Lockout

by John J. Nance

  Paul Wriggle pulled up a mental image of the woman they were discussing. Gail Hunt … in her forties, single, very quiet, hired out of Boeing Military in Seattle with a long-standing top secret clearance. He resisted the tendency to wonder if her being momentarily AWOL from a vacation could portend something more sinister, but it had to be considered.

  And she wasn’t a particularly happy employee.

  “Paul? You still there?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “I … have to tell you we’d had some concern about Golf Hotel in recent weeks, and … and there was a certain amount of animosity over a personnel decision. That’s why her not coming back on time is a worry, and I was just handed a note that the place she … wait a second.”

  He could hear the questions in the background if not the answers: “Is this right? Where?”

  There was a fatigued sigh on the line, and the colonel came back on. “Okay…she was supposed to be at the McGregor Lodge in Estes Park, and they say she never checked in.”

  Paul Wriggle shook his head as he drummed his fingers on the adjacent table and pressed the phone even tighter to his ear. “Let me ask this again, to make sure. Do we have the programming prowess among the rest of you to know what our machine was programmed to do at this stage if turned on?”

  “In a word, sir, no. That was going to be a team effort that she was to lead. That’s why she wanted the aircraft out of the desert, if you’ll recall.”

  “Wait … she wanted it out?” Wriggle asked.

  “Yes. I thought you knew. The request started with her last week. She wanted the ship back here so we could get the onboard programming complete.”

  “I didn’t realize that. But she had no idea it had left Mojave last week, correct?”

  “We don’t think so. She was already on vacation, and someone there would have had to tell her, and from what we’ve learned, the Mojave people didn’t even realize they’d screwed up and pulled our airplane out until today.”

  “That’s correct. Okay, listen up, folks … if our machine thought we wanted her to … to … trigger a locked situation, could she just as easily be persuaded to unlock? Think carefully, because those people are in trouble, and we’ve got to act now if we can.”

  “Paul, shouldn’t we inform … I don’t know, the air staff, the White House. Someone?” Dana Baumgartner asked.

  “And say what, Dana? We’re not even supposed to exist. And even if we could report it that easily, what is anyone else going to do that we can’t do ourselves?”

  There was embarrassed silence on the other end.

  “So, again, I need an answer. Can we countermand whatever order our machine thinks it’s been given?”

  It was Choder who spoke up. “In theory, yes, if we had the final programming done. But we’re searching right now for some notes or anything to tell us where GH left the onboard processor. If it was fairly rudimentary, then it should obey the “all clear” code … if we could transmit it. If it was more complex, a simple unlock order may not work.”

  “But,” Wriggle asked, “… if all it did was respond to the enabling code, can’t it be turned off?”

  “We didn’t send that enabling code!”

  “Someone did! Is there any danger in trying whatever generic code we have?”

  “No. But, Paul, that’s not the point. Point is, our global network is not complete. We’re just over 60 percent coverage. We could go blasting an unlock message all over the planet, and that bird might not hear it.”

  “Do we know where the holes are in our coverage?”

  Another chilling delay filled the void.

  “Yes, sir. We know most of the holes.”

  “Is the Mediterranean covered, or is it a hole?”

  “It’s pretty much an incomplete hole, sir. We’ve got much of northern Europe and the UK, but … but the Med is spotty.”

  “Can the thing be turned off from inside?”

  “Yes. There’s a code you can enter from any of the flight management computers.”

  “But … you’re going to tell me we don’t have a clue what that code is, correct?”

  “Yes, sir. I suppose we are. We really need to find Golf Hotel. But the thing is, the flight management computers will look like they’re dead because the displays turn off. One wouldn’t normally think you could enter anything.”

  There wasn’t much cord between the receiver and the base of the satellite phone, but Paul Wriggle stood now, pulling as tight as he could to allow at least some pacing. He had to keep them moving forward, and, for that matter, he was far too agitated to sit for another second. There couldn’t be much time left for their airplane, and the people aboard.

  “Okay, get the release sequence, open the network, and blast it continuously as far and wide as you can. How soon can you get that going?”

  “We figure an hour or less.”

  “Text me the moment you start the transmissions, and the moment, if any, that you get a response. Keep looking for Golf Hotel … ask the rangers in Rocky Mountain, call any friends we have at FBI for help, check state police and morgues, and meanwhile someone please make sure she hasn’t left some weird message on her desk or her email. Also … someone call Ron Barrett, the owner at Mojave Storage and find out who the employee was who made the mistake. Let’s make sure it’s not someone who knows our lady, okay?

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do your best and do it as fast as you can, please! I’ll be touching down at Andrews in two hours, and if we haven’t got this nightmare resolved by then, I’ll be enroute to our boss. Where things go for us from there is anyone’s guess.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Aboard Pangia 10 (0135 Zulu)

  Dan was working on assembling a toolkit full of scavenged items from his and Jerry’s flight bags and the forward galley when Carol brought Josh Begich to the cockpit door.

