Ray Brentwood’s discovery that the oil patches revealed the presence of the two diesel-electric Russian subs off the American West Coast had propelled him overnight into the national spotlight, but he knew spotlights could shift very quickly. If you failed, they went out altogether — you would be yesterday’s man — the man who got the scent but lost the hunt. With this in mind, he was concerned that the very size of his twenty-four-ship “armada,” as Vice Admiral Rutgers grumpily called it, while essential to cover the area, could be as much an obstruction to the hunt. If the sound of every one of the twenty-four ships was not read and understood correctly by each ship’s sonar operators, it could be mistaken for the enemy. Ray Brentwood also realized something that he hadn’t dwelt on during the officers’ call — that if any one of the Russian’s four big ballistic missiles exploded in the middle of the task force, it would, in the parlance of the military, “neutralize” them in seconds.