Undetected (31 page)

“No, no, nothing like that. Work trouble.” Resigned acceptance passed over her face. “The kind that seems like a constant, recurring nightmare with me.”

He could feel his emotions shifting as her tone registered with him, as he detected an underlay of fear he hadn't heard from her before. She'd changed the topic and driven them full speed into a brick wall. Of everything he had been braced to hear, this wasn't what he was expecting. “How much trouble?”

“So much trouble I'm actually considering marrying you before I tell you just so you'll feel
really
bad if you yell at me.” She tried to come up with a chuckle at the end of that statement but couldn't pull it off. She wiped a hand across her eyes.

“Tell me,” he said simply. “Just start somewhere, Gina. Wherever you like. I promise to listen.”

“There's a photo on the dining room table. You should probably go look at it.”

He held her gaze for a long moment, seeing so many layers of emotions in her—a lifetime of wishing she wasn't smart, wanting to be “normal,” of pain that she couldn't avoid. He walked into the next room.

He turned over the large 24x36 glossy print on the dining room table. A simple picture, computer-generated, he was looking at a line drawing of the world's coastlines, the expanse of the oceans and landmasses in stark white. There were clusters of small objects near the coasts, a few objects in the deep oceans, accompanied by three numbers in small font beside them. A depth number, location numbers. He realized what he was seeing and his heart rate spiked.

He was looking at a photo of all the submarines in the world's oceans on—he found a date and time in the upper corner—the second of November, 8:17 p.m. He forced a deep breath, his heart pounding now. He'd just turned over a live explosive.

Gina came to stand beside him. She pointed out a few of the objects in the deep ocean waters in the photo. “These two are Russian Akulas. These two are British Astutes. This is an Australian Collins class. These are the eight boomers the U.S. had in the Pacific and Atlantic that day. These five are U.S. fast-attacks. Given the locations, these four are probably the diesel Kilos that China purchased from Russia. I can tell the submarines apart by their dimensions.”

“Gina. How on earth—?”

She didn't let him finish. “I want you to tell me it's okay to destroy this photo, to light a match and make it go away like it never existed.”

“Gina . . .”

“It's an accident, Mark. That's all this discovery is, an ac
cident no one else will repeat for a century or more. I want you to tell me it's okay to forget this ever happened, to erase it forever with a match, to be able to go on with my life.”

He pulled out a chair at the table, nudged her into it. He hunkered down beside her to be at eye level, to be able to see her expressions. “You've got to talk through the building blocks that led to this before I can answer you. I promise you, we'll talk it through until you have an answer you can live with. But first I need some facts. When did you print this photo?”

“November 22nd, nine days ago. I did it here. I've got an architect's wide printer in the office upstairs.”

“Who have you told?”

“You. Only you.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “No one else can create that photo. The data no longer exists. I've destroyed or corrupted the original data files to prevent it from happening.”

He felt some of his tension ease a fraction. “There's always a simple observation in your discoveries. Was there one that led to this?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me about that?”

“I can show you,” she said. She got up and went back to the living room, changed a remote setting so the TV displayed her laptop computer screen. She logged into the server deck and started a video playback.

“This is from the NOAA weather satellite EO-1,” she said as he moved beside her to view the screen. “It orbits the earth every 21 minutes—one of many weather-related satellites NOAA has deployed. This particular video is from the infrared camera. The different colors are different tempera
tures. The oceans are cooler here and warmer here,” she said, pointing, “and rain is falling there. This data feeds into the weather models and helps meteorologists make their weather forecasts. This particular satellite has been in orbit about 10 years. There's nothing particularly unique about it. It's just a convenient one whose data I've used over the years to work on the satellite drag problem.

“There was a large solar flare on the 30th of October. I got an alert about it from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Beginning about 60 hours later, lasting four days, there were communication problems between satellites and their ground stations—these random sparkles you see in the video. A solar flare causes all kinds of changes in the earth's upper atmosphere as the high-energy particles in the solar wind hit the earth. Things like the brilliant northern lights that we see, but also more subtle things like satellites encountering additional drag as the atmosphere warms up and expands.

