“Sir?” Someone was asking, and Gershorn Zamir realized he’d been drifting.
“My apologies. I was deep in thought.”
“Do you need me to repeat?” the intelligence officer was asking.
“No. No, but I need to repeat the key question you have grappled with on a daily basis, and this has nothing to do with covering my or anyone else’s posterior. If the bastards launch, can we shoot it down in time? Will the iron dome work against a nuke?”
Listening to a room of high-powered and high-ranking military officers all take a deep breath at once was unnerving, almost as much as the subsequent cautionary glances among the group. But General Alon nodded and took point.
“The ‘it’ versus ‘them’ is the key to the problem. We believe that we have an 80 percent to 90 percent chance of blowing up anything they launch in boost phase, without a nuclear detonation, and long before it gets close enough to us to use the Iron Dome defense system, which is proven. The problem is that the mullahs know those percentages, and they are very likely to launch a barrage of missiles, only one of which will carry the killer warhead. So, which one do we shoot? Our percentages go down significantly the more missiles they launch. We have proton scanners to spot fissile material, this is true. But they also know how to use lead shielding to foil our view, and they’re not beyond launching a barrage of missiles with just enough nuclear material to trigger our detectors, but no bomb. So, the bottom line is this: If they launch more than five missiles, our chances of guaranteeing that Israel will not be hit by a nuclear detonation reduces to 50 percent. These are not acceptable odds.”
“Which,” Zamir added, “… is precisely why the Knesset cashiered our old friend Lavi, because even if he had been correct about hitting Iran’s nuclear program now, we can have no guarantee that a single nuclear warhead couldn’t make it through our Iron Dome.” Zamir let his words sink in for a few beats before continuing. “So, if this American flagged airliner turns the wrong way and heads down the throats of the mullahs, do we shoot it down?”
“If we must,” came the answer, short, to the point, and chilling from General Alon.
“And how do we decide if we must?” the PM asked, suddenly shaking his head, “For God’s sake, is that my decision? A plane full of innocent lives in international distress, and Israel kills them all on the outside chance that the genocidal regime in Tehran will overreact?”
Utter silence filled the conference room and Zamir felt guilty about essentially attacking his team, but, dammit, they had to understand the gravity of such a decision and the way the rest of the world would view it. “We’re gambling Israel’s future with Israel’s respect in the world community, assuming we have some left. I need a better option.”
“You asked for worst case,” Yossi reminded him quietly.
“I did?”
“Essentially.”
“Very well, give me the best case response based on the worst case situation with the airplane. I’m going back home. If the problem is not resolved by the flight crew in two hours, wake me up again and I’ll come back here and we can make the appropriate decisions. I’ll assemble the necessary people to satisfy the authority requirements to approve our response, up to and including a nuclear launch, if, God forbid, we are forced into it. And, gentlemen?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Pray. Pray hard.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Aboard Pangia 10 (0120 Zulu)
Bill Breem and Tom Wilson had gone back into the main cabin on a mission to interview passengers who had responded to Jerry’s request for anyone with aviation electronics experience, and Carol was back in first class. For the first time in hours Dan and Jerry were once again alone in the cockpit.
“Dan … I owe you an apology.”
“For what?” Dan asked, truly puzzled.
“For judging you. Everything you said earlier.”
“Well … accepted, of course, Jerry.”
“I’m beginning to think the wrong person’s sitting in the left seat.”
Jerry was staring straight ahead, his voice almost too low to be heard, and Dan Horneman wasn’t sure for a second that he’d understood the captain correctly. He leaned over the center console toward Jerry as he sat sideways in the copilot’s seat.
“Surely you’re not contemplating turning control over to …”
Jerry turned toward him, a truly lost look in his eyes.
“Of course not. But … I mean, I’m sitting up here helpless as a freaking baby, and you’re the only one who seems to have a clue what to do. Sorry … I’m just very, very frustrated. “
“Me, too.”
“And … something I was trained to never be.”
There was silence before Dan interjected.
“What’s that?”
“I’m scared shitless, man! There. I said it.”
“It’s completely normal to be scared.”
Jerry looked over at him suddenly “So why aren’t you, Dan?”
The question was entirely without rancor, and Dan could see the man searching for anything to hold onto that would justify the four stripes on his shoulders.
“For the record, Jerry, I am just as terrified as you. I just may be a better actor.”
“You may be. You’re Mr. Cool.”
“Look, Jerry, we all need the anchor you provide. This is a team effort, and this team needs a leader, which is you. Quit thinking you’ve got to be John Wayne tough.”
“Yeah,” Jerry breathed, the shadow of a smile marking his changing attitude. “I should have been asking that. What would Duke Wayne do?”
“Probably get all the passengers in a circle! Look, Jere, let’s talk about the plan. We don’t have a lot of time. You heard what’s down there … I think I should test my theory as fast as I can.”
“You mean about rewiring?”
