The moment was broken by the smiling invite from Margaret to go in, and the two of them stood, the general indicating for Laurie to go first. Jim Hacker was ready with handshakes and platitudes as they came in, prepared to talk the doctor down from what sounded like a potentially costly project.

He was not ready, however, for the usually pragmatic General Pickler to be on her side.

Chapter 10: Testing the Waters

Neal had never enjoyed living in Arizona, so the change of venue would have been welcome anyway. The fact that he was also working on something that was so cutting edge also helped make up for the fact that he was also, frankly, well outside his area of expertise.

Luckily the same skills that had gotten him through seven years of university with a pretty much constant hangover had served him well when he was invited to join Dr. West at the Marine Research Institute in Florida. Though this was officially a navy project, the Institute was actually a private facility. It owed a lot of its funding, however, to the US government. So when the navy had come calling they had put their best people on the project.

Laurie and Neal stood in overalls staring at the top of the huge tank emerging from the constantly soaking concrete platform surrounding it. Suspended from the steel gantry that ran over the tank, a bulky and irregular probe, covered in plastic and taping, was hanging by a thick cable into the water, pointing down into the dirty depths of the tank, scanning its hidden bottom far below.

The water had been filled with an unnatural amount of salt, sand, dust, and debris to simulate a greater depth of water than was actually present, for while the tank was one of the largest indoor tanks in the world, it was still a fraction of the depth they would be searching in.

Laurie looked at the specially field-hardened laptop in Neal’s hands and nodded as he explained what was happening. The initial tests had proven their science sound, but their application amateur. Luckily the practicalities of ocean-bed analysis were the bread and butter of the experts here.

The Institute was, essentially, the final evolution in the hunt for oil, a hunt that was seeking with reckless resolve to extract every last drop of fossil fuel from the earth, no matter how deep, cold or, as was becoming more and more the case, war-torn its location was. Through long practice they had evolved sonar and seismology to a fine science, and were capable of viewing, analyzing, and categorizing almost any ocean bed on the surface on the planet.

The very nature of their business, however, meant that the larger the target they were looking for the better. Because of this, high resolution had rarely been a top priority for them as they had scanned the world’s ocean beds for the telltale signs of hidden oil and gas reserves.