John Nance - Lockout

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Lockout: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Over the Atlantic in the dark of night, the electronic brain of Pangia Airlines Flight 10 quietly and without warning disconnects all the cockpit controls and reverses course on its own.
The crew of the huge Airbus 330 at first sense nothing, the flight displays still showing them on course to New York. But with puzzled passengers reporting stars on the wrong side and growing alarm over the sudden failure of all their radios — and when armed fighters pull alongside to force them to land — the confused pilots discover that Flight 10 is streaking back toward the hyper-volatile Middle East and there is nothing they can do about it.
With an alphabet soup of federal agencies struggling for answers and messages flying between Washington, and Tel Aviv where the flight began, the growing supposition that Flight 10 may be hijacked is fueled by the presence of a feared and hated former head of state sitting in first class, a man with an extreme Mid East agenda who may somehow be responsible for the Airbus A-330’s loss of control. As frantic speculation spreads, the possibility that the unresponsive airliner could be the leading edge of a sophisticated attack on Iran designed to provoke a nuclear response drives increasingly desperate decisions.
As time and fuel runs low, flying at full throttle toward a hostile border ahead, Captain Jerry Tollefson and First Officer Dan Horneman have to put their personal animosities aside and risk everything to wrest control from the electronic ghost holding them — and perhaps the world — on a course to certain disaster.
And in the “Hole” — as the war room in Tel Aviv is called — the interim Prime Minister of Israel grapples with a horrifying choice in the balance between 300 airborne lives and the probability of nuclear war.

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Every minute on the ground, Ashira Dyan reminded herself, was a minute closer to a diplomatic nightmare. Making matters worse was the very real possibility that the former prime minister was in serious medical trouble. Even with his steadfast denials and iron-jawed attempts to pretend nothing was wrong, his breathing was labored and he was increasingly rubbing his left arm and sweating profusely in the relatively cool air of the desert night.

A large black Suburban belonging to the American Embassy had plucked them off the ramp just minutes after they had jumped out of Pangia’s Airbus, but for the last half hour the presumably-loyal Iraqi driver had hovered in the lee of the terminal, keeping clear of customs and the local police and waiting to ferry them safely to whatever aircraft could be found for what they all understood was an emergency exfiltration—a quick and clandestine flight away from Iraq. Moishe’s medical situation was getting worse, but he angrily refused to discuss it, and after all, Ashira thought, what can we do? Even if he had a hangnail, Moishe Lavi’s prospects of surviving a trip to an Iraqi emergency room would be nil.

Word that a Gulfstream 5 belonging to a European oil company had been chartered out of Tel Aviv made complete sense, until the plane had come to a stop on the ramp and the Suburban had pulled alongside. Ashira recognized the jet, and despite the Dutch registration number on the tail, she knew well it was one of Mossad’s many tools for rapid extraction. The pilots appeared quickly at the top of the airstairs, both of them completing the image of two Dutch nationals wholly unconnected with Tel Aviv in their professional pilot shirts complete with epaulets. But they, too, were Mossad’s men.

Ashira followed, as they shepherded Moishe Lavi into the Gulfstream. Two flight attendants greeted the former prime minister with appropriate deference as the pilots quickly started the engines and began taxiing, but the relief at leaving the ground and turning toward Israel was tempered for Ashira by her deepening concern that Moishe was deteriorating toward a full blown coronary. Quietly, she briefed the lead flight attendant, who positioned the aircraft’s first aid kit at hand and placed a charged defibrillator behind his seat. There would be nothing more they could do aside from arranging for the best paramedics possible to be waiting at Ben Gurion airport.

And that was more than an hour away.

Building 4-104, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs

Richard Duncan sat nervously across from the desk of his supervisor, his face a study in apprehension. A retired navy chief with a top secret clearance, he’d been approved years before for a job no one else wanted: housekeeper in the main offices of a black project that officially didn’t exist. Not even his wife knew where he went every evening, other than the fact that he cleaned offices to supplement their retirement income. Fifty-six, slightly overweight, and normally jovial, he had been summoned upstairs and escorted to his boss’s office.

His supervisor was fifteen years his junior in age and a genuinely nice person, Richard had always felt, but she was clearly under pressure as she entered the office now and closed the door.

“Richard, we may have a problem,” she began. “I need complete candor from you, okay?”

“Of course. Always.”

“You were the only person with access to the server room night before last, and we’ve been trying to track down a very unusual occurrence we now think may have involved one of the servers. Was anyone else down there with you?”

