Lockout

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Aboard Gulfstream N266SD (0120 Zulu)

Major Sharon Wallace was studying Paul Wriggle from across the Gulfstream’s cabin. They were rocketing on the heels of a tailwind toward the nation’s capital for what would quite likely be the end of their program. Discovering that their misplaced Airbus was over southern Europe with a locked out crew had impacted her commander hard, and she could only guess at his blood pressure, but it couldn’t be good. The words didn’t need to be spoken. They all knew.

Sharon unconsciously twisted her hair through her fingers, a nervous habit that normally the rest of her compatriots loved to tease her about.

The general was hunched over the satellite phone waiting for the team to assemble below in the Springs, Lieutenant Colonel Don Danniher was flying the Gulfstream alone, and the other two pilots they’d begun the day with would be on final approach now for Colorado Springs in Pangia’s A330.

Wriggle was a good man, she thought. A good leader who did not deserve this kind of stress, and for the moment—with a single satellite phone in the cabin—all she could do was sit and watch him deal with the nightmare and wait for his orders.

Across the cabin, Paul Wriggle forced himself to focus as he sat with the secure satellite phone pressed against his ear, listening to the voices of his executive team back on the ground at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.

He could visualize the cramped suite of nondescript offices they had purposefully selected in a back building on the base, as well as the underground chamber they’d built surreptitiously below one of the basements—a wonderfully clever design for security all around. Teaming with electronics and secure fiber optic connections back east, the 24/7 security had been expensive but well worth it. Even the Peterson base commander had no idea of what was happening in building 4-104.

“We’re all here, sir. Finally.”

“Okay,” Wriggle began. “This is an emergency meeting of Air Lease Solutions,” he said, using the code words to expunge all use of military references. He knew very well the prime security directive against talking “around” classified information, but in this case there was no choice, and even though the line was approved for classified information, it made him very nervous.

“We all understand down here, Paul,” Colonel Dana Baumgartner, his second in command said. The use of the general’s first name was a reciprocal code.

“Has everyone there received and read my message on what’s happening?”

“Everyone,” Baumgartner replied.

“All right,” Wriggle began, “Obviously, this is not a drill. The entire program is imperiled, as are the people out there who’ve been inadvertently involved. First, have you checked whether we somehow uplinked a transmission of orders?”

“We have checked,” Colonel Baumgartner replied, “…and the answer is absolutely not. There were none. Our last test run was three weeks ago. It was a good, routine test by all parameters, but, of course, there were no operational receivers in the… air… to receive. The test sequence was the same one we’ve run for two years. No change. But nothing has been triggered in the last, well, three weeks. And as you know, we only trigger the test to keep everything open while we complete the network.”

Paul Wriggle was rubbing his forehead.

“That’s our machine out there,” the general said. “That wasn’t supposed to be the case, but it is, and from the sound of it, sometime this morning she either listened to something we sent, or misinterpreted something someone else sent, and she took action as a direct result. I suppose it’s also possible that she unilaterally decided to turn herself on. Unfortunately, the best fit is an unfortunately timed test transmission.”

“We’re… well, Paul, we’re absolutely sure nothing was voluntarily transmitted.”

“Voluntarily? Why the hesitation, Dana?”

“Because we’re just now checking the last twenty-four-hour history of all our servers, and I just got word that one bank of computers may have been off line for a few minutes yesterday evening, and we don’t know why.”

“Off line? Why would that cause an unwanted transmission?”

“It shouldn’t, but we all want 100 percent certainty, so we have to know why anything dropped off line, and what it did when it came back on.”

“Does anyone else but us have, maybe, a copy of the standard test sequence? Or could someone have cracked into a copy of the overall form of code we use? Could this be sabotage, in other words?”

There was a burst of conversation in the background before another team member answered, the voice recognizable as their chief scientist, a brilliant civilian named George Choder.

“No one is supposed to have a copy of anything, and certainly initiating an… order, for want of a better word… would take the entire string, and we haven’t even finished writing that yet. Plus, no one knew our… machine… was anywhere other than California. But despite all that, I wouldn’t rule out sabotage. This could not happen accidentally.”

“Suppose our machine heard just a test transmission. Could it obey and lock up based on that?”

More conversation in the background, now even more intense, as many seconds passed.

“We… don’t think so, but we don’t know, Paul. But we want to emphasize that there was no purposeful test transmission this week! We weren’t ready for live tests, so… I don’t know the state of our machine’s programming.”

“You mean, the other end, our, ah, operational machine, could have been receptive? It could have reacted to whatever it heard?”

“We don’t understand the question,” Dana Baumgartner said.

Wriggle sighed out of frustration at the elliptical conversation. It would be far easier to just say “airplane,” but anyone overhearing would then have zero doubt what they were discussing. “What I’m saying is,” Wriggle continued, “…can you guarantee me that if our machine was operational, and if it heard the test sequence whether recorded or live, that it absolutely could not trigger it’s lockout function? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, we’re not saying that at all, Paul. We’re saying we can’t guarantee that, because no one was ready for the machine to fly… to operate, I mean. We hadn’t checked that part of the programming. It wasn’t ready.”

“Then we’ve got a huge problem,” Paul Wriggle said. “Regardless of how she got out of our hands, that machine is our responsibility, and we’ve got to get her to release control. I mean now. Who’s our programming expert for the receiving end of the equation?”

“Well, sir, that spotlights another worry,” the colonel replied. “That would be one of our people who has been on vacation, but she didn’t come back as scheduled two days ago, and we’ve been frantically trying to locate her for the past hour.”

