I don't know if you've noticed, but there's no ocean in Iowa."
Hyland smiled at the old dig. "Thanks for pointing that out, Clay."
Clay extended his hand. "You promise you'll let me know?"
"Absolutely."
Clay left feeling totally spent. The great head of steam he'd built up through a night of fitful sleep had wilted into exhaustion and confusion. He got in his truck and sat while sweat rolled down his neck. He watched tourists in aloha wear mill around under the great banyan tree like gift-wrapped zombies.
Cliff Hyland's eggs were still steaming when he returned to the table.
Tarwater looked up from his own breakfast and moved his snow-white hat away from Hyland's plate, as if the rumpled scientist might splash yolk over the gold anchors in a fit of disorganized eating. "Everything all right?"
The young woman at the table fidgeted and tried to look invisible.
"Clay's still a little shaken up. Understandably. He and Nathan Quinn have been working together a long time."
"Lucky they made it this long without self-destructing," Tarwater said. "Slipshod as they run that operation. You see that kid that works for them? Not worth grinding up for chum."
Cliff Hyland dropped his fork in his plate. "Nathan Quinn was one of the most intuitively brilliant biologists in the field. And Clay Demodocus may very well be the best underwater photographer in the world, certainly when it comes to cetaceans. You have no right."
"The world turns, Doc. Yesterday's alphas are today's betas. Losers lose. Isn't that what you biologists teach?"
Cliff Hyland came very close to burying a fork in Tarwater's tanned forehead, but instead he slowly climbed to his feet. "I need to use the restroom. Excuse me."
As he walked away, Hyland could hear Tarwater lecturing the junior researcher on how the strong survive. Cliff dug his mobile phone out of the pocket of his safari shirt and began scrolling through the numbers.
Clay was just dozing off in the driver's seat when his mobile trilled. Without looking at the display, he figured it was Clair checking up on him. "Go, baby."
"Clay, it's Cliff Hyland."
"Cliff? What's up?"
"You've got to keep this under your hat, Clay. It's my ass."
"I got you. What is it, Cliff?"
"It's a torpedo range. We're doing site studies for a torpedo test range."
"Not in the sanctuary?"
"Right in the middle of the sanctuary."
"Jeepers, Cliff, that's terrible. I don't know if my hat is big enough to hold that."
"You gave me your word, Clay. What's with 'jeepers'? Who says 'jeepers'?"
"Amy does. She's a little eccentric. Tell me more. Does the navy have divers in the water?"
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Heinous Fuckery Most Foul
"Jeepers," said Amy. She was at Quinn's computer. Streamers of digital videotape were festooned across her lap and over the desk.
"Oh, that's heinous fuckery most foul," said Kona. He was perched on the high stool behind Amy and actually appeared to be trying to learn something when Clay came in.
"They've been simulating explosions on the lee of Kahoolawe with a big towable array of underwater speakers, measuring the levels. The speaker array is what's in that big case we've seen on their boat."
"We have a couple of explosions on the singer tapes, but distant," Amy said. "Nate thought it might be naval exercises out at sea."
"Speaking of tapes?" Clay picked up a strand of tape. "This isn't my rebreather footage, is it?"
"I'm sorry, Clay. I didn't get the video, but I pulled the audio off before this happened. Want to see the spectrograph?"
Kona asked, "You think those voices in the water be navy divers?"
Clay looked at Amy, raised an eyebrow.
"He wanted to learn."
"Cliff says there're no divers in the water, that his operation is it, militarily, in the sanctuary anyway. But he might not even know."
Amy wadded up the videotape and chucked the resulting bird's nest into the wastebasket. "How can they do that, Clay? How can they put a torpedo range in the middle of the humpback sanctuary? It's not like people won't notice."
"Yeah, she's a big ocean. Why here?" Kona said.
"I have no idea. Maybe they don't want there to be any mistake about whose waters they're blowing up ordnance in. If they blow them up in between a bunch of American islands, maybe there can't be any misinterpretation about what they're doing."
"Lost now," Kona said. "Does not compute. Danger. Danger. Control room needs herb." The Rastafarian had affected an accent that seemed an excellent approximation of how a stoned robot might sound.
"Submarine warfare is all about hide and seek with other submarines," Clay said. "The crews are autonomous when