Lockout

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

First class cabin, Pangia 10 (2330 Zulu)

Ashira had been ready to offer at least one of their top-of-the-line satellite phones to the crew, but Moishe had vetoed the idea, directing her instead to hide the transceiver. There were many things Moishe did that irritated her, but his order had mostly twanged her suspicions.

Ashira was watching him closely, but Lavi was paying no attention, as he sat hunched over a laptop computer that seemed to have his undivided attention. Finally he looked up, locking eyes with her as he snapped the lid closed.

“So, we are returning.”

Ashira’s eyebrows had arched slightly. “To Tel Aviv?”

“Yes… and no. We may fly over our homes and then head for Tehran.”

“WHAT?” she managed.

Moishe Lavi looked almost smug, and while he sometimes reacted to stress this way, it made no sense.

“How do you know this?” Ashira asked, her mind whirling through all the ways any in-the-clear communication could be intercepted and used against them.

“I have Internet… I have email… I have sources, Ashira, and I remain in charge of me. You should know that.”

Cockpit, Pangia 10 (2340 Zulu)

Feeling as if another lifeline had been snatched away from his fingertips, Jerry stopped the constant re-dial attempts and placed the borrowed cell phone in his lap, forcing himself to sit in thought for a second.

“Did they hear you?” Dan was asking. “Did they understand we’re locked out of the system?”

“I think they did… but they said it was coming through badly… like every other word. You heard my end.”

“What were you responding to when you said, ‘We couldn’t be if we tried’?”

Jerry turned toward his copilot with a crooked smile. “They asked if we were hijacked.”

Dan shook his head in amazement. “If we can’t believe all this, I wouldn’t expect them to. That was operations in Chicago?”

“Yeah… and one of our vice presidents, no less… if I heard him right.”

“Okay, Jerry, I’m going down to the electronics bay again. Please motor your seat full forward.”

The captain gave a perfunctory nod as his first officer lifted the floor hatch and once again carefully squeezed behind the captain’s seat. He descended the diminutive ladder into the crowded corridor of electronic racks and blinking lights carrying his airline-issued iPad which was already keyed to the limited electrical schematics pilots were allowed to view. Bill Breem had begged off going down again, describing his wiring knowledge as too rudimentary to be helpful, an uncharacteristic admission stated with a degree of embarrassment.

Even knowing electrical and electronic circuits as well as he did, Dan had never seen the real engineering schematics for the Airbus A330 either. But there was an innate logic to the way even Airbus organized the hundreds of miles of wires that formed the electronic keel beam of the plane. Most of the complex cable harnesses, as they were called, were buried behind baffles and conduits or beneath the floor panels he was standing on, and as he snapped on the interior lights and looked carefully in all directions, nothing seemed out of place.

Where the hell do I begin? Dan wondered. How would you disconnect an entire cockpit, yet continue to feed it bullshit flight information for the displays?

The presence of the unfamiliar cabinet toward the rear of the compartment had been his target before descending the ladder, but there was always an ethereal hope that he’d missed something big and obvious on the first excursion beneath the cockpit. But nothing looked even remotely like a single switch that could reconnect everything, restoring their ability to actually fly the airplane.

Dan moved carefully aft, shining his flashlight around on the various exposed electronic racks, trying to take nothing for granted. But even the electronics boxes with blinking diagnostic lights appeared to be normal.

He reached the unknown cabinet and whistled to himself. The size of it was larger than he’d remembered. Almost eight feet in length, about five feet high, and spanning perhaps three feet laterally, the side made out of what looked suspiciously like a weight-wasting stainless steel. But despite his best effort, he couldn’t locate even a hint of a hatch or service door.

At the forward end, he could see a cascade of cables entering the cabinet, but without pulling up the floor panels it was unclear where they were coming from. The sheer size of the cable harness, however, looked formidable—as if every circuit in the airplane was routed through the big box.

