RED HUNT : Beneath the Pacific, Two Fleets Engage in a Silent War of Maneuver--the Only Battlefield Where U.S. and Soviet Armed Forces Meet. A Rare View From Inside an Attack Submarine.

ACROSS THE PACIFIC OCEAN, a never-ending war of maneuver is under way. It is a three-dimensional struggle--under sea, on the water and in the air--that pits the U.S. Navy against a Soviet fleet three times its size. The prize is control over half the world’s surface. The weapons are multimillion-dollar ships and planes, as well as a vast array of sophisticated electronics that could provide the winning advantage if a conflict between the superpowers ever erupts.

Central to the American Navy’s strategy are 44 fast-attack submarines that roam the vast, deep waters of the Pacific. Armed with sonars and computers, and with intelligence captured by a system of undersea hydrophones planted along the Pacific Rim, they listen for Soviet ships leaving their home ports, then hunt for them off Hawaii and along the West Coast.

Joining this battle of stealth and strategy are 120 land-based P-3C Orion airplanes and heavily armed destroyers equipped with bow-mounted sonar domes. The goal is not to provoke, but to pursue a Soviet fleet that, since the beginning of the decade, has become increasingly bold in its movements across the Pacific--an ocean once left largely to the Americans.

With Soviet submarine-launched nuclear missiles just six minutes’ flying time from the U.S. West Coast, the attack subs are among the most crucial of American defenses. Theirs is a seldom-seen world of precision teamwork, constant preparation and super-secret surveillance.

IT’S JUST AN AVERAGE DAY at sea. Off the Waikiki coast, the propeller of an aging trawler flutters in the water. A cargo vessel laden with containers lumbers rhythmically toward Honolulu. Beyond the channel leading out of Pearl Harbor, a warship turns its stern to the sun and picks up speed. The thoroughbred whine of its twin gas turbines identifies it as one of the Navy’s newer fast frigates.

Three hundred feet below the Pacific swell, Sonarman 3rd Class Dave Sneed hears it all through his headset aboard the nuclear-powered attack submarine Honolulu. A 25-year-old former electrician from Napa, Calif., Sneed joined the Navy to see the world. But 18 months of training in acoustic interpretation convinced him that he could find more excitement prowling the ocean’s depths than cruising its surface. Beneath the waves are storm fronts and steep canyons, trenches that lead down to the core of the Earth itself. It is an unexplored frontier, one that comes alive in an intricate world of faint hums and whirs that only an experienced sonarman can decipher and chart.

As the Honolulu noses above the thermocline layer, where the Pacific’s cold, deep currents mingle with warmer surface water, Sneed makes an electronic sweep of the area. Beyond the starboard bow, a chorus of clacks betrays the twitching tail fins of a school of feeding shrimp. The more rhythmic click off the port beam is a circling sperm whale.

A huge sonar dome on the bow and an array of hydrophones towed several thousand feet behind the stern digitally process the sounds and display them on a screen. The instrument gives Sneed a visual image of the aural world outside. Faint noises appear as dots or intermittent slashes that cascade down like a waterfall; larger intruders produce a bold line.

From this pattern, Sneed can roam the ocean around him, selecting any of the dozens of “contacts” and tuning them in on his headset for identification by ear. After weeks of training and months of active duty, he has learned to distinguish between the background noise of undersea creatures and the more menacing sounds made by man.

Sneed picks up a plaintive baritone moaning. Pressing the earphones to his head, he hunches closer to the green luminescent screen. Seconds pass and then a cry, quickly followed by another. Of course! Grays and humpbacks are heading toward their mating ground off Maui. Sneed allows himself a smile.

Suddenly, another blip appears on the display. This one is different. An imperfect, distinctly mechanical noise.

“Conn, sonar,” Sneed advises. “Suspected contact bearing one-three-two.” (Though modern submarines no longer have conning towers, reports to the captain still are addressed to the Conn.)

Standing astride twin periscopes in the control room, Cmdr. Tom Flanagan, a 37-year-old Annapolis graduate with a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from MIT, brings his ship close to the surface and snaps down the handles of the ascending periscope. “Stand by for observation,” he orders.

“Bearing, mark. Down scope,” Flanagan barks as he sights the intruder. By squeezing a button on the periscope, he sends the target’s bearing coordinates into the ship’s computerized weapons-control system.

