Fly by Wire

Chapter EIGHTEEN

Sorensen took off her New Balances before she entered her room. They were caked in mud, and she figured housekeeping would appreciate it if she didn't track it all over the carpet. She had just tossed them in the tub when her phone rang.

It was a government-issued device — big, heavy, and power-hungry, with a battery symbol that always seemed to be pressing the last bar. The thing was supposedly secure, another satellite gadget, but these days you could never be sure. She walked to the window with the phone in hand, allowing two more rings to shift her mental gears. Sorensen glanced outside. Her room had a reaching view of an open field bordered by brown, dormant hedgerows. In another three months it would be nice to look at. She turned away and hit the green button.

"Sorensen here."

"We need a status report."

She rolled her eyes. No, Hey, how are you? Not even a name to the voice. Just some mid-level guy on the European desk who'd been tasked to keep a distant eye on her. The hard truth came to Sorensen's mind that in five more years it would probably be her on the other end of the line. It made her think about Jammer Davis and his distaste for big, faceless bureaucracies. Maybe he had a point.

Her reply came with an edge. "My status is that I just spent my entire morning with Davis crawling through mud at the crash site. I learned a lot. It'll give me some credibility."

"So he's cooperating?"

She hesitated. "He said he'd help. The guy knows his stuff. He has some good ideas about what brought the airplane down."

"We don't give a rat's ass about what brought the airplane down," countered the terse voice of Langley. "We want Caliph, and you've been inserted into this investigation to take a thorough look at CargoAir."

"Give me a chance, I've only been on the job for two days. We have to go through a few motions here."

"Screw the motions — there's no time! You know what's been happening. Caliph has attacked us directly. This investigation crap will take months. We need results now!"

Sorensen gripped the phone tighter. She really had a way with men these days. "What have you got for me?" she said, turning the tables. "I need that information on Ibrahim Jaber."

After a long pause, the man in Langley began dictating. It didn't take long.

"That's not much," Sorensen said.

"We're still working on it. We dug up what we could. You just didn't give us enough—" the voice faded.

Time, she thought with a grin.

"Look, Sorensen, this is highest priority. You and Davis need to work fast."

"I realize that. And as far as Davis goes — he's a lot of things, but patient isn't one of them. He'll make headway."

"Check in tomorrow at the usual time." The connection cut off abruptly.

"And you have a great day too," she said mockingly to the steady tone that buzzed from her handset.

Sorensen turned off the phone and threw it onto the couch where it clattered against a spent room service tray. A metal cover plate hid the remainder of her half-eaten midnight sandwich. It had been dreadful.

Sorensen went to the bathroom and forced her eyes to the mirror. She knew it wouldn't be good. Her eyes were bloodshot under a dirt-smudged forehead, and damp hair was matted to the sides of her neck. She looked like she felt — tired. She could use a day at a spa, maybe a massage. Fat chance. Her reality was surly phone calls and bad hotel food. Sorensen wasn't normally one for self-pity. Not for the first time, though, she questioned her career choice. It was an argument she'd been having with herself for six months now.

Her sister had married well — or at least rich. At thirty-six, Vicky was three years older, but looked five years younger. Missing were the worry lines drawn by too many all-night surveillance shifts and the stress of endless travel. Vicky Sorensen had her Waspy husband, her uber-house, her twins in preschool. Anna Sorensen had turned it all down.

His name had been Greg. Greg Van Essen. B. S. from NYU. Then an MBA. Landed at UBS. All the uppercase letters you needed in life. He was good looking, in a preppy kind of way. Considerate, in a roses on Valentines Day kind of way. She'd known him and liked him for two years. They were easy together, comfortable. So there was no reason for her to say no when, last summer, he had asked her to marry him.

And she hadn't said no. She'd asked for time. But wasn't that the same thing? When a great guy gets down on a knee and says, "Spend the rest of your life with me," you're not supposed to say you'll give it due and proper consideration. You're supposed to gush, "Yes! Yes!" But that never happened. Maybe it would someday. Maybe she'd spend twenty years at the Company and then find that one great guy who had somehow slipped through to middle age unscathed and without baggage. The one who wouldn't worry about crow's feet or a few gray hairs. Sure she would.

