Lockout

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Aboard Pangia 10 (0135 Zulu)

Dan was working on assembling a toolkit full of scavenged items from his and Jerry’s flight bags and the forward galley when Carol brought Josh Begich to the cockpit door.

“May we come in, gentlemen?”

Dan nodded, reaching out to shake the young boy’s hand. “Absolutely. What’s your name, and how old are you?”

“Josh, sir, and I’m almost fifteen,” the boy replied, his eyes wide and watching warily, lest the captain recognize him and resume his attack. Jerry, however, was studying the forward panel.

“Are you good at wiring things, splicing, insulating, tracing?” Dan probed.

“No, sir. Well, I know basic circuits and stuff. But I’m good at programming.”

“Okay. Stay up here.”

At that moment Bill Breem and Tom Wilson appeared with a male passenger in tow they identified as Frank Erlichman, a man in his fifties with a perpetually startled look on his weathered face.

“Frank, is it?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“And your background, sir? American?”

“Yes. Well, born in Germany but now from Duluth. I’m an electrical engineer. I know wires and circuits, and was an avionics repairman five years back,” Erlichman explained, with a slight accent.

“Okay,” Dan said, “Let me explain what’s going on and how you two can help.

Dan briefed them on what he was planning, ignoring the wide-eyed look of fear on the young boy’s face.

“There’s only room for two of us down there. Mr. Erlichman? You come down first. Josh, please stay here, sit in this right-hand seat when I get out of it, and let the captain run you through whatever wiring diagrams we can pull up on our iPads. They’ll be pretty rudimentary, but they might help you figure out the philosophy of the wiring as it should exist, and there may be a diagram of where all the black boxes are in relation to what they do. Look at the autothrottle and then the autoflight system in general. I’m stabbing in the dark, fellows, but the only reason I think we have a chance is just this: Whatever that damned cabinet down there is for, I don’t think the designers ever expected anyone to mount a serious and sustained effort to retake control. I’m just guessing, of course, but I don’t think they had security uppermost in mind, or I would have never been able to open the side of it.”

Once the captain’s seat was forward again, Dan descended the cramped access ladder, guiding Frank Erlichman down after him, and giving a quick orientation tour of the cabinet and the racks of electronics.

“Dan?” Frank asked, “May one ask, how much time do we have? I am aware that we can’t fly forever.”

“We have about three hours before we’re out of fuel.”

“What then happens?”

Dan shook his head. “In all honesty? I don’t know. It could mean we regain control when the engines die and the power goes off for a few seconds before the battery kicks in, then we can glide somewhere to a landing. It could mean we sit here helpless and crash.”

“Thank you for being straight with me.”

“Okay, let’s get to work. Don’t touch anything on or in that cabinet, just in case it’s still electrified or booby-trapped.”

“I understand.”

“I’m going to look for the VHF radios and start with that. You look for anything that looks like autothrottles or autoflight. Do you speak French, too, by any chance?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I forgot to ask. I don’t know if any of the placards are in French or English, but either way, we’re okay.”

The maze of wires going into tightly packed and insulated wiring bundles and harnesses was nothing short of mind boggling, and Dan kept himself focused on reading the little metal placards on the bottom end of each electronic box, increasingly pessimistic that anything would be plainly labeled. Most of the boxes were American made, with each placard full of serial numbers and date of manufacture and convoluted model numbers, but on the third rack and fifth row, he finally caught the letters “VHF” for one of the aviation-band radios.

Got it!

On the rack itself, the “VHF #1” position was emblazoned, and he loosened the circular nuts holding the radio cabinet in place and gingerly pulled it out of its cradle.

Nothing in the wire harness going into the rear of the cradle showed any signs of change or tampering. It was as if the harness was a standard factory construct, and the plug itself provided no help—only small numbers associated with each pin position could be seen when he disconnected the plug and examined it.

Dan felt his heart sink as he stared at it. What arrogance to think he could figure this out without a schematic. But as Frank moved to his side, the passenger reached out to point to the disconnected rack plug and nodded.

“You recognize something?” Dan asked.

“There is a standard pattern. Power supply, input, output, antenna leads… all of it pretty straightforward.”

“Really? Anything look nonstandard here?”

“You said the radios went off? All of them?”

“Yes.”

“And there were no lights then on the control heads, no indication of power?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Very well. You see, if I were going to build a box to seize control remotely, I wouldn’t need to use the radios. I would just see to it that they were turned off.”