Steaming toward the U.S. sub is a Soviet intelligence-gathering trawler. Ostensibly a fishing vessel, it bristles with radar cones and buggy-whip antennas designed to flash bursts of encoded data to the giant Soviet naval base at Vladivostok, thousand of miles across the Pacific. Its “catch” consists of thousands of radio and microwave transmissions coursing through the U.S. naval facilities at Pearl Harbor.

The technician in charge of the ship’s electronic surveillance measures sends a crucial message to the captain: A high-intensity radar scan beamed directly at the Honolulu’s periscope, he reports, has probably revealed their position to the Soviet vessel.

With a twist of the periscope’s right handle, Flanagan zooms in on the trawler’s silhouette. “The contact continues to close,” he announces. “Diving officer, make depth 400 feet.”

As the periscope slides under the waves, Executive Officer Charles Miletich, 35, a linebacker who captained Navy’s football team in 1973, sounds general quarters and braces himself. Fifteen tons of seawater begin flooding the ship’s forward tanks.

A whirling vortex streams from the trailing edge of the propeller blades and massive fins as they bite into the sea, creating the turbulence called cavitation. High on the console, a light flashes red. The dive is creating enough acoustical disturbance to reveal the sub’s position to Soviet sonar. At the moment, however, escape is more important than stealth.

“One hundred coming to 400,” reports the diving officer, cinching his seat belt tighter. “Two hundred coming to 400.”

The crew plummets at freeway speed, 134 men inside a 7,000-ton tube of steel. Flanagan grasps an overhead cleat; his executive officer clings to a stanchion. The digital depth gauge, now a blur of numbers, loses all meaning. Attention shifts to the older analog dials. Despite the physical sensation of riding a cushioned roller coaster, the nuclear-powered sub surges forward in eerie quiet. The loudest noise is air gusting through the ship to cool computers.

“Three hundred coming to 400.”

“Three hundred and fifty coming to 400.”

Two decks below, in the torpedo room, a rope stretched taut between bulkheads begins to sag. Tons of water are slowly squeezing the sturdy hull of Flanagan’s $500-million machine.

AS QUICKLY AS IT APPEARED,the menacing image of the Soviet trawler fades from the computer screens as the Honolulu completes its dive. Tension in the control room, only slightly elevated, subsides as well: The entire encounter has been an intricate simulation generated by the SSN-688 attack sub’s UYK-7 computer. In reality, there had been no Soviet ship.

But the Soviet Union’s naval presence in the Pacific is very real. On a calm day, pleasure boaters in Hawaii can sail past a Nikolay-Zubov-class trawler that loiters four miles off Pearl Harbor, conveniently close to the Navy Communications Center’s microwave antennas. The trawler is one of six stationed between California and Midway Island. Though some of the ships occasionally perform legitimate oceanographic research, most of their time is spent monitoring U.S. naval ship traffic out of San Diego, observing missiles launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base and tapping microwave transmissions.

Before 1980, the Soviet navy was seldom considered a threat in the Pacific. Moscow’s Pacific Fleet had only three bases--Vladivostok and Sovietskaya Gavan in the Sea of Japan, and Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula--and some of its ships were icebound during the winter. The fleet seldom ventured far from the Arctic waters off the Soviet Far East.

All this changed in 1979 when the Soviets took possession of the abandoned U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. Along with the warm-water port came a renewed commitment to building a deep-water navy. And after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization positioned Pershing 2 nuclear missiles in West Germany in 1985, cutting the flying time of missiles aimed at Western Russia, the Soviets moved their lethal missile-carrying subs closer to the West Coast of the United States. Since 1985, Soviet submarine deployments in the West Pacific have more than doubled. The submarine-launched ballistic missile that took 28 minutes to reach the United States when fired from the Sea of Okhotsk now can hit California in just six minutes.

In this world of shrinking missile flight times and expanding megatonnage, submarines are the most crucial weapon in the U.S. defense arsenal, accounting for 38% of all combatant ships in the Navy. Eight Trident “boomers”--as ballistic missile-bearing subs are known--each armed with 24 intercontinental ballistic missiles, roam the Pacific. They have only one function: to hide in deep water and wait for the order to launch their missiles. Of the U.S. triad of land-, air- and sea-based nuclear armaments, they are the most difficult to detect and destroy.

