Once dismissed from the ceremony, the gold crew’s 30 days of R and R would start in earnest. A month from now, training and class assignments would post, and for the two months after that, men would be busy with two-day to three-week refresher courses at the Trident Training Facility or at the Submarine School, Groton, Connecticut. Half was cross-training for other jobs aboard the sub; the rest focused on the equipment the crewman was responsible for repairing, maintaining, and operating on the boat. The final month before blue crew returned with the Nevada, gold crew would begin preparations for their next patrol. It was four months of life onshore with a cadence that worked. When it ended, most of the crew would be looking forward to going back to sea. Mark would be one of them.
He planned to spend part of his month of R and R rehabbing the deck behind his house, then expected to spend two months attending classes and working on special projects for the Submarine Group 9 commander. It would be a very pleasant summer. He hoped to fit in as many fishing trips as he could arrange. He’d never bought a boat, figuring enough friends owned one that buying gas and helping swab the decks would get him a fishing partner or a set of keys when he wanted to go out. Catch some fish, get some sun, enjoy the water from above rather than below, see how a first date with Linda went—he had his core plan for his summer in mind.
He pulled into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven on Ohio Street. Ice cream. Then finish preparations for the hand-over of the Nevada. When this day ended he’d be on R and R. It already had the feel of being a very good day.
Mark noticed the security before he noticed her. A security officer was at the door of the 7-Eleven, standing by the spin rack of potato-chip selections, unobtrusively checking out those who came and went. Mark recognized him, was acknowledged in return with a brief nod, and with that recognition Mark came to sharp alert. He scanned the store, expecting to see the rear admiral who ran Bangor getting himself a sandwich, but saw no one in uniform among the four individuals in the store. Mark headed toward the back of the store, paused to see what bakery goods were left, considered a day-old donut, then talked himself out of it.
She was standing at the glass doors of the freezer display, studying ice-cream choices. She finally reached in and selected a pint, the dark ribbing around the side of the container one he recognized as dark chocolate with brownie chunks. She wore an oversized Navy jacket in blue and gold, faded jeans, beat-up tennis shoes, her long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail.
He glanced over a second time as she turned toward the checkout counter. “Gina?”
She stopped and looked back at him.
Gina Gray. It had been two years since he last saw her. She was working in Colorado, her brother Jeff was still at sea. There was no reason for her to be on the West Coast, and yet here she was, at Bangor, wearing one of Jeff’s jackets. She smiled when she recognized him.
He had his reason for the security.
He stepped in her direction. She looked good. Thinner than he remembered, but otherwise she hadn’t changed. She looked as young as some of his crew, and just about disappeared in the jacket—like a high school cheerleader wearing a football player’s letter jacket. She was . . . what?—he tried to remember—a decade or so younger than her brother? So 26 now? Or 28? He’d known her for four years before he realized there was a Navy department that existed because of her ideas. She’d created cross-sonar.
“What brings you to Bangor?” he asked.
She started to answer him, and her words froze. Her eyes closed as she fought the embarrassment of it.
He relaxed, waited. He knew about her occasional difficulty with words. It was a kind of stage fright that people experienced before a speech with a large audience or when performing in front of a crowd. But for her it came and went in an unpredictable fashion. Much like a stutterer had moments when the words wouldn’t come, Gina had moments when her speech didn’t cooperate. Mark had his ideas for why it happened so often with him over the years, but he’d kept those thoughts to himself. She got embarrassed enough as it was.
A minute passed. The words weren’t returning.
He chose a pint of cherry chocolate chip ice cream for himself, picked up two plastic spoons from the basket beside the hot-dog relish, reached over and took her ice cream pint. He gently tugged her hand. “Come with me, Gina.”
He paid for her purchase and his. He gave a nod to the security man as he directed her outside.
Jeff had introduced them at a backyard barbecue seven years ago. A good man and protective of his sister. “Gina, the genius,” Jeff liked to whisper with affection, his arms draped across her shoulders. He’d give her cover from the crowd when her words wouldn’t come and shyness overwhelmed her. She was interesting, Mark thought, for her unusual life and abilities. She had never met his late wife, but he knew Melinda would have liked her.
With a nearly full moon and a gentle southwesterly wind, enjoyable Bangor views of the night sky welcomed them outdoors, and he nodded north so they could walk a bit and be away from those who might overhear a conversation. Security fell in a ways behind them.
He opened his ice cream; she opened hers.
“It’s good to see you, Mark,” she finally said softly.
“The same.” He took a bite of ice cream, glanced her way. “I saw Jeff in passing four days ago, off the coast. He was having a good time. I left him chasing an Akula.”
She smiled. “He’ll enjoy that.”
“Your cross-sonar works like a charm. Fast-attacks use it all the time to sync up when they’re protecting a battle group. But it’s been handy even for us boomers, especially when we’re at our most vulnerable, coming into home port.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“What brings you out to Bangor?” he asked again.
“I had some sonar ideas I wanted to explore, and I needed to get away from Boulder for a while.”
“Something happen?”