Gotta get inside this thing! No warnings, no labels, no nothing. This makes no sense! You don’t put a major component in an airplane and weld the whole thing shut. There’s got to be a hatch on here somewhere.

He moved carefully towards the aft end of the cabinet, examining every square inch he could reach by running his fingers along the smooth, unpainted metallic surface.

Okay, logically, if there are no openable panels, then the entire side has to come off or swing open.

He ran his fingers over the top of the right side from aft to forward, realizing at last that there was a ridge where the sheet metal was bent from the vertical to horizontal, overlapping the edge by perhaps two inches, the overlap unseen on the top. He examined the entire front-to-back breadth of the seam, feeling for a latch or screws or some sort of fastener.

On the third pass, he found what felt like a round depression, just the size for an index finger to push in on some type of button.

The space between the top of the cabinet and the roof of the electronics bay was only two inches, not enough to see over, but he could feel the button give a little when he pushed it, and spreading his legs to get a steady stance while holding the edge of the metal rack to his right, Dan shoved his index finger down with as much force as he dared.

He felt the lock begin to move as an earsplitting “CRACK” coursed through him. Just as quickly, the memory of the noise faded as he sank to the floor of the electronic bay.

How much time had passed he couldn’t tell, but regaining consciousness felt like swimming up from the bottom of a giant bowl of soup. It wasn’t immediately clear to Dan whether he was coming in or out of a dream, anesthesia, or a nightmare. He opened his eyes to a sideways, floor level view of a strange compartment that ever so slowly began to look familiar again. He lay there afraid to move for a moment, wondering if he still had arms and legs and whether they would respond if he tried to move.

There was sound all around him now, and he recognized it as a slipstream, which would mean he was in flight somewhere. He struggled to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and the thunderclap realization of where he was and what had happened caused him to sit bolt upright, ignoring the dizzying pain in his head.

There was a burning sensation on his right index finger, and something wet, warm, and sticky was on the back of his head and when he probed it, his hand came back covered in blood. The steel-faced cabinet was still in front of him, looking all the more impregnable and intimidating. Obviously it was booby-trapped, and he’d walked right into it.

There was a voice in the distance… a female voice, Dan judged… and he knew he should look to the right and see if there was a woman attached to it. Or maybe he was still dreaming. It would be so much better to just close his eyes and rest a few minutes.

Or a few hours.

But the voice was insistent, irritatingly calling his name, and he struggled to look to the right, spotting a disembodied Carol, only her head visible as she stuck it below floor level looking for him.

He tried to reply, but his voice sounded too weak for even him to hear.

“DAN! WHAT HAPPENED? DAN, ARE YOU OKAY?”

Carol pulled her head up and out of sight, but it was replaced instantly by the rest of her descending the ladder and coming to him, some sort of towel in her hand.

“Good Lord, what happened?” she asked, as Dan struggled to answer that question himself. There had been a button and he had punched the button, and… and…

“That… thing… shocked me.”

“Shocked you?”

He started to nod, but she was holding the cloth to the back of his head.

“Ow!”

“You’re hurt! Stay still!”

“Voltage… I think it’s got a protection… ah… circuit… shock thing…” Dan could hear his voice trail off as if it belonged to someone else, but slowly his conscious thoughts were coalescing. He had been electrically zapped by something when he tried to open the cabinet. That meant that whoever had put it here did not want it opened, at least not in flight. He could feel his heart racing and wondered in passing if it could have killed him.

“That cabinet… holds the key,” Dan said, but she didn’t hear.

“Can you walk, Dan? I need to get you upstairs to attend to this cut.”

“I’ve… I’ve gotta get into that thing.”

“Not until I get this bleeding stopped.”

With Carol guiding him, he reached the ladder and propelled himself up to the cockpit with her behind, aware that Jerry was watching him emerge with an incredulous expression.

The process of bandaging the gash on the back of his head took several minutes while Dan explained what he could remember to Jerry, who was looking quite feral.

