“Sure, but probably only to Carl and Manny. He said the Mumm was from a champagne he liked. He talked a lot about speed and bubbles in attacking the supercavitation issue, so that must be the connection.”

“Tell us about your facility here,” Ann said.

“Heiland practically built the place. His family had a cabin here on Lake Pend Oreille, so he fell in love with the area.”

Pitt noticed he pronounced the lake’s name “Pond-o-ray.”

“When he headed up acoustics at the Naval Surface Warfare Center,” Nichols continued, “he convinced the brass in Washington to open an offshoot research lab here, using some remnants from the old Farragut naval base. He pretty much built it all from scratch. About ten or twelve years ago, he grew tired of the day-to-day management and decided to retire. That’s when he started his consulting business. Carl was always an engineer first.”

“You’re a long way from blue water,” Pitt said.

“Yes, but the lake is an ideal testing ground. It’s large, lightly populated, and features depths of over a thousand feet. Our work here focuses on research in advanced hull and propulsion designs—ones that allow for submarines to operate with a minimum acoustic signature. The lake is a nearly perfect controlled environment in which to test new designs and technologies.”

“The Sea Jet being a test platform?” Pitt asked.

“Exactly,” Nichols said. “It’s what we call an Advanced Electric Ship Demonstrator. Though it looks a bit like a submarine, it is actually a quarter-scale model of the new DD(X) class of destroyer. We’ve used it to experiment with some radical new hull designs and propulsion systems. It was originally built with waterjet propulsion, but we’ve migrated to some other technologies I probably shouldn’t talk about. We were scheduled to test Carl’s latest tinkering related to the Sea Arrow project, but we’re at somewhat of a loss there now.”

“The technology in the Slippery Mumm?” Ann asked.

“Yes. He was here testing it in the lake just a few weeks ago. I remember him telling the boys that he was really going to be scaring the fish with it. A couple of the fellows were out on the lake at the time and they claimed he was registering some crazy speeds.”

“Didn’t he work on it here at the facility?”

“Not much. He’d come in and run things on our computers, but he was always three steps ahead of us. When he was in town, he was usually holed up at his cabin with Manny, tinkering away.”

“It’s important that we find and secure all of his research related to the Slippery Mumm,” Ann said.