13 comments/ 56159 views/ 5 favorites Life is Uncertain... Ch. 01 By: Stultus Life Is Uncertain - Eat Dessert First! Copyright© 2008, 2012 by Stultus Thanks to Dowyd, Dragonsweb & DuffieDawg and several advance readers that prefer to maintain deniability Synopsis: Is it possible for a woman to cheat on her husband without ever having sex with another man? A former Navy officer and marine researcher discovers the answer, when his wife and her Navy boyfriend show an unhealthy interest in his invention. Years later she returns into his life informing him that his invention may be the only means of finding that same Navy officer alive. An odd unconventional sort of Cheating Wife story with virtually no sex. Sex contents: No Sex Genre: Romantic Codes: MF, Cheating Originally Posted on SOL: 2008-11-29 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. Josie never knew the secret about my "ugly table" and until the very end assumed that all of my secrets were still stored in my small office safe. To make things more interesting and enticing, I started to create a thick stack of entirely bogus research full of formulas and techno-babble that I eventually compiled into a large binder. To anyone else except me, this looked like the crown jewels of my family research, but in fact it was all complete twaddle ... and worthless. Perfect though, for drawing attention away from my important and real research data. During work, I kept the bogus binder close at hand and locked it every night into my safe, completing the illusion that this in fact held my true research. It took about six months of hard work to merge the last bits of my own research into Hugh's previously completed work and finish the theory part down pretty rock solid. It looked alright ... but would it really work? The next step was bigger, build some equipment that could test the theory and (hopefully) get us working operationally. With good news came the buzzards, namely another visit from Josie's Navy friend Commander Blake. He oozed charm from every pore, but I held firm. No data for you bud! He kept dangling money and use of boats, equipment and personnel but no dice. This project was going to be run my way — all the way. I wasn't going to let the Morrissey name be cheated from victory at the last minute on the cusp of final success. This was, however, a very good opportunity to check and see if Josie would obey my strict orders not to allow Blake access to any of my research materials. I had primed the pump, so to speak, earlier in the week when I let her 'discover' that I had kept a copy of the combination to the large safe in the storage room of the lab written on the back of a painting hanging on the wall near it. However, she failed to discover the security camera I had hooked into a motion detector focused on the room. The files in that safe, as I mentioned earlier, were all moot and extremely obsolete. Quite harmless, but excellent bait. I was not kept waiting for long. Reviewing the security camera footage revealed three intrusions. The first one, the day before Blake's visit, showed Josie sneaking in on her own and opening the safe on her own but immediately locking it up again. Apparently just to check and make sure that the numbers to the safe combination were valid. The second one, the second day of Blake's visit, showed a very long conversation between Josie and Blake. It was a very long discussion that made me wish I had bought the more expensive model that also had sound recording capability. She started off by showing him where the combination to the safe was hidden and she seemed to indicate that she had tested it and that it worked. Their body language indicated that they were rather more than good friends, in my opinion. They did not actually kiss, but they hugged several times and gave every appearance of being an intimate couple. How I wished I could have heard what they said during the forty minutes that they were there together! The final entry into the storage room occurred later that same evening, in fact coinciding while we were all off together having dinner at a local restaurant (on Blake's expense account). The intruder was actually Blake's aide and driver whom I had seen relatively little of previously. His aide quickly opened the safe and removed all of the files, undoubtedly moving them off-site as quickly as possible. Blake would certainly not get caught this time with files in his trunk. Blake, apparently accepting his failure to motivate me to accept the Navy's money gracefully, left the following morning. Good riddance! Now the real fun was about to begin. I made a big show out of suddenly finding that my main safe was empty and directly asked Josie if she knew what had happened to all of Hugh's files? She lied straight to my face. Repeatedly. She swore that I had cleaned out the safe myself weeks ago and had sent the contents off to Denise (whom she did not like very much) for storage. Obviously not, but I let her think she'd gotten away with it for a little while. She also swore that she did not know the safe's combination; therefore it was impossible for her to have given it to anyone else, let alone Blake. On it went, lies and more lies. I pressured her to fess up and admit that she had all but given the files to him herself and when I tired of hearing her protests of innocence and she accused me of lying about the files to fabricate a fight. I then showed her the security camera tape. Naturally, this started another huge fight about how "I didn't trust her". Duh, of course not! In the end she was even proud about how she had gone behind my back because I was too suspicious and paranoid to trust anyone to "make the proper decisions' about my work. She was the one looking after and protecting me from myself, etc. In other words she was right to give my family secrets away and I was wrong because I wouldn't give her boyfriend everything myself. 