Sons of Valor by Brian Andrews

Author:Brian Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2021-03-31T19:02:58+00:00

CHAPTER 21

the n2 “suite” in the tier one compound

jalalabad, afghanistan

0750 local time

The rhythmic scratch of a mechanical pencil on paper was an elixir for Whitney’s nerves. She often did her best thinking while sketching, when both hemispheres of her brain were fully engaged. Strands of rope looped and crossed, playing hide and seek on the page as they became impossibly interwoven. The design was of her own creation, meticulously imagined, then brought to three-

dimensional life as only someone who’d spent far too many hours contemplating and sketching knots could do. She pulled her hand away to look at the knot, then blew graphite dust off the page before continuing.

I have to find a new thread to chase . . . but how? Where?

The door opened and Petty Officer Yi walked in. Whitney looked up and acknowledged her with a close-lipped smile. Yi joined her at the table, parking her uber-petite body in the vacant chair beside her.

“What are you sketching?” she asked, leaning on her elbows for a look.

“A knot,” Whitney said, shading. Then, preempting the unspoken question, “Because I like knots.”

Yi smiled at this. “It’s quite an intricate and complex knot.”

“Intricate, yes. Complex, not so much.”

“Well, it looks complex.”

“To the untrained eye, but that’s an illusion. This knot is simple pattern repetition—seven interlocking trefoil knots.”

“What’s a trefoil knot?”

Whitney stopped sketching and rotated her forearm to show the other woman the triangular, beautifully inked three-lobed knot tattoo on the inside of her wrist.

“It kind of looks like a clover leaf.”

“That’s the origin of its name. Trefoil is the common name for Trifolium, which is the genus of three-leafed plants including clover . . . A trefoil knot is the simplest non-trivial knot.”

“What’s a non-trivial knot?”

“A knot that can’t be untied without cutting it.”

“Oh, I see, it’s one continuous strand,” Yi said, tracing her fingertip through the air while looking at the tattoo.

“Exactly. Trefoil knots are chiral.” Yi nodded, but Whitney could see from her woman’s expression that she wasn’t familiar with the word. “A figure has chirality when it’s not identical to its mirror image. For example, our hands are chiral,” Whitney explained holding up both hands—palms out, fingers up, and thumbs extended at right angles.

After a moment, it clicked for Yi. “Oh, I see, it’s like how you can’t wear a glove from your right hand comfortably on your left hand just by flipping it around. The thumb gets all wonky.”

“Precisely,” Whitney said, then moved her hands to align the back of her right hand to the palm of her left so the fingers closed in the same direction but the thumbs were on opposite sides. She then rotated her left hand so that the backs of both hands were touching. Now the thumbs were aligned, but the fingers and thumbs bent in opposite directions. “No combination of rotations or translations will achieve symmetry with chiral pairs,” she explained.

“I guess I basically understood that, but no one ever formally explained it, theoretically, I mean.”

“Whether a configuration is chiral or achiral is fundamental to knot theory.

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