Chapter 1

Life is always uncertain.

I learned this for the first time early in life when my father died when I was only six years old. I've had far too many reminders since. The Morrissey men in my family have a tendency to die early, long before their time. My father and his two brothers are all dead, as are my own four brothers and all but one nephew. All dead before the age of forty, too many of them before even the age of thirty.

Who is to blame? Bad genetics, poor lifestyle choices, or the very capricious whims of fate? Yes — all of the above. So far, I've defied the odds, but I wouldn't place any large bets on my streak of luck continuing.

We've always been a Navy family. My father Jeff died in a freak Navy training accident at age thirty-eight. My oldest brother Lance met his destiny during the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole. Another brother, Rick, picked up an incurable strain of flesh eating bacteria on his first sea duty and was dead a few days later. My remaining two brothers skipped the Navy but still died prematurely anyway. Dave having a diving accident during a marine archeological dive on a bronze age shipwreck in the Aegean Sea, and Hugh dropping due to a heatstroke related heart attack the day before his thirtieth birthday. I could go on and list other premature family deaths going back another couple of generations but you get the idea. Men in my family never make it to their fortieth birthday. It does take some of the pressure off of saving for retirement, but sucks in every other respect.

Us Morrissey's may not be lucky, but we do tend to be smart and insanely driven to succeed. All of us graduated early from High School and breezed through University, often with advanced degrees. I followed Lance and Rick into the Navy ROTC program and was commissioned immediately after graduation, but I was still able to continue work on my Master's degree. Dave and Hugh worked their way through school with the help of a few scholarships and were both able to complete their Doctorates. I was close to all of my brothers, but I felt especially close to Dave and Hugh.

Knowing that their careers were likely to be short, Dave and Hugh had frantically worked their entire lives together on a pet research project, an improved method of performing underwater scanning and mapping. Dave was a well respected marine archeologist and Hugh was a geologist, and together they hoped to adapt terrestrial 3-D seismic technology to quickly map large sections of sea bottom at a time. Ideally, the end result would be a method to quickly and easily locate likely sunken shipwreck sites without the long and very expensive process of slowly towing a sonar rig over small areas of ocean.

We all believed we could do this and worked together hand-in-hand as much as we could. When Hugh died, I was even quite willing to drop my own naval career to try to complete Hugh's work and hopefully pick up right where he left off.

My US Navy career had been fairly productive and had gathered no small amount of interest from higher up the chain of command. As an officer, I had gone into the sonar technical area and within a few years I knew as much about our equipment and the state of the technology as any of my most senior petty officers technicians (the guys who actually did 99% of the real work). By the end of my first sea cruise I had even submitted four separate recommendations as to how our existing equipment could be improved. After two years on a shore assignment, where I was able to finish up my Master's degree and start on my Doctorate, I received special orders to report to a Naval R&D facility where the next generation of sonar research was occurring.

I might have been a small fish in a big research pond but it didn't take me long to make a few big splashes. Promotions came fast and soon I was leading several research teams working on cutting edge sonar theories. There were always officers who outranked or were senior to me but word came down from on-high that I was someone's golden goose and was not to be messed with. Somehow, they kept me out of Navy politics and just let me work, and work I did for about the next five years without interruption.

One secret to my success was that I had Vice Admiral Thorne up at the top of the R&D ladder acting as my 'sea daddy', keeping my nose and records clean and far away from normal officer politics (and possible reassignment elsewhere). The other secret to my success was his daughter Josephine (Josie) who had official access to my labs as a civilian consultant, and unofficially smoothed every road in front of us, seeing that we got everything we wanted or needed.

I can't count the number of times that she came into my lab after midnight to put a blanket over me when I was 'just shutting my eyes for a moment' on top of one of the work tables or in a cot in the corner. She also made sure that I had fed myself at least once a day and forged my signature to handle 98% of our usual routine paperwork. It wasn't until years later that I really noticed what she had done for me ... namely, everything.

Not quite thirty yet, I was already a man absolutely and completely focused upon my career ambitions. I didn't know how much time I'd have left in my life and I didn't want to waste a minute of it asleep or away from my research. At most, I figured, I would have only ten years left in my life to complete the job my family had given their lifetime of work to, not to mention my USN research projects. I doubted that it would be enough ... but it would have to be. I was determined to get forty years of work done in the next ten!

I admit that I was attracted to Josie ... she was smart, witty, and extremely decorative. I kept telling myself that I didn't have a moment in my life to waste with romance. At best, it would only lead to another grieving wife holding a small child in a few too short years. I was determined that I would not inflict this pain on yet another generation of Morrissey widows! I was more than happy to let the family line, and the cycle, die out with me.

Hugh's sudden death brought me up short and out of the fog of work I had immersed myself into. He was only two years older than I was! Maybe I now had even less time than I thought.

I loved the Navy sonar research work, but my new family obligations were even greater. I was the last one left that could finish Hugh's life's work ... and I would. My only remaining brother Dave needed me. There were screams and howls of protests, but my letter that resigned my commission was accepted and I soon became a free man.

Four days later, while I was in Hugh's old small lab next to the family house working on our marine seismic mapping project full time and had just briefly shut my eyes to rest them a moment when I felt a familiar presence and a blanket placed over me. Josie had followed me home!

A month later we were married. It seemed only natural, for the last five years she had been taking care of me in one place and now that I was on my own she had followed to join me. I resisted her attachment to me at first, telling her that she was very likely to become an early widow, but she didn't much care. And soon, I didn't much care either — I was in love with her as much as she was in love with me.

