Free Fall

by Rick Mofina

  “We know that pattern’s been used before.”

  “It’s standard on the Darknet, but in this case it looks like they may have custom-built their own software and written their own codes to create even more layers, possibly hundreds, that result in even more encrypted connections through relays on any given network.”

  “So a little different than a run-of-the-mill hacker?”

  “Yes, more sophisticated. And they’re using hidden servers.”

  “Isn’t that how the child porn industry does it? And we’ve defeated them and tracked people down.”

  “Correct, but what may be at work here is people who’re using off-the-grid servers, or servers that may be rented through third and fourth parties. Those servers could be anywhere—Latvia, Thailand, Romania, anywhere. Remember your basics, Nick. Our suspect pool is anybody with a computer and access to the internet.”

  “So where are we, Ron?”

  “We’re pulling in help from the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force. We’re hoping the Department of Defense, the CIA and the NSA might be able to give us a hand.”

  “So we don’t yet have any names, any addresses, or anything for the foundation of a warrant?”

  Sanchez shook his head.

  “Ron, if they’re that good with email, do you think they have the skill to hack into a flight system and take control of a jetliner?”

  “It’s our job to find out,” Sanchez said. “Look, Nick, I’m not going to sugarcoat this—whoever is behind the Zarathustra email is very smart and very good.”

  Twenty-Six

  La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands

  At the site on Mesa Mota Mountain, the young American tourist Veyda Hyde shaded her eyes and took in the sweeping view of the city below, the airport and the Atlantic Ocean.

  Breezes with a hint of sea salt rolled up the mountainside and lifted strands of her hair.

  “It’s so glorious up here, so tranquil.”

  “Calming, almost spiritual. As it should be.” Seth, her boyfriend, turned to photograph the monument again. The couple was traveling with a local sightseeing bus, and the memorial on Mesa Mota was its most solemn stop. Seth marveled at the structure, a modern piece of artwork depicting a towering spiral staircase that ascended sixty feet, representing the connection between the earth and the sky.

  The memorial plaque at its base said that it was erected in memory of the people killed in the aircraft accident at the Los Rodeos Airport below, where, in 1977, two 747 jumbo jets collided in the world’s worst aviation accident. Veyda and Seth were familiar with the history. Events leading up to the tragedy had unfolded when a bomb planted by a separatist terror group had exploded at Gran Canaria Airport on a nearby island. It had forced the diversion of a number of large international jetliners to the smaller Los Rodeos Airport at Tenerife. A sudden fog had enshrouded the area, reducing visibility as an airliner from Los Angeles taxied and another from Amsterdam prepared to lift off on the same runway. The poor weather and problematic radio communications with the air traffic control tower resulted in the two jets colliding on the runway, killing 583 people.

  Veyda and Seth had joined the other tourists, studying the plaque, running their fingers over it, then touching the staircase and admiring the memorial wreathes, some of which were in various stages of decay.

  Veyda covered a yawn with her hand.

  Their pilgrimage to Tenerife was the latest among several others they’d made.

  In recent weeks, they’d traveled to Japan, where they’d visited the site of the world’s second-worst aviation disaster, that of Japan Airlines Flight 123.

  The aircraft, a 747 jumbo jet, was doomed some ten minutes after the plane had lifted off from Tokyo International Airport for Osaka, when the rear pressure bulkhead tore open due to a maintenance error. The incident had ruptured the hydraulic lines and led to the failure of the vertical stabilizer, making the plane impossible to control. The jet stayed aloft for half an hour before it crashed into Mount Takamagahara, some sixty miles northeast of Tokyo, killing 520 people.

  As part of their pilgrimage to Japan, Veyda and Seth had rented a car and navigated their way to the village of Ueno-mura in Gunma Prefecture. Then they’d trekked to Osutaka, the mountainous crash site. There, they’d observed the memorial stone, the bell and the religious statue representing mercy. They’d also taken in the metal-wood-and-stone memorial posts that had been erected by victims’ families. The structures held the remains of those victims. Veyda had crouched for a closer look at the photographs, toys and notes families had left at the posts.