“Not … rewiring, but … finding the point at which any of the boxes down there have been routed to the big cabinet, cutting that connection and re-mating whatever wires with the appropriate input on each box.”
Jerry was shaking his head. “I don’t think I followed you about that. I wanted to run it past our maintenance people in Chicago, but the damned battery died on that sat phone, and Carol says they haven’t found a replacement or the charger. Apparently the charger is in the passenger’s bag.”
“I know. We’re silent again.”
“Yes. But Dan, back to the wiring thing. Please explain it to me.”
“Okay, let’s say I find your DVR at home isn’t sending a video signal to your television because the video signal has been routed through a big amplifier that’s malfunctioning. If I disconnect the video lead between the DVR and the malfunctioning amplifier, and instead connect it directly to an input slot on your TV, where it belongs, suddenly you get to see whatever you’re playing on your DVR. Get it?”
“You think it’s that simple, Dan? Down there, I mean?”
“In principle, not in fact. I’ll have to trace and understand and cut wires and splice them to have any hope of making this work, but, essentially, that’s what’s going on down there … all the outputs from all our normal electronic instruments, including autoflight and autothrottles, are being shunted off into that cabinet, and then the electronics in that cabinet are replacing the signals with their own versions and sending them off to the controls, while sending us false displays. I don’t care about the displays, I want our controls back.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“That’s why I want to attack the radios first. Just one VHF. If I can find how to repower one VHF radio, or maybe even the satcom, it’ll validate the method. If that works, I want to try the autothrottles. There is a risk, of course, that they could just wind the engines down to idle if I cut anything, but if I’m right, I might be able to restore our control.”
“That’s a hell of a risk, Dan.”
“And if we do nothing and wait until we run out of fuel …”
“I u
nderstand that.”
“So, what do you think, Captain, sir? Should I at least try the radios?”
Jerry pursed his lips and nodded, his eyes forward, deep in thought, anger propelling a derisive snort. “Who the hell put that damned thing down there, Dan? Is our airline lying to us? Is this now a standard specter shadowing us on every flight?”
“Can’t be. I’ve never seen an installation like that before.”
“But it’s apparently there to take over. When? If we’re incapacitated or … or hijacked? But in the hours since it apparently turned us around and switched off the cockpit, the damn thing hasn’t varied our heading or speed or altitude one iota. So is it flying the airplane or did it just freeze the controls?”
Dan exhaled sharply. “Damn, I didn’t think about that.”
“You mean, that it hasn’t varied anything since the turn around?”
“That it might be malfunctioning. Good God!”
“Does that change anything in your thinking?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I need to get moving, if I’m going to try.”
Jerry nodded again, this time emphatically. “Nothing else is helping us, and Chicago doesn’t have a clue. Yes, Dan. Let’s go for it.”
Carol had quietly re-entered the cockpit and was waiting, standing just behind the center console, as Dan turned to her.
“I need a quick scavenger hunt. I need anything close to black electrical tape or any tape that’s sticky and insulating. I need the sharpest steak knives you can find in your galley, if any. And I need wires … but I’ll probably just have to make do with what I find down below.”
“Do you need anyone down there with you?” she asked. “I could …”
Dan was shaking his head no as Jerry raised a finger.
“Wait … Dan. This airplane is crammed full of computers and that snot-nosed kid I wanted to kill may be more expert than we know. Carol? Bring that kid up here, will you?”
“Certainly,” she replied, disappearing back into the cabin as Dan smiled to himself. Captain Tollefson was once again in the game.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Aboard Gulfstream N266SD (0120 Zulu)
Major Sharon Wallace was studying Paul Wriggle from across the Gulfstream’s cabin. They were rocketing on the heels of a tailwind toward the nation’s capital for what would quite likely be the end of their program. Discovering that their misplaced Airbus was over southern Europe with a locked out crew had impacted her commander hard, and she could only guess at his blood pressure, but it couldn’t be good. The words didn’t need to be spoken. They all knew.
Sharon unconsciously twisted her hair through her fingers, a nervous habit that normally the rest of her compatriots loved to tease her about.
The general was hunched over the satellite phone waiting for the team to assemble below in the Springs, Lieutenant Colonel Don Danniher was flying the Gulfstream alone, and the other two pilots they’d begun the day with would be on final approach now for Colorado Springs in Pangia’s A330.
Wriggle was a good man, she thought. A good leader who did not deserve this kind of stress, and for the moment—with a single satellite phone in the cabin—all she could do was sit and watch him deal with the nightmare and wait for his orders.
Across the cabin, Paul Wriggle forced himself to focus as he sat with the secure satellite phone pressed against his ear, listening to the voices of his executive team back on the ground at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
He could visualize the cramped suite of nondescript offices they had purposefully selected in a back building on the base, as well as the underground chamber they’d built surreptitiously below one of the basements—a wonderfully clever design for security all around. Teaming with electronics and secure fiber optic connections back east, the 24/7 security had been expensive but well worth it. Even the Peterson base commander had no idea of what was happening in building 4-104.
