John Nance - Lockout

“Well, we know the flight controls worked on this ship out of Tel Aviv, and no one’s been in here with a welding torch, so presumably any huge switch array that’s been thrown down there can be unthrown, so to speak.”

“And if it can’t?” Jerry asked.

“Too early for apocalyptic thinking, my friend. Do you want the worst case? Ultimately?”

“Yeah, Dan. Give me the worst case.”

“Worst case is we all die. But the inconvenient truth is, we’re all going to die someday anyway, so all we can do is delay that inevitability as best we can, and when you work back from that premise, there is hope.”

First class cabin, Pangia 10

Forty feet aft of the cockpit Moishe Lavi had regained his seat and settled in, his eyes focused somewhere far away, as Ashira could clearly see. She knew this look, this sudden air of detachment, always the face he showed when something very strategically challenging was roiling his fertile brain. She had learned how to bide her time in learning what it might be, and even then—even in the throes of sexual delight when his guard was down and his cock was up and in total control—he would sometimes mislead her with an ease Prince Machiavelli would have admired.

She watched now in silence, her own stomach contracted at the news of the pilots’ loss of control and now Moishe’s studied response. She waited patiently for his return to the mundane cabin of the aircraft, trying to guess his mind.

As Moishe Lavi returned to his seat, Carol quietly pulled open the cockpit door and stood just inside, her eyes wide as she waited for at least one of the pilots to turn toward her.

“We have a signal!” she said, causing both pilots to turn toward her.

“Sorry?” Dan managed.

“On one of the cell phones we gathered. We have a signal, and we have an operator!” She held out the handset, and Jerry grabbed it with the zeal of a starving dog lunging for a scrap.

First class cabin, Pangia 10 (2330 Zulu)

Ashira had been ready to offer at least one of their top-of-the-line satellite phones to the crew, but Moishe had vetoed the idea, directing her instead to hide the transceiver. There were many things Moishe did that irritated her, but his order had mostly twanged her suspicions.

Ashira was watching him closely, but Lavi was paying no attention, as he sat hunched over a laptop computer that seemed to have his undivided attention. Finally he looked up, locking eyes with her as he snapped the lid closed.

“So, we are returning.”

Ashira’s eyebrows had arched slightly. “To Tel Aviv?”

“Yes… and no. We may fly over our homes and then head for Tehran.”

“WHAT?” she managed.

Moishe Lavi looked almost smug, and while he sometimes reacted to stress this way, it made no sense.

“How do you know this?” Ashira asked, her mind whirling through all the ways any in-the-clear communication could be intercepted and used against them.

“I have Internet… I have email… I have sources, Ashira, and I remain in charge of me. You should know that.”

Cockpit, Pangia 10 (2340 Zulu)

Feeling as if another lifeline had been snatched away from his fingertips, Jerry stopped the constant re-dial attempts and placed the borrowed cell phone in his lap, forcing himself to sit in thought for a second.

“Did they hear you?” Dan was asking. “Did they understand we’re locked out of the system?”

“I think they did… but they said it was coming through badly… like every other word. You heard my end.”

“What were you responding to when you said, ‘We couldn’t be if we tried’?”

Jerry turned toward his copilot with a crooked smile. “They asked if we were hijacked.”

Dan shook his head in amazement. “If we can’t believe all this, I wouldn’t expect them to. That was operations in Chicago?”

“Yeah… and one of our vice presidents, no less… if I heard him right.”

“Okay, Jerry, I’m going down to the electronics bay again. Please motor your seat full forward.”

The captain gave a perfunctory nod as his first officer lifted the floor hatch and once again carefully squeezed behind the captain’s seat. He descended the diminutive ladder into the crowded corridor of electronic racks and blinking lights carrying his airline-issued iPad which was already keyed to the limited electrical schematics pilots were allowed to view. Bill Breem had begged off going down again, describing his wiring knowledge as too rudimentary to be helpful, an uncharacteristic admission stated with a degree of embarrassment.

Even knowing electrical and electronic circuits as well as he did, Dan had never seen the real engineering schematics for the Airbus A330 either. But there was an innate logic to the way even Airbus organized the hundreds of miles of wires that formed the electronic keel beam of the plane. Most of the complex cable harnesses, as they were called, were buried behind baffles and conduits or beneath the floor panels he was standing on, and as he snapped on the interior lights and looked carefully in all directions, nothing seemed out of place.

Where the hell do I begin? Dan wondered. How would you disconnect an entire cockpit, yet continue to feed it bullshit flight information for the displays?

The presence of the unfamiliar cabinet toward the rear of the compartment had been his target before descending the ladder, but there was always an ethereal hope that he’d missed something big and obvious on the first excursion beneath the cockpit. But nothing looked even remotely like a single switch that could reconnect everything, restoring their ability to actually fly the airplane.

Dan moved carefully aft, shining his flashlight around on the various exposed electronic racks, trying to take nothing for granted. But even the electronics boxes with blinking diagnostic lights appeared to be normal.

He reached the unknown cabinet and whistled to himself. The size of it was larger than he’d remembered. Almost eight feet in length, about five feet high, and spanning perhaps three feet laterally, the side made out of what looked suspiciously like a weight-wasting stainless steel. But despite his best effort, he couldn’t locate even a hint of a hatch or service door.

At the forward end, he could see a cascade of cables entering the cabinet, but without pulling up the floor panels it was unclear where they were coming from. The sheer size of the cable harness, however, looked formidable—as if every circuit in the airplane was routed through the big box.

Gotta get inside this thing! No warnings, no labels, no nothing. This makes no sense! You don’t put a major component in an airplane and weld the whole thing shut. There’s got to be a hatch on here somewhere.

He moved carefully towards the aft end of the cabinet, examining every square inch he could reach by running his fingers along the smooth, unpainted metallic surface.

Okay, logically, if there are no openable panels, then the entire side has to come off or swing open.

He ran his fingers over the top of the right side from aft to forward, realizing at last that there was a ridge where the sheet metal was bent from the vertical to horizontal, overlapping the edge by perhaps two inches, the overlap unseen on the top. He examined the entire front-to-back breadth of the seam, feeling for a latch or screws or some sort of fastener.

On the third pass, he found what felt like a round depression, just the size for an index finger to push in on some type of button.

The space between the top of the cabinet and the roof of the electronics bay was only two inches, not enough to see over, but he could feel the button give a little when he pushed it, and spreading his legs to get a steady stance while holding the edge of the metal rack to his right, Dan shoved his index finger down with as much force as he dared.