“Give me the initials.”

“Golf Hotel, sir. She was supposed to be up in Rocky Mountain National Park, but we can’t find her, and the phone and her iPad are both turned off…”

“I apologize for sounding suspicious, folks,” the general continued, knowing the potential effect of his voicing a loyalty doubt, “…but we’re in very dangerous territory here. Does Golf Hotel have the ability to trigger an uplink signal remotely, by herself?”

“She shouldn’t. But… again… none of this was an anticipated possibility.”

Choder’s voice interceded. “Ah, sir, I would bet my career that Golf Hotel would never do anything like that, but to be honest, she has the control of the receiver’s programming and I’m afraid we’ve more or less left that to her until now. She probably knows better than anyone… well, hell, she does know better than anyone, what state the programming is aboard our, ah, machine.”

Paul Wriggle pulled up a mental image of the woman they were discussing. Gail Hunt… in her forties, single, very quiet, hired out of Boeing Military in Seattle with a long-standing top secret clearance. He resisted the tendency to wonder if her being momentarily AWOL from a vacation could portend something more sinister, but it had to be considered.

And she wasn’t a particularly happy employee.

“Paul? You still there?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I… have to tell you we’d had some concern about Golf Hotel in recent weeks, and… and there was a certain amount of animosity over a personnel decision. That’s why her not coming back on time is a worry, and I was just handed a note that the place she… wait a second.”

He could hear the questions in the background if not the answers: “Is this right? Where?”

There was a fatigued sigh on the line, and the colonel came back on. “Okay…she was supposed to be at the McGregor Lodge in Estes Park, and they say she never checked in.”

Paul Wriggle shook his head as he drummed his fingers on the adjacent table and pressed the phone even tighter to his ear. “Let me ask this again, to make sure. Do we have the programming prowess among the rest of you to know what our machine was programmed to do at this stage if turned on?”

“In a word, sir, no. That was going to be a team effort that she was to lead. That’s why she wanted the aircraft out of the desert, if you’ll recall.”

“Wait… she wanted it out?” Wriggle asked.

“Yes. I thought you knew. The request started with her last week. She wanted the ship back here so we could get the onboard programming complete.”

“I didn’t realize that. But she had no idea it had left Mojave last week, correct?”

“We don’t think so. She was already on vacation, and someone there would have had to tell her, and from what we’ve learned, the Mojave people didn’t even realize they’d screwed up and pulled our airplane out until today.”

“That’s correct. Okay, listen up, folks… if our machine thought we wanted her to… to… trigger a locked situation, could she just as easily be persuaded to unlock? Think carefully, because those people are in trouble, and we’ve got to act now if we can.”

“Paul, shouldn’t we inform… I don’t know, the air staff, the White House. Someone?” Dana Baumgartner asked.

“And say what, Dana? We’re not even supposed to exist. And even if we could report it that easily, what is anyone else going to do that we can’t do ourselves?”

There was embarrassed silence on the other end.

“So, again, I need an answer. Can we countermand whatever order our machine thinks it’s been given?”

It was Choder who spoke up. “In theory, yes, if we had the final programming done. But we’re searching right now for some notes or anything to tell us where GH left the onboard processor. If it was fairly rudimentary, then it should obey the “all clear” code… if we could transmit it. If it was more complex, a simple unlock order may not work.”

“But,” Wriggle asked, “…if all it did was respond to the enabling code, can’t it be turned off?”

“We didn’t send that enabling code!”

“Someone did! Is there any danger in trying whatever generic code we have?”

“No. But, Paul, that’s not the point. Point is, our global network is not complete. We’re just over 60 percent coverage. We could go blasting an unlock message all over the planet, and that bird might not hear it.”

“Do we know where the holes are in our coverage?”

Another chilling delay filled the void.

“Yes, sir. We know most of the holes.”

“Is the Mediterranean covered, or is it a hole?”

“It’s pretty much an incomplete hole, sir. We’ve got much of northern Europe and the UK, but… but the Med is spotty.”

“Can the thing be turned off from inside?”

“Yes. There’s a code you can enter from any of the flight management computers.”

“But… you’re going to tell me we don’t have a clue what that code is, correct?”

“Yes, sir. I suppose we are. We really need to find Golf Hotel. But the thing is, the flight management computers will look like they’re dead because the displays turn off. One wouldn’t normally think you could enter anything.”

There wasn’t much cord between the receiver and the base of the satellite phone, but Paul Wriggle stood now, pulling as tight as he could to allow at least some pacing. He had to keep them moving forward, and, for that matter, he was far too agitated to sit for another second. There couldn’t be much time left for their airplane, and the people aboard.

“Okay, get the release sequence, open the network, and blast it continuously as far and wide as you can. How soon can you get that going?”

“We figure an hour or less.”

“Text me the moment you start the transmissions, and the moment, if any, that you get a response. Keep looking for Golf Hotel… ask the rangers in Rocky Mountain, call any friends we have at FBI for help, check state police and morgues, and meanwhile someone please make sure she hasn’t left some weird message on her desk or her email. Also… someone call Ron Barrett, the owner at Mojave Storage and find out who the employee was who made the mistake. Let’s make sure it’s not someone who knows our lady, okay?

“Yes, sir.”

“Do your best and do it as fast as you can, please! I’ll be touching down at Andrews in two hours, and if we haven’t got this nightmare resolved by then, I’ll be enroute to our boss. Where things go for us from there is anyone’s guess.”