Borger jumped when the door opened behind him and the overhead lights suddenly came on.
“You really need to get an office with some sunlight,” Caesare announced. “We all need a little vitamin D once in a while.”
Borger swiveled in his chair, arms still folded over his stomach, which was protruding a bit from under his loud, orange Hawaiian shirt. “I take pills for that.”
Caesare raised his eyebrows. “Really?”
“No, but I should.” Borger looked to Clay, who had just closed the door behind them. “Hey, Clay. How was Brazil?”
“Who ever said getting thrown out of a country wasn’t exciting? How goes it, Will?”
“Pretty good.” Borger swung back toward his monitor. “Langford asked me to do something for him, but it won’t be done for quite a while yet.”
Caesare sat backwards in a small metal chair and rolled it up next to Borger. “What do we have here?”
“A deep scan of the North Atlantic, pixel by pixel.”
Clay and Caesare both raised their eyebrows curiously. “Pixel by pixel?”
“Just about. I got the last three months’ worth of data from the NSA, recorded by the ARGUS reconnaissance satellite.” Both Clay and Caesare were familiar with the government’s newest bird. They were also both familiar with the term reconnaissance when referring to a satellite. It was the preferred term over the more accurate label “spy satellite.” The ARGUS had recently been launched under the generic name of ‘NROL-39’ and was the first with real-time capability. All other previous spy satellites had the ability to take increasingly sharper pictures and at frame speeds faster than video. However, what they still lacked was bandwidth and the ability to send their ultra-high definition pictures back to Earth quickly enough for a real-time experience.
That limitation had finally been rectified in ARGUS. With most of the new system’s design focused squarely on transmission capacity, the ARGUS was literally able to stream live, ultra-high definition video back to Earth, where it was recorded twenty-four hours a day. And all with a field of view that was unprecedented. It was a huge technological advance for a “reconnaissance” satellite and a capability that few countries, including allies, were even aware of.
Nevertheless, a pixel-by-pixel scan was an enormous undertaking. It was the digital equivalent of examining every grain of sand on a given beach.
Caesare leaned in closer to Borger’s monitor. “What on earth would you need three months of pixel data for?”
“For the Forel,” Clay murmured, peering over Caesare’s shoulder.
“That’s right.” Borger began typing on his computer again and brought up another window. He then used his mouse to drag the new window onto a second monitor. With a few clicks, the new window instantly filled with a blue frame of the Atlantic Ocean, detailed enough to easily make out several small white caps on top of one of the swells.
Clay and Caesare could see the computer making a thin white line as it zoomed horizontally across the image, one tiny pixel at a time. It finished scanning the frame in less than five seconds and started another. “How far along is it?”
“Maybe halfway.”
“You must be looking for a periscope,” Caesare said.
“Or the exhaust.”
“Correct again. It’s a long way from Russia to Brazil, especially for a diesel-electric, which means they would have had to surface many times to expel their stale exhaust and recharge their batteries. I’ve got almost a thousand servers backtracking through images for a three hundred square mile area, looking in both visible and infrared.”
“Find anything yet?”
“Nope.” Borger frowned and shook his head from side to side. He swiveled his chair back to them and smiled. “But that’s the bad news.”
“There’s good news?”
“The good news is I think I know what that equipment is for aboard the Forel.” He moved to yet another screen and brought up the video that Caesare had taken before they were thrown off the sub. Borger played the video until Caesare’s camera focused on the rack of equipment. He froze the image. “I spent some time going over this with several engineers in Pensacola, and we all agree that these devices are indeed amplifiers. And you see this?” He pointed to the bottom edge of the screen. “These appear to be power cables. These other cables,” he traced up the side of the still picture, “carry the audio.”
“Audio for what?”
“Ah…” Borger clasped his hands. “That’s the million dollar question.”
Caesare smirked. “Something tells me you have a million dollar answer.”
“Why, yes, I do.” He paused, staring at them but saying nothing.
“And what is it?”
Borger grinned and held his hands up for dramatic effect. “Active Noise Control!”
Both Clay and Caesare sat motionlessly. Not because they didn’t understand; they did. Instead, they remained quiet, considering the possibilities.
Clay looked back at Borger’s screen and mumbled, almost to himself, “Noise cancellation.”
“Bingo!”
Borger leaned back in his chair. “Navies have been trying to perfect ANC in their subs for years, but so far it’s been unattainable. If you ask me, I think they’ve found a way to do it with the Foreclass="underline" not just reduce their noise but eliminate it altogether.”
“Wow. Does Langford know about this yet?”
Borger shook his head again. “Not yet.”
Clay remained quiet, thinking. Borger’s assessment suddenly raised a number of other questions. Finally, he turned his wrist and checked his watch. “It’s time.”
13
To their surprise, Admiral Langford and Stan Griffith, the National Security Advisor, were already waiting in the conference room when Clay, Caesare, and Borger arrived. Langford broke off his conversation and motioned the three inside to the chairs on the other side of the wide table. The new Secretary of State, Douglas Bartman entered and closed the door just moments behind them.
“Gentlemen,” Langford began, “I’d like you to meet John Clay, Steve Caesare, and Will Borger. They came with me from Investigations.” Silent nods were exchanged while Langford continued. “Clay and Caesare were onsite to examine the Forel. Mr. Borger is our computer expert, trying to figure out exactly what we’re looking at here. Clay, want to start us off?”
“Yes, sir,” Clay spoke up. He quickly recounted their trip to Belem and time aboard the Forel submarine, leading to their abrupt expulsion. He also described their dive beneath the sub in the middle of the night, including what they saw around its tail section.
“Okay, Will, you have the data they sent. Any idea what we’re looking at here?”
“Yes, sir,” nodded Borger. “It looks like we may be looking at an operational Active Noise Control system.”
“What?”
“ANC, sir,” repeated Borger. “It’s only a guess without being able to put my hands on it, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it is.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Bartman looked back and forth between them. “What’s Active Noise Control?”
“Noise cancellation,” answered Langford. “A way to render a submarine silent underwater. No wonder the Forel was so damn hard to find.”
Borger continued. “From what Clay and Caesare described, there are sensor and actuator rings around the entire tail section, which mimics some of the test designs other countries have tried, including our own.”
“So it’s completely silent?” asked Bartman.
“Well, not completely, but very close.”
Bartman pondered the Admiral’s reply. “But we still don’t know what the Russians were after.”
“Correct, but we now know what Brazil’s government is after. And why we got kicked off the sub so fast. My guess is that this is a working prototype of the technology used in Russia’s new stealth submarines. And I think the Brazilian Navy may have just realized the same thing.” Langford turned to Borger. “Anything on our other project?”