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 actually prove that 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. Life is Uncertain... Ch. 02 The ship renovations exceeded my expectations and were more than adequate for our task at hand. With all of the new technology, the former crew requirement of over twenty people was reduced to a core of eight. We hired a Captain, an experienced pair of mates, a Chief Engineer and his assistant, a radio/radar tech, and two crewman/deckhands. The crew was mostly Turkish, from the Izmir area, and my brother Dave, with all of his local connections there, was able to get excellent references for them all. Piracy, often a concern in remote waters, was going to be the last of our worries. For the shakedown cruise, we added an electrician/instrumentation guru who turned out to be so technically useful and genial in personality that we hired him permanently to handle the computers and the 3-D seismic/sonar scan equipment, or as we began to call it, our 3DS3 equipment. We began daily shakedown cruises off of Izmir to begin testing everything we could think of and found very few problems that couldn't be fixed or bypassed on the spot. The new ship's engine, which we had selected for its reliability, ease of maintenance and fuel efficiency rather than cruising speed or power, purred like a happy kitten. Our only notable deficiency was in the ship's galley. Apparently not one of us could cook anything that the rest of us would enjoy eating even once, let alone weeks on end while at sea. We gave up and hired a cook to fill our up our crew to ten and everyone's morale improved dramatically. We needn't have been at all worried or concerned about our shiny new and untested 3DS3 equipment, it worked like a charm from the very first test. Dave had spent one entire summer season several years ago doing a slow precise sonar survey of a promising area of coastline near Izmir that he believed should have a number of ancient shipwrecks. Instead of towing a small scanner at the crawling speed of 1 knot (as Dave had done in the original survey), we spent just one day dropping sensors across a one square mile area of sea floor and then launched our towed 3DS3 array behind the boat in the center of our search area and fired off our small seismic detonators. Then we compared the results of the two different surveys and the results were spectacular! We could not only get a complete 3-D mapping of the exact contours of the sea floor, but we could also get some subsurface mappings as well. Our new technology did work, and it produced far clearer images than a now obsolete towed sonar scan could produce ... and at a fraction of the cost and time to produce! The theory and the equipment worked. At a glance, even a novice marine archeologist could now tell a possible bronze age shipwreck from a modern sunken fishing boat, and have the exact GPS coordinates. Even those ancient wrecks now covered completely by sand and mud appeared clearly in the scan, thanks to the ground penetrating 3-D seismic sensors. Dave was ecstatic. This was everything he had hoped Hugh could create, and more! In just one day of work, we had identified at least six new very promising locations worthy of diving for further investigate later. Dave and his grad students would be busy for years. In late March, our client and his crew of two salvage divers joined the ship and we set sail for the coast of Cyprus. We never did get a name for the WW-2 era ship he was allegedly searching for, but we were given some old long range B&W photographs and some rough dimensions. Our target was apparently a small tramp freighter that had been sunk by Allied bombers sometime during 1942. We didn't really know exactly what we were searching for, but our client assured us that he'd know it if he saw it. No problem. If she was anywhere in the area then we would find her. And we did. It took awhile, but the difficulty was in isolating the correct target from the hundreds of other likely wrecks in the area that our scans revealed, including more than a few that might have future archeological significance. Out of the numerous located sunken ships in the search area, five seemed to fit the profile best and our client sent his divers down to each one. The fourth wreck turned out to be the ship that he was searching for and it was fortunately reasonably easy to get to in about 200 feet of water, and it was most definitely a motherlode! The drivers grinned from ear to ear as they each displayed a small bar of salvaged gold, but I still don't think that it was just the bullion that attracted my client to this one particular wreck. The client made his private plans to secretly salvage his found gold (mostly likely Nazi loot from North Africa), plus whatever else it was that he was looking for, and we received our final promised payment of $1,000,000, plus the signed transfer title to the ship. We never saw our client again and I'm not entirely sure he ever got his gold — or anything else, salvaged. He was involved in an odd 'freak accident' in Istanbul about two months later that screamed out deliberate murder to my mind. Either someone talked to the wrong person about the gold discovery or else there was much more at stake with this wreck than just mundane gold. Either