An attack sub like the 365-foot-long Honolulu has a more complicated role. Though hydrodynamically shaped to resemble a porpoise, it behaves more like a shark. Its mission is to detect, pursue and prepare to destroy enemy nuclear submarines and surface battle groups. It is the guerrilla of the sea, a coastal raider unfettered by the formal naval protocols regulating contact between U.S. and Soviet surface ships. Nowhere on Earth are the world’s major armies or surface fleets engaged in direct conflict. But beneath the Pacific, a silent war of maneuver occurs every day as nuclear-powered attack ships stalk Soviet ships--or their computer equivalents--firing imaginary torpedoes and cruise missiles in preparation for war.

Though the Navy refuses to confirm it, the 44 U.S. fast-attack subs patrolling the Pacific also gather intelligence in the Sea of Okhotsk, observe naval traffic off the coast of North Korea and guard the Aleutian Islands; and the next generation of attack submarine, the SSN-21, will be able to go under the Arctic polar cap, an area the Soviets now have largely to themselves.

“Our attack submarines provide a terrible uncertainty to any enemy,” says Adm. Bruce DeMars, deputy chief of naval operations for submarine warfare. “They move forward into enemy waters, blend invisibly into the environment, attack with tremendous firepower, then disappear to attack again.”

INSIDE THEHONOLULU’Scontrol room, the crew is hardly winded from its successful evasion of the imaginary trawler. But now the computer ups the ante, sending two Soviet warships--a submarine and a surface destroyer--in pursuit of the U.S. vessel. This situation is vastly more complicated, requiring precise command decisions and timely responses from the crew. In a real war, the Honolulu would be dangerously outnumbered, in a fight for its life.

Flanagan must decide whether to strike the enemy sub or the surface ship first. As a junior officer in 1976, he was invited to work on the Navy’s cruise-missile project. Today, at just 37, he is an expert fast-attack skipper. He makes his choice: “Let’s get going after this Soviet sub, men,” he encourages.

The submarine in pursuit of a target is a model of terse efficiency. Concise directions are given, then parroted back to ensure against errors.

“Helm, all ahead two-thirds.”

“All ahead two-thirds, helm aye.”

Even in a multimillion-dollar vessel crammed with sophisticated equipment, human skills still provide a crucial margin of safety. The attack sub’s UYK-7 computer has not made paper obsolete. Despite the UYK-7’s power and reliability, every fast-attack and ballistic-missile sub in the Navy comes with a plotting table and a battery of navigators, who independently resolve every targeting problem with the aid of an instrument called the Mark I Dead Reckoning Analyzer. It was developed in 1940.

“To be honest with you, that computer’s never taken a depth charge close aboard,” says Paul Thielen, the sub’s assistant navigator. Thielen swears that, given a two-minute handicap, he can beat the computer. “It’s all Buck Rogers b.s., you know what I mean?” he sneers. “Human beings prefer pictures to a stack of dots.”

One problem with the computer is its limited memory. The UYK-7 can quickly and accurately plot a torpedo path between a moving U.S. sub and a moving enemy ship at a specific point in time, but once its memory is filled, the record of what transpired hours before is erased. So as the hunt progresses, a crew member records every target bearing on a moving scroll of paper--Xs for sonar readings, Os for visual sightings. If the computer should fail, the captain can make a solid estimate of where the target is heading based on where it has been. Back in port, this contact evaluation plot can provide important clues on new enemy evasive tactics that may improve the odds of survival in wartime.

Aboard the Honolulu, the war of maneuver with the Soviet sub is well under way. Suddenly, the sonarman reports an ominous development: The Soviet submarine has shifted to a speed so slow that the underwater noise it produces is almost impossible to detect. In the dark waters of the deep Pacific, the Russian vessel has effectively made itself invisible. Flanagan could search for it with active sonar, but that might enable the Soviets to lock in a precise fix on his ship. He must simply listen and wait.

Soon, the computer simulation turns to attack. Sonar is first to sound the alarm: “Torpedo in the water.”

It may only be a war game, but no submarine commander can be dispassionate when he hears the sound of a homing torpedo. “All ahead flank,” Flanagan orders. “Take her down.”

“Torpedo bearing zero-nine-zero.”

“Torpedo bearing zero-eight-zero, 500 yards.”

