Her face softened. “Yes. I get it.” She looked down. “But we’ll never get a perfect list of candidates together. The only thing we can do now is hope that whoever goes up there can make it work.” Then she took my hand and said, “And all we can do down here is enjoy the time we have left. Do you understand that, Aron? It’s time to let this go and start living again.”
I wanted to let it go. But I couldn’t give up. Not yet.
I shook my head. “I can’t. I gotta try.”
Rage flashed across her face and she threw my hand back at me. “You’re a fucking idiot, Aron! A goddammed fucking idiot! You have no idea what you just gave up.” She turned and stormed off towards the dock. I just stood there and watched her go.
After a few minutes, I heard, “Aron?”
I turned and saw William looking through the half-opened door.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“She was pretty mad, wasn’t she?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
I rubbed the back of my neck and shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
He tilted his head and said, “Is it boyfriend-girlfriend stuff?”
I grinned and said, “Sort of, but we don’t have time to worry about boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, do we?”
He shook his head.
“We have work to do. Right?”
He opened the door the rest of the way and said, “Right.”
“Then let’s get to it.”
It was painstaking work, but little by little, we pieced together the information we had found. By the time we had finished the food that Helen brought us for dinner, William and I probably knew more about the Chinese military communication infrastructure than anyone else left on the planet.
I found a map of Asia and had William plot the location of the equipment we found on one of the lists. It didn’t take him long to figure out how to do it. He drew lines between the symbols he placed on the map using the information from the spreadsheet. With him doing that, I had time to focus on the big question. What did it all mean? So far, all we had was a pretty map and we were already through most of the files.
I scratched my head and ran my hand through my hair. I felt like we were going down another rabbit hole. It was just a bunch of communications equipment: hubs, routers, laser uplink stations, and radio towers. Maybe Jin thought he could build something out of all this stuff, but there was no way in hell that I could. He had been a Cyber Ace in the Chinese Cyber Force. I had managed communications contracts. Even if he did plan to build something, how did he plan to get the stuff from China to the Maldives? Perhaps he had some other secret up his sleeve, like an SF296 fighter jet hidden in a mango grove somewhere.
“I’m done.”
I looked over and saw William sitting cross-legged on the bed, leaning back on his elbows. If I sat like that, I’d crack in half like a dry crab shell.
“Did you plot everything?” I looked over his shoulder and pretended to understand the intricate web of communication pathways laid out on the map.
“Yup.” He nodded. “So, what does it mean?”
I stood up straight, interlaced my fingers behind my head and said, “I don’t have a clue. Are you sure that’s everything?”
He nodded again. “Everything that you told me to plot. The only thing I didn’t use were the numbers in the hidden column.”
My hands dropped to my side and I grabbed his data mat. “What hidden column?”
“Right there, between the seventh and eighth column. There’s a column of numbers that was minimized. I thought you hid it so I wouldn’t mess up.”
He was right. There was another column. Each cell contained a one or a zero. I selected the column title, hit the translate button and then watched as the Chinese symbols turned into four letters: EMPH.
“What’s an emph?”
“It’s not an emph, it’s an acronym. EMPH stands for Electro Magnetic Pulse Hardened. Do you know what that means?”
He shook his head.
I began to get that same excited feeling that I used to get back in school when my brain managed to finally wrap itself around a really tough math problem. “It means that some of this equipment might have survived the storm. These ones.” I pointed at column. “The cells with a number one in them.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Do you remember what your dad told you about the storm?”
“A little.” He shrugged. “He said a big solar flare hit the earth and burned up most of the atmosphere.”
I nodded, “Right. A solar flare burned up most of the atmosphere, but solar flares also do something else.” I began to pace the room. “See, solar flares are huge clouds of charged solar plasma… energy like electricity. Anyway, when the sun shoots out a flare. The flare flies through space really, really fast.”
William looked at me, his head tilted to the side.
“Have you ever shocked yourself? You know, touch something and get zapped?”
He nodded.
“Well, a solar flare has a lot of stored energy and when that energy touches the earth… Pow! It zaps it just like when you get shocked. That energy comes in through the planet’s magnetic poles.”
William said, “That’s what I said. A solar flare burned up the atmosphere.”
“Yeah, but it did something else. That energy spawned massive geomagnetic storms and those storms fried most of the electronics in the world.”
His brow furrowed. “Is that why you and dad had to build all the stuff for the IICN from all that spare junk?”
I smiled. “Exactly. Some bits and pieces of equipment didn’t get fried, but that was just luck. EMPH equipment wouldn’t have been damaged at all.”
“So some of this stuff,” he said, pointing to the map, “might still work?”
I sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “It’s possible. But the only way to know for sure would be to go there and check it out or—”
William stared at me for a half second before saying, “Or what?”
“William, I need you to go through that list again.”
“Again?” he whined.
“Yup. All of it. For every piece of equipment that has a one in the EMPH column, I want you to color the equipment icon blue. Got it? How long do you think that will take?”
“About thirty seconds,” he said, smiling. “I linked each icon to the spreadsheet, so all I have to do is write a script to change the color based on the value in the column. Come on… I did harder stuff when I was five.”
I ruffled his hair. He ducked out of my reach and flashed me an annoyed look. It was the kind of look my girls had given Kelly when she would dress them up in the same outfits.
It actually took him closer to three minutes to finish the script, but I wasn’t complaining. All real coders underestimated schedules. He handed me the data mat and I overlaid the position of the Indian reconnaissance satellite on it.
“There,” I said, pointing at an icon located in the southwestern part of China. “See that?”
He nodded.
“If that laser uplink station is still operational, we might be able to communicate with it through the Indian satellite that Jin hacked.”
“I don’t get it. How is that uplink station going to decrypt the messages?”
I folded my arms across my chest, leaned back, and smiled. “Jin really was a genius.”