John Nance: Lockout

There it was again, that same feeling they were sinking too much. It shuddered through Dan, prompting him to pull more back pressure on the yoke as he ran the pitch trim nose up to compensate. He had to be missing something. Nothing felt right!

Still more back pressure and more nose up trim. Definitely not right!

“Get out the fire extinguishers and check the trash bins in the restrooms and turn off the circuit breakers in the galley,” Jerry barked the order into the phone.

“Should we declare an emergency?” Dan asked, glancing at Jerry in time to see him shake his head.

Dan glanced back up at the glareshield, confirming the 160-knot speed he’d dialed into the speed selection window. But his confusion was growing over what the wallowing of the 737 was trying to tell him. He stole another glance at the real airspeed indicator with such a firm expectation of seeing the same 160-knot reading that his brain refused to contradict him with the fact that it read only 130 knots.

The jet was descending through an altitude of 600 feet above the snow-covered surface of Turnigan Arm, the body of shallow seawater that alternately became a vast mudflat at low tide, the scope of it extending from the western end of the runway several miles across the channel.

“You’re kidding! A cigarette in the trashcan?” The captain was shaking his head, still on the interphone.

Once more Dan ran the pitch trim nose up and increased his pull on the control yoke to get them back up on the glide path, but as the nose seemed to respond, a sudden, massive, audible vibration coursed through the control column, refusing to stop, the vibrations buzzing through Dan’s consciousness, confusing him, paralyzing him, the shaking making no more sense than the sudden blur of motion in his peripheral vision as the captain loosed a guttural cry and lunged forward, flinging the handset away.

“JESUS!”

Tollefson jammed the throttles to the stops and shoved the control yoke forward. The engines wound up to full power, accelerating and buzzing at full takeoff setting, as Dan moved his left hand to back up the captain’s on the throttles, but the captain angrily waved him away.

“I’VE GOT IT! MY AIRPLANE!”

The seismic shaking of the control column stopped, but Tollefson’s eyes were aflame as he glanced toward his copilot.

With the airspeed rapidly increasing and the nose down, they sank below the 300-foot threshold of the runway as the four blood-red VASI lights ahead disappeared.

Dan was already folding up with embarrassment. He’d failed to recognize the so-called stick shaker, the most basic emergency warning in the cockpit—the 737’s way of telling its pilots that the plane was a mere three knots away from not having enough airspeed to stay in the air. He’d all but stalled them, and now Jerry was fighting to keep them in the air.

Tollefson pulled gingerly, carefully, the big 737 too low to get over the embankment less than a quarter mile ahead without more altitude, the airspeed accelerating slowly now above 130 knots. He arrested their overall descent less than 150 feet above the muddy bay, the engines screaming, the Boeing gaining airspeed, the captain careful not to re-enter the event horizon of a stall as they began climbing again, struggling to nurse the jet back above the altitude of the runway threshold.

And just as quickly they were high enough and the runway surface reappeared, the aircraft now climbing, the airspeed coming up through 165 knots, flashing over the threshold embankment at the end without shearing off the landing gear, but with little more than thirty feet to spare.

Jerry swept the throttles back to idle, fighting too much airspeed as well as the vicious, gusting crosswind. He wrestled the 737 toward the concrete, the yoke continuously in motion, using the rudder to kick out the twenty-degree crab into a sideslip as he set the jet down on the left main gear about halfway down the runway. He let her roll to the right enough to settle the right main gear and nose gear and in a blur of movement yanked the spoilers out and the thrust reversers into operation, struggling to keep her on centerline, listening to the chattering of the anti-skid system as they slowly decelerated on the slick surface through a hundred knots, then eighty, then sixty, the end of the runway coming up too fast, his stomach in a knot.

With agonizing slowness the speed decreased until at last it dropped below twenty, and Jerry Tollefson gingerly steered the 737 to the left and off the end of the runway, where he came to a complete stop on the runup apron.

The captain took a deep breath and looked over at Dan Horneman, as if an alien had suddenly plopped down in the copilot’s seat.

“What in holy hell was THAT, Dan?”

“I…”

“You almost killed us!”

“I… I don’t know, Jerry, I…”

“Where the hell was your airspeed control?”

“I had the autothrottles on…”

“You WHAT?”

“The autothrottles, I had them on and…”

“No you didn’t… they weren’t even armed! I turned them off when I killed the ILS and told you to fly the damned approach manually. You were supposed to be flying this mother, not programming her!”

“I don’t know what to say, Jerry, other than I humbly apologize, and I recognize that you saved us.”

Tollefson was shaking his head in utter amazement, his left hand still on the yoke and shaking slightly as he tried to get a handle on what to say and how to answer the tower controller who was waiting for them to change to Ground Control.

“Where in the hell did you learn to fly, Horneman? Microsoft?”

Three Years Later

National Security Agency, Ft. Meade, Maryland (9:05 a.m. EST / 1405 Zulu)

Jenny Reynolds sighed and let her mind refocus as she forced herself to stop tapping out a desktop drum solo with her pencil. Two hours trying to unravel a mystery message had passed her personal breaking point.

Jenny shook her head in a gesture no one noticed and forced herself to disconnect from the puzzle. An hour ago she’d yanked off her iPod headset to concentrate, but the challenge of an uncracked code would not stop chewing on her. Why had a simple unidentified satellite burst managed to offend her so profoundly?

NSA’s satellites and computers picked up endless bursts every hour that she couldn’t translate, at least at first—transmissions with no known syntax, no known purpose, and no recognized source. Of course, there were also sophisticated communication “gamers” all over the planet who loved to stick a finger in the NSA’s eye from time to time with sequences which were exactly what they appeared to be: garbage. Gobbledygook uplinked just to worry Washington and give Ivan, Ahmed, or Chan a good laugh, especially since that scumbag Snowden defected.

But this transmission was different somehow. Not a game. Wrong point of origin, wrong frequency, wrong everything. It was there, just out of reach, teasing her to recognize something in the encoding.

And, there was that other disturbing reality: People didn’t waste time encoding messages hidden in frequency harmonics and piggybacked on routine transmissions unless there was a very specific purpose to be served.

I’m trying to be the perfectionist again! she thought, well aware that her penchant for being perfect tended to irritate her geeky coworkers—as did the fact that she liked to dress well. “Learn to call for help every now and then,” she’d been told in her recent job review. It was a slap in the face that still stung.

Jenny slipped her feet back into the black pumps that gave her a fighting chance of seeming taller than her petite five feet, and she force-marched herself through the labyrinth of cubicles to her boss’s corner office.