by M. R. Hall
Passengers screamed. They were falling.
Jenny had passed an anxious and frustrating ten minutes in Guy Ransome’s suite while he barked orders into two telephones at once and finally succeeded in getting his message through to the National Air Traffic Control Service. He tried to be patched through to the aircraft’s cockpit but failed. Communicating with an airliner in flight was an exclusive business, it seemed; not even the airline’s owner could cut through the bureaucracy.
Having had the message back from Bristol, he slammed down the phone and turned to Jenny. ‘Bristol has made contact with them. They’re turning round and landing at Filton. It’s the only big airport close enough to land a 380 that can be safely cleared in time.’
‘Is the plane all right?’
Ransome forced back his shoulders and glanced off out of the window. ‘They have a computer fault.’
‘What sort of fault?’
The phone rang. Ransome snatched up the receiver. ‘Yes . . . I see. Where are they now? . . . Instruct Brendan to be ready to go in two minutes, and tell them she’ll be down directly.’ He ended the call and turned to Jenny. ‘The police are here. Do you want to go with them or come with me to Filton?’
‘How do I do that?’
He nodded towards the next room. ‘Fire escape.’
‘All right. Let’s go.’
She grabbed her bag and followed him. He paused to pull over the bolt on the main door, then stepped through to a passageway which led to the bedroom. French windows opened to a small balcony at the side of the building which connected to a narrow fire escape. Ransome went through and started down the steps. Behind them, Jenny heard a knock on the main door of the suite, and an insistent voice on the other side calling for it to be opened. She hurried after Ransome as the knocking turned to violent pounding.
She could hear the sound of the helicopter engines slowly winding up as she clattered down the final two flights and followed Ransome along the path which led to the corner of the building. The helicopter was fifty yards away on the open stretch of lawn behind the terrace.
‘Stop there!’ The voice belonged to one of two detectives who had made it onto the fire escape.
Jenny broke into a run.
‘What was that?’ Finlay yelled, as he fought to stabilize the aircraft after its sudden unprompted lurch to the left.
‘No idea,’ Cambourne answered, straining to keep his cool. Stick to the rules, he told himself. But he didn’t know of any that covered this situation.
‘What’s wrong with these bloody screens? How do we reboot them?’
‘I’m trying.’ Cambourne searched across the bank of switches above his head, hoping for inspiration. He was working from the assumption that several flight computers couldn’t malfunction at once without there being an electrical fault. Perhaps one of the four generators was malfunctioning. But without a system display to indicate which of the aircraft’s circuits was faulty, he was shooting in the dark.
Finlay steeled himself and took a deep breath. He was aware that his mind was cluttered with extraneous thoughts. The computers were the first officer’s responsibility. His task was to get the plane on the ground using whatever tools he possessed. He checked the two screens in front of him: the primary flight and navigation displays were still in working order. On the radar he could see the half-dozen planes in the corridor behind him peeling off to the east. The airspace had been cleared. He had an unobstructed hundred-mile run back over the Brecon Beacons and the Severn estuary into Filton, on the north-west outskirts of Bristol. It could have been worse: many airports didn’t have runways long enough to allow a 380 to land.
Finlay radioed the tower at Bristol. ‘Skyhawk 1–9-9, Bristol, we’re having some more electrical problems. We’re working on finding out which systems are faulty. We may need some assistance on the ground . . . Bristol?’
There was a click, then a constant static hiss over Finlay’s headphones. He glanced over at Cambourne. His face had turned a deathly white.
‘This isn’t making any sense,’ the first officer said.
‘Sir, please return to your seat.’ The stewardess pursued Michael along the aisle as he made his way forward towards the entrance to the cockpit.
‘I need to speak to the captain.’
‘You have to return to your seat.’
The chief steward appeared, blocking his path. ‘Sir, back to your seat at once, please.’
Michael spoke in a low whisper so as not to be overheard by passengers sitting nearby: ‘Did you know Captain Nuala Casey?’
