Breakthrough by Michael C. Grumley
John Clay is a Navy geek working out of the Pentagon who gets a call to look into how a nuclear submarine could find itself suddenly fifteen miles off course while cruising in the Caribbean. Alison Shaw is a dolphin researcher working on machine translation to provide communication between us and our flippered friends. He’s not having any luck figuring out why that area is causing weird things to happen to ships, robots, and the ocean itself, while she’s having unhoped for success with her research, which maps the dolphin’s motions and sounds in situational context to enable two way communication. He’s Navy. She has a bad taste in her mouth from the last time the government appropriated her research, not to mention the Vietnam era dolphin bomb project. Naturally he winds up turning to her and her team to help figure out what’s at the bottom of the mystery. And why the ocean level is dropping, despite global warming. It’s not a bad read, and it’s not really mil sf, mostly. Call it a techo-thriller. Fans of Startide Rising (David Brin) and anything by Clive Cussler will like it pretty well. I gave it a 3 out of 5.