Breakthrough

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Special thanks to Kelly Foster, my number one fan. Without her this book would never have been written. Thanks also to Andrea, Mom, Steve, Richele, Jennifer, and Dan, for their proofreading and expert feedback.

Something out there sounded strange. He pressed the headphones in tighter against his ears.

Sonar operators were a special breed. Few people could sit in front of a computer screen, fighting monotony day after day, listening to the faintest of sounds through lonely ocean waters. But for the few who could, it was surprising how attuned a human sense could become. Eugene Walker would rather be a Ping Jockey than do any other job in the Navy. Here he could hear everything. Even on a boring night like this, he knew exactly what surrounded them as they slid silently through the dark waters.

What he was listening to tonight was odd though. He had heard it for some time but couldn’t pin it down. He shifted in his seat and studied the computer screen in front of him, listening to the strange sound picked up by his computer. He played it again and again, and still could not place it. Some jockeys were rumored to be so good that they could identify the current moving through the coral, but those guys had spent their entire lives on their boats. He couldn’t hear currents, though he had identified some natural occurrences that the computers could not. But this one was strange; a steady hum at a very low frequency and just barely within the range of human hearing.

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