Hindsight (Daedalus Book 1)

by Josh Karnes

  Chapter 33

  Isla Roca, Puerto Rico

  The Gradys, along with Detective Vega, were met by Carl on Thermion's helipad at the Daedalus facility as soon as they landed. Vega exited the helicopter first and greeted Carl while the Gradys were filing out and the rotors were still turning. “Detective Alex Vega, Fajardo police,” Vega shouted over the rotor noise as he reached out to shake hands with Carl.

  “Carl Jacobs,” he responded, directing the new arrivals away from the helipad along the concrete path adjacent to the building. “I assume you were sent by Agent Ortiz.”

  “Yes. He said I should talk to Larry Duncan, and that Mr. Duncan offered assistance and equipment to search El Pliegue.”

  “That's right. I will be helping you out, along with Aaron West who is meeting us at the dock with the equipment we will need.”

  “And what about Mr. Duncan?”

  “Larry is not much use out here. Aaron and I do this every day,” he said, and then looked past Vega toward James. “We met yesterday out by the buoys,” he said. “I apologize, I forgot your name.”

  “James Grady,” he said, shaking Carl's hand. “This is my wife, Melissa, and you may remember Eli and Mark.” Carl nodded greeting to each of them.

  “So, the plan?” Carl asked.

  “We are to go search for Joseph Grady at El Pliegue,” Vega said.

  “All of us?”

  “Yes. All of us,” Melissa responded.

  “Alright then, we had better get moving.” Carl promptly led them to the dock to meet up with Aaron. The dock was a long walk from the helipad, nearly a quarter of a mile, but Carl didn't look back or encourage additional conversation. Frankly, he didn't think it was a very good idea to take the lost kid's family out on the water looking for the kid. He knew for sure they weren't going to find the kid, not alive anyway. And he wasn't equipped to deal with the grief-stricken family if they found the kid and he wasn't alive. But, Carl considered, this is really a wild goose chase. Most likely they'd go out and troll over El Pliegue doing a sonar mapping of the bottom, and they might find something that might be the kid but there would be no way to know for sure without diving. If the kid drowned in El Pliegue while SCUBA diving, he'd sink to the bottom of a seven hundred foot deep sinkhole and not even Thermion had the equipment necessary to dive down there to check anything out. So, what was the point?

  They arrived at the dock and Aaron was there waiting with equipment already loaded in one of Thermion's Zodiacs. When he saw the approaching posse he realized that they would be exceeding the capacity of one Zodiac with seven people plus the equipment. “Hey Carl,” he said as Carl made his way onto the dock.

  “Aaron. This is Detective Vega and the Grady family. They want to go out to El Pliegue and do a sonar search.” Carl turned around, “Guys, this is Aaron West, another one of our scientists.”

  Detective Vega stepped forward and addressed Aaron. “What is it exactly that you do here, Mr. West?”

  Aaron had been prepped on how to respond to these questions. “Mostly we do research,” he said. “On GPS vulnerabilities.” It didn't feel right to lie to these people, but Aaron had convinced himself that this statement, by itself, was not entirely false.

  “GPS. Yes,” Vega said. “Then why all of the boats?”

  “Well, we're on a tiny island here. If we need anything that didn't arrive on a weekly supply boat, we have to go get it, and the boats are a lot cheaper than your chopper. Or if we need to shuttle people on or off of the island here, we use these Zodiacs.”

  James interjected, “Yesterday you were out working on some equipment out in the water.”

  “Yeah, we have been doing some GPS testing that required us to set up a grid of GPS receivers, and four of them had to be out in the water attached to buoys,” Carl said.

  GPS receivers in a grid, James thought. A big enough grid that it went off of the shore of the island a few hundred yards to El Pliegue. What kind of GPS experiment would use this kind of grid? He asked himself. The engineer in James was curious. Something was going on that didn't precisely add up. If they were testing GPS vulnerabilities, as Aaron West had just said, then you would only need one GPS receiver.

  James knew about testing vulnerabilities. You have one target and you launch whatever attack against that target in order to see how it handles the attack. Whatever holes there were, those are your vulnerabilities. It would be the same whether testing networks, like James did routinely, or testing GPS receivers. The principle is similar. But a grid. A grid would be deployed in order to locate something. But what would you locate with a grid of GPS receivers? There had to be something missing from this story. Were the GPS receivers just an accessory to some other sensor that sensed the presence of the thing you are locating? That would make sense. Or was there something about GPS receivers themselves that made them sensitive to the presence of whatever thing these Thermion guys were trying to locate? And speaking of which, what thing do you need to locate out here, above the surface of the water or land? Something you can't see. James's radar was beginning to ping. What is it? He asked himself. And then it occurred to him: these Thermion guys had lost something out here too. Could this possibly be related? Is this too much of a coincidence?

  James decided he shouldn't bring this question up just now. He needed to pay attention to these scientists' every move and see if he could pick up on some clues on what they were really up to, but he had the sense that they were not telling the whole truth right now and if he probed too much they might shift to full-on lies. But he couldn't shake the suspicion that whatever they were looking for was related to Joseph's disappearance, and maybe whatever they were doing to find their lost thing could also find Joseph.

  Instead of following up his thoughts with further inquiry, James decided to try and move them from conversation towards action. “So if you guys are doing GPS research, then I guess you have a pretty solid sense of the geography of this place. Looks like we came to the right place to get help with a search. When can we get started?”

  “Well, we need to come up with a plan,” Aaron said. “You see, each Zodiac has a capacity of only seven people, but that's with no extra equipment. We have some extra sonar equipment loaded up on this boat for mapping what's at the bottom of El Pliegue, so really there's only room for five in addition to the sonar rig.”

  “We'll have to take two boats,” Melissa said.

  “Yeah, that's no problem. We can take two boats. But maybe we can cover more area with two boats,” Aaron said.

  “You mean, split up. One group goes to El Pliegue and the other, somewhere else?” James said.

  “Something like that,” Aaron said.

  “Tell you what. Let's have Aaron take a couple of you with him out to El Pliegue and map with the sonar. I'll take another boat and the rest of you with me and we'll search the coastline. The water is super clear and we have plenty of daylight left today,” Carl offered.

  “Me and Eli will go with Mr. West to El Pliegue,” Melissa said. “And James, you can take Mark and Detective Vega with you to search the coast.”

  James considered this. He wanted to be out there at El Pliegue himself. It felt like being on the J.V. team to go back to the coast to search. But on the other hand, if the worst were to happen, and Joseph turned up on the coast in less than perfect health, then he didn't want Melissa to be the one to find him.

  “Do you have SCUBA equipment?” James asked Carl.

  “Yeah, we can load it up. Why?”

  “Get it. I'll take Eli with me and Detective Vega to search the coast with Carl here,” he said. “That way if we need to do any diving, Eli can do it, he's a pro. No point in diving out at El Pliegue because it's just too deep, like he said. Sound like a plan?”

  “I guess I'm with you,” Mark said to his mother.

  “Well then let's get moving!” Melissa said. Carl and Aaron insisted that everyone wear a life vest, citing his desire that they not expand the search to include memb
ers of the current search party. Carl retrieved two SCUBA rigs for his boat.

  Detective Vega felt like a fifth wheel. This was not his idea of police work. He was beginning to realize that he was babysitting, and that Ortiz had sent him out here with the Gradys mostly to keep them busy and out of the way. But he boarded the Zodiac along with Carl, James and Eli without complaint.

  Both boats were launched and Grady family members waved at one another as they departed. James sincerely hoped they all would fail to find anything. He came to the grave realization that the chances of finding Joseph unharmed out here on this rock were almost zero.