  “May we come in, gentlemen?”

  Dan nodded, reaching out to shake the young boy’s hand. “Absolutely. What’s your name, and how old are you?”

  “Josh, sir, and I’m almost fifteen,” the boy replied, his eyes wide and watching warily, lest the captain recognize him and resume his attack. Jerry, however, was studying the forward panel.

  “Are you good at wiring things, splicing, insulating, tracing?” Dan probed.

  “No, sir. Well, I know basic circuits and stuff. But I’m good at programming.”

  “Okay. Stay up here.”

  At that moment Bill Breem and Tom Wilson appeared with a male passenger in tow they identified as Frank Erlichman, a man in his fifties with a perpetually startled look on his weathered face.

  “Frank, is it?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “And your background, sir? American?”

  “Yes. Well, born in Germany but now from Duluth. I’m an electrical engineer. I know wires and circuits, and was an avionics repairman five years back,” Erlichman explained, with a slight accent.

  “Okay,” Dan said, “Let me explain what’s going on and how you two can help.

  Dan briefed them on what he was planning, ignoring the wide-eyed look of fear on the young boy’s face.

  “There’s only room for two of us down there. Mr. Erlichman? You come down first. Josh, please stay here, sit in this right-hand seat when I get out of it, and let the captain run you through whatever wiring diagrams we can pull up on our iPads. They’ll be pretty rudimentary, but they might help you figure out the philosophy of the wiring as it should exist, and there may be a diagram of where all the black boxes are in relation to what they do. Look at the autothrottle and then the autoflight system in general. I’m stabbing in the dark, fellows, but the only reason I think we have a chance is just this: Whatever that damned cabinet down there is for, I don’t think the designers ever expected anyone to mount a serious and sustained effort to retake control. I’m just guessing, of course, but I don’t think they had security uppermost in mind, or I would have never been able to o
pen the side of it.”

  Once the captain’s seat was forward again, Dan descended the cramped access ladder, guiding Frank Erlichman down after him, and giving a quick orientation tour of the cabinet and the racks of electronics.

  “Dan?” Frank asked, “May one ask, how much time do we have? I am aware that we can’t fly forever.”

  “We have about three hours before we’re out of fuel.”

  “What then happens?”

  Dan shook his head. “In all honesty? I don’t know. It could mean we regain control when the engines die and the power goes off for a few seconds before the battery kicks in, then we can glide somewhere to a landing. It could mean we sit here helpless and crash.”

  “Thank you for being straight with me.”

  “Okay, let’s get to work. Don’t touch anything on or in that cabinet, just in case it’s still electrified or booby-trapped.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’m going to look for the VHF radios and start with that. You look for anything that looks like autothrottles or autoflight. Do you speak French, too, by any chance?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I forgot to ask. I don’t know if any of the placards are in French or English, but either way, we’re okay.”

  The maze of wires going into tightly packed and insulated wiring bundles and harnesses was nothing short of mind boggling, and Dan kept himself focused on reading the little metal placards on the bottom end of each electronic box, increasingly pessimistic that anything would be plainly labeled. Most of the boxes were American made, with each placard full of serial numbers and date of manufacture and convoluted model numbers, but on the third rack and fifth row, he finally caught the letters “VHF” for one of the aviation-band radios.

  Got it!

  On the rack itself, the “VHF #1” position was emblazoned, and he loosened the circular nuts holding the radio cabinet in place and gingerly pulled it out of its cradle.

  Nothing in the wire harness going into the rear of the cradle showed any signs of change or tampering. It was as if the harness was a standard factory construct, and the plug itself provided no help—only small numbers associated with each pin position could be seen when he disconnected the plug and examined it.

  Dan felt his heart sink as he stared at it. What arrogance to think he could figure this out without a schematic. But as Frank moved to his side, the passenger reached out to point to the disconnected rack plug and nodded.

  “You recognize something?” Dan asked.

  “There is a standard pattern. Power supply, input, output, antenna leads … all of it pretty straightforward.”

  “Really? Anything look nonstandard here?”

  “You said the radios went off? All of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And there were no lights then on the control heads, no indication of power?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Very well. You see, if I were going to build a box to seize control remotely, I wouldn’t need to use the radios. I would just see to it that they were turned off.”

  “What are you saying, Frank?”

  “We should try to find power to plug in … here and here … to these pins … and you might just reactivate the transceiver. The antenna seems to be in place.”

  “I wish we had a circuit tester or ammeter.”

  “So do I. But these instruments are all powered by the same voltage. Any positive and negative lead should work.”

  They searched the adjacent rack before finding a small box several feet away with blinking lights on the front. Dan unscrewed and removed the box, disconnected the cannon plug on the back of the rack and waited for the aircraft to react.

  Nothing.

  “Okay, which are the power leads?”

  Frank took over, cutting the two appropriate wires and pulling them through far enough to reach the back of the VHF radio. He stripped a section of insulation from each of the cut wires to the radio and spliced the power leads in, and immediately two small LEDs on the front lit up.