Confused, the steward nodded.
‘So did I. I’m a fellow pilot, and I think I might know more than whoever is flying this plane about what happened on 189.’
‘What’s going on?’
The voice behind Michael belonged to Tommy Sanders. His usual swagger had been replaced by a look of alarm.
‘Tell these people to take me to the cockpit while they still can,’ Michael said.
Sanders’s face froze in fear.
‘Jesus Christ.’ Michael shoved past the steward and ran the length of the cabin to the cockpit door.
Captain Finlay and First Officer Cambourne had swapped seats. Finlay didn’t like to fly with his left hand on the joystick, but there it was, he had no choice. The priority was to get as low as possible and quickly; he needed to be able to see the ground.
The interphone buzzer sounded.
Cambourne responded: ‘Yes?’
‘Michael Sherman, formerly of the RAF. I was a friend of Captain Nuala Casey—’ Cambourne heard what appeared to be sounds of a scuffle breaking out in the background.
‘Ignore him,’ Finlay barked.
‘Are you in trouble?’ Michael insisted. ‘I may be able to help.’
‘Tell him to get back to his seat,’ Finlay snapped.
‘I think I know something about what happened on 189. Their stall must have been caused by loss of airspeed indication. I’ve got Nuala’s GPS with me—’
Cambourne hesitated.
Finlay relented. ‘All right. Let him in.’
Cambourne glanced left and saw that the two screens in front of the first officer’s seat now occupied by Finlay were starting to break up, too.
‘I said let him in – we’ve got no instruments.’
In the moments it took for Michael to pass through the two safety-locked doors that separated cabin and cockpit, Finlay took decisive action. He switched off all four of the aircraft’s main generators and activated the auxiliary power unit. The lights in the cockpit flickered and died.
‘Shit.’ The APU wasn’t functioning either. He activated the ram air turbine and waited on tenterhooks for the first sign that the propeller-driven generator had successfully dropped out from beneath the undercarriage and started to supply power to the aircraft’s vital systems.
Michael stepped out from the pitch-black void between the two doors as the cockpit lights blinked dully back into life.
‘Loss of power?’
‘We’re on the RAT,’ Finlay said.
Michael scanned the ten dead screens in the cockpit. ‘You’ve lost everything?’
‘I think I’m somewhere between direct law and mechanical back-up.’
‘Meaning?’
Finlay moved the joystick subtly right and pressed the right rudder pedal. ‘I’ve got joystick controls, left and right rudder, manual trim and thrust, but no instruments of any kind.’
For a moment, the three men fell silent. ‘Where’s that GPS?’ Cambourne said desperately.
Michael pulled the small hand-held unit out from his jacket pocket and switched it on. It took frustrating seconds to boot up.
‘You may not get a signal in here,’ Finlay said, ‘the shielding—’
He was right. Standing behind the cockpit seats there wasn’t even a single bar of reception.
‘Give it to me,’ Cambourne said, snatching it from him. He pressed it up hard against the cockpit window and two b
ars appeared. ‘It’s working – just.’
A map appeared plotting their position above the town of Pontypridd in South Wales. They were heading on a southeasterly course.
‘Here, let me.’ Michael leaned forward and adjusted the display to include crude speed and height readings as well as an electronic compass. ‘Don’t forget this is ground speed, not true airspeed.’
‘I’ll take anything I can get,’ Finlay said. ‘Has someone got a phone? We’d better call Bristol before they shoot us out of the sky.’
Greg Patterson’s shirt clung damply to his skin. Like him, his fellow business-class travellers were sitting stiffly in their comfortable seats flinching at every bump and sudden movement. The effortlessly smooth craft on which they had begun their flight now felt erratic and brittle. There was a strange, high-pitched whine beneath the sound of the engines. The cabin temperature had dropped and the air felt thinner. There had been no announcement from the cockpit, but no one in his section had yet called over a stewardess to demand an explanation. They didn’t want one. The plunge, the flickering lights, the failure of the seat-back screens all pointed to there being a serious problem, and the frequent fliers – which was most of them – would have noticed that the plane had turned around and was now heading downwards.
