talk this way with anybody else. If I was on that boat, I'd try to transfer off."

"I sailed with some skippers I didn't like. It's mainly a matter of style."

"You say so, Commodore." Jones paused. "Just remember one thing, okay? There's lots of ways to impress a senior officer, but there's only one way to impress a crew."

Fromm insisted that they take their time. The mold had long since cooled and was now broken open in the inert atmosphere of the first machine tool. The roughly-formed metal mass was set in place. Fromm personally checked the computer codes that told the machine what it had to do and punched the first button. The robotic system activated. The moving arm selected the proper tool head, secured it on the rotating spindle, and maneuvered itself into place. The enclosed area was flooded with argon gas, and Freon began spraying on the plutonium to keep everything to the proper isothermal heat environment. Fromm touched the computer screen, selecting the initial program. The spindle started turning, reaching over a thousand RPM, and approached the plutonium mass with a motion that was neither human nor mechanistic, but something else entirely, like a caricature of a man's action. As they watched from behind the Lexan shield, the first shavings of the silvery metal thread peeled off the main mass.

"How much are we losing?" Ghosn asked.

"Oh, the total will be less than twenty grams," Fromm estimated. "It's nothing to worry about." Fromm looked at another gauge, the one that measured relative pressures. The machine tool was totally isolated from the rest of the room, with the pressure inside its enclosure marginally less than outside. The fact that argon gas was heavier than air would keep oxygen away from the plutonium. That prevented possible combustion. Combustion would generate plutonium dust, which was every bit as lethal as Fromm had told them. A toxic heavy metal, the additional hazard of radioactivity - mainly low-energy alphas - merely made death more rapid and marginally less pleasant. The machinists moved in to take over supervision of the process. They had worked out extremely well, Fromm thought. The skills they'd brought with them had grown with remarkable speed under his tutelage. They were nearly as good as the men he'd trained in Germany, despite their lack of formal education. There was much to be said for practical instead of theoretical work.