Neal Caldwell possesses a remarkable gift of congenital chromesthesia, where he sees colors and patterns when hearing sounds. He learned to couple it with sonar expertise through his time in the US Navy, making him the world’s foremost authority in identifying undersea vessels. Betrayed by his closest friend, his meticulously guarded secret is exposed, and he encounters a sinister world as North Korean ships, acting as proxies for the Chinese, forcibly abduct him on the high seas. The Chinese mission: to locate and identify US submarines. Such capability would cause a tectonic shift in the alignment of the world’s strategic nuclear powers. Concurrently, Neal’s young son is kidnapped in San Diego. He serves as collateral to compel Neal’s cooperation, forcing him to potentially become the most notorious traitor the world has known.
Punished by his captors with ruthless methods that exhaust his mental and physical strength, Neal is caught in a web of moral complexities, exploring the fundamental nature of loyalty, love, and betrayal. As the resiliency of his spirit is pushed to its breaking point, the question becomes, which path will he follow?
Neal Caldwell possesses a remarkable gift of congenital chromesthesia, where he sees colors and patterns when hearing sounds. He learned to couple it with sonar expertise through his time in the US Navy, making him the world’s foremost authority in identifying undersea vessels. Betrayed by his closest friend, his meticulously guarded secret is exposed, and he encounters a sinister world as North Korean ships, acting as proxies for the Chinese, forcibly abduct him on the high seas. The Chinese mission: to locate and identify US submarines. Such capability would cause a tectonic shift in the alignment of the world’s strategic nuclear powers. Concurrently, Neal’s young son is kidnapped in San Diego. He serves as collateral to compel Neal’s cooperation, forcing him to potentially become the most notorious traitor the world has known.
Punished by his captors with ruthless methods that exhaust his mental and physical strength, Neal is caught in a web of moral complexities, exploring the fundamental nature of loyalty, love, and betrayal. As the resiliency of his spirit is pushed to its breaking point, the question becomes, which path will he follow?
It first appeared as a vague, amorphous shape. It changed quickly, in only a second or two, shimmering as it became focused into several rotating spheres of mauve against a lemon-yellow background. I was sure, without a doubt, that it was a nodule of the purest iridium. I pressed my headset intercom button.
“Captain, I’ve found a good one.”
“Whatcha got, Neal?” Scott Atkinson asked. He’s the skipper of the Deep Metal Explorer One, which we affectionately nicknamed “Ramee” for rare metals.
“A pure iridium nodule. Umm, bearing two-four-six true, range twenty-five miles, depth about thirteen thousand feet.”
“What’s your confidence level on the nodule?”
“Very high, ninety-nine percent. I haven’t seen one this pure in a long time. And it’s likely a large one based on the signal strength I’m getting from such a long distance. The thermocline has a sharp cutoff in this area, giving us a nice strong sound channel with a convergence zone near the seafloor. Unusual conditions, for sure.”
“How about location accuracy?”
“The same; I’m certain it’s at the position I have a fix on. I’ll fine-tune it as we get closer.”
“Neal, well done! This could be quite a windfall for us.”
“Captain, we’ll need to proceed quickly. Being so late in the afternoon, I will probably lose the sound channel in the next two to three hours. Sure would like to get this baby’s position pinpointed before then.”
“No worries, Neal. We’ll be there in under an hour.”
I returned to monitoring the sound from the sonar suite onboard the Deep Metal Explorer One or DME-1. DME-1 is the principal ocean-going research vessel of US-based TransOceanic Mining Corporation, usually called TOMC, or just “toe-mick”. We were operating in the Pacific Ocean between Baja California, Mexico, and Hawaii, in an area known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. The CCZ covers an immense ocean area and is about forty-five hundred miles across in an east-west direction, encompassing just under two million square miles. The water depth ranges from twelve to eighteen thousand feet, making this vast region of the abyssal plain a formidable area to search. It was our third month at sea.