The most difficult choice a submariner makes is whether to run from a torpedo or to stand his ground, keeping the ship silent so it may not be detected: If the enemy knows the sub’s location, of course it should run. But what if the enemy is just trying to spook the sub into revealing its position? Cavitation will reveal the sub’s exact location and allow a second shot. And the sub’s captain must base his decision on information relayed from a crew with an average age of just 22 and from officers who average 26.

Some captains instinctively freeze; Flanagan immediately fires his own torpedo, hoping it will preoccupy the enemy while he escapes. A sub that survives the first run of torpedoes and stops to listen to the bearing of its adversary will have the best chance of firing a lethal second shot.

“Left full rudder, shift your rudder to right full!” Flanagan yells. The maneuver produces an aquatic “knuckle,” or underwater disturbance, that will deflect the torpedo’s active sonar.

The Soviet torpedo, preceded by the ping of active sonar, draws closer still. The active, pinging sonar, growing louder, is constant and unnerving. It echoes through the ship. Soon it is joined by a klaxon summoning damage-control parties to their stations.

FLANAGAN AVOIDS a direct hit. “The ship has just experienced a close-aboard explosion by incoming torpedo,” the executive officer announces. “All stations make damage reports to control.”

From the bowels of the ship comes a voice, almost inaudible because of static on the speaker, warning of a steam leak in the engine room. Fires burn in the torpedo nest. The sonar computers are down, and lights are beginning to flicker as the crew starts to hand out gas masks.

Operating alone in an ocean that spans 60% of the Earth’s circumference, a submarine in the Pacific is subject to many potentially fatal threats. East of the Kuril Trench northeast of Japan, strong converging currents can buffet a ship. Pacific islands often dismissed as pinpricks on a map only hint at the vast volcanic ranges and isolated seamounts that submarines traverse below. And, theoretically, a leak could damage the reactor’s uranium-235 core. The reactor and propulsion system fill two-thirds of a submarine, but the Navy has not experienced a single nuclear accident in more than 3,000 reactor years. Sailors aboard a nuclear submarine for an entire year absorb less radiation than airline passengers flying from New York to Los Angeles.

But the threat of flooding causes the greatest fear. Should one of its main compartments rupture in the lower depths, a submarine would sink like a stone. Less likely, if seawater were to mix with sulfuric acid in the ship’s battery cells, a cloud of chlorine gas could kill the entire crew.

Deep under water and thousands of miles from home base, even minor problems can loom large. But an attack sub also is capable of running for more than 10 years without refueling. Engineered to precise specifications, it is a complex biosphere maintained at a temperature of 72 degrees with 32% humidity. The on-board desalination plant makes 10,000 gallons of fresh water each day. An oxygen generator and two carbon dioxide scrubbers keep the air so germ-free that the first thing sailors get after returning home is a cold. The only reason to return to port is to buy groceries.

One thing a sub doesn’t have is open space. Every inch is accounted for and most areas serve several functions. The officer’s wardroom doubles as an operating room because no other place is large enough to perform surgery. The Honolulu’s crew of 134 makes do with only 120 beds that are the size of an average coffin.

In such cramped quarters, a damage-control drill is a studied ballet. Men move rapidly through the ship’s narrow corridors, gracefully pivoting sideways to slide past one another. If the crew seems rehearsed, it’s because there’s little else to do. Recreation consists of a few books and a video library of 500 movies. Men on a cruise of 70 to 95 days are constantly learning one another’s job. An officer must master 746 different technical tasks before he receives his “dolphins,” the badge of a qualified submariner.

THE TWO SUBS have exchanged their initial volleys. Now Flanagan prepares to pinpoint and destroy the enemy. His primary mate operator, the most accurate shooter, has been tracking the enemy across his computer screen. His target solution--the best path for a torpedo--has been computed and rechecked.

“What’s the status of the weapon in tube one?” Flanagan asks.

Lt. David Leach, a 29-year-old mechanical engineering graduate of USC, is coordinating the weapons-control screens. “Tube one now ready, sir,” he reports.

“All ahead one-third. Open outer door.”

The target practice is serious business. But it’s also a video game played on the most sophisticated computers that the military-industrial establishment can produce. The game can be Pong-simple when the enemy travels a straight line at a constant rate of speed--or devilishly complex if the weapon is a cruise missile and the target is near a merchant ship over the horizon.

