Lockout

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Aboard Pangia 10 (0245 Zulu)

Still flush with hope, even an hour after restoring the throttles to manual control, Dan Horneman prepared to descend the ladder to the electronics bay once again, pausing behind the captain’s seat to put a hand on Jerry Tollefson’s shoulder.

“Hang in there, Captain!”

Bill Breem had spent the last hour standing behind the copilot’s seat, watching and working with Josh Begich, trying to figure out wiring diagrams they’d called up on Dan’s company iPad.

Jerry turned as far around as he could, nodding at his first officer. “Yeah, you, too, Dan. Be damned careful down there.”

“I will.”

Dan looked back at the copilot’s seat where Josh Begich was punching his way through electrical diagrams. Carol was back in the cockpit, waiting to kneel as best she could in the cramped space behind the captain’s seat to be the relay for Dan. He could see the strain on her face as she struggled to smile at him.

Frank Erlichman was anxiously waiting for Dan at the bottom of the ladder.

“Any progress, Frank?”

The man nodded, his words precise and spoken in a slow meter in pace with the seriousness of the situation. “I have been tracing wires as fast as I could, and I believe I know where the main controls have been spliced; although whoever wired this modification did such a professional job you would never know it wasn’t a part of the original wiring harness.”

“Show me, please,” Dan replied, following the man to the right side rack. “We don’t have much time.”

“Ja, I think,” Frank continued, “…if we cut here and here… ready to reconnect as before… and then splice these wires with these… we might be able to reroute control of the autoflight system. But… it is a big gamble.”

“How much?”

“Pardon?”

“How much is guesswork and how much is certain, Frank?”

The man looked the copilot in the eye without a trace of humor and laughed ruefully. “It is all guesswork. I am not certain of anything.”

“Okay. Is there a safer approach?”

“Yes. I think so. Those racks in what you call the cabinet?”

“Yes?”

“It is full of relays. Why would it be full of relays if the purpose wasn’t to shunt power and control?”

Dan looked at the long rows of small, square metal cubes and a semi-ancient memory popped into his head, a memory of trying to explain what a relay was to his mother, who thought it somehow would explain what her son was doing to make money in the software business.

“Think of it this way, Mom,” he’d said. “All the lights in town have gone off in a storm. Now the storm is gone, and I want to turn all the lights on again. But that’s a huge amount of electricity, and I want to just flick a little switch. So, instead of routing a river of power through tiny wires that would burn up, I use a relay. I flick a switch, a little power goes through a little wire and powers an electromagnet, the electromagnet causes a metal rod to move a much bigger switch from “off” to “on,” and I never have to get close to that much bigger and more dangerous amount of electricity.”

It had been a noble attempt, but when she explained to friends that Dan controlled the city’s light system, he gave up.

Frank, he realized, was talking, and he’d let himself drift.

“In other words,” Frank repeated, “…I think that is how it is done. My thinking is that the relays are not normally powered on, so that when they’re not powered, all is normal. When something causes them to come on and do their job of switching, that’s when everything changes. The flight controls, for instance. The relay is energized, one of them cuts the power going to and from your flight controls… your sidestick controls on the flight deck… removing your manual input to the autoflight computers. Instead, it sends false information to the same autoflight computers, enabling them to be commanded perhaps by radio from outside, or by some internal program. In any event, as long as those relays are active, you can’t interfere.”

“Like someone just unplugged our cockpit controls and plugged in an alternate set of controls.”

“Exactly.”

“And we’re just along for the ride. Okay, I’m with you.”

“Well…” Frank continued, “…my theory is that if we interrupt the power that’s letting those relays disconnect your cockpit, they’ll shift to the off position and let go of the various controls.”

“Great!”

Frank Erlichman was shaking his head energetically. “But wait, please. I have to warn you that if we’re wrong… if we shut down the wrong one… even turning it back on might not cause it to latch again. Without a wiring diagram—”

“I understand, Frank. But we have to try. So we just selectively and physically pull the relays out of their respective sockets and see what happens?”

“No, no, no! If we pull a relay, it will depower that relay, yes, but it will also break whatever circuits are flowing through it when the relay is not powered on.”

“Oh, Lord, of course. When the thing is off, the normal power to, for instance, the sidestick controllers, flow through that very relay.”

“Yes. We need to depower each relay without pulling it out of the socket.”

“So how do we do that? We can’t get to the back of this cabinet where all those wires come in.”

“I’m sorry… I don’t see a way without finding the power leads and cutting them.”

Dan leaned against the starboard electrical rack for few seconds, letting his mind race over the options. He was missing something, and it was pissing him off.

All available resources…

The phrase echoed through his conscious mind like a rebuke, and he raised an index finger in a wait gesture.

“Stay here. Don’t pull anything. I’ll be right back.”

