Lockout

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Aboard Pangia 10 (0030 Zulu)

Dan Horneman took a deep breath as he finished buttoning up the heavy coat he’d borrowed. He was standing beside the offending metal cabinet in the electronics bay beneath the cockpit of Flight 10. The thing was still booby-trapped with electrical power, but as long as he was careful, his plan might work.

He turned toward the forward hatch leading back to the cockpit and nodded to Carol, who was watching carefully, deep concern etching her almost flawless face.

There was no way to reach over the top of the thing without all but bear hugging the metallic side. Provided the voltage within wasn’t too great, all the layers he was wearing should prevent electrical arcing, he thought. The previous shock was enough for one lifetime, but he had been skin to metal with the thing while grounding himself with his other hand to close a circuit that could have killed him.

Not this time.

Slowly feeling his way along through thick leather gloves, Dan followed his memory until his index finger settled into the hole. It took a bit of twisting and pushing to force his glove-clad finger in deep enough to touch the top of the metal plunger, but at last he could feel it, and after checking to make sure his face wasn’t touching skin to metal, he shoved the plunger down hard, feeling nothing yield. He shoved harder, his finger protesting in pain, knowing that before he’d been hit by a bolt of electricity before reaching the release point.

If there was a release point.

Dan withdrew his finger and pulled his hand and arm away, thinking through what he’d felt. There was a plunger, but unless it was a dummy set up just to suck in and shock an intruder, there had to be a release mechanism inside.

Once more he took his flashlight and poked around every part of the cabinet he could reach or see, wondering if he could have missed another hole or hatch or panel somewhere. But he found nothing.

Okay, I’m just not pushing it down far enough.

He needed a small wooden stick, but finding wooden sticks in a jet at 38,000 feet was ridiculously unlikely.

Dan stepped away from contact with the cabinet and pulled off his glove, fishing in his uniform pocket for the clippers. Small, metallic, and just slim enough, it might work, he thought. Once again he donned the glove and maneuvered himself into position, carefully inserting the body of the nail clipper into the hole and feeling it align with the sides, the cutting head settling squarely on the plunger. Slowly, gingerly, he moved the tip of his index finger to the more narrow back end of the clipper and pushed steadily, feeling the plunger descend, keeping the small tool aligned with his index finger until it was in almost to the limit.

The “click” of the internal locking cam releasing was felt more than heard, but suddenly the top of the cabinet rotated toward him.

He grabbed each end and lifted the entire side off its lower channel moving it far enough aft to expose more than half of the electronic nightmare within.

There in the middle was a large warning placard in red block letters:

There was an ordinary keypad to the right of the sign, with keys large enough to be pushed by a gloved hand, but there was no indication of the code.

What in hell IS this thing? Dan thought, already knowing the most important part of the answer: It was obviously what had disconnected their entire cockpit and locked them out of the basic ability to fly the jet. Whatever it was supposed to accomplish strategically, tactically it was controlling the show, and that had to end.

Dan ran his eyes carefully up and down the racks of electronics, finding no switches large or small and only a few blinking LED lights. No other placards or identification plates adorned any of the equipment, and all of it was packed in so tightly that there seemed no way to reach around behind any of the boxes.

Jesus, where do I start?

He could hear Carol’s voice calling to him, and he turned toward the hatch, flashing her a thumbs-up. She nodded and smiled and withdrew her head undoubtedly to report to Jerry that he was in, but in to what? The more Dan examined the contents of the cabinet, the more his stomach knotted. Whoever had installed the infernal thing had no intention of bluffing. Even if he could work with the thick gloves, there were no wing nuts on any of the boxes that might free them up and allow them to be pulled out, and if the system was wired to resist interference, it might even fry the electronic engine controls and flight computers, leaving them with a dead and falling airframe.

He allowed himself a few seconds of horror, imagining what kind of death that would be, helplessly watching your plane and passengers fall to destruction while you flailed at dead, useless controls, unable to do anything. His mind flashed back to the gut-wrenching story of the Germanwings crash, and his own unbearable rage thinking about the terrorized captain of that flight, locked out of his own cockpit and pounding helplessly on the door as his suicidal copilot descended into the Alps.

To a lesser extent, Dan was fighting that same kind of rage and frustration, and he forced himself to slow his breathing and concentrate. He had a bit more than three hours, and he had to believe that anything that could be engineered into place could probably be reverse engineered. If only it wasn’t booby-trapped.

He slid down to the floor alongside the thing, watching it for a minute, letting his subconscious have a crack at his feelings, which were running amok.

The wave of hopelessness washed over him again, but for some reason he felt himself swim through it, rejecting its nihilistic conclusions. After all, an hour ago they weren’t even aware there was an offending cabinet full of control-stealing electronics. Now he was staring it in the teeth.

Wait a minute!

The new thought came unbidden, but the recognition was powerful and it caused a sharp intake of breath and a surge of hope at the same time. Dan sat up a bit straighter and followed the logic trail.

People don’t put warnings on invulnerable things! If it was impervious to disconnection, there would be no placard.

He could see the wires going in and could trace at least some of them to racks outside the cabinet that he could reach and wouldn’t shock him. If he could find the right wires, the right controls, and figure out which of the boxes inside the cabinet were connected to which ones on the outside, he had a chance.

No. No, it’s more than that! he thought, eyes widening. There is a key here, and something that they were afraid would be discovered. Something that CAN be discovered. It’s a freaking Easter egg hunt.

In other words, it wasn’t “if,” it was “how.”