way, our client was now very dead. And now so was Dave. I was in Istanbul myself, getting the final legal registration papers for our ship and Dave had gone back to Izmir to meet with his incoming students and grad students taking his usual summer field marine archeology course. He had taken the Texas A&M University owned boat out and was doing some shallow test dives in Izmir harbor to make sure all of the diving equipment was in good condition for the summer when he failed to resurface. His body was found by local divers and one of his grad students the next day. An investigation showed that his air tank was filled with pure CO2, rather than compressed diving air. There were some reports that some of the local staff had seen a few odd strangers near the boat dock and the storage areas, but with all of the new arriving students (many of them Turkish) seeing strange faces wasn't particularly unusual and no one thought twice about it until later. His death was ruled an unfortunate accident. I believe it was murder, performed by the same folks who had also killed our client about a week earlier. Either they didn't know about me (Dave had always been the more public figure for our enterprise) or I somehow dodged death myself a time or two without ever noticing it. I did hear a funny story upon our return from our cruise around Cyprus that we had been "reported dead", that another ship in our area had suffered a mysterious explosion and for a day or so it had been assumed to be us. A few phone calls to the Consulate had straightened that confusion out, to everyone's slight amusement. I made all of the arrangements for Dave's funeral (his ashes were buried at sea in an old Phoenician small jug at one of his older, already excavated wreck sites) and I made arrangements with both of Dave's Universities (Mimar Sinan in Istanbul and Texas A&M in the US) to handle the first few weeks of Dave's classes until a permanent replacement professor could be found. My plans were all set to return home when my last hopes for a happy life there were dashed. Josie had opened my small office safe and given Blake my bogus, but impressive looking research binder! Before I had left for Turkey, Josie and I had been getting along as well as we ever had during the two years of our marriage. Especially during our last six months our sex life was suddenly rich and full and we now shared many intimate moments together. She had assured me repeatedly that she had no improper relationship with her 'friend' Blake whatsoever and that she would completely respect my privacy wishes and give him nothing, without my explicit permission. I had begun to really trust her again. I really had, but ... before I left for my overseas project, I had a professional security company secretly set up a new motion activated secret camera for my office (this time with sound) that connected to an image server on the Internet. If Josie or Blake made any attempt to get into my small safe there, I would know about it. I didn't hide the combination very hard and left it in an obvious place (taped underneath my computer keyboard) where they could find it if they really wanted to find it hard enough. No one had entered my office for over two months, in fact not until I was back in Izmir handling Dave's estate after his death right before I planned to return home. Josie and Blake together were searching my office and upon finding the combination, Josie opened my safe and handed Blake my fake research binder and then hugged him. The sound quality was less than perfect. In fact it was pretty awful. Josie seemed to be rather emotional and was crying a bit, apparently conflicted about what she was doing, namely betraying me and my interests to her boyfriend. In the end, loyalty to her boyfriend seemed to outweigh her vows to me. They left the office immediately afterwards hand-in-hand. Again, they hadn't kissed, but their affection was obvious. This for me was the final betrayal. I phoned up my old lawyer that had handled my original attempted divorce and instructed him to start it up all over again. I would fly back briefly the next week just to sign the necessary paperwork and to file US registration paperwork for our (well, now I guess it's just mine) ship before returning to Turkey ... apparently to stay for awhile. The idea of divorce, just like last time, did not apparently meet with her approval. My original petition was once again returned torn in half and I received an angry letter that I didn't read beyond the second paragraph before I angrily threw it into Izmir harbor. I replied with an angry letter of my own that itemized all of her betrayals and told her bluntly that I'd never set foot in the country again as long as I was married to a cheating thief. Silence. The exchange of letters stopped and we didn't communicate with each other again. My divorce petition seemed to die somewhere in legal limbo but I wasn't in any hurry to remarry anyway. In fact the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that she would be the one soon wanting a divorce so she could marry Blake. I told my lawyer to let my petition sit in Limbo and wait for her to file on me on grounds of abandonment. Then we would stall on her for a change. It was petty and vindictive, but I felt I had grounds to be angry. ********************* I ended up staying in Izmir for about five years. It is a beautiful part of Turkey and has all of the trappings of civilization that one could possibly ask for, and I got into a pretty nice routine. During the summers I would act as an assistant instructor for Dave's old marine