Scrambling up and down the small ladder through the narrow hatchway to the cockpit was getting easier, or he was becoming less aware of the bruises. Carol saw him climbing out and was just regaining her feet when he emerged, taking her by the shoulders to move her aside gently on the way to the right side of the cockpit.

“Josh…?”

The boy’s head snapped around toward him as he flashed a wait gesture to Jerry who was looking puzzled. Bill Breem was looking at him as well, but saying nothing.

“Okay. Help me figure this out, if you can. Both of you.” Dan described the cube-shaped electrical relays and the inability to reach the power leads behind them. Breem began asking questions, and he and Dan were firing ideas back and forth too intently to notice Josh Begich trying to snag their attention. Frustrated, the boy reached up and grabbed Dan’s left forearm.

“You guys are missing it.”

“Missing what?” Breem asked, not unkindly.

“If a relay is powered on one side and the other side is holding open the circuit you want to close, pulling that relay out of its socket for a few seconds or even minutes will do no harm. You can pull the relay, pop the cover off, cut the power leads, then put it back in and the little switch inside will no longer be powered, the little plunger rod inside will be spring-loaded back, and the circuit it was designed to interrupt will no longer be interrupted, it will be restored.”

Dan looked at Bill Breem who was nodding.

“He is absolutely right.”

Dan turned back to Josh. “Okay, but what if we get the wrong one and want to repower it? If we’ve cut the power leads inside…”

“Well, the relays I’m used to working with have little prongs on the back going into the socket. Just bend the power prongs aside, and if you need to repower it, bend them back and plug it back in.”

“Josh, you just earned your keep! Thank you. That’s what I was missing.”

Dan whirled around to return to the electronics bay as Jerry caught his arm.

“I’ve slowed us down considerably, Dan, and I think we’ve got at least two hours before we’re over Tel Aviv now. At least it looks like we’re still bore sighted.”

“Got it. Pray hard, buddy. I’m going to start pulling things.”

Within five minutes Dan had put on the insulating coat and gloves he’d used before and with Frank briefed and standing beside him with a pair of needle nosed pliers, he reached in gingerly and grasped the first cube, pulling it smoothly from its socket.

A sudden uncoordinated bank to the left almost propelled Dan’s face into the metal frame of the open cabinet, but he managed to pull his head back just enough to avoid the inevitable bolt of electricity that would have accompanied the slightest touch. Frank had braced himself against a non-electrified rack, but his eyes were wide now as Dan looked at the relay cube in his hand and tried to decide what to do. He could hear Carol’s voice from the hatch relaying Jerry’s cry of alarm that they were in a steep bank, and he could feel the big aircraft in a severe sideslip, the rudder commanding a right turn as the wings tilted to the left, the frightening sound of the slipstream hitting the side of the A330 in a way it was not designed to be flown.

Still thrown to the left, Dan turned to reinsert the cube as they hit some sort of turbulence just enough to knock the relay from his hand. He heard it clatter and skitter to the bottom of the cabinet and knew there was too little time to chase it down. He could hear Jerry’s voice clearly through the hatch yelling to restore whatever he’d changed.

The relays all appeared to be identical, and he made a split second decision and grabbed for one off to the right side of the row of cubes, pulling it out and shoving it in place of the first one he’d removed.

And suddenly the severe sideslip stopped, the Airbus returning to coordinated flight, whether in a bank still or not, he couldn’t tell.

“What’s happening?” he yelled at Carol, whose terrified face could be seen through the hatch.

“Jerry says we’re still turning left, but we’re not slipping,” she shouted.

Dan got to his knees and shone the small flashlight at the bottom of the cabinet, being careful not to touch his face to the frame. He spotted the loose relay and gave chase, sticking his arm perilously into a maze of equipment and finally closing his hand around the precious little cube, then scrambling to his feet to plug it back in place of the substitute he’d removed.

“He says the turn is continuing,” Carol yelled. Dan pushed past Frank, motioning for him to stay in place, and climbed the ladder far enough to hear Jerry directly.

“What’s happening, Jerry?”

“Man, don’t do whatever that was again, please! I thought we were going to go inverted!”

“Are we wings level now?’

“No. We’ve turned around almost 270 degrees and are still turning left. Wait… from the horizon it looks like the bank is lessening and the whiskey compass says we’re coming back to the original course.”

“We just did a 360?” Dan asked.

“Apparently. Did you put everything back?”

“Yes. For the moment.”

“I don’t know, Dan. I don’t want to experience that ride again.”

“I need to keep experimenting, Jerry.”

“Well, whatever just happened, this thing has been commanded to return to the original course.”

Dan scrambled out of the hatch and stood at Jerry’s side to eliminate the need for yelling back and forth.

“You think that’s what’s happening? Someone’s actively controlling us?” Dan asked.

“It’s possible. It was weird. The slip stopped, the wings leveled, and then it started turning again to get back to course. Are there any antenna leads down there that might be feeding it commands from a satellite? Can we disconnect them if there are?”