“I wrote an algorithm to clean up the video, remove the sparkles, so the data could process faster. Those of us who work with satellite instruments and large data files—it's not a large group, and most of us know each other, at least by email. Someone mentioned I had a cleanup algorithm that worked well. People dropped me emails, asking if I could run my cleanup algorithm on their data files too. Over the next week I cleaned up data from 32 satellites and 84 instruments, removing the sparkles thought to be transmission errors caused by the solar flare.

“I was surprised to find the sparkles appeared across every instrument—from the narrow-wave gamma ray and x-rays, the infrared, down to the very long-wave microwave and radio frequencies—every part of the electromagnetic spectrum had
them being recorded.” She paused and watched the video. “I finally got curious about the sparkles.” She reached over and ran her finger lightly across the screen. “These random sparkles are not transmission errors. They're reflections from deep in the sea.”

She didn't say anything more. She didn't need to.

Reflections.
The underlying discovery was genius-level simple. He walked back to the dining room and looked again at the photo. “You mapped them to this?”

“With some rather elegant analysis, yes,” she replied, joining him. “The solar flare's high-energy particles are reflecting off the submarine hulls, like a billiard ball bouncing off a rail. They scatter in all directions, and unlike visible light waves, water doesn't reabsorb them. Satellites circling the earth are at the right place and time to capture a portion of those bounced reflections. Once I figured out the satellites' orientation and the instrument angle, I time-synced the data sources and compressed back the motion video to the original shape and form of the object. I combined the various instruments' data and plotted the sparkles. And I saw every submarine in the oceans.”

Every submarine, including the U.S. boomers that spent their patrols with standing orders to stay undetected. In the wrong hands, this photo would be devastating.

“We're going to eat something. What do you want delivered? Pizza? Chinese?” he asked abruptly.

“Chinese, if I have to choose between the two.”

“What would you prefer?”

“Italian, maybe. Something with chicken.”

“Have you slept much since this printed?”

“Not much,” she admitted.

“Get comfortable on the couch, put your feet up, close your eyes, and catch a nap while we wait for the food. We'll talk after we eat.”

She hesitated. He picked up one of the cats and handed it to her. “Is this Pocket or Pages?”

“Black is Pocket.”

“Stretch out on the couch. I bet she's asleep before you are.”

Mark walked over to the bookshelf, slit the plastic on a new three-pack of composition notebooks, took out the top one and pulled a pen from his pocket.

“You're welcome to use the laptop if that's a faster way to put your thoughts and questions in order,” Gina offered, watching him.

“A notebook is easier to burn if necessary.” He walked back to her, tipped up her chin, and kissed her. “We'll figure this out. Get that nap, Gina.”

Gina was asleep. She'd finally told someone about the discovery, the photo, shared the stress of it, and her body was demanding rest. Mark knew what that stress felt like, could feel it still draining through his own system.
Lord, I don't
know what to do here
, he said silently in a prayer that came from deep in his heart and his mind. The hull of a sub was unlike any other structure man designed in composition and form, and solar-flare energy reflected off of it—a simple discovery. Yet so breathtakingly complex in what it signified.

Gina, the genius.
A term of affection, a term of endearment. Jeff said it, Mark thought it. But also in terms of fact. Gina noticed things. She simplified matters. She didn't see what she did as particularly a gift. Her discoveries
were
simple, most of them instantly understandable by others. She thought it was merely an oversight that someone else hadn't already done the same thing she thought to try. The simplicity in what she realized was what showed her genius. This photo was only round three of what life with her would be like. It would be a fascinating future, spending the next several decades with her.

This last discovery was an accident, but she'd had the skill to recognize that something more than transmission errors were occurring, had the skills to pursue the idea and take that data back to the underlying photo. Smart didn't adequately convey what it meant to say Gina had talent.

He loved her. And she needed him. This kind of discovery was something she shouldn't be asked to carry alone. She needed someone more than just her brother in her life.
Jesus
, give me a heart able to see this woman clearly
, one you love even more than I do. Help me
see what she needs in this moment and in the
days ahead.
He sat in a chair across from the couch, notebook on his knee, and watched her sleep.