“What are you saying, Frank?”

“We should try to find power to plug in… here and here… to these pins… and you might just reactivate the transceiver. The antenna seems to be in place.”

“I wish we had a circuit tester or ammeter.”

“So do I. But these instruments are all powered by the same voltage. Any positive and negative lead should work.”

They searched the adjacent rack before finding a small box several feet away with blinking lights on the front. Dan unscrewed and removed the box, disconnected the cannon plug on the back of the rack and waited for the aircraft to react.

Nothing.

“Okay, which are the power leads?”

Frank took over, cutting the two appropriate wires and pulling them through far enough to reach the back of the VHF radio. He stripped a section of insulation from each of the cut wires to the radio and spliced the power leads in, and immediately two small LEDs on the front lit up.

“Wait here,” Dan said, scrambling to stick his head above cockpit floor level.

Jerry was already waiting for him. “The number one radio just lit up, Dan! What did you do?”

“Too long to explain. That’s just step one. Call out if anything changes up here.”

“Can I use the radio?”

“Hey man, knock yourself out. We should be adjacent to Italian airspace by now. Maybe Rome control could hear us.”

“Hey… wait a second… it’s not transmitting.”

Dan pulled himself out of the hatch to stand beside Jerry’s chair.

“What do you mean?”

“The audio control panel here… it’s still dark, and even though I know I had the switch selected to the number one radio before all this crap began, when I hit the transmit button, nothing happens.”

Dan reached down and worked with the panel, then looked at his panel on the right side.

“You’re right. We’ve only turned the thing on. Can you change frequencies?”

“Yes. That’s just manual, or at least it works.”

“Can we hear anything?”

“Let me find the right ATC frequencies for where we are, and I’ll let you know, but it isn’t going to help us much unless we can talk.”

Carol was standing beside him, and Dan turned to her.

“Any luck on radio batteries for that satellite phone we were using?”

“No. That was apparently the only one on board.”

Josh Begich looked up, listening to the exchange.

“You know, that telephone can’t be too exotic in terms of what kind of charging power it needs. Perhaps we could find a charger aboard and modify it? I would bet a lot of people have chargers in their carryon bags.”

“I’ll make the announcement and see what we can find,” Carol said, turning to Dan. “And I’ll send Jeanie up to relay for you.”

“Okay, stand by on searching the bags. There’s not much room down there. Jerry? I’m going back down and keep at it.”

“Go for it, Dan. Hey… take a minute to get something to drink or hit the head if you need it.”

“I’m good, but you need a break?”

“Yeah, next time you come up, I need to get out of this seat for a minute.”

Josh was looking over at the two of them. “I thought you couldn’t control anything?”

“We can’t,” Jerry replied, knowing where this was going.

“But, that means that if you need to get up, nothing will change while you’re out of the cockpit, right?”

“Ever hear of Murphy’s Law, kid?” Jerry asked.

“Uh, no. Is that an electronics law?”

“No, it’s life. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. If I unstrap and leave the cockpit with Dan downstairs, guaranteed that’s the exact moment we’ll get control back and go into a dive or something.”

Josh looked even more confused.

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, but then we’d have control back, right?”

Jerry looked up at Dan who was suppressing a laugh, then back at Josh Begich.

“I’ll have to explain this to you later, kid. It’s like the facts of life.”

Dan returned to the underdeck area with renewed hope, but the look on Frank Erlichman’s face was funereal.

“What’s wrong, Frank?”

“I traced the autothrottle circuit. I doubt we can touch it.”

“Show me. What do you mean?”

Frank led him forward to a separate electronics rack, pointing to a large electronic box and the nomenclature on the identiplate.

“I think this is what you were looking for. But please look at the wiring harness. I traced the basic wires and they go to the cabinet, and then another autothrottle related box, then back to the cabinet, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to be sure you can regain control by cutting anything.”

“It would be a gamble, in other words?”

“A big one.”

Dan looked at his watch, the gesture well understood by Frank who had an ashen look about him.

“Okay… let’s think about this. The engine power is frozen at the same level as when this happened,” Dan began, counting off points on his fingers. “That means they’re not controlling it, most probably, they’ve just disconnected our ability to set it. Regardless of the back and forth wiring, the big question is: Which one of these boxes, if turned off instead of on, would restore our ability to move the throttles?”

“You’re playing, I think, with fire,” Frank said. “These are computer controlled and not as simple as the radio.”