The primary mate watches a screen that displays the targeting information: speed, range, course and bearing rate. As the target moves, its progress is tracked by sonar, radar and periscope or a combination of all three, and a dot appears on the screen. The primary mate plots numerous target bearings, trying to coax the dots into a straight line, which indicates that he finally has a can’t-miss solution.

Leach checks his data a final time and toggles a lever to the right. The sub shudders slightly as water in a tube normally filled with a 21-foot-long Mark-48 torpedo is shot out of the tube. In the torpedo room, the loud blast is followed by an ear-popping wave of pressure.

Forty-five years ago, sinking a ship meant launching a torpedo and hoping it would hit. Modern acoustic torpedoes are wire-guided; as the torpedo rockets through the water, a thin copper wire spooling out from behind, it appears on a screen in front of the weapons-control officer. If the operator sees the target change course, he can redirect the torpedo.

Those skilled at target solving are rewarded when the pinging sound of the searching torpedo suddenly shifts from a steady whir to a high-pitched screee. “Detect!” a sonarman yells. “Unit is homing.”

Flanagan’s return salvo to the computer-generated sub hits its mark. “Sonar reports loud explosion to the southeast, captain,” Miletich says. “Sounds like breaking-up noises.”

“Reload tube one. Ready the weapons in three and four,” Flanagan says. “My intention is to continue to engage the enemy.”

Referring to the Soviet destroyer, he continues, “The primary target is now designated Sierra 4. Let me know when you have a firing solution.”

THE LONG AFTERNOON watch comes to an end. Sierra 4, the make-believe destroyer, has been dispatched and the Honolulu, maneuvered back up to periscope depth, rolls gently beneath the swell. It is twilight on the surface. Sixty feet below, the control room is rigged for red so that crew members can adjust their sight to the night’s shadows.

Flanagan is enjoying some periscope liberty, angling the lens upward for a look at the stars, when sonar detects a transient sound. Another ship. But this time not just the fantasy of the sub’s computer. The control room atmosphere quickens. Is it military or merchant? Friend or foe?

“He’s really booming in now, Ace,” the chief sonarman says, grabbing a set of headphones. “He’s a real galloping horse. Strong, rhythmic. Boom, boom, boom. Looks like he increased speed.”

Sonarmen in World War II seldom provided more than a compass reading of enemy targets; sinking a ship required a visual sighting to determine its range, estimated speed and bearing. Skilled marksmen made the system work fairly well: By the end of the war, U.S. submarines had destroyed 55% of Japan’s merchant fleet and 38% of its warships. Unfortunately, coming to the surface to make sightings was so dangerous that one of every five U.S. submarines were themselves sunk.

Today, U.S. attack subs rarely surface. All the information they need can be obtained at a depth that would have crushed a diesel-powered boat. A ship normally is heard before it is seen. The heavy, laboring beat of a tramp steamer is easily distinguished from the rhythmic gallop of a warship. Sonar gives estimates of a target’s speed, based on the number of blades fixed to a propeller shaft and the rate at which they turn. Once an enemy vessel is detected, its range can be figured by bouncing sound waves off the ocean floor. Salinity, temperature and underwater turbulence all affect the equation, but the longer a computer collects data, the more accurate its target solution becomes.

With every narrowing mile, a ship reveals more of its personality. Most older submarines have propellers welded to the shaft. Over time the shaft will develop metal fatigue and other irregularities. As the imperfection increases, the sub acquires a unique signature, allowing sonarmen to identify ships by name.

Flanagan puts the periscope inches above the surface, photographs the contact, then sends the scope back down in three seconds--more than enough time to gather targeting information for the computer and to make a brief videotape.

“Diving officer, make the depth six-two feet,” he says. “Where’s the XO?”

“Ship all ahead one-third steady on course two-three-oh,” responds Master Chief Garnet Curtis, the chief of the boat with 24 years in the Navy.

Seconds later the tape is replayed. The verdict is in. “It’s a Spruance-class destroyer,” Flanagan beams, identifying the U.S. surface Navy’s most lethal sub killer.

Miletich laughs. “Looks like a Russian Udaloy to me.”

MEN WHO WERE thinking about watching the evening movie return to their stations smiling, anticipating the battle. This is no computerized ghost ship. A warship is a worthy foe. “Sinking” it will be fun.