She needed time, and that was the one thing this situation wasn't going to give him. She seemed to have lived her life at two speeds, the intellect and work and curiosity moving forward at such a speed that the personal side—the self-confidence, the relationships and friendships—were noticeable in how they'd lagged behind her work life. She needed time and confidence and friends, and someone to love her without limits. She'd thrive within that environment. He so wanted to be that person for her.

Mark didn't bother to wake Gina when the food arrived. He put her chicken Parmesan in the refrigerator to keep until she was ready to eat it, out of reach of the kittens. He started
in on the lasagna he'd ordered for himself while he turned his attention to the problem she faced.

In his job he dealt with the more-than-theoretical reality of nuclear war. He had to balance hard concerns every time he took a sub out to sea. He knew how to make tough decisions, but factoring in the implications to Gina for this one was not simple. For a year now, Gina's sonar discoveries had grown progressively more revealing. She was at her limit. She desperately wanted to destroy this photo. Whatever decision was made now had to accommodate what Gina was feeling. Showing the Navy that photo would land a world of attention on her. That fact worried him.

She hadn't destroyed the photo before she had shared it with him. If he wondered if she trusted him, he had his answer. When her life was stressed beyond bearing, she had put it on his shoulders. He was glad for it. She hadn't told her brother about the photo yet—Jeff and the USS
Seawolf
had departed days before she printed this photo—and Mark was pretty sure he could convince her not to tell Jeff when he was back in port.

She'd just destabilized the strongest leg of the nuclear-deterrent triad: air, land, and sea. Land-based silos could be bombed, planes could be shot down or prevented from taking off. But ballistic-missile submarines at sea had to be found before they could be attacked, and she'd just taken a photo of every deployed boomer.

He leaned back in the chair, linked his hands behind his head. He was beginning to think she should burn the photo.

G
ina slept three hours before she stirred. Mark looked over at her from his phone call and recognized this time the movement was more than a shift to change positions. “Thanks, Bryce, for the news that it's ready,” he told his brother. “I'll plan to pick it up in the morning.” He tucked away the phone and watched Gina open her eyes and groggily move aside both kittens from their perch on her chest.

“Are you hungry now or are you craving more sleep? You can turn in for the night—I'll lock up for you,” he said quietly. He knew security was around the house, but he'd make the checks just the same.

Gina sat up and pushed her hair back from her face. “I'm hungry, and I'd rather talk.”

He handed her the notebook with his notes. “I'll reheat your dinner.”

He came back with a plate and saw the notebook on the end table. She was playing with the puppy.

“Has Pongo been out?” she asked. “I fenced the backyard for him.”

“Twice. He brought back a chewed-up work glove the second time.”

“He acquired it when I made the mistake of leaving the pair within his reach. He thinks it's a game.”

Mark set up a TV tray in front of her with the plate, silverware, napkin and glass, then took the puppy. “Enjoy.”

She ate with an appetite he was pleased to see. “I'm sorry that Jeff, Daniel, and I were all unavailable when you printed the photo, Gina. That you had to make this discovery and realize its scope on your own.”

“God heard about it,” she said, and he heard sadness in her words. “I knew . . . early on I knew what was coming. Each pass through the data, every sparkle that resolved back to its originating point—I knew what it meant. Made me pretty sick the first 48 hours. But I've grown resigned to the reality. My life is forever going to be like this, Mark. Finding out stuff I don't want to know, that I don't want others to know. But I'm going to get wiser about what to do once it happens.” She looked over at him. “I want to burn that photo,” she said with conviction.

Mark thought it might be necessary. “You said no one else could create this particular photo. That the data no longer exists.”

“I've checked a number of the satellite archives. My cleaned-up file was retained, not the original file with the sparkles. These are very large data files. You don't keep extra copies of them around without a reason.

“I corrupted my own copies of the instrument data. I ran an algorithm across the videos, intentionally removed some of the sparkles that were there, introduced new ones. The data will look normal to someone playing back the video image, but it can't be used to generate a photo.”