archeology classes, locating ancient shipwrecks and learning the historical recovery and preservation parts of the business. I got my story in National Geographic Magazine (two different cover stories) and the 3DS3 process seemed to make archeological history every time we displayed it for a growing crowd of academic admirers. Soon during some of our summer cruises we would also have a documentary film crews joining us from either BBC, History, Discovery or National Geographic Channel, or some other TV network. I tried to stay in the background as much as possible and gave my late brothers the lion's share of the credit for developing the technology. During the spring and fall, I would make our ship and crew available for private charter search expeditions, usually for the benefit of a large marine salvage company, but occasionally we did some government work, such as locating an historically important wreck. The private salvage work paid very, very well. We made them understand that our technology could save them years or decades of searching, doing the work in just a matter of weeks, and that while our 'locater fees' were high ... so were our likely results. We kept raising our charter fees but our booking schedules kept getting filled for years in advance. We usually charged a flat twenty percent of the estimated salvage value of a wreck. Payable immediately upon confirmation of discovery. Later salvage costs, taxes, etc., were all to become their problem, and there was no shortage of clients lining up to pay us. Our old boat handled crossing the Atlantic Ocean just fine, and soon there will hardly be a single Spanish treasure galleon left undiscovered in the Caribbean. We even made a trip a few years ago into the Indian Ocean, via the Suez, and went equally smoothly. Someday, we'll make a trip to the Pacific to find some Chinese Treasure Fleet wrecks, too. The world was literally our oyster now! During the winters I began to take it easy and just relaxed to smell the roses, literally. I have a beautiful large villa on the hills of Izmir and a gardener with a penchant for growing magnificent heirloom roses. I have more money than I can ever spend in a normal lifetime, let alone an abbreviated Morrissey one, and I think I have found the perfect companion to share these probable last few remaining years of my life with. Dave's permanent replacement, a lovely dark-haired professor named Yonca. Vivacious and utterly uninhibited, Yonca now shares virtually every moment with me and together we tend to astonish many of our new summer students with our very 'clothing optional' Mediterranean lifestyle. From the very first cruise out to a wreck location, topless women are very much the norm onboard the boat and by the end of the summer, full nudity for everyone is pretty much the rule, rather than the exception (unless there is a film crew on-board). Yonca was only a bit younger than I am and her biological clock was starting to tick a bit louder. She knows that legally I am still married in the US but that didn't stop her from deciding that I was excellent father material nevertheless. The baby was expected to be born about the time I turned thirty-nine, so the odds were decent that I might still be around to at least hold my child. Now I had a legacy to leave behind after me and perhaps the fates would be kinder to this child, my son to be, otherwise our branch of the Morrissey name was just about extinct. ************************** One late spring, five years into my most pleasant exile, we were finishing up the last few bits of a channel mapping survey for the Commonwealth of the Bahamas' (and satisfying my own personal curiosity about the nature of the megalithic era submerged Bahama 'road') when we had an unusual visitor; The US Assistant Secretary of State for the Navy. He had apparently flown in to Nassau straight from Washington where a Bahaman naval patrol boat was waiting for him to speed him over to our ship. Frankly, I had been quite surprised that I had not heard anything at all from the Navy since my separation from Josie. Undoubtedly, they would have soon figured out that my faux research notes were all quite useless. Since the 3DS3 process had been repeatedly proven to be extremely successful I had been half expecting them to show up hat in hand and groveling for forgiveness, and begging for some scraps from my table. Well, I was only half right, but still better late than never. He made the usual expected appeals to my patriotism, sense of duty, etc and I in return appealed to his own sense of self-preservation ... leave now or become ballast at the underwater end of our towed 3DS3 array. He used the words, "emergency" and "critical national security" a lot, but I had been to college and in the Navy myself and knew some big words too. Like "bilge", "twaddle", "bullshit" and (my favorite) "No and Hell No". Yonca, nearly seven months pregnant with our son and (as usual) topless, was loudly encouraging me to feed this distinguished personage to the local sharks (if they would have him) and I was more than half inclined to agree. The sneaky bastard had one final card to play though, and he outmaneuvered me. If I performed this one mission for the Navy, my wife would willingly in return sign my divorce papers. Damn. The things we do for family. Yonca still wanted very much to marry me, or at least be able to give my name to our son, to keep the family line going — her idea not mine. I figured that somehow or another I would be dead within the next year or so and my name was really the only important thing left that I could give