Yes, how about that, Lauren thought, but replied, “Thank you.”
“Would you like a turndown service? I can make your bed. Fresh sheets and a down comforter? Did you select what pillow you would like?”
Lauren felt guilty. Almost. She’d managed to get maybe the last seat on the direct American Airlines flight that day—a brand new route from Hong Kong to our nation’s capital. It had cost Lauren about two months’ salary. First class. Not business. First.
Mike would probably yell at her when she got back. Tell her she’d been hysterical, that it had cost a year’s tuition for one of the kids. That wasn’t fair. He never yelled. He would mope around a bit and do something passive-aggressive, make those faces she always made fun of. Of course he’d want her to get home safely.
Even if this flight cost every penny of her savings, Lauren would have spent it. She needed to be back with her kids.
The protests in Hong Kong had died down under a torrential rainstorm that day, but the news wasn’t getting any better. The concierge at the front desk of the hotel had insisted everything was fine, that the internet would be working soon. The conference people had said to wait it out.
Lauren’s gut had said otherwise.
Get the hell out of here, her every instinct had screamed.
After maxing out both of her credit cards that morning, she hadn’t even bothered checking out of her room, but had walked out the front door after lunch, taken the train from Kowloon out to Lantau Island and the Chek Lap Kok airport, and checked herself into the Flagship Lounge.
Just being in the American Airlines lounge had made her feel like she was closer to home.
“Ma’am?” The flight attendant was still hovering. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”
“I’m fine. I can do the bed thing myself.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am.”
She watched the flight attendant walk to the next pod behind her and start asking the same questions. Lauren noticed a woman with brown hair staring at her from business class. The flight attendant drew the curtains.
Lauren turned back to the flat screen and the stalled flight tracker. Was the attendant lying? She sensed something was off. The in-flight internet wasn’t working either. What were the chances that all these systems weren’t working on this nearly new aircraft?
Lauren checked her watch.
It was 11:14 p.m. Hong Kong time. She should switch to New York hours, which would be 10:14 a.m. Right? She found it confusing.
Three hours and twenty minutes in the air, so far. Almost thirteen to go, which would usually be painful, but—she had paid for first class, and she might as well enjoy it. She could get a good night’s sleep and be fresh for her little girl when she landed tomorrow.
Lauren looked out the window again.
The sun had gone down in Hong Kong as they’d started boarding. Through the windows of the Flagship Lounge, she had watched the sunset over the green hills of Lantau Island.
Before takeoff, the captain had come on the intercom and described the route. They wouldn’t be chasing the sun by heading east—when they took off, they would fly almost due north. Due to high winds in the jet stream, he said, they would be taking a more northerly route, keeping clear of North Korea and passing near the edge of Mongolia. Then up into Russia and Siberia, south of Yakutsk, and out over the Sea of Okhotsk and the northern part of the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The route would take them north of Nome, Alaska, and then through Canada, down the East Coast, and home. A deep twilight persisted well into the night as the plane slid up over the top of the world.
Lauren settled back into her chair and stared at the ceiling. The cabin was dark, the mood lighting shifted from deep purple to black. Everyone else was sleeping, or pretending to be in the way that people did on airplanes. Maybe she would get another glass of champagne, then hit the sack.
How often would she get offered Dom Pérignon? And a down comforter on an aircraft?
She closed her eyes and laughed.
Maybe she wouldn’t tell Mike she’d taken first class. She could ask her mother for the money. She usually couldn’t wait to hand it over. Mike hated it when she did that, got money from her parents, though less so since her dad had passed.
Her smile fell away.
A rumbling noise.
She opened her eyes. Was that their engines? She glanced out the window and did a double take. What the hell was that?
Red lights blinked in the inky blue distance over the faintly curved line of the Earth’s horizon. Not in the distance, she realized, as she craned toward the window. That was another aircraft, and it was close. And it swung closer.
Passengers on the opposite side of the plane pointed out their windows. The noise level in the cabin grew. The 777 suddenly angled left in a stomach-lurching roll, eliciting a collective gasp in the cabin.
The pilot came over the intercom: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, I’m very sorry, but we have been ordered to make a change in our flight plan.”
Outside Lauren’s window, the unmistakable and aggressive lines of a fighter jet materialized from the darkness. A single red star on each of its two tail fins.
CHAPTER 10
“SOMEWHERE IN SIBERIA, maybe the Arctic,” I whispered to Chuck. “A sixteen-and-a-half hour flight almost straight over the North Pole.”
“She’s in Russia right now?”
I nodded. “Assuming they weren’t turned back. Her flight took off more than three hours ago, about when that Aeroflot crash was announced.”
“Jesus,” he muttered under his breath. “What was she thinking about?”
“Getting home. Like us.”
Billowing thunderheads crowded the morning sky.
A groaning whine echoed within the nearly deserted canyon of Bourbon Street. We both looked up. A commercial jet headed away from the storm clouds. Another dot moved in the distant sky. And another, and another. Jets circling New Orleans in a holding pattern, each of them waiting for their turn to land.
How much reserve fuel did each of them have?
