John Nance - Lockout

The power is coming off! he thought to himself, just as a voice yelled down from the flight deck, relaying Jerry’s words.

“PUT IT BACK! PUT IT BACK! THE ENGINES ARE COMING TO IDLE!”

“OKAY!” Dan yelled back over his shoulder as he prepared to re-mate the cut wires, positioning them so he could make firm contact and then twist them back together. He could feel the big aircraft continuing to slow. He was too far ahead of the wing mounted engines to actually hear them, but the decreasing sound of the slipstream told the tale. The thought crossed his mind with lightning speed that if the engines didn’t rebound when he touched the wires, they were truly at the end of the line, and the thought made him almost desperate to touch the wires together again, just as something else was warning him to wait.

What the hell am I missing? Dan thought. The pressure to act was accelerating to unfathomable levels as he forced his mind to divulge whatever it was thinking in the periphery of the subconscious.

Oh, jeez! Yes!

Dan turned to yell at the face he saw watching him from the hatch.

“PUSH THE THROTTLES UP! SEE IF THEY RESPOND!”

“What?”

“TELL THE CAPTAIN TO PUSH THE THROTTLES UP!”

Carol nodded and disappeared, and the seconds slowed down to an agonizing pace as time dilated and Dan lost track of reality. The two ends of the wire were still in his respective hands, and the big jet was getting progressively slower. Without more power they would slow and stall, and unless the autoflight system was truly engaged, they would fall out of the sky.

Dan tried to force himself to touch the wires and finish it, but another part of his brain was screaming to wait a few extra moments in case deliverance was at hand. When a surge of thrust reached his consciousness, Dan was unsure whether he was imagining it or feeling it.

Carol’s voice from above broke the suspense:

“IT WORKS! HE SAYS IT WORKS! WE HAVE MANUAL THROTTLES!”

Dan looked at Frank, realizing neither of them had been breathing. He gasped for breath then and smiled at the shaken passenger.

“Thank God!”

“Indeed.”

“Let’s get these wires taped and very far apart.”

“I can do that for you!” Frank said, a very large grin on his face. The jet was reaccelerating, the slipstream sounds rising back to where they’d been.

“I’m going up for a minute. Standby to reconnect those wires if something goes wrong.”

Dan all but levitated out of the hatch to find an ebullient captain fine-tuning throttles he could actually control.

“Jesus Christ, Dan! Well done! God, I’m not going to buy you a beer when we get on the ground, I’m buying you a friggin’ brewery!”

“Full manual control of the engines?”

“Yes! Goddamit, yes! And I can hear air traffic control on the radio. Bosnia, I think. One-twenty-one-five,” he said, citing the emergency frequency. “I can’t talk to them, but I can hear the buggers. I don’t know how fast we’re going, but I’m gonna slow us down a bit by feel to conserve fuel while you work the rest of your magic!”

“We’re just starting the process, Jerry.”

“I know, but hell, you can try to kill me in Anchorage anytime, Bro!”

Dan smiled, a cascade of emotions coursing through his head, all of which he forcibly suppressed.

“You have no side stick control, though?”

“No. And all the displays are fiction. But I’m pretty sure I can feel this baby well enough to slow her down without stalling.”

“Pretty sure?”

“All I’ve got. But we can control something for the first time in hours! How’d you do it?”

“The truth?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I guessed, Jerry.”

“Okay.”

“And the next guess might not be as lucky.”

Silver Springs, Maryland (8:45 p.m. EST / 0145 Zulu)

Jenny Reynolds sighed. Her laptop was fighting back, and she was getting seriously pissed.

She sat back for a second, rubbing her eyes before casting them around the surprisingly spacious apartment. She’d only imagined what a clandestine “safe house” would be like, but never had she actually been in one.

Jenny glanced at her watch, reading nearly 9:00 p.m. The Pangia flight would be over Tel Aviv in less than two hours now, and Will had apparently pried enough information out of his unsuspecting confederates at the Pentagon to confirm that nothing aboard had changed: The pilots were still unable to control the jet, and the rising level of alarm from Washington to Tehran was becoming deeply worrisome. Worse, Will had had the temerity to lay the singular hope of deliverance on her shoulders.

“I’m just guessing, Will. Let’s get real here. Even if I can figure out how to reverse whatever that original order was, that might not be enough to solve it. They could be taking telemetry orders from some live control room now and impervious to anything I send. Besides, this server is blocking me at every turn, and even if I write the right code, I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get it broadcast on the right channels in time.”

“Just do your best.”

“I am , but at precisely what point are we going to let someone else but us know what we suspect?”

“One more hour. Nothing bad’s going to happen to them for another hour. After that, it could be very bad.”

She’d stood then, moving to him as he stood by the door and taking him by the arm, locking eyes.

“I need a commitment, Will! Got it? If I can’t make it work by one more hour from now, we need to call a rainmaker. So who would that be?”

His eyes broke the lock and looked away, toward the window, then toward the door.

“No!” she snapped. “Stop that! Look at me, dammit!”

Will Bronson turned his gaze back to her, looking startled. “Okay, okay. Calm down.”

“Do you even have a plan?”

“Sort of.”

“ Sort of ? What do you… what do you mean sort of, for Chrissake?”

“Look, Jen, I’m not sure who we’re battling here.”

She cocked her head slightly as if seeing him for the first time. “Really?”

She sat studying him, realizing he was perspiring ever so slightly and looking far more uncertain that she’d recognized before.

“You know what I think?” she asked suddenly. “I think there’s a deeper subtext here, dude. I think what you’re trying hard not to say is that you’re not sure whether you’re protecting your bosses at the Pentagon and trying to undo what they’ve done in time, or whether we’re fighting some renegade group in the government, or maybe even some crazy individual? Am I right?”

He tried to pull away from her, but she tightened her grip. His voice was rising, betraying angry frustration.

“Okay, I don’t know. That’s the point. That’s why I came to find you tonight because I am worried who’s behind this and if it is our side and we’re messing with that flight for some legitimate reason, and I go and breach security to tell the world…”

“Goodbye career,” she finished the sentence for him.

“Yeah, and maybe worse. You, too.”

“All right, now I need YOU to focus. You just used the phrase ‘for some legitimate reason.’ Is there any legitimate, reasonable, conceivable justification for putting those people in peril, if this is something our side did?”

Will looked down in thought for a small eternity before sighing and nodding, then changing the gesture to an emphatic head shake. “No.”

“Then I need that commitment. One hour more. If I can’t be sure we’ve freed them… and it’s only a bizarre Hail Mary pass we’re talking about… if I’m not sure, who you gonna call?”