  Afterward, they’d gone to Tokyo International Airport and visited the Safety Promotion Center, which housed a memorial to the tragedy. It displayed pieces of the wreckage and a history of events leading up to the accident. From the moment the bulkhead tore open, sealing the flight’s fate, it had remained airborne for half an hour before it crashed, giving some passengers time to write final messages to their families.

  These were respectfully presented for viewing at the memorial.

  “I don’t think we will survive. Thank you for a good life,” one note had read, while another passenger had written, “Always take care of each other. I’ll always love you. Please don’t forget me.”

  Tears had rolled down Veyda’s face as she’d read more notes.

  She was intimate with loss.

  After their visit to Japan, Veyda and Seth had flown to India and made their way to the location of the world’s third-worst air accident—in 1996, a Kazakhstan Airlines Ilyushin Il-76 had struck a Saudi Arabian Airlines 747.

  The Kazakh charter flight, with twenty-seven passengers and ten crew, had originated in Kazakhstan. It had been on its descent to Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport where the Saudi jumbo jet, with 289 passengers and twenty-three crew, had departed for Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The Kazakh jet had wrongly descended lower than its assigned altitude and had collided midair with the Saudi plane, killing 349 people.

  Wreckage had fallen from the skies to the fields below, nearly one hundred miles west of Delhi. Pieces of the charter jet had scattered near the village of Birohar, while remains of the Saudi 747 had fallen to the earth near the village of Charkhi Dadri. Enduring the heat, Veyda and Seth had walked among the fields where debris and bodies had rained down from the heavens.

  They were aware that upon recovering the cockpit voice recorder from the Saudi plane, investigators had learned that the pilots had recited the Islamic prayer for believers when they face death.

  Veyda was well acquainted with death.

  She felt a deep, spiritual connection to the disaster sites in Japan, India and the Canary Islands, and was glad that she and Seth had seen them, felt them, breathed them, firsthand.

  I need to bear witness to what we’re doing.

  She tugged at Seth and they stepped away from the Tenerife memorial at Mesa Mota to be alone. While Seth took pictures, Veyda checked her phone. She took a fast look at Newslead’s stories on EastCloud Flight 4990, and then reviewed Newslead’s stories filed from London on the Shikra Airlines tragedy.

  “Have you read them, Seth?”

  “I have. I’m disappointed, because she’s by far the best.”

  “Still nothing, nothing showing reverence to Zarathustra.” Veyda shook her head. “Does this Kate Page realize the gravity of her failure?”

  “Perhaps she needs to be enlightened?”

  “This entire sad world needs to be enlightened.”

  Veyda tapped her phone to her chin as she took in the airport below, her face stone-cold behind her dark glasses.

  “What happened on this island was a tragedy,” she said.

  “An epic tragedy. A record number of deaths.”

  “Records are made to be broken.”

 
Twenty-Seven

  Farnborough, England

  Shikra Airlines Flight 418’s right wing disintegrated and the landing gear ripped away as the jet piled into the ground, scraping, lifting, cartwheeling, breaking into pieces, spilling passengers, catching fire.

  Jittery footage of the crash had been captured by an amateur plane spotter, perched outside the perimeter of Heathrow’s southern runway.

  Jake Hooper made notes as the video was replayed several times in slow motion by an engineer with the Air Accidents Investigation Branch. Hooper was among the investigators gathered at the AAIB’s headquarters, located amid lush woodland at Farnborough Airport, a forty-five minute drive southwest of London.

  In keeping with international agreements, Hooper, Bill Cashill and other American experts, along with a contingent from Kuwait’s Aviation Safety Department and Shikra Airlines, were there to support the British investigation of Shikra Flight 418, which had crashed after its engines had shut down.