Luke walked ahead of us, awkwardly holding the large drone that was almost as big as him. He took his job seriously. It kept him occupied. At least he wasn’t on his iPad playing games. I hadn’t said anything to him yet. What would I tell him? That mom was lost? Somewhere?
“Over a million people in the air at any one moment.” Damon watched the jets circle. “Ten thousand planes up there, and they gotta get them all down.”
“Damon,” Chuck whispered urgently.
Our young friend glanced at Chuck, and then me. “Sorry.”
With GPS suddenly not working, aircraft were being spaced much further apart for landing sequences when they arrived at airports. Everyone should be able to get on the ground, the TV anchor had said, but then the news had cut to busy airports around the country, detailing how many airplanes were in the sky, how many were unaccounted for, and how many were running low on fuel—and then they cut again. To scenes of the burning wreckage from earlier that morning.
Only one reported crash, the one off Zanzibar.
So far.
What else would happen with GPS down? How many interconnected systems relied on it?
And who the hell still had a map? A real, physical map of highways and roads? When I was a kid, my dad always had one in the car, one of the whole United States. You used to be able to buy them in gas stations. Not anymore. Chuck didn’t even have one packed in his bug-out bag. Somehow the thought hadn’t occurred to him.
Even in the confines of the French Quarter, I felt lost without the map app on my phone. I knew Frenchmen Street was back along Bourbon, but at some point the streets seemed to zigzag. I could get lost within a few blocks. But with air travel shut down, I would have to somehow make my way by ground transport all the way across the country.
I didn’t know where Lauren was, but I couldn’t control that situation. I needed to get back to my little girl. I
needed to get to Washington.
“We can’t take Babet’s car,” I said to Chuck.
We’d tried two other gas stations and three rental offices on Canal Street, but everyone was out of anything to rent. Cars, SUVs, trucks. Even camper vans. Nothing. We’d called Grandma Babet’s landline from the gas station, and she’d volunteered to let us take her Monte Carlo to Nashville if we couldn’t find anything. Said we could take it all the way to Washington if we needed.
Damon was less enthusiastic.
That plan would strand his grandmother without a car if there was an emergency. Chuck volunteered to pay for the car, double what it was worth. I sided with Damon. We couldn’t take her car. Our current plan was to find a dealership near the highway and buy a used one outright.
“Let’s try in there.” Damon indicated a coffee shop a half block down on Saint Louis Street.
We needed an internet connection.
Usually the bars were crowded, but now the coffee shops were overflowing. Every table was occupied. Damon found us a spot to perch near the front on the interior ledge of a bay window. Before coming inside, we’d launched the drone high into the sky. It hovered two hundred feet overhead.
Luke went with Chuck to go and get some coffee, while Damon logged in to the café’s wireless on his laptop.
“Anything?”
A minute’s wait felt like an hour.
“There it is.” Damon turned his laptop’s screen for me to see.
A flight tracking website. He entered Lauren’s flight information, and it showed a dotted line from Hong Kong, up over Russia and the Arctic, then down between Canada and Greenland to the East Coast of America.
The Boeing 777 had taken off at 7:55 p.m. Hong Kong time, which was 6:55 a.m. our time. A little more than three hours ago. The website indicated the sixteen-and-a-half-hour flight was on schedule for an 11:30 p.m. landing at Washington National, except there was no dot on the screen to indicate where the plane was right now.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Had the plane fallen out of the sky?
“It’s probably out of radar contact. At least, civilian radar. There are a few systems onboard that ping location, but they rely on satellites. It could be a GPS malfunction. I’m not sure how this website gets its location data.”
“But it’s still indicating an on-time arrival?”
He checked the American Airlines website and two other flight trackers. “So far.”
“Will it be allowed to land? Isn’t American airspace closed?”
“Usually that means they’re rerouted to the closest airport.”
“So she’ll end up in Siberia?”
“I doubt the Russians want an American airliner. Neither do the Chinese. Back on 9/11, almost all the transoceanic planes en route to the States ended up in Canada. Labrador. Places like that.”
“Canada?” That didn’t seem so bad.
“But this isn’t the same as 9/11. We don’t have the threat of terrorists in the air actively attacking American targets. This is global. Everybody is walling themselves off because they don’t know what’s happening. Even Canada is shutting down its borders.”
Unusual, but unfortunately not unprecedented. Same thing happened when that virus outbreak started, but not as sudden as this.
“So where will all th—”
My phone pinged. A text from Terek: “I’m at the hotel. I might have a solution.”
He’d contacted me through the mesh-network app.
“You see this?” I held my phone up. “Your buddy says he might have a car.”
Damon read the message. “Did you turn on location tracking through Wi-Fi?” He opened my settings, shook his head, made a change, and handed my phone back. “Not as accurate as GPS, but if we set a latitude and longitude for our Wi-Fi mesh nodes—”
“Will my regular map app work?”
“Sort of.” He nodded. “And look at this.” He pointed at his laptop screen. “Two NOAA satellites have gone offline.”
“Noah?”
“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They’re trying to update the track on Hurricane Dolly, but can’t get any new imaging. Same thing for the fires in Appalachia and California, and the storms in the Midwest.”