She also didn't complain about my usual eighteen hours of work each day/every day, nor was there much complaint about our nearly nonexistent sex life. All being my fault. One hundred percent. I was not a good or proper husband, I must have told her so several hundreds of times, but for some reason she just didn't listen and stayed with me doing her part to keep the other tiny portions of my life that didn't include research alive and well. I didn't deserve her!

I raised an eyebrow when I discovered that the Navy was paying us a grant to assist me with my research, spearheaded by her father. I wasn't thrilled that they had a sort of leash on me, and a right to eventually cherry-pick over my research findings, but I let Josie talk me into agreeing to it. With this agreement, Josie's 'friend' Commander Don Blake, our Naval Affairs Coordinator, now regularly entered into our life, for which I was increasingly perturbed.

Commander Blake had apparently been an old flame of Josie's. Their families had known each other for decades and entertained in the same circles. Blake had an Admiral of his own in his immediate family tree, and several others back in the mists of history. He was handsome, witty, and superbly confident, never setting a foot wrong. I hated him nearly immediately, especially now that I was closer to achieving our long time family goal.

He was always pushing for 'preliminary results'. I held firm on "When it's done" and absolutely and specifically forbade Josie from handing over any data until I gave the final okay. It caused the most significant argument of our brief marriage.

Josie, coming from a Navy family, never understood my need to keep our family research private — at least long enough to prove that it was a success. She didn't comprehend just how badly I needed to prove that the brief lives of the Morrissey men had amounted to something at the very end. That we could give marine science a meaningful contribution that the world could appreciate — not just a few Admirals in some locked room somewhere offering us a quiet handshake instead. She attributed my lack of desire for "sharing my toys" as she put it to unwarranted paranoia and suspicion.

That still didn't explain anything close to my satisfaction why a box of Hugh's old research notes had ended up in the back of Blake's car at the end of his first visit to us. Blake at least had the good sense to be a bit embarrassed. Josie had obviously given them to him and the quiet look of stubbornness on her face spoke volumes. Forbidden or not, I was certain that Josie would go behind my back and do it all over again the next time Blake came to visit.

Once Blake had left (without the research notes), I spent the next full week of irreplaceable research time doing a security cleanup of Hugh's old files. I made a big show over locking up all of the 'critical' files in a large safe in the storage room of the lab that Josie did not have the combination to and moved all of the 'moot' materials into the basement of our family house. Formerly my father's, then Hugh's, now mine ... well, Josie's and mine anyway.

Hugh liked his research done in the old fashioned way, everything on paper, with notebooks galore tossed everywhere. I was much more modern and used several laptops and kept all of my data on CD-RW's, keeping the laptops themselves relatively clean and secure from snooping. I didn't print my files often and when I did I made sure that they were shredded immediately after use or locked up into my smaller office safe. My previous work in the Navy had instilled good security working habits and I would be very unlikely to be leaving anything lying around for unfriendly eyes or hands to find.

In fact, moving the files around was really just a rather large noisy shell game. The files now in the big safe were in fact rather worthless, mostly dead ends and early failed theories. The most harmless materials in fact that I could find. I even added some of my mother's old cooking recipes for good measure (no loss - mom was a terrible cook). Not one of the thousand odd pages of material would divulge a single new workable theory or method of application. Harmless to my family, but excellent bait for Blake's next visit. Dealing with the 'good stuff' was a bit harder to do and I needed a bit of help from almost outside of the family.

Hugh had a longtime girlfriend named Denise who had often helped him with his work before he died. She and I got along pretty well, and she didn't want to see Hugh's life work just disappearing into a Navy research lab either. We made a deal that helped us both. I gave Denise a part-time job "organizing Hugh's files", which consisted of her taking to her home virtually everything, scanning it all page by page into computer images and then burning all of Hugh's hand-written notes and binders. It took her about four months of work and she created nearly a hundred CD's of the document images. I then painstakeningly read through each CD and copied the relatively few files I might need for future reference onto a couple of working CD's. The stack of remaining disks of less or no importance were then wrapped up for long term storage and placed into a metal security box and secretly buried late one night up on a local hill at a place my brother and I had often played at when we were children.

My brother Hugh had been quite close to success before he died, and the sonar knowledge that I was now able to contribute now appeared to add the final missing puzzle piece. The new process worked well as a theory but to build the test equipment and charter a boat was going to take serious money, more than we had. Blake had been more than willing (even eager) to offer it during his visit, but at a price. Full partnership, full access to research notes, etc.

Unacceptable. Wasn't going to ever happen if I had anything to say about it. Josie had plenty to say about it. We fought nonstop for the next two weeks straight and for the next two months I slept in either the lab or the guest bedroom. I couldn't win the fight, but I was determined that I would not lose it either.

Secure storage for my handful of working discs was another but temporary problem. For awhile I used a smaller electronic safe in my office, but Josie was showing unusual interest in it, and I was fairly sure that a hired professional burglar could get into it with little trouble. The solution arrived via serendipity. Josie had talked me into going to a local antiques auction one weekend where there was a Tiffany lamp that she wanted for our living room. We had just recently declared peace between us, so I agreed to go with her, and was glad I did. I was looking at a small table that I could use for my own office when the antique dealer pointed out an interesting detail, the table had a well concealed secret compartment! Pressing two points of the side carvings caused a small drawer to be revealed. Certainly large enough to hide several CD storage cases! I won the bidding for the item at its minimum reserve price and from that day on it securely protected all of my secrets.