San Diego matters in the novel less as a described cityscape than as a center of military marine-mammal research. Its naval facilities and research programs form a trail that Leon Anawak follows while trying to understand the possible strategic use of dolphins and other marine animals. The city’s significance lies in the gap between public accounts of training and research and Jack Greywolf’s memory of experiments designed to influence animal behavior.

A Naval Research Network

Anawak’s investigation identifies the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego as part of a longer institutional history. He explains that it succeeded the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center, also associated with Point Loma in San Diego. In tracing the funding, he finds a connection to an organization that now finances the US Navy Marine Mammal Program. These links place San Diego within an overlapping network of naval command, ocean surveillance, and animal research, rather than presenting the work as an isolated scientific initiative.

The passage does not map the facilities or describe the city’s broader geography. Instead, San Diego enters the narrative through records, institutional names, and the recollection of someone who served there. Point Loma helps locate the research history, while the succession between naval centers gives Anawak a documentary route into the subject. The city is thus rendered through the systems that operate from it and the evidence they leave behind.

Marine Mammals and Military Uses

Anawak’s online research widens the question beyond San Diego. He finds accounts of a former Soviet program in which dolphins, sea lions, and beluga whales were trained to locate mines and recover lost torpedoes; the animals were reportedly used to defend warships in the Black Sea. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, some were transferred to an oceanarium, while others entered therapy programs or were sold to Iran, where their subsequent use was uncertain. The shifting destinations make the military history difficult to trace, but show why Anawak considers animal training relevant to contemporary strategic concerns.

The broader case for military use rests on practical abilities. Dolphins can use echolocation to locate objects in darkness, and tests cited in Anawak’s research indicate that they could find mines faster than divers. Sea lions were reported to have a high success rate detecting torpedoes at naval bases, including San Diego. The animals’ capacity to work underwater gives them advantages over human divers and some equipment, making marine-mammal programs attractive to armed forces. The account also notes that similar initiatives existed in Russia, India, and the Middle East. These references establish an international context; they do not, by themselves, establish that trained animals were responsible for the attacks in the novel.

Greywolf’s Account

San Diego becomes more immediate when Anawak confronts Greywolf with the records. He points out that Greywolf had served in the naval program and, by the time he left, was a lieutenant responsible for two dolphin fleets, MK6 and MK7. Greywolf had been positioned to advance further within the program, but left before taking charge of it. The detail turns an institutional investigation into a personal one: Anawak is not merely assembling public information but testing it against the experience of a former insider.

Greywolf recalls what he witnessed in San Diego in 1989: researchers carried out brain procedures on dolphins and inserted electrodes to stimulate neural activity. He also describes a separate demonstration involving a harness fitted with electrodes, through which operators could direct a dolphin’s movement and alter its behavior. Anawak connects the work to earlier attempts to map the dolphin brain. Greywolf’s recollection presents the research not simply as observation or training, but as an effort to make animal behavior responsive to electrical control. The account gives the program a human witness, while leaving the full scope and purpose of the work unresolved.

Narrative Significance

The city’s role is built from two kinds of evidence that do not perfectly coincide. Anawak finds official and historical information about marine-mammal programs; Greywolf supplies a first-person recollection of experiments at San Diego. Together they make military involvement in animal research credible within the story, but they do not prove that a particular program caused the global marine crisis. That distinction preserves the uncertainty around the attacks even as the military becomes a plausible object of suspicion.

San Diego therefore functions as a hinge between animal intelligence and human attempts to control it. The same capacities that make marine mammals effective underwater workers—sensing, navigation, and behavioral flexibility—also make them targets of research into command and response. By locating this history in a real institutional setting and filtering it through Anawak’s investigation and Greywolf’s testimony, the novel makes the question of nonhuman agency inseparable from the question of who is trying to direct it.