“Offline?” Chuck returned with the coffees. “You mean, destroyed?”
“Maybe NOAA is moving them to get out of the way.”
“What altitude were they orbiting?”
“About two thousand kilometers.”
“So the wreckage is spreading?”
Damon raised his shoulders. “I’ll try and contact my friends at NASA, see if they have any more info.”
“We found Lauren’s flight,” I said to Chuck.
He handed me a coffee. “And?” He looked over his shoulder.
Luke watched us carefully. He knew things weren’t right. A bottom-of-the-stomach unease was infecting everyone. All around us in the coffee shop, hushed cursing and quiet but urgent conversations.
I leaned toward Chuck and spoke quietly. “The online flight tracker shows that the plane took off, but there’s no information on where it actually is. With GPS down, and who knows if satellite tracking—”
“Is something wrong with mom?” Luke frowned.
“She’s on her way home,” I said.
Luke considered that for a second. “We’re going to get her?”
“I promise.”
Damon said, “We should get back to the hotel. My grandmother says we need to get over there.”
“Who the hell is that?” Chuck said.
Damon and Luke were across the street in Washington Square Park retrieving the drone. Babet’s Monte Carlo was parked outside the hotel, so we expected to see her in there. I put the key in the door to our room and opened it, but instead of Babet’s slim frame, we discovered a twenty-something woman in a windbreaker rummaging through Chuck’s bags by the TV.
“This is my sister, Irena,” Terek said. He stood to one side of the bags.
“Mind getting her away from my stuff?” Chuck growled.
Irena held her hands up in mock surrender, a lopsided grin on her face as she backed away. “I’m impressed. I’ve got my own survival stash in the back of my truck.”
“Truck?”
“This is what I was trying to tell you,” Terek said to me. “Irena has a truck.”
I heard a toilet being flushed, and then water running. “I told them not to touch your stuff,” Babet said as she exited the bathroom a second later.
Luke lurched through the door, the huge drone grasped in both his arms.
Damon walked in behind him. “Have you guys met Terek’s sister?”
Irena put her hand out. I shook it. “Nice to meet you,” I said.
Firm grip.
Her dark brown eyes were expressive and kind, her black hair close cropped but long enough that a curling loop drooped down over her forehead. She was slender, not much more than a hundred and twenty pounds, and stood maybe two inches shorter than Chuck’s six feet.
Irena squatted and held out a hand to Luke. “And what’s your name?”
He took it and pumped firmly. “Luke.”
“Irena.”
Luke turned to me, his face beaming. “Dad, just like Gorby’s mother. You remember, from the old apartment?”
How could I forget? “Yeah, I remember.”
Irena maintained a puzzled smile and stood. “I’m sorry, who do I remind you of?”
“It’s your name,” I said. “We used to have a neighbor called Irena. A wonderful lady.” I remembered the two barrels of a shotgun emerging from the Borodin’s apartment, with the eighty-year-old Irena behind it.
“I heard you guys need a lift to Nashville.” Irena offered her hand to Chuck.
Chuck hesitated, but then shook. “Yeah, that’s right.”
The TV was on with the volume low. Luke squeezed past us and deposited the drone on the floor. “Dad, can I use the iPad?”
<
br /> I nodded, sure.
Irena looked at the drone, her eyebrows raised. Impressed. She pointed out the door past us. “That’s my Range Rover right there.”
It wasn’t new. Rust showed through the fenders. The paint chipped in places.
“I keep it stocked at all times with emergency supplies, too.” She nodded at Chuck. “Though I don’t have all the equipment you do.” She flicked her chin at the bags by the TV. “Night vision goggles. Very cool.”
“And you need to go to Nashville?” Chuck said.
“Washington. To Terek’s wife. Gotta take care of my little brother, and I should get back up to New England, got my stuff up there—but I figured Nashville could be on the way. Damon has helped us out, so we’d like to return the favor.” Her accent was Eastern European, but she spoke like an American.
“You were working on the docks, too?” Chuck said.
Irena’s grin widened. “Just finished college. Boston University. Was trying to figure out what to do, and this was an easy way to spend a few months in the Big Easy, you know?” She looked back at the TV. The news anchor was listing the satellites NASA had lost contact with. “But it looks like the holiday is over.”
Chuck turned to Damon. “Tell me again how you know these two?”
CHAPTER 11
CHUCK PULLED ME and Damon onto the front balcony of the hotel. I left the door ajar so I could see Luke by the TV. Babet sat protectively behind him. I checked my watch. Almost 11:30.
Thunderheads crowded the sky, the midday sun high between them, the air damp and thick. Cicadas whined from the branches of the oaks across the street. I held one hand up to block the sun and watched the dot of an airplane crawl across the bright blue.
“I met Terek online, playing Slayer,” Damon said.
“What’s that?” Chuck wasn’t into video games.
“It’s a massive multiplayer—”
“I thought you went to school with him at MIT.”
I hung back by the door, one eye on Luke and the other on the TV. The news was back to covering the airports. My heart felt like it was stuck in my throat, held up by a trip wire, as I waited for news of another air crash.
CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1) Page 6