  The people around the table viewed the tragedy on the flat-screen that covered one wall. The silence that fell over the room was broken by the flipping of pages and the impatient tapping of Bill Cashill’s pen.

  “All right, colleagues, shall we continue, then?”

  A slide presentation on the crash replaced the video on the screen as Evan Taylor, a lead AAIB engineer, continued. The AAIB’s overview included a timeline, the aircraft’s flight history, summaries of the readouts from 418’s flight data recorder and transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder, as well as the email sent to the Kuwaiti Embassy in London.

  “Of course this is all unverified,” Taylor said. “We’ve yet to interview the crew, who are in serious but stable condition in hospital. You all have copies of the currently available information in your folders. Let’s go through it, shall we?”

  The group studied every aspect of the preliminary data, looking for the key piece to point them to the cause. Hooper examined factors like the automatic flight control system, autopilot engagement and disengagement, all cockpit flight control input, the control wheel, control column and rudder pedal, and the computer failure indicator.

  Other investigators concentrated on the performance of the crew. But they found nothing noteworthy on that front. All crew members were experienced with exemplary records. Blood testing showed no indication of drugs or alcohol. The crew was rested before the flight.

  Nothing had emerged as a potential preliminary explanation of the jet’s sudden shutdown of its engines. No reports of wind gusts, no early evidence of a bird strike; a simultaneous dual-engine failure was highly unlikely. Investigators scrutinized readouts for the power plants, and key factors such as fuel levels, fuel pumps and fuel flow. No problems had surfaced, and no evidence had emerged pointing to a system failure or malfunction of the aircraft’s digital fly-by-wire system, an extraordinarily complex control system built by Richlon-Titan.

  After several hours of intense work by the group, Taylor opened up the meeting and encouraged brainstorming on possible causes.

  “We believe we must give serious consideration to the email received by our Embassy in London,” said Waleed Al-Rashid, lead engineer for Shikra Airlines.

  “Why?” Bill Cashill’s head snapped up.

  “We think it is a factor, this anonymous communication.” Al-Rashid read from the page: “ ‘Sorrow and pain for one of your planes —Z.’ We cannot rule out the possibility that somehow, someone interfered with the operation of the aircraft.”

  “I think you’re grasping at straws,” Cashill said. “We’ve seen nothing to give this claim an ounce of weight, given it came after the incident.”

  “But Mr. Cashill,” Al-Rashid said, “the message is signed clearly with an English letter, Z. It is our understanding that American authorities also received a similar email concerning the incident with EastCloud Airlines Flight Forty-nine Ninety, the so-called Zarathustra email. Given that both flights involve aircraft with Richlon-Titan flight systems, I think we have a commonality worth considering, an avenue of investigation worth pursuing, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Hooper saw Cashill’s jaw muscles bunching.

  “Absolutely not!” Cashill said. “Everyone in this room is aware that the air industry receives groundless ‘threats’ daily, both in-flight and on the ground. And in ninety-nine percent of cases, they are unsubstantiated. Make no mistake, I’m not being cavalier about this. Yes, the FBI, British officials and your own security authorities are investigating both emails but so far, to our knowledge, they’ve found nothing concrete. If they had, they’d be leading both of our investigations right now.”

  “Mr. Cashill, I point you to line one twenty-three and those that follow in the transcript—the conversation between Captain Fahad Al-Anjari and copilot, Khalid Marafi, the line starting with Marafi.” Everyone turned to the transcript and read.

  Copilot: “We’ve got a double engine failure! The engines have been switched off!”

  Captain: “Switched off? How? We didn’t do that! Try restarting!”

  “My concern,” Al-Rashid said, “is that aspect about the switching off of the engines—specifically when the captain says, ‘We didn’t do that.’ This might point to a problem linked to the threat.”

  Cashill stabbed the table with the end of his pen.