Both the Soviet Udaloy and the American Spruance are built expressly to destroy submarines, and they are universally hated by those who cruise underwater. A Spruance packs 30 Mark-46 torpedoes that spit out from tubes just above the water line. Its ASROC rocket launcher can fling a torpedo up to five miles. The SH-60B Seahawk helicopter, housed near the fantail, can fly over the horizon to torpedo a sub that mistakenly thought it was beyond the ship’s missile range. In World War II, a depth charge consisted of 300 pounds of TNT packed into a 55-gallon drum. Those stowed on a Spruance have a destructive potential measured in kilotons.

The scope of the Honolulu again peeks above the water, not more than 18 inches, and then only for three or four seconds. Instantly, the control room is bombarded by the sound of an angry swarm of hornets--the signal signature of a destroyer’s surface search radar. “Contact, bearing, mark, down scope,” the captain shouts.

“Low power, use 150-foot masthead height,” he orders, summoning the scope again. Squatting low on the deck, he grabs the handles just long enough to focus and mutter, “Range.”

“Five thousand yards,” the periscope assistant reports.

“Angle on the bow port 90.”

“Target is within weapons range, recommend firing point procedures. Have weapons range,” says Miletich, now grimly intent on his prey.

Aided by periodic sonar readings, the weapons controllers begin refining their target solutions. No longer a speck on the horizon, the destroyer turns left, then zigs wide of the search area a Mark-48 could cover. What had been a straight line of dots begins to bow.

“I think he has a sniff of us,” sonarman Sneed says as he listens for changes in bearing, range and speed. “We were close, so close, really close.”

Six pulses of varying duration bounce off the sub’s sonar dome. Descending on the glowing “waterfall” screen, they look like the chalk marks a tailor might make. Sneed logs their bearing and frequency, then admits: “He’s using a weird pulse.”

In the control room, the primary mate is coaxing yet another potential target solution from the computer when a ping of active sonar brushes across the hull. But instead of pursuing the contact, the destroyer turns and begins steaming away.

“That guy can’t hear anything, going 25 knots,” Thielen concludes. “If he knew we were here, he’d have turned and started pinging us hard.”

The Honolulu has been sparring for position for nearly 40 minutes. According to the contact evaluation plotter’s record of the engagement, Flanagan is the winner on points. But nobody on the evening watch wants to settle for a decision.

“What’s the layer depth?” the captain asks.

“Three hundred and forty, sir.”

“OK, we’re below that, so we’re in good shape. All ahead full.”

The sub picks up speed and begins racing for position ahead of the destroyer. Prudence dictates it stop now and then to swish its towed array of hydrophones, to monitor any new noise. In many ways, the tactic is similar to that used by jungle insurgents. At speeds above 20 knots, a submarine’s primary weapons--stealth and sonar--begin to degrade. Once the submarine’s noise rises above that of the ocean around it, it not only becomes blind but also opens itself to attack.

Forty miles south of Oahu, the sub begins to close in on the ship. “Steady on course 260,” Flanagan orders.”

Flanagan tells the diving officer to begin climbing. “Drive it right up there to 150 feet and come left 15 degrees rudder.”

At 150 feet the ship pauses, comes horizontal and searches for intruders in the blind spots near its stern. “All stop,” Flanagan orders. Honolulu comes dead in the water.

An opaque blue curtain, held taut by Velcro fasteners, blocks white light entering from the fore passage. Another curtain surrounds the Conn, where Flanagan and Miletich plan their final attack.

The submarine floats upward at five knots for a final look. The destroyer’s silhouette now belongs to the night, but lights still burn on the bridge. Flanagan centers the scope’s infrared cross-hairs and turns on the image intensifier. “Final bearing and shoot.”

“Speed three, bearing two-nine-four,” the primary mate operator answers.

“Contact, bearing, mark, down scope.”

Leach shifts the fire control lever to the left, then jerks it right, sending a bolt of water into the sea.

Flanagan looks through the scope a few seconds more before breaking into a smile. “We have one surface warship,” he reports. “He’s history. We had a great angle on the bow.”

“You got his pennant number, I hope,” Curtis, the chief of boat, deadpans.

“I took a few pictures,” Flanagan says. He plans to mail them to the destroyer’s captain. “I’m going to mark down his latitude, longitude and position on the field of fire and write, ‘You were there,’ on the back.”

The idea is overwhelmingly approved. The young periscope assistant looks up at his captain. “It’s like we always say, sir. There’s only two kinds of ships in the Navy: submarines and targets.”