Lockout

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Cockpit, Pangia 10 (2220 Zulu)

“Jeez, Dan, we’re idiots!” Jerry Tollefson said as he lunged for a small panel on the center console.

“What?” Dan Horneman jerked his head to the left to read Tollefson’s expression, alarmed at the tone.

“What do we do with the transponder when the radios are out?”

“I don’t… oh, Christ! You’re right. The radio failure code”

“Hell yes! We should have been squawking 7600 on the transponder.”

“Probably no one out here to see the code anyway, Jerry. Don’t chew on yourself. I didn’t think about it either.”

“Yeah, but air traffic control’s radar goes out a lot further than they admit.” He dialed in 7600 and sat back, looking anything but relieved. “I’m assuming this thing is still transmitting. If so, when we’re approaching Newfoundland they’ll figure it out. Dammit! I can’t believe we forgot that!”

“This cirrus layer is clearing,” Dan remarked, peering out of the forward windscreen at the starfield beginning to come into view. “I kind of expected it would be with us all the way.”

“Doesn’t solve our radio problem, but it may help air traffic control keep everyone comfortably clear. I mean, we’ll follow the assigned routing exactly, but they need to know we can’t hear them or respond.”

Dan chuckled. “Somehow I think they’ve probably got that one figured out. We’re at least one position report behind.”

The two of them fell silent for a minute until Jerry gestured outside.

“This really unsettles me, Dan. I know we can easily call Kennedy Approach or New York Center by cell phone as soon as we get over Canada, but what if there’s a war going on down there and they’re not talking to us because they can’t.”

“A war?”

“Well… we’re out of touch with the world, okay?”

“I doubt the planet’s coming to grief, Jerry. We’re the ones with the radio problem and a strange power failure.”

“You think it’s all us?”

“Yes,” Dan replied. “There’s zero static on our VHF radios, which means our radios are dead, not theirs. Ditto with the satcom… no lock, no sign the unit’s working. We’re not even sure the transponder is working. I mean, I see the little reply light flashing…”

“That means the radar beams are hitting us, Dan. And boy, look at that.” Jerry said, pointing to the transponder readout. “We’re… what, 700 miles west of Ireland and that thing is blinking like a hundred beams are hitting us per minute.”

“Could mean it’s malfunctioning, too.”

“You try the high frequency radios? I mean, it may be World War II technology, but…”

“I tried, Jerry. No static, no nothing.”

“I pulled out my cell phone a minute ago, and, believe it or not, for a second I got a signal.”

Dan laughed ruefully. “The captain left his phone on, huh? So that’s the problem! Your cell phone’s fried the equipment!”

“Yeah, right,” Jerry replied, smiling in spite of himself.

The starfield overhead was in full bloom now, the constellations coming clear as Dan let his mind drift away from the radio problem and admire the beauty of the celestial show they’d been denied for the past few hours. He found himself searching for Polaris, the North Star, to the right, but couldn’t be sure which one it was. Sometimes this time of year he could see the Aurora Borealis, the so-called Northern Lights, as they danced like moving curtains of colored light over the North Polar Region.

Strange, he thought. Polaris has to be there of course, but I can’t find it and I can’t even see the big dipper. I must be really tired or something.

Dan tore his gaze away from the window and reached down to dial up the lights on his side of the cockpit as he noticed a distant glow far away to the right. He peered out the right side window for a better look at what had to be light filtering through the bottom of an overcast beneath them. But that made no sense, given their position practically over the middle of the North Atlantic. The Azores were way to the south, to their left, and out of sight, even with a clear sky.

Must be the lights of a fishing fleet, he thought, recalling the intense floods of commercial fishing vessels working off the Washington coast as a kid. Or maybe those were a collection of deep sea drilling rigs, though he remembered those as being hundreds of miles to the north. Whatever they were, it was an interesting phenomenon.

Dan returned to the task of boosting the cockpit lights as Jerry started paging through diagrams of the electrical system on his iPad, searching for an answer. Dan watched for a few seconds before forcing his attention to the various panels and displays, trying to sense if anything was amiss that they hadn’t seen. And for some reason, at the end of his scan and almost as a personal joke, he decided to consult the all but forgotten little mechanical compass at the top of the center windscreen, the so-called “whiskey” compass which owed its name to open cockpit days when cheap bourbon was often used to float the internal compass rose when the normal alcohol solution leaked out.

Dan pulled out a pocket flashlight and pointed the tiny beam on the compass rose, mechanically reading the numbers.

Zero nine five degrees… zero nine six, something like that. He turned off the light and automatically flipped the number around in his mind, knowing their planned heading was 278 degrees magnetic. Pilots had an easy mental shortcut—a crutch—for quickly adding or subtracting 180 degrees, the same way pilots flip the compass heading of one runway number around to read the reciprocal. Start with zero-nine-five degrees, add 200, subtract 20, and in this case, voila! 275 degrees. That would be about right, he thought.

Dan replaced the flashlight in his pocket, overriding the sudden suspicion that he was missing something.