  “This is nothing but a distraction. Look, our preliminary review of EastCloud points to clear-air turbulence and a pilot disabling the flight-management’s safety features to deal with it, resulting in the overcontrol of the aircraft. The pilot had an antidepressant in his blood and was embroiled in a personal family crisis at the time of the flight. Those are facts, and an absurd claim by Zarathustra, Lord of the Heavens, to a reporter in an email has no bearing on them.”

  “But, sir—” Al-Rashid said.

  “Let me finish. These emails are a distraction diverting us from the real facts here with your airline. And let’s be candid, your maintenance history with this plane has been sloppy. For starters...” Cashill tapped his pen to the table to underscore each point. “Tools left in the aircraft. Rivets improperly replaced in the underbelly. Maintenance logs incomplete. And the topper here everyone seems to have missed—improper replacement parts used in the flight-management electrical system.”

  “Mr. Cashill, without question, we—” Al-Rashid nodded to the other Kuwaiti experts “—accept and acknowledge your observations. However, my point, in relation to the two emails, is we must take into account the history of assertions by cyber experts that the computer systems used by new commercial jetliners can be hacked.”

  Cashill shook his head.

  “We’ve all been over this a hundred times. Those claims have been knocked down before by the NTSB, the FAA, the AAIB, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the European Aviation Safety Agency and many others, because it’s not possible to wirelessly interfere with flight-certified hardware. And we know the Richlon-Titan system has safety features that can be manually disabled, allowing the crew to manually direct the aircraft to perform beyond programmed safety limits. However, that system has some half a dozen safeguards to protect against a system failure, the loss of electrical power, or the malfunction of any of the onboard computers, which run on a stand-alone network. They can’t be hacked. We really need to move on here.”

  In the tense moment that passed, investigators made notes or studied pages from their folders.

  “Thank you, Bill and Waleed, for the informative debate. I think all points have to be considered as we move forward,” Taylor said.

  The AAIB engineers turned to the topic of engines. As they debated theories, Hooper could not silence the alarm ringing in a back corner of his mind because he agreed one hundred percent with the Kuwaitis.

  The threats raise real concerns.

  And Hooper couldn’t dismiss them. With both the Shikra and EastCl
oud flights there had been a sudden malfunction and a sudden failure. In both cases, they appeared to have surprised the crew.

  That formed the basis of a disturbing pattern.

  Was it interference?

  Hooper flipped through his folder, and began drawing circles on his pad, something he did as he fell into a deep thought.

  What if, just for a moment, we consider that somehow, somewhere, someone discovered a point of vulnerability in Richlon-Titan’s fly-by-wire system? What if they found a wireless jump point or a back door into the system? Was it possible to override the plane’s security software and gain access to the flight-critical system?

  Hooper felt a chill coil up his spine.

  What if it is possible?

  Twenty-Eight

  Manhattan, New York

  Old men played Chinese chess at the tables of Columbus Park in Manhattan’s Chinatown while not far off, a group of senior citizens practiced Tai Chi.

  Strategy and strength. That’s what I need.

  As Kate watched, she felt her story slipping away.

  It had been two days since she’d returned from London. In that time, she’d reconnected with her family, giving Grace, Vanessa and Nancy the souvenirs she’d bought for them in England. Kate had kept her promise and had taken Grace shopping for her new pink shoes.

  Wait ’til Amber sees these! Thank you, Mommy! Thank you!

  But with each passing moment since she’d got back, the story spun through Kate’s subconscious. Gut instinct told her that the London tragedy, the EastCloud flight and the Zarathustra email were connected. But she couldn’t go with the story until she could get an official to acknowledge it.

  Or could prove it herself.

  Chuck was right to demand on-the-record confirmation. Given the magnitude of the story, more was at stake than Newslead’s credibility. The impact it would have on the airline industry would be huge. It was clear to Kate that Newslead could not risk anything short of an airtight item.