It was now an hour since I contacted the Captain. We arrived on station, what I called datum, and were directly overhead of the nodule. As before, I was positive it was iridium, but resolution at such depth didn’t allow me to discern if it was one large nodule or several smaller ones. The depth was 12,726 feet. An insufferable and hazardous depth, to be sure, but Ramee had a robotic submersible up to the task as long as the nodule weighed less than 110 pounds. The submersible, called simply Bob, had a small sonar array, along with video cameras. Its operating station was in a room adjacent to Ramee’s bridge, controlled by one of the crew, a single young woman of 26 named Julie Thornton. She attended Georgia Tech, earning a BS in robotics, and joined TOMC after graduating in 2029. Now a year later, this was her first deployment at sea.
Captain Atkinson ordered Bob to be lowered into the water, and it was soon on its way into the deep, dark depths of the ocean. I remained at Ramee’s sonar suite, providing navigational guidance to the nodule until Bob’s sonar and video located it.
I called Bob’s operator, “Julie, put Bob on an initial heading of zero five zero and descend at your best rate.”
“Zero five zero, roger that,” Julie replied.
Ten minutes passed quickly, and Bob had descended nearly 6,000 feet, although it was still too far away for Julie to navigate Bob to the nodule without my input. I continued to see the rotating spheres of mauve against a lemon-yellow background with each sonar ping.
“Julie, turn to zero six five.”
“Roger, zero six five.”
After another six minutes, “Okay, now zero seven three.”
“Zero seven three, roger.”
Five minutes later, Julie called out, “Bob has sonar acquisition! Shifting to internal auto guidance.”
I continued monitoring for another two minutes to ensure Bob followed the correct heading and then said to Julie, “Confirmed that Bob is following an accurate course. You should have video acquisition soon. Depth now 12,600 feet.”
Julie replied, “Roger and concur with 12,600.”
“Good! I’m signing off and will come up to check on the video.”
I placed the sonar suite in standby and climbed the two decks to the bridge. The skipper and Marissa Haynes were both there, along with the regular watch.
Marissa was the ship’s second in command, called the Executive Officer, or XO, which is understandable jargon with most of the crew being ex-Navy. She was forty and, like the skipper, was ex-US Navy, a former Surface Warfare Officer assigned to destroyers. Marissa resigned her commission at age 29 after seven years of active duty. Married and impossibly intelligent, she had a BS degree in geology from the University of California at San Diego. TOMC has employed her for the past eleven years, and many consider her one of TOMC’s rising stars.
“Hi, Neal! Great job!” Atkinson said as he and Marissa turned to me, grinning ear-to-ear.
“Thanks, Captain. I hope we get video soon. I’m going to check on Julie.”
“Okay, I’ll join you. Marissa, keep an eye on the bridge, please.”
The atmosphere in Bob’s control room was tense. Julie was sitting at the console with the Captain and me standing behind her, the three of us staring at two large video monitors. There was nothing to see except Bob’s powerful lights probing into the black void.
“Okay, depth now twelve sixty-eight. We should see the sea floor soon. Descent still in auto,” Julie said. I could hear (and see!) the nervousness in her voice.
Then, “There, there, right there! Do you see it?” she yelled.
“Yes, yes!” the Captain and I yelled simultaneously.
The wash from Bob’s propellers blew off a cloud of silt from the two large nodules, each about twenty inches in diameter. The murkiness cleared after Julie placed Bob in manual control and throttled back, using just enough thrust to keep Bob hovering over the nodules. Bob’s lights reflected off a few small areas of the nodules now clear of the muck. They looked to be metallic.
“Julie, latch onto the closest nodule and see what it weighs,” the skipper said. Julie maneuvered Bob’s two grappling arms to the nodule and, after some jostling, got it off the seabed.
“94.2 pounds,” she said.
Scott Atkinson let out a long sigh. “My goodness, if that nodule is all pure iridium, it will be quite a payday! Let’s get it aboard and try to retrieve the other one before it gets dark.”
Two hours later, both nodules were undergoing analysis in Ramee’s metallurgic lab. They were both solid, and the second nodule weighed 101.1 pounds. We took tiny one-half-millimeter core samples from each nodule, and testing revealed that they were iridium, with a purity of 99.8 percent. Their total weight (including the core samples) was 195.3 pounds. The entire crew gathered for breakfast the following day to hear the news, with Captain Atkinson giving everyone a brief overview of what had transpired.
“And so,” the skipper continued, “we have about 195 pounds of essentially pure iridium.” There were a couple of gasps and low whistles from the crew as they were all familiar with the metal’s rarity.