But only Patterson knew just how serious a problem it was likely to be. To die now would be the least he deserved for having let Amy travel alone. Since losing his only daughter he hadn’t found the courage to confront his boss, the founder and CEO of Cobalt Inc., Dale Cannon, or even to tell his wife what he knew. He was astonished and sickened by his own cowardice. His father had served as a front-line infantryman during three tours of duty in Vietnam and he had inherited none of his mettle.
But in nearly ten years working for Cobalt, Patterson had now come to realize that he had learned to separate the interests of business from its ethical consequences to a degree that would shock any reasonable human being. Dale Cannon, not the brightest man who had ever lived, though certainly one of the most cunning and amoral, had pulled off the trick of harnessing the intellectual curiosity of a number of highly intelligent men and women by exploiting their greed. His theory – that if you offered a high enough reward, a scientist would do just about anything if it could be passed off as advancing the sum total of human knowledge – had worked with a degree of success that reflected very bleakly on human nature. Cobalt’s software had generated billions of dollars in revenue. It had started with broadly laudable aims: to protect vulnerable and sensitive systems from outside attack, but Cannon had been unable to resist the lucrative offers from less salubrious customers. Cobalt had accepted contracts from the Saudi and Iranian governments to ensure that polluting Western influences didn’t make it to their citizens over the internet, and from security services as opposed in their philosophies as Israel’s Mossad and Pakistan’s ISI. In the purely commercial realm, it had worked on submarine control systems and advanced avionics, helping develop modular systems that could be updated and replaced at will.
Dale Cannon’s increasingly reckless choice of customers had been a long-standing and growing source of tension among a number of his senior executives. Matters had come to a head two years before when three of Cobalt’s top programmers were poached by a Chinese corporation to work on highly secretive government projects. All senior personnel, including Patterson, knew that this meant the Chinese would now have the means to penetrate and disrupt any number of systems, including the latest avionics in both military fighters and commercial airliners. But Cannon refused to discuss these dangers and, worse still, rebuffed all approaches by American government officials, convinced that they were determined to put him out of business.
Patterson had been secretly counting the days until the escalating Cold War in cyberspace claimed its first human victims. It had come later than he expected, but the warning signs had been present for several years. Localized disruptions in electricity and gas supplies throughout Europe had gone largely unreported, but he had noticed them; there had been blips in air traffic control systems too. These were given mundane explanations by local media, but surely no one could have ignored the twenty-minute diversion of a quarter of internet traffic through Chinese servers that had occurred in April 2010. Yet it seemed they had, at least until six weeks ago, when Doug Kennedy and two associates – one of whom was retired Wing Commander Tommy Sanders – turned up in Cobalt’s London offices threatening to drive them out of the free world unless they gave up the secrets of their technology. Dale had acted cool, initially playing along, then pulling Patterson out of their first Washington meeting merely to prove that he wasn’t going to be the government’s poodle.
Immediately it was known that Patterson wasn’t travelling, several colleagues contacted him urging him to go to Washington in any event. Not only the company’s but their own futures were potentially on the line, they argued. One even feared that they might face federal indictments. Patterson had been sorely tempted, but in the end his cowardly streak had again got the better of him. And to his everlasting shame, when Cannon telephoned to offer his condolences after the crash, he had felt pathetically grateful.
He railed against his predicament. It should have been Dale Cannon sitting in this seat now. It was all Cannon’s fault. When Sanders had approached him several days after the accident and subjected him to a lengthy interrogation, he had been left in no doubt that the CIA were convinced that viruses, which had probably started their lives as lines of code written in the sealed rooms of Cobalt’s Lombard Street offices, had found their way into the avionics of commercial airliners. They had undoubtedly passed through several sets of hands since and many stages of malignant evolution, but it was Cannon’s money that had nurtured them to life, his manipulation that had persuaded young minds to leave their consciences at the door.
