John Nance - Lockout

“There’s a good reason!”

“Which I need to know.”

“It has to do with monitoring. I don’t want anyone cancelling out whatever you send. We could have only one chance.”

“And time is running out, right?”

“One shot, Jen! You want to gamble?”

She snapped back to the computer, re-focusing on where she’d been when his phone rang. Both of them stared at the screen in silence for a few moments.

“I know a transponder you could use clandestinely, but we can’t trigger it out of this place,” he added.

Jenny sighed and bit her lip, racing her mind’s eye around a planet full of communications satellites and trying to recall a classified vulnerability she’d read about within the last few weeks. It was a geosynchronous communications satellite over the eastern Atlantic, which would cover the Mediterranean and some of the Middle East, but what was the vulnerability?

“Jenny?”

“Shh-h. I’m thinking.”

“About what?” Will got to his feet and stood aside quietly, watching her as she tapped a pencil on the desk and then started nibbling the eraser like a crazed chipmunk, occasionally shaking her head as if in deep dialogue with an unseen colleague. He was wholly unprepared for her to turn suddenly and yelp.

“What?”

“I think I’ve got it. I hope I’ve got it!”

“Okay. Can I ask what?”

She was already back at the keyboard typing frantically, bringing up a series of pages of some technical site and landing finally on a blinking cursor. She typed in a series of keystrokes and waited as some distant server considered her request.

The screen filled suddenly with a blue background and a series of open fields.

“Yes, yes, yes! I did remember. They were testing this one transponder and someone left the portal open with a very mundane sign-in code.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’ve got one shot at uploading the reversal string and firing it toward the Med. If we’re lucky, it will repeat three or four times before self-cancelling. But, hopefully, that will be enough.”

“And the frequency is the same?”

“I’m not certain, Will, but I think this covers the same spectrum.”

“Will NSA intercept it?”

“Yes, but not immediately.”

“Then for God’s sake, don’t do it! Not from here.”

“Will… why?”

“Save your work. Here’s a flash drive. Save it, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

“What aren’t you telling me, Will Bronson?”

“That we may have every cop in the Beltway looking for us! Please, let’s go!”

She worked quickly to transfer the computer code to the flash drive, her head spinning with the pressures of time and Will’s sudden panic over transmitting. But the opportunity was there and the transponder was waiting, her finger poised over the execute key he hadn’t seen her pull up. She glanced over as he moved to the window to check outside, and tapped the key, immediately collapsing the transmit page. Maybe it would be tracked and maybe it wouldn’t be, but she’d taken her best shot. He was wrong to want to wait, she was sure of that, yet something wasn’t quite making sense about his concerns.

Just as suddenly, he was back at her side, nodding as she ordered the computer into hibernate mode and snapped it shut, handing him the flash drive.

“Okay. Done.”

“What do you mean, done?” he asked, searching her eyes.

“I mean it’s on the flash drive and saved, I’m ready to get back to that transponder when you think it’s safe, and I’m ready to get out of here. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Although I’m worried we may have blown the one chance to stop this,” Jenny said, wondering why she was lying about it. What was she doing, testing him?

Will was already turning toward the door, his hand on her shoulder.

“Worry not. I’ve got it under control.”

Aboard Pangia 10 (0245 Zulu)

Still flush with hope, even an hour after restoring the throttles to manual control, Dan Horneman prepared to descend the ladder to the electronics bay once again, pausing behind the captain’s seat to put a hand on Jerry Tollefson’s shoulder.

“Hang in there, Captain!”

Bill Breem had spent the last hour standing behind the copilot’s seat, watching and working with Josh Begich, trying to figure out wiring diagrams they’d called up on Dan’s company iPad.

Jerry turned as far around as he could, nodding at his first officer. “Yeah, you, too, Dan. Be damned careful down there.”

“I will.”

Dan looked back at the copilot’s seat where Josh Begich was punching his way through electrical diagrams. Carol was back in the cockpit, waiting to kneel as best she could in the cramped space behind the captain’s seat to be the relay for Dan. He could see the strain on her face as she struggled to smile at him.

Frank Erlichman was anxiously waiting for Dan at the bottom of the ladder.

“Any progress, Frank?”

The man nodded, his words precise and spoken in a slow meter in pace with the seriousness of the situation. “I have been tracing wires as fast as I could, and I believe I know where the main controls have been spliced; although whoever wired this modification did such a professional job you would never know it wasn’t a part of the original wiring harness.”

“Show me, please,” Dan replied, following the man to the right side rack. “We don’t have much time.”

“Ja, I think,” Frank continued, “…if we cut here and here… ready to reconnect as before… and then splice these wires with these… we might be able to reroute control of the autoflight system. But… it is a big gamble.”

“How much?”

“Pardon?”

“How much is guesswork and how much is certain, Frank?”

The man looked the copilot in the eye without a trace of humor and laughed ruefully. “It is all guesswork. I am not certain of anything.”

“Okay. Is there a safer approach?”

“Yes. I think so. Those racks in what you call the cabinet?”

“Yes?”

“It is full of relays. Why would it be full of relays if the purpose wasn’t to shunt power and control?”

Dan looked at the long rows of small, square metal cubes and a semi-ancient memory popped into his head, a memory of trying to explain what a relay was to his mother, who thought it somehow would explain what her son was doing to make money in the software business.

“Think of it this way, Mom,” he’d said. “All the lights in town have gone off in a storm. Now the storm is gone, and I want to turn all the lights on again. But that’s a huge amount of electricity, and I want to just flick a little switch. So, instead of routing a river of power through tiny wires that would burn up, I use a relay. I flick a switch, a little power goes through a little wire and powers an electromagnet, the electromagnet causes a metal rod to move a much bigger switch from “off” to “on,” and I never have to get close to that much bigger and more dangerous amount of electricity.”

It had been a noble attempt, but when she explained to friends that Dan controlled the city’s light system, he gave up.

Frank, he realized, was talking, and he’d let himself drift.

“In other words,” Frank repeated, “…I think that is how it is done. My thinking is that the relays are not normally powered on, so that when they’re not powered, all is normal. When something causes them to come on and do their job of switching, that’s when everything changes. The flight controls, for instance. The relay is energized, one of them cuts the power going to and from your flight controls… your sidestick controls on the flight deck… removing your manual input to the autoflight computers. Instead, it sends false information to the same autoflight computers, enabling them to be commanded perhaps by radio from outside, or by some internal program. In any event, as long as those relays are active, you can’t interfere.”