She shrugged. “A guy I met there . . . well, we broke up. It’s been hard seeing Kevin at work every day. And the satellite mapping work I’ve been doing of the oceans’ seabed is done but for the processing time.”
“I’ve seen a couple of the new navigation maps. Those yours?”
She nodded.
“The detail is superb.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sorry to hear about Kevin. Jeff’s mentioned him a few times.”
Mark knew Gina had been dating Kevin Taggert for the last two years. Her brother thought he was okay, but Mark could hear in the way Jeff talked about it that he was kind of cool on the guy. Kevin was a government academic who also worked at NOAA, maybe a good fit for her on paper, but not so much in reality. The fact the relationship had broken apart wouldn’t surprise Jeff.
“Kevin was kind about it, but I didn’t see it coming. Not sure why I didn’t.” She shook her head. “You had a good patrol?” she asked.
“All-quiet,” he said. “The best kind.”
“Got a chance for the battle E this year?”
He smiled. “Working on it. Nebraska is going to be stiff competition.” He wanted to win Best Boat of the Year, and his crew was giving him their all to make it happen. They were a competitive bunch of guys.
He liked Gina. Always had. She was younger than his sisters. She had started college at 14, taken an interest in sonar because her brother was pursuing a career as a submariner. The Navy had gotten a fortunate break there. She could have turned her interest to medicine or biochemistry. Cross-sonar was so classified, the Navy department that deployed what she’d developed had been given the name Sonar Maintenance and Acoustical Hardware Longevity Program. The name alone suggested it was too boring a department to be curious about, which was effective at keeping interest low as to what was being done.
“Gina, the genius,” Jeff would say with affection, while privately Mark knew he worried about what his sister was going to do to keep from being bored. It was one thing to be a gifted child, another to be a gifted adult. She
was ahead of where knowledge was at in her own fields of study, and finding something to keep her absorbed required breaking new terrain. Jeff was concerned about the pressure she felt from expectations on her to produce new science. She had the skills to go where she would like and work on what was appealing. Finding a job would never be an issue. But that led to a nomadic life. The crosscurrents of boredom, others’ expectations, and whether she could settle down someplace long term all added to her brother’s concerns for her future.
Jeff had hoped Boulder would be a good place where she’d be able to stay for more than a few years. Jeff’s big-brother worries were shared by Mark too, now that he realized she was again in transition. He remembered similar worries with his own sisters before they’d married and settled down, starting families of their own.
Gina had come to Bangor to see her brother. Mark got that priority without her having to say it. The fact she was here weeks before Jeff was due back in port told Mark more than she had said about Boulder and how badly the breakup had hit her. Gina was keeping herself busy while she waited by working on her sonar ideas. Probably true enough.
“Some sonar ideas, is it? Care to talk about what you’re working on?”
She gave him a long look, as if considering whether she wanted to answer him. “What if you could actively ping,” she finally said, “and the other guy couldn’t hear you?”
He stopped, stunned. “That’s possible?”
“It’s one idea I’m here to explore.”
It felt like a punch. She was a national-security nightmare.
One advantage the U.S. had over every other submarine force in the world was its ability to be quieter than the other guys, to hear them coming by passively listening. The only way another country’s submarines could find a U.S. sub was by a mistake on the part of the U.S. crew, or by an active ping—sending out a sound through the water and listening for the returning echo. But the fact they generated the sound gave away their own position. It was a basic tenet of submarine warfare that to ping was to get yourself a torpedo in reply. But if it was possible to ping without being heard—it turned on its head basic submarine warfare tactics.
Mark started walking again. He wanted to wince, but his job had trained him to accept the unthinkable and deal with it—fast, logically, and with a steady, cool calm. The implications of her idea were reverberating through his mind. This was more than just dangerous territory; it was destabilizing.
If an enemy nation—or, for that matter, their allies—would ever find out what was in this woman’s head, billions of dollars of military hardware would be at risk, and decades of underwater dominance would disappear. The oceans would become a level playing field, even if the numbers were still vastly superior on the U.S. side. No wonder security was hovering over her.
He looked over at her. “Who have you told?”
She offered a slight smile. “You.” She ate another bite of her ice cream. “I asked Lieutenant Commander Toombs if I could use the lab here to run down my ideas, since moving around terabytes of classified data is a bureaucratic nightmare. He arranged for me to use his office at night and opened up an audio lab for me so I could work without interruption. I’m running the idea against the data from the USS Ohio encounter with the British sub Triumph. The Ohio was cross-linking sonar with the USS Michigan when it happened. It’s a big data set. So I snuck out for ice cream while it runs.”
Gina had moved on from working for the Navy six or seven years ago, and this was the idea she had nudging around in the back of her mind? Mark couldn’t help wondering about the ideas she hadn’t taken the time to explore.
“The concept isn’t without its limitations,” she added. “It requires cross-sonar to be running. The active ping is faint, which theoretically means it will work better with one sub above and one below a thermal line. The amount of cross-sonar conversation necessary is exponentially higher than a cross-sonar search, a fact that risks someone being able to gather enough data to crack the algorithm behind cross-sonar itself.
