"We'll think of something. Won't we, Little Father?"
"I will think of something," Chiun said sternly. "You will do the thing I think of."
"Just remember what's important, me, or getting that sub."
Chiun steepled his long-nailed fingers before his chest and made his eyes menacing. "Drowning the submersible vessel is very important. If you follow my instructions to the letter, possibly you will not drown, too."
Twenty minutes later the helmsman called from the pilothouse, "Contact!"
Rushing to the pilothouse, they found the helmsman monitoring the sonar scope.
"What do you make of this?" he asked Sandy.
She stared at the greenish scope. It showed a green grid with a bird's-eye view of the cutter's outline in its center. Ahead off the port bow was a tiny but very distinct green blip.
"It's not a sub. Too small," Sandy decided.
"It's metallic. Maybe it's a one-man sub."
They watched it for several minutes. The object was tracking an undeviating course.
"If it's a one-man sub, it's off a mother ship," Sandy said firmly. "We'll follow it and see where it goes."
The cutter stayed in its easterly heading, cleaving through the waves with only a slight bumping when they struck larger swells.
Abruptly the object changed course, and Sandy snapped out orders.
"Starboard. One degree!"
The helmsman spun the wheel expertly, and the cutter dug in as it moved to stay with the mystery contact.
"It's either a small sub or a torpedo," Remo suggested.
Sandy shook her head. "Torpedoes don't change course, not that I know of."
"This thing just did," Remo muttered.
Chiun drifted away, evidently bored. Remo found his thoughts wandering. The smell of the open sea was causing him to flash back to the previous night. He was trained to feel fear when fear was a useful survival tool. After a crisis was over, he discarded fear like a used Kleenex. But the memories of the previous night kept coming back.
He joined the Master of Sinanju at the rail. "I almost bought it out here," he told Chiun.
Chiun eyed a solitary petrel that was eyeing him back. "You did not."
"Been a long time since I came that close."
"Purge your mind of all such considerations. The past is the past."
"I gotta find Freya."
"And you will. If she does not find you."
Not long after that, the sonar scope began pinging excitedly, and Remo and Chiun returned to the pilothouse.
"What's happening now?" asked Remo.
"Our contact just ran into a schooled-up pod of fish," Sandy told them.
"What kind?"
"Hard to say. Maybe whiting."
"Whiting is not quality fish," Chiun said disdainfully. "Its bones do not digest well."
"You're not supposed to eat the bones," Sandy said absently.
"If you cook fish right," Remo told her, "you can eat the bones, too."
"And the heads," added Chiun.
"Must be whiting," Sandy remarked, her eyes intent on the scope. "It's about the most plentiful kind you could catch out here these days."
"Maybe it's turbot," said Remo.
"That's weird," Sandy suddenly stated. "The contact is changing course, and the fish are moving with it."
"Looks like they're running from it," the helmsman said.
"No, it's following them. They're not scattering before it."
"Then it's gotta be a fish," said Remo.
Sandy frowned deeply. "No, that's a metallic blip. We can tell these things."
"So why is it following those fish?"
"That," muttered Sandy, "is the question of the hour."
They watched the cluster of sonar blips as the cutter Cayuga thundered along.
"We're approaching the Nose," the helmsman warned.
"The part of the Grand Banks that Canada doesn't lay claim to," Sandy explained. "We're not exactly welcome in these parts, but it's still international waters, so we're out of our jurisdiction."
"The Canadians are our allies. What could they do?"
"Complain to our superior officers and get us cashiered out of the guard." Sandy frowned. "What do you think, helmsman?"