Michael C. Grumley
Breakthrough
DEDICATION
To Autumn and Andrea, two of the most wonderful women to bless this Earth.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Kelly Foster, my number one fan. Without her this book would never have been written. Thanks also to Andrea, Mom, Steve, Richele, Jennifer, and Dan, for their proofreading and expert feedback.
1
Something out there sounded strange. He pressed the headphones in tighter against his ears.
Sonar operators were a special breed. Few people could sit in front of a computer screen, fighting monotony day after day, listening to the faintest of sounds through lonely ocean waters. But for the few who could, it was surprising how attuned a human sense could become. Eugene Walker would rather be a Ping Jockey than do any other job in the Navy. Here he could hear everything. Even on a boring night like this, he knew exactly what surrounded them as they slid silently through the dark waters.
What he was listening to tonight was odd though. He had heard it for some time but couldn’t pin it down. He shifted in his seat and studied the computer screen in front of him, listening to the strange sound picked up by his computer. He played it again and again, and still could not place it. Some jockeys were rumored to be so good that they could identify the current moving through the coral, but those guys had spent their entire lives on their boats. He couldn’t hear currents, though he had identified some natural occurrences that the computers could not. But this one was strange; a steady hum at a very low frequency and just barely within the range of human hearing.
Not more than ten feet behind Walker stood Commander Sykes, reading through yet another fascinating maintenance report. Sykes was a stickler for detail as most were, but even the best commanders eventually fell prey to the unrelenting boredom of perfect routine. He picked up his warm coffee and sipped, letting his mind wander to his wife and girls at home, wondering if they were in bed yet. He glanced at his watch absently and turned the page, now just scanning for anything that stuck out.
By pure instinct, he noticed from the corner of his eye his Navigation Officer repeatedly looking at the instruments and then back to the table and his digital map.
“Something wrong Willie?”
Willie Mendez didn’t reply for a long moment. Reporting a problem to the XO wasn’t something you did without triple checking. “Mmm…”
Sykes turned slowly, still reluctant to take his eye off the report now blurring into a jumble of words.
The officer looked closer at the large illuminated, three square foot map between them. “I’m getting something strange here, sir.”
Sykes looked at the table and back up to another monitor, seeing the problem immediately. He took the clear rule and recalculated himself. He frowned and looked back at the young navigator.
“How many times have you checked this?”
“Four times.”
Sykes scratched his chin while Mendez spoke. “Plotting from our last verifiable had us here, two minutes ago.” He zoomed the screen in, enlarging the area. A small circle appeared next to his index finger joined by small GPS coordinates hovering beside it. He then moved his finger further up the chart in the same direction. “Now it’s reporting us here.”
“In two minutes?” Sykes’ response was rhetorical. He shook his head and sighed. 380 knots per hour was a bit optimistic for a nuclear class submarine. Was it a glitch? This wasn’t the first computer malfunction they’d had, far from it. He knew that software written by some geek hyped up on Jolt was far more fallible than traditional mechanical or electrical systems, hell even the cooks knew that by now. “Anything else acting buggy?”
“No sir.”
“Run integrity checks on both systems.”
“Already started, sir.” All eyes turned to the monitor now displaying the results. “Systems report no consistency errors.”
Great, broken software that doesn’t even know it’s broken. Sykes looked closely at the orange GPS display. “Try re-synching the satellites.”
Willie complied and waited. He began to slowly shake his head. “Birds look good, I’ve got five…now six. Pinpointed to one meter and reporting the same coordinates.”
The Commander didn’t respond. He remained focused on the GPS screen, thinking.
Eugene stuck his head out of the tiny radio area and dropped his headset around his neck. “Sir. I’ve been picking up something for the last few minutes on sonar. It might be related.”
Sykes’ eyes trained on Eugene. “What is it?”
“Not a vessel sir. Nothin’ I’ve ever heard before.”
Sykes put the second headset on and listened as Eugene played it for him. “What the hell is that?”
Frowning, Eugene switched back to the live feed and closed his eyes. “…it’s gone now.”
“Any ideas?”
Eugene sighed. “I’m not sure, at first I thought it may have been thermal vents but that wasn’t it.” He watched Sykes look back at Willie and return to the table. After a long silence and with forced control, he put his mug down and stepped from the room over the lip of the hatch, continuing down the long gray, metal corridor. “Of all the damn timing.”
Captain Ashman replied to the knock on his door with a simple “Enter”. Sykes stepped in and stood with the military’s exaggerated erectness, his head barely an inch from the piping overhead.
“What it is?” he hardly needed to look up from his own reading to know who it was.
“Sir, we seem to be encountering some problems with our navigation system. It’s put our position off by about fifteen miles.”
Ashman looked up. “Fifteen miles?”
“Yes sir”.
“Did you run diagnostics?”
Sykes nodded. “Yes sir, by the book but cannot find any problems.”
Ashman tapped his finger gently against pursed lips. “Could our speed be off?”
“No sir. The propulsion systems are in perfect synch. It’s just our position that’s incorrect. I suspect it’s a misread somewhere in GPS, but we can’t verify unless…”
“If we surface the mission is aborted.” Ashman’s tone was sharp. “Did someone upgrade our systems before we left?”
“Not that I’m aware of, sir.”
“If I find out that someone was stupid enough to upgrade anything before a four-month mission, I’ll personally escort them to the brig!”
“Yes sir!”
He took a deep breath. It didn’t matter whether someone upgraded the system or not, it was still broken and probably could not be fixed from here. Even if it could, it would leave enough doubt to abort the mission anyway. No one would risk continuing on and having a problem crop up at deeper depths. Down there you can’t just pop up to the surface.
“Talk with the engineers and make sure no one made any changes.” Sykes nodded, he’d expected this order before he knocked on the Captain’s door. Ashman retracted his legs and stood up. “Take us up. Tell them we’re coming back.”
By the time Sykes made it back to the bridge he was developing a bad feeling.
2
The Cayman Islands were first discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1503. Named Las Tortugas after the many sea turtles, the islands were governed as a single colony for centuries until they became an official British territory in the late 1960’s. Like many Caribbean islands, the majority of business in the Caymans was tourism, flocked to regularly by thousands of sunburned, overweight Americans with too much money and a penchant for cat naps. Arriving in Georgetown and setting out for adventure in their sparkling rental cars and air conditioning, most visitors would be hard pressed to spot remains of the devastation inflicted by the hurricane just a few years earlier. Progress could be simply astounding when it came to the anticipation of more money.