Life is Uncertain... Ch. 01

I told her flat out I didn't trust her to make any decisions about my own life, proper or otherwise and frankly told her I wouldn't object at all to a divorce, so she could then spend more time with her boyfriend Blake. This shocked her into silence for a good bit before we started that phase of the argument. No, I couldn't actuallyprovethat they were lovers ... but they sure acted like it, and that was enough for me. She was embarrassed enough to let me win at least that part of our argument and she stomped off apparently to brood and plan her next discussions about the nine million other ways I was mistaken and wrong.

Well, in the end I was wrong about that too. Instead of brooding, she packed up some of her clothes and drove off to visit her family for awhile. By awhile, I mean close to six months. I started the divorce paperwork and had it mailed to her parents home. A few weeks later I woke up in the middle of the night in my lab to find that Josie was back. She had covered me up with a blanket and had left the divorce petition torn in pieces on my desk.

She was back, but things weren't quite back to normal between us. We both tip-toed around each other and for the next month we slept in separate bedrooms again. In the end, I got a grudging admission that she shouldn't have let Blake take the files and that she would never disrespect my opinions in that way again for as long as I lived. It wasn't quite an apology, but it would do for now.

Life calmed down a bit and got somewhat back to normal.

*****

________________________________________

Actually, Josie's six month absence had been extremely productive for me professionally. Without all those other minor inconveniences such as sleeping or eating regular meals, I was getting a great deal of work done. In fact, I had really done just about everything there was left to be done without being out on a boat now. I had scraped up my pennies, emptied my savings and had bought, begged or borrowed nearly every piece of equipment that I needed to test with. Some of it was ad hoc, but it should do for now. The only thing I needed now was a boat and a large patch of ocean to test scan. This turned out to be the easy part.

My brother Dave, the marine archeologist, was at this time my last living male relative and I was in fairly regular contact with him. After all, that was what all of this family research had been intended for from the very beginning. A cheaper and easier way to quickly scan and map large sections of the ocean floor to find old shipwrecks, sunken cities, uncharted reefs, etc.

Dave spent at least ten months of the year in Turkey, consulting for Texas A&M's famous marine archeology department and also teaching at a local University and working bronze age shipwrecks in the Aegean. He had been contacted by a friend of a friend there that badly needed to find a World War Two era shipwreck. Quietly and immediately. Money was not really an issue but he didn't want to hire any of the big salvage firms due to privacy issues. From the sound of things, it looked like the customer wanted things done really on the quiet to avoid inconvenient minor things such as government permits, legal salvage rights, taxation, etc. Since I wasn't going to set foot into the water to recover anything, being contracted just to "find" a shipwreck suited me fine. I could test and start fine tuning the scanning equipment and let someone else pick up all of the expenses of diving and salvage recovery.

I flew out to Istanbul that summer to meet with my brother Dave and discuss terms with our prospective client. A deal wasn't too hard to work out. The client had about a one hundred square mile area of sea near Cyprus that he wanted searched, as quietly as possible. The client was pleased that we had zero interest (and no physical capability) in conducting any salvage operations of our own and that we were quite happy to be just a discovery company.

The whole thing was obviously fairly dodgy and less than 100% legal operation, but our client was rather likeable and knew exactly what he wanted ... and wasn't at all afraid to pay what it would take to get the best results. We made a hand-shake deal and got enough up-front expense money to rebuild my detection array equipment to a better standard than I had been able to afford out of my own expenses.

We now desperately needed a small but practical boat to do our testing with, large enough to stow and tow our modified detection array and launchers for our seismic detonation devices and seabed detectors, but small enough to handle shallow water and with as small a crew as possible. Cousteau might have enjoying sailing about in the Calypso, but even a two hundred foot WW-2 era minesweeper needs a large crew of about fifty people to man and a small fortune to operate. Since our client was willing to write the checks, we scoured dozens of naval surplus yards until we found just the right sort of thing. An old worn out WW-I era small 66-foot Minehunter/Patrol ship of very uncertain parentage, and an even spottier history of irregular maintenance. Originally German made and sold (or given) to the Ottoman Turks before the First World War, it had changed ownership at least a dozen times over the years. Several conspicuous gaps in the ownership suggested less than legal transfers of ownership and perhaps a sordid past that included piracy.

The ship was relatively dirt cheap as its legal title (and everything else) was a mess, but nothing that a few under table cash payments in Istanbul and six months in a repair yard in Izmir getting a complete modernization overhaul couldn't fix. The boat would be sea legal and ready to go by early March and we would have our equipment completed and ready by then as well.

The deal from this point was simple. We would search for his wreck for up to of 100 days during this spring, leaving him the full summer for his own salvage during the likely calmest weather period of the eastern Mediterranean. If we found and confirmed the wreck, we would receive a bonus of $1,000,000, plus we would get to keep the restored Minehunter. If we don't find it, we'd get nothing and go home and enjoy watching our suntans fade.

I returned home with the satisfaction that everything was going exactly to plan and that I would even have time during these next six months to finally begin to enjoy my married life, giving Josie considerably more attention for a change. I freely admit it, so far in our marriage my work had definitely come first and my relationship with Josie had definitely taken a distant second place in my priorities. With 99% of my work now done, I could reverse this behavior ... at least until the ship repairs and upgrades were completed and the start of good cruising weather in the eastern Med.

We had never taken an actual honeymoon so we made up for lost time and had a belated one ... and enjoyed it so much we went right back and took a second one. With my head out of the lab, we started to learn how to actually talk to each other and we exchanged a good number of very sincere apologies for our mutual past behaviors. Josie explained her motivations for passing on my research materials to the Navy, specifically in order to reach the hands of her father, the top R&D Admiral.

She felt then, and still strongly continued to believe, that with my research under his protection and guidance I would have the greatest opportunity to succeed. In turn, I explained that the historically extremely abbreviated lifespan of male Morrissey's made it essential that if our family invention was to ever grace the cover of National Geographic magazine, not to mention the other more scholarly marine archeological and oceanographic publications, it was essential that my work not become distracted. Our goal was locating ancient shipwrecks at the moment, and side applications of this technology such as harbor mapping, submarine location, and even undersea mineral resource positioning, despite their significance to national security, must take a back seat ... for now.

Josie agreed, and I hoped that we had had our last 'misunderstanding' over this issue. I was a bit disappointed that she did not want to come with me for the test search project, but as the absence was only likely to be at most three months, I wasn't that upset to kiss her goodbye at the airport when I caught my March 1st flight to Istanbul.

Unfortunately, I wasn't to see her again for over five years.