“And operationally it will only be helpful at the margins. The odds that two U.S. subs, with towed arrays deployed, running cross-sonar, miss hearing an enemy sub are very small. Their noise profile is too high. But an active ping should give you added range so you can pick them up at a farther distance than what cross-sonar on its own can give you.”
Bishop appreciated the limitations, but he already saw one key use. “An active ping would solve the problem of a sub lying in wait, with its engines and propulsion powered down, drifting and waiting for someone to come across his path. Right now we have to trust luck—someone on board drops a wrench, or closes a hatch too loudly, or the natural drift requires them to engage the drive shaft every few hours to keep from settling too deep. But the new electric-diesel combination subs can rest on the ocean bottom on the continental shelf, down around 400 to 500 feet, and are difficult to locate until they lift off the ocean floor. An active ping that couldn’t be traced to its originating location would be a significant help in finding them.”
She nodded and slid the lid back onto her ice cream. “There isn’t enough data in this British sub encounter to give me more than a probability that this works. It looks promising, but I don’t know if it’s more than that.”
“What do you need?”
“A couple more weeks and I’m going to be at the end of what I can do with the existing data. I need a sea trial to test the idea. And that’s going to be a problem. It can’t be run at Dabob Bay. It’s going to take ocean time. I need two fast-attacks and a boomer, although I might be able to give an answer with three fast-attacks. I need the right mix of sea conditions, with a choreographed set of maneuvers to create the permutations in data I need to see. There will be a massive amount of data to record. And if I’m wrong, that sea trial risks giving away cross-sonar to anyone within listening range.”
“You lay out the probability it works, you’ll get your sea trial to gather data,” he predicted.
“I hope so.” She started to say something, stopped, appeared to change her mind, and simply said, “I don’t expect this idea to hold up, Mark. But it’s probably going to take that sea trial to put my finger on where it falls apart. I think it may prove fragile, only working a portion of the time based on the sea conditions. It seems extra sensitive to white noise, which is what I’m trying to test for now with the existing data. Nothing would be worse than running a test that tells you all is clear, only to find it didn’t see an enemy sub sitting nearby.”
“All of a submariner’s life is probabilities, Gina. If this could find a quiet sub that other techniques miss—even if it could do it in only one out of five times it was tried—it would still save lives. Whether the risk to cross-sonar being reverse-engineered is worth it depends on the variations where this proves helpful and the time it takes to execute the ping.”
She nodded. “Anyway, that’s what I’m working on.”
“I appreciate you telling me, trusting me.” They had started walking again, and he closed up his own ice cream. “Earlier, you said ideas, plural. What else are you exploring?”
“I’d rather not say until I know if it is even feasible. I’m still looking for a data set that will let me explore the idea. It’s . . . well, it’s kind of out there, even for me,” she admitted.
“This idea was kind of out there too,” he remarked. “Let me know if you need some help finding that second data set. I’ll see if I can get you what you need.”
“Thanks.” She glanced at the time. “I need to get back to the lab. My data run should be finishing up.”
“I’ll stay in touch, Gina, see if I can find out for you when Jeff is due back in port.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“Can I tell anyone what you told me tonight?”
She bit her bottom lip, then nodded. “Use your discretion.”
“One person, I’m thinking. Rear Admiral Hardman.”
“I’ll trust your decision on it.”
Mark saw her safely back to the 7-Eleven parking lot. Security would drive her back. He held the passenger side door for her, said a quiet good night.
If he had wondered what else he was going to be doing during his R and R, a chunk of it had just filled in. He’d keep an eye on Gina until her brother got back to port and discreetly alert the Navy to what was coming.
Operational security meant closing down knowledge of this to a very few people who absolutely had to know. She’d elected to tell him. She, without a doubt, was going to tell her brother. They needed someone with rank involved, which led him to Rear Admiral Hardman. Keep it at that, hopefully, and keep her buffered from people bothering her. She didn’t yet need help for the work—she needed time, data, and the freedom to work uninterrupted.
He had a headache. An active ping that could not be heard. What he hadn’t told her was the fact she had raised the risk to her brother’s life by over half, depending on if this worked, and if and when other countries acquired the capability. Espionage inevitably acquired everything significant. Jeff commanded a fast-attack, and shooting them, sinking them early in a confrontation was the only way to take on a battle group and survive.
Mark got into his car, sat behind the wheel thinking, sighed, and hoped Gina’s second idea wasn’t also going to turn on its head established submarine tactics. His job was changing because of this woman, and he wasn’t entirely sure it was a good thing. Her cross-sonar discovery was a significant help. This new idea . . . this active ping that couldn’t be heard . . . was going to be a great addition right up until the day an enemy could also do it—and then it was going to really hurt. He’d spend the 90 days out on patrol, bracing himself to hear a torpedo in the water with the Nevada as its destination.
The number of subs the U.S. had operationally deployed, the tactical advantages they had, were formidable. But science could shake what was a solid wall and open new cracks. They needed her ideas. He didn’t believe in a one-person-only kind of discovery. Gina’s having the idea guaranteed others would eventually have the same idea. It was better to know the science and what was possible than to hide from it and simply hope no one else would figure it out.