my young son. It was worth letting 3DS3 get within the greedy grasp of the Navy. I'd have to patent the process very soon anyway, so that my widow and son could license the technology and provide for their long term futures. Sure we were currently worth many tens of millions, but life is uncertain and a guaranteed long term income is always useful for a family. An hour later we were in a dry dock in Nassau, where a large crane was lifting our small ship onto a flatbed truck to take it, equipment and all, to the airport, where a giant Air Force C-5 cargo plane was waiting to carry it and us to Langley AFB, near Norfolk, Virginia. On the short flight, I was given the mission briefing and understood why my 3DS3 equipment was so desperately needed. Josie's boyfriend, Captain Don Blake (he had now been apparently promoted up from Commander) was commanding a test cruise of a new ultra-stealth technology mini-submarine in the James River that was designed for SpecOps missions, such as by SEAL teams. It was extremely sonar and magnetic detection resistant and in fact this was part of its testing, to be able to sneak it by a pair of Navy Destroyers and several other smaller ships that were actively searching for it in the river. Something went wrong, and/or the new stealth mini-sub worked a little too well. They had suddenly lost communications with it and had been unable to locate the boat for two full days now. Supposedly there was enough air inside to last for about another twenty-four hours, at most optimistic estimates. I had less than a day to find this 'undetectable' craft lost somewhere in the James River between Hopewell and Newport News, with the added bonus of rescuing the man that my ex-wife had apparently preferred over me. The distance to be searched was a bit of a concern, being about forty miles or so of twisting river, but it was the twists and bends that would make the seismic work a bit harder to do. It had been raining quite a bit in the region lately and the James River was at near flood stage with a fairly fast moving current. This made me suspect that our target would be unlikely to be located at the furthest upstream areas. In fact, the unusually fast current and all of the mud stirred up made it seem likely to me, and several of the other Naval officers I spoke with, that the craft (assuming it had lost all power) would have been washed into some muddier or deeper corner of the river near a bend, and possibly now mostly or completely covered by mud deposited by the currents. Charting out the likely current patterns, I picked ten areas that seemed to me to be the mostly likely areas to search. With the amount of oxygen Blake and his crew had remaining, this was about the most area I would have time to search in any case. Under normal circumstances, searching a forty mile stretch of twisting river would have taken me weeks to do the job carefully and properly. The Navy had another flatbed truck waiting on the tarmac when the C-5 landed and our ship was quickly transferred over. Within an hour after landing we were on the river at Newport News and ready to start our prepared search patterns. I didn't have the time to do absolutely everything myself and I made extensive use of several other small ship crews to help plant the seismic charges and buoys in advance to save my crew time. Time was of the essence, and for once I let security take a back stage to practicality and speed of efficiency. With the immanent patent filings, the Navy would soon get its payback for those early years of funding anyway. Life is Uncertain... Ch. 02 It was a very near thing. Blake's boat was found nearly completely buried in the mud at a large bend in the river near Fort Eustis. It was our eighth site of the ten planned areas to search. By the time Navy divers had cleared off enough mud to hook up a cable and pull it onto a nearby destroyer there were less than two projected hours of breathable air left inside, but Blake and his crew of two were alright. Mission accomplished. I declined to attend the party that celebrated the rescue. The sight of my ex-wife (soon to be official), along with a small boy hugging Blake and crying tears of joy as he and his crew emerged from their crippled deathtrap was more than enough motivation to make me want to scurry off and plan for a very hasty departure. There was talk of medals and other awards, and a rumor of an impending personal telephone call from the President of the United States, but I declined semi-gracefully. The moment the last Navy person was off of our ship, we immediately turned her nose to the sea. After a last minute diesel fill-up at a dock at Virginia Beach I told the Captain to make flank speed and get the hell out here and get us back to Nassau. I'd done my good deed and now I just wanted to get back home as soon as possible. We finished up our job in the Bahamas' and crossed the Atlantic heading toward the Med to handle our final contracted job of the spring to find an old 18th century shipwreck of a British ship of the line near Oran. We didn't enjoy great success with that one; the ships powder room had apparently exploded when she sunk pretty much destroying the entire ship. We found a ballast mound and some cannon but not much else. Our client couldn't really prove definitively that this was the exact wreck they were after. The water depth there was also a bit too deep for normal diving so this wreck might remain a mystery for a few more years, if it is ever solved at all. It was almost the start of summer and time to go home. Yonca's water broke while we were still about fifty