“No, ma’am. I’m always careful to make sure no one follows me in without clearance. I was alone.”

“Very well, then, this is the key question I have to ask you. Did anything out of the ordinary happen while you were in there by yourself?”

“Yes.”

Cabinet Room, The White House

Being unable to join the others in the Situation Room who had been watching the real time information flow had been difficult for Paul Wriggle, but the president had arranged a steady stream of relayed messages to keep him informed, while he waited with Jenny Reynolds and Will Bronson. It was especially important for internal military politics, Paul Wriggle suggested, that a mere two star such as he not be seen hanging out with the president of the United States, especially when the four star general who was the air force chief of staff was in the building.

News that the Airbus A330 had successfully landed in Baghdad with the tattered remains of number two engine on the right wing immediately raised the question of how to get the jumbo jet repaired and back in the air toward the US. Paul had been on the phone almost continuously with Dana Baumgartner back in Colorado Springs as they started to pull together an aircraft-on-the-ground team, chase down a replacement engine, and work on getting someone into Baghdad to inspect the damage. More than an hour passed before word came that a Special Forces team had already arrived at Baghdad airport to secure the A330, but that was merely step one.

The general glanced at the door again, expecting it to open at any time with the president inbound. Working so diligently while suffused with a deep sense of gloom was emotionally exhausting, but he had no choice. He replaced the receiver and met the gaze of the other two people in the room as the president and chief of staff walked in the door, sitting quickly at the table across from Jenny and Will.

“I owe you two an explanation,” the president began, “but I can explain only part of what has happened tonight. The biggest part of the mystery remains. What role might have Mr. Lavi played in all this, if he played any at all; and to that end, I wish the hell I could have teleported to Baghdad a while ago and shaken it out of him.”

“Would there be an opportunity to speak with him later, sir?” Will asked, puzzled that the president was shaking his head sadly.

“Not in this life, Will. The jet that plucked him out of Baghdad a little more than an hour ago just landed in Tel Aviv. Moishe Lavi had a massive coronary in flight and was dead on arrival.”

Jenny and Will exchanged startled glances as the president continued.

“That doesn’t mean we won’t get to the bottom of it. I’m convinced this was his doing, and a faction of the Israeli intelligence apparatus is probably responsible, but what I want to make sure of is that what you suspected, Will, is not true. The mere thought that the DIA might have been assisting Lavi is intolerable, and if it turned out to be true, I would have to deal with it harshly.”

“But, sir,” Jenny began, “…what about the aircraft? How could it lock out its pilots?”

The president glanced at Paul Wriggle and arched a thumb in his direction. “Partially because this fellow did what I asked him to do,” the president began. “No, I didn’t ask him to imperil the Pangia flight, but I did ask him to build a system that could disconnect a cockpit in flight.” The president turned to General Wriggle. “Paul? Do you want to narrate the details, or should I?”

“Your choice, Mr. President.”

“Okay, I’ll do it.” He turned back to Jenny and Will. “Do the two of you remember when President G.W. Bush promised, just after 9/11, that we’d be able to take control of airliners in the future from the ground and prevent hijackers from flying into buildings?”

“Yes,” Jenny said. “I recall he was at Chicago O’Hare at the time. It was a planeside news conference.”

“That’s correct, it was. And it was a result of incredibly negligent staff work. The airline community was agape if not outraged. No one had such a system designed, and no one thought it could work. But even though President Bush’s announcement was a grossly premature declaration, one of my later predecessors rekindled the idea as Project Skyhook, and while you don’t need to know all the gory details, when the science looked shaky, that president decided he was going to terminate the program but announce to the world that we’d already equipped every US flagged airliner with such a system, even though it didn’t really exist. It was kind of a brilliant idea to deter al Qaida, but at the last minute, a seismic shift in the intelligence picture scrubbed the public disinformation campaign and the project was shoved to the back burner. Actually, it was shelved because it would have been terribly expensive, and because there were a lot of experts cautioning that an accidental takeover from the ground with such a system could create havoc. Worse, President Bush had said air traffic controllers would do the recovery flying of a hijacked airliner, but most air traffic controllers are not qualified heavy jet pilots, so an entire cadre of standby drone pilots would be needed. Anyway, when I came into office the following year and was briefed on this, I decided to change the name of the project but keep a deep black project team working on it, just in case the idea might prove more viable with better technology.”

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