The muscles in Emerson’s jaw clenched angrily. If he still had a warship, he would have gone after that damn sub. But he didn’t. Both gradually and reluctantly, he accepted his primary objective: the safety of the survivors. And for better or worse, the submarine appeared to be gone.
Even though the Pathfinder was a little smaller than the Bowditch, its crew managed to accommodate everyone by clearing space in the infirmary and mess hall. It was tight, but within an hour, everyone had been checked out. Emerson’s medical staff reported only a few more injuries.
However, the bodies of the Bowditch’s crewmembers that drowned in the deluge were still being recovered, hefted aboard, and bagged. It was a painfully somber picture.
Alison and her team were sitting in a corner of the crowded mess hall as Will Borger came through the gray steel door, scanning the room. When he spotted them, he hurried through the crowd. His bright Hawaiian shirt stuck out like a beacon.
“Ms. Shaw.”
Alison peered up at him through puffy red eyes but said nothing.
Borger stopped and abruptly considered what he was about to say. He chose his words carefully. “Someone wants to talk to you outside.”
She lowered her head almost as if she hadn’t heard him speak. “I’m not in the mood,” she whispered.
Borger was hurting as much as they were. He’d worked with Clay for years and had the highest regard for him. He was an incredible officer. Clay was smart, resourceful, and always treated people with respect. Even more than that, he was an amazing friend.
Borger could see that Alison was devastated but he persisted. “Ms. Shaw. It’s important.”
Alison looked up again with irritation. But before she could reply, Borger cut her off.
“Trust me.”
She rolled her eyes and looked at the others, then rose slowly. Frankly, she didn’t care if it was the President outside. With a silent huff, she followed Borger back through the throngs of people. Kelly, Chris, and Lee followed in single file behind her.
Brushing past people as she pushed her way through felt surreal. Everyone Alison passed was talking in low voices about the Bowditch or Captain Krogstad. But she didn’t hear anyone talking about Clay. Most of them probably hadn’t even noticed him onboard.
Where the crowd became too thick, Borger reached back and gently guided her at the elbow. He leaned forward and forced their way through, seemingly in a hurry.
Once outside, Alison stopped and looked around. “What?”
“This way.” He led them all up along the port side of the ship until they were within twenty feet of the bow, where he turned back and addressed them. “Captain Emerson was just about to give the order to head for Georgetown when we saw them.”
“Saw who?”
Borger grinned and nodded over the side of the ship. When the group of four spread out and peered over, they were all shocked to see Dirk and Sally in the waves below, staring up.
Alison’s eyes widened and she gasped. “Sally! Dirk!”
Both dolphins kept their heads above water and spoke back with a series of whistles and clicks.
As excited as Alison was to see them, a look of disappointment instantly replaced her momentary joy. She hadn’t thought about their Prowler boat until now. She scanned the horizon but found nothing. It must have sunk as well. After all, it was still tied to the Bowditch at the time of the attack.
“The servers,” she said.
Lee knew what she was thinking the minute she looked out at the water. “The servers were on the Prowler. So was the vest. There’s no way to talk to them.”
Defeated, Alison watched silently as the dolphins continued speaking.
Chris, who hadn’t said anything, watched them too, curiously. After about fifteen seconds of listening, he turned to her. “Ali, are you noticing anything with Dirk and Sally?”
She turned to him listlessly. “I don’t know. What?”
Chris went back to watching them. “Don’t they seem a little excited to you?”
“I guess so.”
“No, I mean unusually excited.”
“Maybe they’re hungry.”
Chris’ eyes narrowed on her and he bumped her in the shoulder intently. “I’m serious. Look at them.”
Trying to concentrate, Alison watched both dolphins. She couldn’t understand them without the IMIS system, but she had grown familiar with some of their sounds. Her brow furrowed as she listened closely.
Dirk suddenly disappeared underwater, but Sally continued talking just as quickly. Something wasn’t right.
Lee noticed the exchanges between Ali and Chris. “What is it?”
“They’re trying to talk to us.”
“No kidding.”
Chris was still looking down at the water. “I think they’re trying to tell Alison something.”
“But we don’t have the servers.”
Borger cocked his balding head and ponytail. “What kind of servers do you need?”
“It’s not just the hardware,” Lee replied. “It’s the data. Without that, we can’t do any local translations.”
Borger thought a minute. “Do you have copies of the data?”
“Of course, but it is back at the lab, on IMIS. The production system.”
“Do you ever connect remotely?” asked Borger. “Like with a tunnel?’
“All the time. But the amount of data we’re talking about would take forever to copy remotely. Especially out here on a boat. If we tried to copy it over satellite, we’d be retired long before it finished, and by then we wouldn’t remember why we needed it.”
Borger grinned at the joke. “Well, that may be true over commercial satellite networks. But the military satellites are lower in orbit, and consequently, much faster.”
“How much faster?”
“A lot faster.”
“Well, I don’t think it can do a hundred megabits. And that’s pretty much what we’d need for a live feed from the main system.” Lee almost turned away but noticed that Borger was still thinking.
After a moment, Borger leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I think I might be able to do it.” He winked at Lee. “But you can’t tell anyone.”
It took less than thirty minutes for Borger to bundle the satellite channels into a single connection with enough throughput capacity. The easy part was then passing the signal through his laptop to an underwater speaker and microphone they’d borrowed from the Pathfinder’s engineering crew. By establishing an encrypted tunnel into the lab back in Puerto Rico and with the higher speed of his satellite connection, no processing of data had to happen on Borger’s laptop. Instead, the processing would all happen directly on the giant IMIS system itself.
The tradeoff was that Borger had secretly commandeered most of the satellite network’s capacity, which meant a lot of other military users would be scratching their heads for a while, wondering why the system had slowed to a standstill. Borger was hoping they would be done by then.
Outside, Alison and Chris had managed to get Sally and Dirk to come around to the Pathfinder’s stern with its lower deck. Sally was still speaking rapidly, and Dirk had returned after disappearing several times. He seemed… agitated.
Lee and Borger approached with Borger carrying his laptop. “Okay,” Lee announced. “We’re ready. This may be a little kludgy, but it should work. We’ll need to talk through Mr. Borger’s laptop. The translations are going to be slower too because of the satellite connection. So, we may need to be patient.”