“I hadn’t looked, but there might be.”

Once more, Dan descended the ladder back to the electronics bay, where Frank Erlichman was waiting with a pleading look betraying any attempt to project calm.

“Jerry raised the issue of whether someone’s fighting us move for move,” Dan explained.

“Similar to what would be used to fly a remotely piloted vehicle. I think they call them a drone?”

Dan nodded, as he crouched by the ladder and let his eyes run over the mysterious cabinet.

“Yes. Like a remotely piloted vehicle, an RPV, or these days we call it a UAS, unmanned aircraft system. If that was so, maybe we could disconnect the telemetry antenna and block any further orders from coming in.”

“But what if the relays did not unlatch?”

“Yeah, I know. We disconnect the active control from the ground, but we still can’t regain cockpit control.”

“For there to be active control or just a signal which turned this thing on, there would need to be a satellite connection, and I found a lead in the big cabinet labeled satcom.” Frank pointed aft and Dan followed, as he moved to the open cabinet, looking for the thick wire he had seen.

“I see it. And… there appears to be a cannon plug. Okay, help me with this logic. If this cabinet activated and took away our control in flight, it either did so by some freak accident… in other words turned itself on… or it received a radio signal. If I was going to go to all the trouble and expense of engineering this thing in the airplane to seize control from the flight crew, I wouldn’t depend on VHF radios or anything with limited range. I’d use a satellite link, separate from the passenger system or our cockpit satcom with the company.”

Frank was nodding. “And you think if the antenna lead here is disconnected, it might let go of us, whether we’re being actively controlled or not?”

“I don’t think we’re fighting a live person, Frank. Jerry up there nailed it a while ago, I think, when he said we haven’t changed heading once since this all started. How could that be active control?”

“That is logical,” Frank replied, watching Dan think it over, his eyes glued to the satcom antenna lead.

“Frank, I think we have to disconnect the satellite antenna, at least for a while. If we are under active control, and we don’t disconnect, and we keep turning off different systems, like we’ve already done with the throttles, whoever’s at the remote controls will try to compensate somehow. But if we deprive it of the basic satellite connection…” Dan’s voice trailed off.

Frank Erlichman nodded solemnly. “I see two possibilities. If we disconnect the antenna lead and nothing happens, I would think that proves we were probably not under someone’s active control. That doesn’t mean the satcom couldn’t have been the means of someone on the ground programming us previously. Second, if we disconnect the satcom and this cabinet unlatches and returns control, it proves we were under active control and now we’re free.”

“I think I followed all that, but the bottom line is, we’ve got to try to disconnect. Could you hand me those gloves?”

The cannon plug connector for the satcom antenna was easy to reach, and Dan looked up to find Carol once again in position, leaning down through the hatch as he held onto the lead.

“Tell Jerry I’m ready to disconnect this antenna, but if we’re under someone’s active control, like a remotely piloted vehicle, this could be a big risk.”

She disappeared for a few moments then reappeared, nodding essentially upside down as she stuck her head down far enough to be heard.

“Dan, he says we need to take the risk. Be ready to reconnect it if something bad happens, but go ahead and disconnect now.”

“Okay.” He glanced at his watch, which was showing exactly 0252 Zulu.

Building 4-104, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs (0252 Zulu)

Colonel Dana Baumgartner yanked the phone to his ear on the first ring. The discovery of what appeared to be both the lock and unlock codes in Gail Hunt’s classified office safe had precipitated a mad scramble to upload the unlock sequence and open the fiber optic channel to NSA’s computers, a process that required a maddeningly lengthy series of steps that had taken the better part of an hour. No way, Dana thought, could anyone have accidentally triggered that satellite array. Sabotage was the only answer.

“The unlock code is just about to go up, sir, on your order.”

“Do it! Now! Are you sure it’s the right sequence?”

There was a telling hesitation. “No, sir, we’re not. It’s our best guess, based on Gail’s notes.”

“Had she changed the numbers before?”

“Yes. Often. For security.”

“Blast the disconnect code out there, and let’s hope it’s the right one.”

“Yes sir. Transmission in sixty seconds, and we think we now have the Med covered.”

Aboard Pangia Flight 10 (0254 Zulu)

Dan held the two halves of the connector and hesitated, wondering whether there was any other aspect he hadn’t considered.

A fleeting memory of an impromptu lecture he had once given to his employees in the early days of his company came out of nowhere, an admonition for them to listen to intuition, but he couldn’t tell whether it was intuition or the shock of the aircraft’s earlier reaction to the pulled relay that was staying his hand.

Is there any reason I can think of why we’d want to maintain this connection? Somewhere there seemed to be an answer to that question, but he couldn’t get his mind around it, whatever it was. Something was definitely tugging at him, yet the logic was inescapable: If someone was controlling them from below, this would solve the problem!

Dan took a deep breath and pulled the two halves apart, totally isolating the satcom receiver.