Maze [antikvár]

T wo hundred fathoms down in the Atlantic depths, 317 nautical miles southeast of Greenland, the USS Boston tiptoed through the ocean's perpetual night at four knots. She was an SSN-688 Los Angeles Class attack boat, among the latest and the best of the U.S. Navy's hunter/killer submarines. In his command position in the submarine's attack center, her captain followed her painfully slow progress on the green spiderweb of his dead reckoning tracer monitor. As she had been for hours, Boston was running a steadily diminishing series of concentric circles around a position at the center of the display identified as Area Bravo. Currently, she was running the circumference of a circle sixty miles in diameter. That Boston should even be in the area at all was in contradiction of one of the most fundamental principles of the submarine service. Every operations order on every boat in the Atlantic Submarine Fleet made it clear that Area Bravo was virgin territory, an absolute no-go area. Area Bravo was the sanctuary, the private patch of water of another U.S. submarine, the Ohio, a Trident missile boat twice the size of the Boston. Yet Boston had been ordered to invade the heart of Ohio's lair while she was returning to New London from special operations by an urgent "immediate execution" order from COMSUBLANT. The computer-generated code name of her mission was Seashell. Studying it, the Boston's captain had felt a shiver of concern. His assignment was to stalk the waters around Ohio "to determine whether or not Ohio was under surveillance without her knowledge by potential enemy forces."