“You say it’s booby-trapped?” Jerry asked.

“Yeah. In a phrase. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Can we… can we maybe use gloves and get past it?”

“Dunno. Could be it has other security safeguards as well, but that’s got to be the key. There are huge wire bundles running into it from the front side under the floor. I’ve never seen anything like that in an A330, although… to tell you the truth… I’ve only been down in two other hellholes. But those two had nothing like that, just an open bay of electronic racks where that thing is situated.”

“I’ve never been down there at all,” Jerry said.

“Any luck getting through on any of those other phones?” Dan asked.

“No. They’re still trying.”

“I was hoping to find a way to restore the radios, but it’s hopeless to trace wires. Millions of them. Wait, Jerry… did anything change up here when that thing zapped me?”

The captain shook his head no.

“I was hoping it had. That might mean it’s just a short. But… I think this thing intends to defend itself. God knows how many volts of electricity it hit me with, but I don’t think its intent was to kill.”

Jerry’s eyebrows were up as high as they could go, the alarm in his voice visceral.

“What are you talking about, Dan?” Bill Breem interjected. “You make the damned thing sound sentient.”

“It may be. God, that stunned me! But it’s the key. You don’t build a defense system for routine electronics on a plane. Has to be something someone doesn’t want us screwing with, and since we’re not in control, the box that IS in control doesn’t want us taking over. So, that fits.”

“What fits?” Jerry asked. “I’m not following you.”

“I’m not either,” Bill Breem added, a genuinely engaged look on his face.

Dan took a deep breath as Carol nodded her okay to turn forward in the copilot’s seat. “I mean, we’ve been relieved of control thanks to something electronic, and it’s more than likely that whatever that is, is in that cabinet, and the cabinet is protecting itself because it doesn’t want us taking control back.”

“Who is ‘IT’?” Jerry asked. “I mean, I know you’re referring to the cabinet, but who’s controlling the cabinet?”

“Ah… yeah. That’s the friggin’ question, right?” Dan said. “If we knew that, we might know how to fight it off.”

Jerry cursed and turned left toward the side stick controller, grabbing it and mashing the priority button before deflecting the stick full to the left.

Nothing happened, and he flopped the stick back and forth violently as if trying to break it away from its base.

“Goddamnit!”

“I know. Nothing,” Dan said.

“Who the hell would install such a thing in a commercial jet? Has Pangia gone mad?”

“Why would you think our airline would have…” Bill Breem began, letting his voice trail off as the ridiculousness of the question hit him. It was here, therefore someone in their airline had to know, and had to have decided not to tell the pilots.

“Okay, guys,” Jerry continued. “If that thing IS in control, we’ve got to defeat it. Can we cut the cables?”

Dan was shaking his head vigorously. “No. Too risky. But… what the hell is it? Is it some sort of surrogate control center? Is it supposed to protect us and instead it’s gone nuts?”

“I don’t have a clue, but I want it gone.”

“Yeah, Jerry… me, too, but if we go cutting cables to something we don’t understand that seems to be in control and defending itself, we could crash. If we cut the wrong cable, remove that thing’s ability to fly and don’t restore ours, we’re done.”

“We’ve got to do something!” Breem said.

“So what do you think we should do?” Jerry asked through gritted teeth, looking squarely at Dan but expecting Breem to respond as well.

Dan could feel the cobwebs dropping away at last. The burning sensation in his finger and mild headache were trivialities he could ignore.

“Okay, it’s a straightforward problem in essence. It’s electrical. Find me some thick gloves, insulate my shoes, put on the thickest coat I can find, and I’ll go get that goddamn cabinet open. That’s step one.”

“And step two?”

The single laugh that escaped unbidden turned into a guttural giggle, as Dan shook his head. “Jerry, even if I wrote thriller fiction for a living, I wouldn’t have a clue where this story goes next!”