“We’re all here, sir. Finally.”
“Okay,” Wriggle began. “This is an emergency meeting of Air Lease Solutions,” he said, using the code words to expunge all use of military references. He knew very well the prime security directive against talking “around” classified information, but in this case there was no choice, and even though the line was approved for classified information, it made him very nervous.
“We all understand down here, Paul,” Colonel Dana Baumgartner, his second in command said. The use of the general’s first name was a reciprocal code.
“Has everyone there received and read my message on what’s happening?”
“Everyone,” Baumgartner replied.
“All right,” Wriggle began, “Obviously, this is not a drill. The entire program is imperiled, as are the people out there who’ve been inadvertently involved. First, have you checked whether we somehow uplinked a transmission of orders?”
“We have checked,” Colonel Baumgartner replied, “… and the answer is absolutely not. There were none. Our last test run was three weeks ago. It was a good, routine test by all parameters, but, of course, there were no operational receivers in the … air … to receive. The test sequence was the same one we’ve run for two years. No change. But nothing has been triggered in the last, well, three weeks. And as you know, we only trigger the test to keep everything open while we complete the network.”
Paul Wriggle was rubbing his forehead.
“That’s our machine out there,” the general said. “That wasn’t supposed to be the case, but it is, and from the sound of it, sometime this morning she either listened to something we sent, or misinterpreted something someone else sent, and she took action as a direct result. I suppose it’s also possible that she unilaterally decided to turn herself on. Unfortunately, the best fit is an unfortunately timed test transmission.”
“We’re … well, Paul, we’re absolutely sure nothing was voluntarily transmitted.”
“Voluntarily? Why the hesitation, Dana?”
“Because we’re just now checking the last twenty-four-hour history of all our servers, and I just got word that one bank of computers may have been off line for a few minutes yesterday evening, and we don’t know why.”
“Off line? Why would that cause an unwanted transmission?”
“It shouldn’t, but we all want 100 percent certainty, so we have to know why anything dropped off line, and what it did when it came back on.”
“Does anyone else but us have, maybe, a copy of the standard test sequence? Or could someone have cracked into a copy of the overall form of code we use? Could this be sabotage, in other words?”
There was a burst of conversation in the background before another team member answered, the voice recognizable as their chief scientist, a brilliant civilian named George Choder.
“No one is supposed to have a copy of anything, and certainly initiating an … order, for want of a better word … would take the entire string, and we haven’t even finished writing that yet. Plus, no one knew our … machine … was anywhere other than California. But despite all that, I wouldn’t rule out sabotage. This could not happen accidentally.”
“Suppose our machine heard just a test transmission. Could it obey and lock up based on that?”
More conversation in the background, now even more intense, as many seconds passed.
“We … don’t think so, but we don’t know, Paul. But we want to emphasize that there was no purposeful test transmission this week! We weren’t ready for live tests, so … I don’t know the state of our machine’s programming.”
“You mean, the other end, our, ah, operational machine, could have been receptive? It could have reacted to whatever it heard?”
“We don’t understand the question,” Dana Baumgartner said.
Wriggle sighed out of frustration at the elliptical conversation. It would be far easier to just say “airplane,” but anyone overhearing would then have zero doubt what they were discussing. “What I’m saying is,” Wriggle continued, “… can you guarant
ee me that if our machine was operational, and if it heard the test sequence whether recorded or live, that it absolutely could not trigger it’s lockout function? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, we’re not saying that at all, Paul. We’re saying we can’t guarantee that, because no one was ready for the machine to fly … to operate, I mean. We hadn’t checked that part of the programming. It wasn’t ready.”
“Then we’ve got a huge problem,” Paul Wriggle said. “Regardless of how she got out of our hands, that machine is our responsibility, and we’ve got to get her to release control. I mean now. Who’s our programming expert for the receiving end of the equation?”
“Well, sir, that spotlights another worry,” the colonel replied. “That would be one of our people who has been on vacation, but she didn’t come back as scheduled two days ago, and we’ve been frantically trying to locate her for the past hour.”
“Give me the initials.”
“Golf Hotel, sir. She was supposed to be up in Rocky Mountain National Park, but we can’t find her, and the phone and her iPad are both turned off …”
“I apologize for sounding suspicious, folks,” the general continued, knowing the potential effect of his voicing a loyalty doubt, “… but we’re in very dangerous territory here. Does Golf Hotel have the ability to trigger an uplink signal remotely, by herself?”
“She shouldn’t. But … again … none of this was an anticipated possibility.”
Choder’s voice interceded. “Ah, sir, I would bet my career that Golf Hotel would never do anything like that, but to be honest, she has the control of the receiver’s programming and I’m afraid we’ve more or less left that to her until now. She probably knows better than anyone … well, hell, she does know better than anyone, what state the programming is aboard our, ah, machine.”
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