The Dallas was quartering an area east of the Grand Banks.  Any boat transiting Route One tended to come through here.  They were moving at five knots, trailing out the BQR-15 towed- array sonar.  They'd had all kinds of contacts.  First, half the submarines in the Russian Navy had whipped by at high speed, many trailed by American boats.  An Alfa had burned past them at over forty knots, not three thousand yards away.  It would have been so easy, Jones had thought at the time.  The Alfa had been making so much noise that one could have heard it with a glass against the hull, and he'd had to turn his amplifiers down to minimums to keep the noise from ruining his ears.  A pity they couldn't have fired.  The setup had been so simple, the firing solution so easy that a kid with an old-fashioned sliderule could have done it.  That Alfa had been meat on the table.  The Victors came running next, and the Charlies and Novembers last of all.  Jones had been listening to surface ships a ways to the west, a lot of them doing twenty knots or so, making all kinds of noise as they pounded through the waves.  They were way far off, and not his concern.

They had been trying to acquire this particular target for over two days, and Jones had had only an odd hour of sleep here and there.  Well, that's what they pay me for, he reflected bleakly.  This was not unprecedented, he'd done it before, but he'd be happy when the labor ended.

The large-aperture towed array was at the end of a thousand-foot cable.  Jones referred to the use of it as trolling for whales.  In addition to being their most sensitive sonar rig, it protected the Dallas against intruders shadowing her.  Ordinarily a submarine's sonar will work in any direction except aft—an area called the cone of silence, or the baffles.  The BQR-15 changed that.  Jones had heard all sorts of things on it, subs and surface ships all the time, low-flying aircraft on occasion.  Once, during an exercise off Florida, it had been the noise of diving pelicans that he could not figure out until the skipper had raised the periscope for a look.  Then off Bermuda they had encountered mating humpbacks, and a very impressive noise that was.  Jones had a personal copy of the tape of them for use on the beach; some women had found it interesting, in a kinky sort of way.  He smiled to himself.