"Tell me again what in the hell it's supposed to be I'm listening for?"

The young petty officer seemed lost for words again as he looked from his captain to the first officer standing just inside the curtain of the sonar station.

"It's like ... like ... a pressure wave of some kind, and it's moving extremely fast. The only thing that can cause something like that is a large object moving through the sea. We hear the same thing with whales, only on a smaller scale."

"I just don't hear it."

"How fast did you say it was moving again?" the first officer asked.

This time the operator looked at his training partner, who had also failed to hear the strange noise. He swallowed, then looked at the two officers.

"About seventy-six knots. I measured the speed of the pressure wave against our static location."

Lofgren removed the headphones and looked at the operator, but Cleary kept his eyes straight ahead, not flinching away from his captain's questioning look.

"Captain, it went to almost eighty knots speed after I detected it, and at the moment it passed beneath us I felt the boat ..." He stopped, knowing the explanation would sound too amazing to believe.

"Felt the boat what?"

"I have the computer and depth track on paper to back me on this, Captain."

Lofgren didn't say anything as he waited.

"Columbiaactually rose in depth by eight feet as water under our keel was displaced by whatever it was that plowed beneath us when we came into the affected area." The sonar man pulled a graph and showed it to the two officers. "One minute we're at three hundred and three feet of depth, the next we went to two hundred and ninety-five--a difference of eight feet. Something monstrous passed beneath our keel at that exact time. What could move a Los Angeles class boat by that much depth from that far away?"

The first officer raised his eyebrows and looked at Lofgren.

"I guess it would have had to have been big to shove aside that much water. Are you sure the object was that deep?"

Again, the young man was hesitant to answer. "Captain, it was so deep that ..." He saw the impatience showing on both officers' faces. "About fifteen hundred feet at first contact."

"Fifteen hundred feet of depth and then it suddenly sprang like a cheetah up to seventy-five knots? I can't buy that, Cleary. Not even the Russians have anything remotely close to half that," the first officer said.

"Write it up, Cleary, and get it to me. We'll bait the hook and send it out and see if anyone at COMSUBLANT bites."

As Captain Lofgren returned to the conn, he half-turned to his first officer.

"Before you say anything, Dick, we know the attack on the surface happened, and we know Columbiadidn't do it. Therefore, someone else had to have done it. In addition, that someone did it in clear listening range of not only us, but also that Chinese sub they handled with ease. I'll bet my command that the attacker and Cleary's strange contact are one and the same."

The captain turned and saw the eyes of his crew looking at him. The unknowns being pondered frightened them, and he could see it.

Every man aboard knew they had something in the water that could outrun and outgun them, and nothing made an American submariner more concerned than an unseenand unknownenemy.

3

EVENT GROUP COMPLEX,

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA

Director Niles Compton sat with the sixteen departmental heads of the Event Group, silently watching a briefing delivered to the President of the United States by his national security team from the White House. The council there did not know the Event Group was listening in.

"With our losses in the sea of Japan five weeks ago, our weakened status dictates that we have to redeploy our forces even more thinly than they are," the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Kenneth Caulfield, said as he stood before the large situation board.

"Ken, we'll get back to that. What I want to know is what we have on the attacks in Venezuela."

Caulfield nodded toward Admiral Fuqua, the naval chief of staff, who opened a file folder and cleared his throat as if he were uncomfortable with what he was about to say.

"The detonations at sea against the oil tanker, the Greenpeace vessel, and the Chinese attack submarine were nuclear in nature. The yield of each weapon estimated at only five-point-six kilotons. As with the warheads detonated over Caracas, the radiation yield was almost nonexistent. These were the cleanest weapons we have ever come across. Dissipation occurred only hours after the attacks, and there are no lingering effects to air, ground, or sea."

"That's impossible," ventured the president's national security advisor. "No one has weapons that clean, we would have--"

"Andy, what have the boys across the river come up with on where this nuclear material originated?" the president asked CIA Director Andrew Cummings.

"Well, sir, the samples sent to us by courier from our naval asset in the area support no conclusions as to where this material was bred; they only raise more questions."

"Come on, Andy, I'm not going to hold you to it. Give me what your people are thinking."

"We have nothing on record as far as a nuclear fingerprint goes. This material may have been spawned by a breeder reactor that has not been identified."

"Again, that's impossible; the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has--"

"Damn it." The president slammed his palm down on the tabletop, cutting his security advisor short once more. "I think everyone in this room better have learned by now that there are people out there we know nothing about. The Atlantis incident should have taught you that. Assume we have someone out there that can toss clean nukes around. Let's concentrate on finding out who and why, not the impossibility of it," the president said angrily.

In Nevada, Niles Compton glanced at several of his key people, including Captain Carl Everett of the security department and Virginia Pollock, the assistant director of the Event Group. They both saw Niles nod toward them, indicating they would be assigned the task of efforting the problem of clean nukes on their end, at least historically speaking, to see if any research conducted in the past historical record could be uncovered. Without being ordered to do so, Niles hoped to help his old friend in the White House with something the Event Group might have in their database. The Event Group had vast archives on the discovery, engineering, and manufacture of fissionable materials for their study.

"We mayhave a break as to the whypart of the equation, Mr. President," Cummings said in Washington as he opened another red-bordered file folder.

"Go ahead, Andy, something is better than nothing. I'm tired of finding things out at the last minute and playing catch-up; we've been bloodied the past six weeks by groups who have slipped by our intelligence services." He saw that his comment stung almost every man and woman in the room. Even his best friend in Nevada, Niles Compton, felt the rebuke.

"Sir, we do know that the supertanker that was hit was banned from every oil pumping station in the world, with the exception of Caracas, for environmental reasons. Venezuela had leased her, and China was the only nation that agreed to allow her to dock at their off-loading facilities in Shanghai."