miles out of Izmir and for a few scary hours we thought she would actually give birth on-board, but we got her to the hospital just in the nick of time and our son Hugh David Morrissey was born. ************************* The summer seemed to pass slowly. The US Navy kept sending me various letters and envelopes of increasingly obvious importance and I treated them all with equal distain. I used them to start BBQ fires without ever having opened a single one of them. I had hired a big law firm that specialized in patent law and had given them all of my 3DS3 process materials so they could get it properly patented for me within a few months. I'd also let them handle most of the licensing arrangements at usurious rates. The USN would get their chance, but they could now stand in line with everyone else ... they didn't need anything particular now from me, in my opinion. I had no intention of wasting a moment of the probable last year of my life dealing with any bureaucratic agency. My divorce lawyer reported that things were moving along again, and that I could soon expect to meet a courier that would arrive with the final signed agreement. Upon my final signature then, everything would be a done deal. Yonca and I started to make arrangements for a simple civil ceremony, with the Captain of our ship actually conducting the wedding. There was just one odd surprise when the courier arrived with the paperwork. It was Captain Blake, now retired from the USN. "Give me five minutes to say my piece without interruption and you'll get this signed divorce agreement and everyone will be out of your lives forever." He said waving a stack of documents at me as he came on-board our ship docked in Izmir harbor. It sounded like a fair deal to me. I even offered him a chair in our little parlour room of the ship and Yonca offered him some Turkish coffee. "First of all — NO INTERRUPTIONS. None. Or I'll leave with this agreement unsigned and you can then deal directly with Josie." "Second. You are the single biggest idiot I've meet in twenty years either on land or at sea. Oh, you're clever enough, it's true, but you don't even have the sense of a drowned sea rat. I still don't know why she loved you — and still does. Never once was Josie unfaithful to you, and certainly not ever with me." "Yes, we have been close friends since childhood, but that is all ... more like brother and sister in fact. We have always talked to each other when times were hard and shared hugs and other comfort, but we have never once desired to go to bed with each other. I am gay, and have been for my entire adult life. I had to keep this mostly secret during my Navy career but now that I have retired I look forward to openly spending time with my own partner — who is most definitely not your wife." "If you had bothered to read, let alone believe, any of the letters she mailed you, you would have known that for about two days during your first visit to Turkey you were declared by the local Embassy here to be dead in a ship explosion. They notified Josie via telegram of this incorrect news and she immediately called me. In fact, here is another copy of that telegram ... we made a lot of copies of it and kept mailing them to you but you apparently couldn't be bothered to see or read them." "Only after she believed you to be dead did she allow me access to your research notes, which I might add were a masterpiece of misdirection. That binder alone probably cost the Navy an entire man-year of research time trying to figure out if any part of it was useful. She had kept her final promise to you and had refused the Navy all access to your research materials ... until the day she received the telegram declaring you to be dead. By the time she found out later that this report was false, it was too late. She had already given me what she believed to be your records, only so that your family work would not die with you." "You have thus very falsely maligned Josie, the sweetest and most loyal woman I have ever known in my life on these two accounts of being unfaithful to you, via both the love of your marriage and the sanctity of your research. You never trusted her and in the end you have betrayed her, rather than her betraying you. She still does not want this divorce — she still loves you for some incomprehensible reason, but she agreed to it in order to gain your assistance to save my life. She had already lost the man she loved and she could then not bear to also lose her friend I only had one remaining unanswered question. "Who was that small boy by your sides at your reunion on the destroyer in the James River? I assumed that this was your son." "That is your son. Josie had just found out she was pregnant when you left for Turkey. That was why she didn't wish to make the trip here with you. She didn't want to take any chances overseas and risk losing the precious child. She knew and understood that it was likely that you would die a regrettably early death and that this might be her only chance to keep something of you for the future." This was an awful lot to swallow at one sitting, and all of it made me feel like a complete heel. Even Yonca, who was normally never at a loss for words, remained silent and just keep looking down at her feet. "I'd like to speak with Josie." I told Blake as we shook hands right before he left our boat a few minutes later. "I thought you might ... now." He replied. "She flew over with me and brought along little Patrick. I think it's about time that he met his father. She's staying at the Hilton in Izmir. Would you like to meet there tonight at 7:30 for