She reached for the napkin. “The algorithms I used to build
the photo have been isolated onto one of my data servers upstairs, and I physically pulled that card and have it stored in the safe. I can clear it with a powerful magnet and wipe it forever.”

“Good to know. Those are crucial security steps.”

Gina nodded. “I was thinking it might be possible to do a preemptive safeguard against someone else discovering this. If I can get my algorithm installed as part of the satellite receiver's software, the sparkles could automatically be removed from the video. Most of these satellites use a common down-leg protocol. Call it a transmission-error cleanup algorithm. Solar flares are going to keep happening in the future. The key point to intercept and mitigate this is at the receivers.”

“I like the idea. It's a solid way to play defense.” Mark reached for his notebook and jotted down the information. “I've got a short list of critical questions to ask, Gina. Let me ask them, then we'll come back to this.”

“Sure.”

“After a solar flare,” he said, looking at the first page in his notes, “every submarine in the ocean is vulnerable to being seen from space for how long? Starting 60 hours after the flare and continuing for four days?”

“The peak visibility is early in that window, at about 72 hours. You might be able to start finding useful information 40 hours after a solar flare in the narrowest bandwidths. The reflections taper off with time into the longer radio wavelengths and have dissipated after four days.”

“How often do solar flares happen?”

“The sun has active cycles and dormant periods, lasting about 15 years. The sun is active right now. Solar flares in the upper right quadrant of the sun are those that affect the
earth. High-energy bursts are hitting the earth once or twice a month right now.”

He glanced again at his notes. “Have you read any scientific paper, heard anyone at a conference, or come across any reference in the literature that suggests anyone else has wondered correctly about even small pieces of this science?”

“Satellite technicians trying to get data sent and received cleanly have made numerous references to the problem of glitches in the data stream, and it's become accepted wisdom that the sparkles are transmission errors caused by a solar flare or other sun eruption. There are technical discussions on how sensitive to tune the receiver—you don't want to be requesting constant retransmissions when it's actually a data problem. I've seen nothing else that overlaps any other part of this.”

“You're still an outlier right now.”

“Yes.” She leaned her head back against the cushion of the couch. “You can't convince me someone else is going to stumble on to this, Mark, simply on the predicate that other people are smart too. For me it was pure chance, essentially an accident. You have to have access to multiple satellite data transmissions across a wide variety of instrument types and have collected data in the days after a significant solar flare. You have to guess that the transmission sparkles are actually reflections, then have the skill to reconstruct original shapes from motion video in data that gives you an occasional point or two to work with. The odds of this sequence of events coming together again . . . well, it would be easier to be hit by lightning twice.”

Mark thought the odds were even longer than that, but he was looking at the exception, looking at someone who
had actually figured it out. “Do you think there's a more streamlined way to get this image, now that you know it's possible to see into the oceans using solar flare reflections?”

“I've been thinking about it. The solar flare is a necessary requirement. Beyond that—” she paused a moment—“it's only guesswork, but the multiple instrument types are likely a necessary condition. You need to see across the energy spectrum to gather enough reflections. Sparkle data from 5 satellites wasn't effective, nor was 10. I needed 17 data sets to get the first glimmers that an actual object was there, 23 to see a shape, and all 32 to get the resolution necessary to distinguish one submarine type from another. Not to mention I had on average four days' worth of video from each instrument to work with. Some combination of that data volume is going to be a necessary factor—the number of satellites and the hours of video.

“The strength of the solar flare is also likely a key variable. The stronger the solar flare, the better the photo. This was the strongest one on record since observation satellites have been aloft. A single reflection off a submarine isn't useful data. I need a bunch of reflections off a hull in order to see a shape, compute its depth. There are tens of millions of high-energy particles thrown out during one of these solar flare bursts, but they still have to hit a very precise spot on earth and then have a satellite in the right location to record the reflection. Creating an image . . . again, it's long odds.”

Hearing her lay out how many variables had to come together for her to make this discovery got his attention. That reality made their considerations about what to do even more layered.

“Hold on a minute.” He got up and took her plate back
to the kitchen, giving himself some time to reflect on an idea that had been slowly taking shape over the last hour. He returned and handed her the ice cream carton and a spoon. “Pass it over to me when you're done.”