“Well… you may have a point. We turned the radio on but still can’t transmit on it because we didn’t turn on the audio selector panel.”

“We can probably find that circuit.”

“No… let’s… could we try a few things for the throttles and be ready to reverse if it doesn’t go right?”

“There are no switches. You mean, pull the racks out from their plugs?”

“How about stripping a section of wire, cutting it in the middle, and if all hell breaks loose, just re-twisting the ends together.”

“We can’t do that with gloves, and there is substantial voltage.”

“I have to try.”

Once again Dan stuck his head above floor level to brief Jerry and the others on what he was about to do and position Carol to relay any information from Jerry if there was a change.

With five minutes of work stripping wires, they were ready, and Dan used a glove to insulate his hand while running the exposed wire into a pair of uninsulated nail clippers.

“Okay. Here goes.”

The sound of the click as the clippers snapped through the 18-gauge wire was almost inaudible, but Dan could feel the tiny impact in his gloved fingers. At first, it seemed as if there were no further reaction, until he realized he was leaning forward slightly against the deceleration of the airplane.

The power is coming off! he thought to himself, just as a voice yelled down from the flight deck, relaying Jerry’s words.

“PUT IT BACK! PUT IT BACK! THE ENGINES ARE COMING TO IDLE!”

“OKAY!” Dan yelled back over his shoulder as he prepared to re-mate the cut wires, positioning them so he could make firm contact and then twist them back together. He could feel the big aircraft continuing to slow. He was too far ahead of the wing mounted engines to actually hear them, but the decreasing sound of the slipstream told the tale. The thought crossed his mind with lightning speed that if the engines didn’t rebound when he touched the wires, they were truly at the end of the line, and the thought made him almost desperate to touch the wires together again, just as something else was warning him to wait.

What the hell am I missing? Dan thought. The pressure to act was accelerating to unfathomable levels as he forced his mind to divulge whatever it was thinking in the periphery of the subconscious.

Oh, jeez! Yes!

Dan turned to yell at the face he saw watching him from the hatch.

“PUSH THE THROTTLES UP! SEE IF THEY RESPOND!”

“What?”

“TELL THE CAPTAIN TO PUSH THE THROTTLES UP!”

Carol nodded and disappeared, and the seconds slowed down to an agonizing pace as time dilated and Dan lost track of reality. The two ends of the wire were still in his respective hands, and the big jet was getting progressively slower. Without more power they would slow and stall, and unless the autoflight system was truly engaged, they would fall out of the sky.

Dan tried to force himself to touch the wires and finish it, but another part of his brain was screaming to wait a few extra moments in case deliverance was at hand. When a surge of thrust reached his consciousness, Dan was unsure whether he was imagining it or feeling it.

Carol’s voice from above broke the suspense:

“IT WORKS! HE SAYS IT WORKS! WE HAVE MANUAL THROTTLES!”

Dan looked at Frank, realizing neither of them had been breathing. He gasped for breath then and smiled at the shaken passenger.

“Thank God!”

“Indeed.”

“Let’s get these wires taped and very far apart.”

“I can do that for you!” Frank said, a very large grin on his face. The jet was reaccelerating, the slipstream sounds rising back to where they’d been.

“I’m going up for a minute. Standby to reconnect those wires if something goes wrong.”

Dan all but levitated out of the hatch to find an ebullient captain fine-tuning throttles he could actually control.

“Jesus Christ, Dan! Well done! God, I’m not going to buy you a beer when we get on the ground, I’m buying you a friggin’ brewery!”

“Full manual control of the engines?”

“Yes! Goddamit, yes! And I can hear air traffic control on the radio. Bosnia, I think. One-twenty-one-five,” he said, citing the emergency frequency. “I can’t talk to them, but I can hear the buggers. I don’t know how fast we’re going, but I’m gonna slow us down a bit by feel to conserve fuel while you work the rest of your magic!”

“We’re just starting the process, Jerry.”

“I know, but hell, you can try to kill me in Anchorage anytime, Bro!”

Dan smiled, a cascade of emotions coursing through his head, all of which he forcibly suppressed.

“You have no side stick control, though?”

“No. And all the displays are fiction. But I’m pretty sure I can feel this baby well enough to slow her down without stalling.”

“Pretty sure?”

“All I’ve got. But we can control something for the first time in hours! How’d you do it?”

“The truth?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I guessed, Jerry.”

“Okay.”

“And the next guess might not be as lucky.”