dinner?" The dinner was pleasant; very cordial but nevertheless quite strange. Everyone was on their best behavior and there were no accusations or recriminations. Josie said that she thought she would stay for another week or so and she especially wanted to see our boat, and watch 3DS3 working after all of those long years of hard work. She also wanted to meet our students, especially some of the older grad students who had studied under my late brother Dave so she could hear their old funny stories about him. She had never met him before his tragic death. Blake flew back home a few days later, but Josie and our son stayed. Young Patrick took to the life of a sea dog with alacrity and soon became our official cabin boy whose new favorite word was a loud piratical "Arrrrr". Josie had never told him that his father had deserted the family, just that he was a very busy and important man who had to work overseas all of the time far away from home. This was an act of quite unexpected kindness compared to the alternative things she easily could have said instead. It made our bonding considerably easier, and soon we really began to feel like a family. Yonca displayed the most surprising flexibility. For the last six years she had had me all to herself and had expected to soon be able to officially marry me. Already she had borne me a child and had been hinting that she wouldn't mind having another ... soon. Immediately, if not sooner. The complication of my wife reappearing into my life, along with a five year old son that I had been previously unaware of, could have been a great and unpleasant shock to her. I expected anger and ultimatums, or annoyance at the very least. Instead, she showed remarkable patience and support, and to my unexpected delight, she and Josie appeared to hit it off together remarkably. Within days, Josie had taken up Yonca's extremely casual attitude towards dress, and Josie's pale white breasts were soon on indefinite display along with the rest of the other women students and TA's. They tanned up very nicely ... and so did the bikini area a few weeks later. A visit of a week or two soon turned into 'for the rest of the summer', and then was extended again until after our fall series of contract jobs, and then she just stopped making deadlines entirely. Even the announcement that Yonca was now pregnant with our second child didn't depress her in the slightest. The two women spent every non work moment together, often took naps together, and had become as close as sisters. On New Years I discovered that they were even closer. I had stayed up a bit late doing some Happy New Year's celebrations, drinking Raki (vile stuff — I don't know how I got talked into it) with some of the crew and local University staff and it took a few hours to push the last happy merrymaker out of the house so I could get some sleep of my own. Yonca wasn't in our bed; she and Josie had left the party right after midnight. I went to check Josie's room as Yonca often napped there with her and heard a good number of rather loud, but not unhappy noises. Peeking through the doorway I saw that the two ladies were engaged in mutual lovemaking in a 69 position. They noticed me eventually but didn't stop, so I blew them a kiss and shut the door to give them some privacy. I awoke late in the morning to find a lovely pair of tanned breasts on both sides of me, and a pair of equally smiling faces. "We've made an executive decision!" Josie announced. "We've decided that despite your numerous faults you're worth keeping. So we've decided to share you. I'm still married to you back in the States and Yonca can marry you over here, so as long as we stay out at sea, everyone should be happy. Besides, you make beautiful babies, and it's my turn to have another one!" There wasn't much said after that and Josie did get her chance to become pregnant again ... repeatedly, but since she didn't give birth to our daughter until late October I think it took quite a few repeat applications. Josie and Yonca together make a superb set of wives and we were all deliriously happy. ************************** Last November 5th, a historic occasion in the annals of the Morrissey family took place. I had my fortieth birthday party! No other man in my family tree since 1863 had lived so long! We kept the celebration private, just family. Josie and Yonca, along with our four children. Dinner was a cake — a huge magnificent cake, with the words "Life is Uncertain — Eat Dessert First!" I did. I squeezed a lovely tit on both women and pulled them together with me for a group kiss that lasted until all forty candles had burned out. Will I live to reach the age of fifty? Who knows, but I don't much care. I'll be too busy eating my dessert. *********************** Author's End Note: This is a rather odd duck of a story. It's one of my early ones and still isn't as smooth and polished as I would have liked. At the time I was writing quite a bit in the 'Cheating Wife' genre but was already pretty much bored with the five usual plots that nearly everyone does over and over again, ad nausium. My goal was to write a uniquely different sort of cheat story, something slightly more philosophical, something along the premise of 'Can a woman 'cheat' without actually having sex with another man?' Most readers said 'Yes', that Josie had technically cheated by betraying her husband's research. Many also thought that her husband was an idiot too and I wouldn't disagree. So in short the entire story really becomes another example of an otherwise loving couple that didn't communicate with each other well.