Recruited to the near-impossible task of putting the genie back in the bottle, Patterson had worked hard over the ensuing days to gather as much data as he could to take to Kennedy in Washington, but had amassed far less than he might have done if his wife hadn’t behaved so recklessly. He had been on the verge of persuading a colleague to hand over passwords to one of Cobalt’s most secure servers when, in a grimly ironic twist, Michelle had released the contents of his private emails to the world, forcing him to take flight immediately to save what he had already collected.
How extensively the viruses were distributed and how precisely they were controlled remained unknown. If Sanders was to be believed, it appeared – anecdotally, at least – that many aircraft and airlines were already affected, meaning that no commercial flight could be considered completely safe. When Patterson had queried the wisdom of taking a 380 across the Atlantic to attend their Washington meeting, Sanders had replied that the first rule of warfare was that lightning never struck twice. Like a fool he had accepted the logic, not stopping to think that the analogy was entirely false: lightning was a random event; Cobalt’s programs were precision weapons.
The plane banked to the right and steepened its angle of descent. The strange whine grew louder, piercing his eardrum like a dentist’s drill. Patterson clamped his eyes tight shut and prayed that death would come quickly.
Sitting in the rear seat of the helicopter, Jenny struggled to hear the conversation Ransome was having on his phone over the noise of the engine. It seemed there had been some communication with the aircraft. She was desperate for news. It was selfish of her – there were probably many children, mothers and fathers and young people with their whole lives ahead of them on board – but all she could think of was Michael.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked as he rang off.
He didn’t answer.
‘What’s going on with the plane?’
‘Their only communication has been by cellphone and they’re navigating using a hand-held GPS.’ He seemed more angry than distressed. ‘200 million pounds’ worth of aircraft . . .’
Jenny felt the knot in her stomach tighten. ‘Wh
ere are they?’
‘Approaching the Severn estuary between Newport and Cardiff. They’ve dumped their fuel and are heading in to land at Filton.’
They broke through the blanket of low cloud at 6,000 feet and the landscape opened out beneath them. The estuary spanned the horizon from right to left, sparkling orange and yellow in the slanting sun.
‘300 miles per hour,’ Cambourne called out, no longer bothering to attempt the translation to knots. ‘9,500, 9,000 . . .’
‘Yes?’ Finlay barked.
‘We’ve lost reception – “searching for satellites”.’
Attempting to assist, Michael leaned forward from his seat behind Cambourne’s, but there was nothing to be done. Even pressed right up to the windshield the message remained stubbornly on the screen. ‘It’s probably the battery – it uses more juice on a weak signal.’
‘Where the hell does that leave us?’ Finlay said.
‘Grateful we’re in daylight,’ Michael said. ‘I know this bit of country, I’ll navigate. Turn five degrees left.’
‘Where are the RAF when you need them?’ Cambourne said. ‘Someone to guide us down wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘Trying to find a working plane, I expect,’ Michael replied. ‘The nearest Tornado’s probably in East Anglia. Expect them to arrive just about the time we’re touching down.’
Finlay had flown simulators on direct law, but no matter what the instructors said, it was a million miles from reality. Without the flight computers making their constant automatic adjustments, the aircraft had all the finesse of an oil-tanker in a force nine gale.
‘Keep her going down, nice and steady, ten miles to landing.’ Michael tried to sound reassuring, but his heart was beating so hard he could hardly force out the words. He had no idea how Finlay was remaining so calm; the man was made of steel.
The nose tipped down further as Finlay manually adjusted the trim and throttled back. The engines were now turning at little more than idling speed as they began their gliding descent towards an airport which remained invisible to him. As they crossed onto the southern side of the estuary the city of Bristol spread out ahead of them, but Finlay had no idea where to locate the runway.