Sorensen turned to the tub and began to run water. The hot side wasn't working. So, under an arctic spray, she went to work scraping mud from her tennis shoes with a hotel toothbrush.

The conference room was a standard affair, institutional chairs and three tables mated end-to-end. Over a dozen people associated with the investigation were present, including the head of each working group. Bastien kicked things off with a reminder for everyone that what they were about to hear was privileged information, not for public release. Davis found the warning laughable given what the investigator-in-charge had done yesterday.

"As you all know," Bastien said, "the flight data recorder has so far given no usable information from the moment the dive began. Our technicians, of course, will continue their work. It has been determined, however, that up to the moment when the data stopped streaming, everything was consistent with a normal flight profile."

Bastien introduced the lead engineer from the manufacturer of the voice recorder, Doral Systems. The guy passed around a stack of business cards and everybody took one. Davis saw a cell phone number scrawled on the back and thought, He'll be sorry. He tucked the card into the Rolodex that was his jacket pocket, not bothering to alphabetize.

The Doral man explained that his technical team had been over the recording a half-dozen times, and had transcribed a rough text of the dialogue as well as all readily identifiable sounds. These secondary noises could be every bit as vital as the crew's words. Levers raised, switches actuated — all of it registered.

This nonvoice data would eventually be replicated, switch and mechanical sounds mimicked in a real cockpit, extraneous noise filtered out. Voice recorders were notoriously hard to decipher given the degree of background clutter — wind stream, instrumentation, ventilation ducts, mechanical actuators and automated voices and warnings. The cockpit of a big airplane was a virtual ocean of chatter that could mask and mislead. All of it would be processed, simulated, filtered again and again until everyone agreed on each action that had been performed by the crew. It wasn't the same as having solid information from the flight data recorder — that loss tied one hand behind their collective backs — but much could be learned.

The Doral man passed out a four-page transcript to everyone. The information Davis began to scan was preliminary, but in time the technicians would nail everything down, save for the occasional garbled, unintelligible word.

"We will begin," the Doral man said, "at power-up, roughly forty-two minutes before impact."

The audio began. It was rather scratchy, but the voices of Captain Earl Moore and First Officer Melinda Hendricks were clear. The dialogue was also projected on a screen at the head of the room, a PowerPoint mirror of the printed copy everyone had in front of them. A clock in one corner of the screen tracked time to the nearest one-tenth of a second.

The crew could be heard running through the Before Starting Engines checklist, standard challenge and response items to ensure that every lever, switch, and instrument was prepared for flight. The use of checklists was standard procedure at all airlines. While most pilots could climb into a familiar airplane on any given day and fly without issue, it took only one distraction, one ill-timed sneeze-and-gesundheit, to keep the flaps from being set for takeoff. Virtually every item on the checklist, Davis knew, was written in blood — at some point in the past a mistake had been made, an airplane crashed, and the checklist grew another step. Some of the crosschecks went back to the very dawn of aviation, while others were more contemporary. Altogether it made for a good system, helped aviators not repeat the errors that those before them had made. But as airplanes became more advanced, more complex, each new step in technology brought a matching stride of uncertainty — there were always new hazards to uncover.

Midway through the checklist, the audio hiccupped. The Doral engineer explained, "Here, we have an electrical interruption. We believe the ship was on ground power, and it has already been confirmed that the portable power unit they were using had been giving the ground crews trouble for weeks. Everything comes back up in roughly ten seconds — not enough time to lose any navigation alignments."

This had to be the glitch Jaber was referring to, Davis thought, his far-fetched secondary theory on how the flight data recorder might have failed. Indeed, the voice recording soon picked back up and the crew could be heard finishing their checks. The only other anomaly before takeoff was a mention by the first officer that her clock had lost the correct time. Just like at home, Davis mused. The power goes out, and you have to reset every damned clock in the house.

Takeoff and climb were normal. With the aircraft established at 38,000 feet and flying nicely on autopilot, things started to go very wrong.