The XO, Marissa Haynes, continued, “The closing price of iridium from yesterday’s global metal commodities market was 6,125 dollars. Per ounce! Which equals a little over 19 million dollars! Quite a haul for one day!!”
The dining area went bonkers with cheers, whoops, back-slapping, and general cheerful chaos. They all knew that 40 percent of their cargo’s worth was theirs, with 60 percent going to TOMC. Someone shouted, “The toe-mick execs are going to go nuts!” The 26 members of the crew would share the almost eight million dollars, dividing it on a variable scale to ensure that everyone would be well off.
After several minutes, the Captain quieted everyone and said, “We still have another five weeks on our deployment, and who knows? Perhaps more good fortune will come our way. I’m sure most of you already know this, but one person here has been instrumental in our success: Mr. Neal Caldwell! Neal, come on, stand up and take a bow!”
I stood, and the raucous yelling started again, quickly becoming a loud chant of “Nee-AL! Nee-AL! Nee-AL!” which seemed to continue forever. I could only smile but soon joined in with the joyous yelling. What a remarkable couple of days it had been!
After another ten minutes of celebration, I felt a tap on my shoulder, turned, and saw it was Marissa. “Hey, XO,” I said, “quite the day, eh?” I looked into her sparkling brown eyes, always alive with curiosity. Her medium-length light brown hair was in a bun, accentuating her cheekbones. Like everyone else onboard, she wore TOMC’s designated fire-retardant coveralls. They were functional and utilitarian and did not obscure her well-toned figure, which she appeared oblivious to.
“Neal, you’re pretty damn incredible. What a gift you have! I must say I am more than a little jealous of Lisa.” She stared intently at me with the slightest smile on her lips. As usual, I had to remind myself mentally to ignore her beauty and remember that she was married. As was I. And to one as beautiful and intelligent (or more brilliant, I thought). After all, Lisa was a Naval Academy grad with nuclear engineering and oceanography degrees and had served on US Navy nuclear attack submarines. She left active duty as a Lieutenant Commander after serving for eight years. She was now the Chief Scientific Director of Ocean Mining at TOMC, a position she was hired for after she left active duty four years ago.
“Yeah, it is amazing. Most of the time, I don’t think about it much. I mean, it’s just part of me, the way I’m put together, so to speak.” She smiled, revealing a perfect row of white teeth. I continued, “But on days like this, the experience is so vivid, so profound, I have to pinch myself to ensure it’s actually me. Thanks for appreciating it.”
Her gaze shifted, focusing on something in the distance. “Hmm…yes, that’s interesting. But I should stop hogging you so you can get back to the merriment. And I need to check on something.” She casually strode off, departing the dining room and perplexing me by her sudden nonchalance.
The Color of Sound by R. Alan Gilmore is a heart-pounding espionage thriller. Neal Caldwell was born with a condition called “Chromesthesia,” where sounds appear as colors, shapes, and movement. It was both a curse and a blessing. He was teased and bullied unmercifully as a child, but was considered a highly valuable resource as a sonar technician in his adult years. He was valuable enough to risk an international incident with China on the world stage to bring him back to America.
The first few chapters were written in a very sweet tone, describing his childhood, his early career, and meeting Lisa, the love of his life. Then suddenly, there was a crisis, and the story moves relentlessly forward for most of the book. Then the ending uses a softer tone. I liked the contrast.
This story is about patriotism, loyalty, friendship, suffering, betrayal, selflessness, and never giving up. Neal's journey through the abductions, the torture, the threats, and the separation from his family creates moving themes that keep the reader engaged. The most emotional part of the book for me was how the United States government responded to Neal’s abduction, but the President of the United States finally responded like a compassionate patriot, instead of a politician.
Following the CIA, FBI, NSA, and many branches of law enforcement as they worked together to track down the Caldwell family members and outmaneuvered the foreign agents was not only impressive but very exciting.
I had never heard of chromesthesia, so it was interesting to learn about it. It is not a disease; it is a neurological condition, and it is relatively rare.
I enjoyed reading The Color of Sound, and I plan to follow this author in the future. I am giving this book a rating of 5 stars. It was flawlessly edited. The story is based on a very unique premise that makes it interesting, compelling, and moving. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a good espionage thriller.