He sat down, made several more notes, put his idea aside to come back to at a later time, then resumed his original questions. “A photo of where the world's subs were positioned two weeks ago is interesting history, but a photo of where subs were at two hours ago is actionable. How fast can the satellite data be turned into a photo?”

“Throw several powerful computing clusters at this data, it could be fast. Maybe an hour or two?”

“Real time?”

“No. There's a threshold number of sparkles that have to be captured. The photo resolution goes from a faint smudge, to fuzzy, to solid mass, to detailed enough to tell if it's our sub or someone else's. The software could be optimized to focus on only one part of the ocean, then look for the early clues, that it's an object big enough to be a sub. A massive amount of computing power, a maximum number of satellite data sources landing on that key window of time about 72 hours after a solar flare—you might be able to get a fuzzy photo of subs in the northern half of the Pacific that is an hour old. That's probably best-case: a photo about an hour old.”

An hour was actionable intelligence. And military history had taught him how important accurate, current information was to a situation. “Gina, I've got some thoughts beginning to jell. They range from destroying the photo to giving it to the Navy now, to a more finessed option of saying nothing about this capability until a situation warrants the risk—such as tensions rising, a war threatening to break out—and we
judge the timing of revealing this capability against the risk that an enemy learns it can be done. I'll be back in the morning with more detailed thoughts. Leave everything as it is for now, Gina. Don't destroy the photo or the code. Give me that much as a promise.”

She finally nodded. “I do want to burn it, Mark.”

“That's factored into my thinking, and it's why I'm asking you not to do anything just yet.”

“I'll leave things be for the night.” She passed over the carton of ice cream. “Are you staying at a hotel?”

“My brother wouldn't hear of it. I'm staying with Bryce and Charlotte for the night. I'll give you their phone number in case for some reason you can't reach my cell.” He spooned a corner of the ice cream carton, glanced at her. “Why did you decide to tell me about this discovery?”

“I wanted to burn the photo and not tell you, not tell anyone. Then I thought about you getting back from patrol and knew you would come to have a conversation—” she paused and let out a long breath—“and I'd look guilty, and you'd ask what was wrong, and I'd have to lie and try to convince you nothing was wrong. It just seemed easier in the end to simply show you the photo.”

He smiled. “I appreciate that. Marry me, Gina. You need me. I want you as my wife. There are worse reasons to get married.”

“There are better.” She bit her lip. “I don't love you, Mark.”

“Yet,” he qualified. “You don't love me yet.” He considered her, then dipped the spoon back in the carton. For her sake he was working hard not to show how much it hurt to hear her say that. But he also heard the underlying tone, and he understood more than she might like him to. He'd go hug the
woman, but she wouldn't understand the emotional spectrum playing out inside him tonight.

“I'm going to guess you don't know what you feel right now,” he finally said, “besides a layer of fear, a tangle of ‘why is he interested in me?' and a wish you wouldn't have to make another important decision right now.” He didn't wait for a response but headed to the kitchen to put away the ice cream. When he reentered the living room, he leaned over the sofa and kissed her. “Come say good-night, lock up behind me. I'll be back at nine a.m. sharp with some possibilities.”

“You weren't kidding when you said you had some work to do.”

Mark looked up to see Charlotte leaning against her kitchen doorway. He'd appropriated the table to work on a decision tree, factoring through different crisis situations and what a photo of the sea would do, both pro and con. The months at sea had beaten him up physically, but he could still drum up focused concentration when it was necessary. He glanced at the clock. It was three a.m. “I'm making progress,” he said.

He tossed a couple of kitchen towels across the pages that were classified as Charlotte came into the room, wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of faded blue socks. She made herself a cup of tea. “I find it fascinating that you went to the sea, your brother Jim went to space, and Bryce is content to stay on terra firma and be a businessman.”

“He's got a good head for it,” Mark replied with a smile as he took a long stretch. “And unlike Jim and me, he doesn't need a rush of adrenaline with his job.”

She brought over the pan of brownies she'd baked earlier
that day and took a seat at the table, sliced off a sliver for herself, passed him the pan and the knife.