"I agree, Marvin, but I would like to hear your reasoning on this," Qati said.

"We've never had a really destructive terrorist act over here. This one will change things. People won't feel safe. They'll install check points and security stuff everywhere. It'll really piss people off, make people think. Maybe they'll see what the real problems are. That's the whole point, isn't it?"

"Correct, Marvin," Qati replied.

"Can I help you with the painting?" Ghosn asked. He might get curious, Ibrahim thought, and they couldn't have that.

"I'd appreciate it."

"You must promise to turn the heat on," the engineer observed with a smile.

"Depend on it, man, or else the paint won't dry right. I guess this is kinda cold for ya."

"Your people must be very hard to live in such a place."

Russell reached for his coat and gloves. "Hey, man, it's our place, y'know?"

"Do you really expect to find him?" the Starpom asked.

"I think we have a fine chance," Dubinin replied, leaning over the chart. "He'll be somewhere in here, well away from the coastal waters - too many fishermen with nets there - and north of this area."

"Excellent, Captain, only two million square kilometers to search."

"And we will cover only two-thirds of that. I said a fine chance, not a certainty. In three or four more years, we'll have the RPV the designers are working on, and we can send our sonar receptors down into the deep sound channel." Dubinin referred to the next step in submarine technology, a robot mini-sub, which would be controlled from the mother ship by a fiber-optic cable. It would carry both sensors and weapons, and by diving very deep it could find out if sonar conditions in the thousand-to-two-thousand-meter regime were really as good as the theorists suggested. That would change the game radically.

"Anything on the turbulence sensors?"

"Negative, Captain," a lieutenant answered.

"I wonder if those things are worth the trouble " the executive officer groused.

"They worked the last time."

"We had calm seas overhead then. How often are the seas calm in the North Pacific in winter?"

"It could still tell us something. We must use every trick we have. Why are you not optimistic?"

"Even Ramius only tracked an Ohio once, and that was on builder's trials, when they had the shaft problem. And even then, he only held the contact for - what? Seventy minutes."

"We had this one before."

"True enough, Captain." The Starpom tapped a pencil on the chart.

Dubinin thought about his intelligence briefing on the enemy - old habits were hard to break. Harrison Sharpe Ricks, Captain, Naval Academy, in his second missile-submarine command, reportedly a brilliant engineer and technician, a likely candidate for higher command. A hard and demanding taskmaster, highly regarded in his navy. He'd made a mistake before, and was unlikely to make another, Dubinin told himself.

"Fifty thousand yards, exactly," Ensign Shaw reported.

"This guy's not doing any Crazy Ivans," Claggett thought for the first time.