  “Wait here,” Dan said, scrambling to stick his head above cockpit floor level.

  Jerry was already waiting for him. “The number one radio just lit up, Dan! What did you do?”

  “Too long to explain. That’s just step one. Call out if anything changes up here.”

  “Can I use the radio?”

  “Hey man, knock yourself out. We should be adjacent to Italian airspace by now. Maybe Rome control could hear us.”

  “Hey … wait a second … it’s not transmitting.”

  Dan pulled himself out of the hatch to stand beside Jerry’s chair.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The audio control panel here … it’s still dark, and even though I know I had the switch selected to the number one radio before all this crap began, when I hit the transmit button, nothing happens.”

  Dan reached down and worked with the panel, then looked at his panel on the right side.

  “You’re right. We’ve only turned the thing on. Can you change frequencies?”

  “Yes. That’s just manual, or at least it works.”

  “Can we hear anything?”

  “Let me find the right ATC frequencies for where we are, and I’ll let you know, but it isn’t going to help us much unless we can talk.”

  Carol was standing beside him, and Dan turned to her.

  “Any luck on radio batteries for that satellite phone we were using?”

  “No. That was apparently the only one on board.”

  Josh Begich looked up, listening to the exchange.

  “You know, that telephone can’t be too exotic in terms of what kind of charging power it needs. Perhaps we could find a charger aboard and modify it? I would bet a lot of people have chargers in their carryon bags.”

  “I’ll make the announcement and see what we can find,” Carol said, turning to Dan. “And I’ll send Jeanie up to relay for you.”

  “Okay, stand by on searching the bags. There’s not much room down there. Jerry? I’m going back down and keep at it.”

  “Go for it, Dan. Hey … take a minute to get something to drink or hit the head if you need it.”

  “I’m good, but you need a break?”

  “Yeah, next time you come up, I need to get out of this seat for a minute.”

  Josh was looking over at the two of them. “I thought you couldn’t control anything?”

  “We can’t,” Jerry replied, knowing where this was going.

  “But, that means that if you need to get up, nothing will change while you’re out of the cockpit, right?”

  “Ever hear of Murphy’s Law, kid?” Jerry asked.

  “Uh, no. Is that an electronics law?”

  “No, it’s life. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. If I unstrap and leave the cockpit with Dan downstairs, guaranteed that’s the exact moment we’ll get control back and go into a dive or something.”

  Josh looked even more confused.

  “Really?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, but then we’d have control back, right?”

  Jerry looked up at Dan who was suppressing a laugh, then back at Josh Begich.

  “I’ll have to explain this to you later, kid. It’s like the facts of life.”

  Dan returned to the underdeck area with renewed hope, but the look on Frank Erlichman’s face was funereal.

  “What’s wrong, Frank?”

  “I traced the autothrottle circuit. I doubt we can touch it.”

  “Show me. What do you mean?”

  Frank led him forward to a separate electronics rack, pointing to a large electronic box and the nomenclature on the identiplate.

  “I think this is what you were looking for. But please look at the wiring harness. I traced the basic wires and they go to the cabinet, and then another autothrottle related box, then back to the cabinet, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to be sure you can regain control by cutting anything.”

  �
�It would be a gamble, in other words?”

  “A big one.”

  Dan looked at his watch, the gesture well understood by Frank who had an ashen look about him.

  “Okay … let’s think about this. The engine power is frozen at the same level as when this happened,” Dan began, counting off points on his fingers. “That means they’re not controlling it, most probably, they’ve just disconnected our ability to set it. Regardless of the back and forth wiring, the big question is: Which one of these boxes, if turned off instead of on, would restore our ability to move the throttles?”

  “You’re playing, I think, with fire,” Frank said. “These are computer controlled and not as simple as the radio.”

  “Well … you may have a point. We turned the radio on but still can’t transmit on it because we didn’t turn on the audio selector panel.”

  “We can probably find that circuit.”

  “No … let’s … could we try a few things for the throttles and be ready to reverse if it doesn’t go right?”

  “There are no switches. You mean, pull the racks out from their plugs?”

  “How about stripping a section of wire, cutting it in the middle, and if all hell breaks loose, just re-twisting the ends together.”

  “We can’t do that with gloves, and there is substantial voltage.”

  “I have to try.”

  Once again Dan stuck his head above floor level to brief Jerry and the others on what he was about to do and position Carol to relay any information from Jerry if there was a change.

  With five minutes of work stripping wires, they were ready, and Dan used a glove to insulate his hand while running the exposed wire into a pair of uninsulated nail clippers.

  “Okay. Here goes.”

  The sound of the click as the clippers snapped through the 18-gauge wire was almost inaudible, but Dan could feel the tiny impact in his gloved fingers. At first, it seemed as if there were no further reaction, until he realized he was leaning forward slightly against the deceleration of the airplane.