Skyhook

ONE MONDAY EVENING OVER THE GULF OF ALASKA, SOUTHEAST OF ANCHORAGE

“Whoa! What’s this thing doing?” Captain Gene Hammond asked.

The chief test pilot’s unexpected question snapped Ben Cole upright in his seat, drawing his attention from the maze of computer screens. Instinctively, he pressed the right side of his headset closer to his ear, as if trying to recapture the comment.

“I don’t know,” he heard the copilot respond.

Ben’s eyes flickered to the forward bulkhead of the converted business jet’s cabin, imagining the civilian test pilots hunched over their controls in the cockpit some thirty feet away. He felt the Gulfstream pitch down slightly, the white noise of the slipstream rising as the jet gained speed, the unexplained maneuver sharpening the isolation of being all alone in the stripped-down cabin.

“Crown, are you purposely descending us?” Hammond queried the test director by radio link. “I don’t think that’s the plan.”

Ben felt a sparkle of chills as he forced his eyes back to the display, confirming the lowering altitude and rising airspeed.

“Negative,” the voice from the Air Force AWACS replied. “Stand by.”

The unseen presence of the AWACS, a huge four-engine Boeing, had been reassuring, like a protective parent hovering in the night some ten thousand feet above and several miles behind the Gulfstream. But it seemed dangerously distant. Ben knew that the cavernous interior of the AWACS was crammed full of electronics, a two-star Air Force general, two corporate officers, and a cadre of test engineers, all of them expecting a much-needed flawless performance in the eleventh hour of a top secret program that could make or break Uniwave Industries.

“We’re descending at three thousand, four hundred feet per minute, on a course of zero two five degrees,” Hammond said. The edge in his voice was cutting into Ben’s faith that humans were really meant to fly.

Dr. Ben Cole, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Caltech, pulled his eyes away from the computer screens and glanced toward the aircraft windows on his left, all of them black portals into the void of a moonless Alaskan night. He swallowed, and the sound was suddenly deafening.

“We’re working on it, Sage Ten,” the test director shot back, using the typically innocuous call assigned to the Gulfstream.

“And down here we’re definitely locked out,” Hammond replied.

Ben fumbled for his transmit switch. “What… what’s going on up there, guys?”

There was no reply at first, the silence conspiring with the dilation of time to feed the rising apprehension clawing at his insides.

“Stand by, Ben,” the copilot replied at last, his voice typically calm and flat. “Your damn program’s diving us. You’re not doing anything back there, are you?”

“No!” Ben replied, much too sharply. “I got all the right signals when we locked the program link. Nothing’s showing wrong here.”

The test director’s voice was back on the radio, overriding Ben’s reply.

“Sage Ten, we’re not asking for that descent. The remote control column up here is commanding straight and level. You sure you’re locked on our signal?”

“Trust me,” Hammond shot back. “We’re straight, but anything but level, and we are locked onto the telemetry. About two minutes after we turned over control to you, this started, just when you checked the speed brake. You’ve got the controls, Crown, and you’re descending us through fourteen thousand now.”

“No, we’re not,” another voice chimed in.

The remote test pilot was sitting in a replica of the Gulfstream’s cockpit safely aboard the AWACS. The plan called for the remote pilot to fly the Gulfstream by high-speed datalink for five minutes before engaging the automatic program they were there to validate — the program Ben had labored tirelessly to perfect for the previous eighteen months of eighteen-hour days. They were down to the wire now, and the thought of a setback was unacceptable.

“If this continues,” the Gulfstream pilot was saying, “we’d better abort.”

“Not yet.” The swift reply from the test director cut through their headsets. “Hang on, we’re… working on it.”

“Ben?” Gene Hammond’s voice was taking on a new level of urgency as he called his on-board test engineer, but as usual, he was trying to wrap his concern in the joking tones of a stressed airman who wasn’t about to admit to the pressure he felt. “Ben, now would be a very good time to tell me what your brainchild thinks it’s doing. A temper tantrum, perhaps?”

Ben mashed the interphone switch again, trying, and failing, to match the casual tone the pilot had adopted. “I don’t know! If they’re not commanding the descent from the AWACS, I can tell you it’s sure not in the program.”

“Is it thinking on its own, Ben?” the copilot added. “You know, making up some solution we don’t know about? You’re not some secret fan of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, are you?”

Ben felt his mind racing through an impossible tangle of technical details in search of a reassuring answer. There was none.

“Maybe we’d better disconnect.”

“Crown?” the pilot transmitted without hesitation. “I’m unsafeing the kill switch down here. If we descend through eight thousand, I’m pulling the plug on Winky.”

Ben suppressed a tiny flash of resentment. He hated the word the test pilots had coined to belittle the complex automatic system. Winky indeed! Pilots and engineers were always on a collision course, he’d been told, and he was realizing the truth of it as he punched the transmit switch again. “We could try a reset,” he added, aware the AWACS above couldn’t hear him on interphone. “They could have screwed up something back there in entering the maneuver plan. The test point altitudes, for instance.”

“Crown?” Hammond was transmitting again. “We’re descending through ten thousand, I’m just short of red-line speed, and your sage advice for Sage Ten would be greatly appreciated right about now.”

“Uh… stand by,” the test director repeated.

There was a pause the length of a heartbeat before Hammond responded. “No… too late. We’re disconnecting.”

Shit! Ben thought to himself. He sighed and sat back, feeling a cloak of disappointment enfold him. There would be corporate hell to pay for a bad test sequence. He wouldn’t be the only one in the crosshairs of company dissatisfaction, of course. There were more than sixty software experts working on the top secret system. But it had been Dr. Ben Cole, the young and the bold, who’d risked his fledgling career and his fair-haired status of “wunderkind” to take the lead position at age thirty-four.

Ben felt the Gulfstream undulate through some mild turbulence. They’re pulling out, he told himself, letting his mind disconnect for a few seconds, entering one of the tiny distractive mental loops that always helped him recharge.

Whatever happened, he would be employable. He could still work most anywhere he wanted to, and maybe he could even throttle some of his eternal ambition in favor of doing a little living. He’d had no life at all for the past two years in Anchorage. He’d been too busy to even have a girlfriend, although he’d dated a few local women and taken an occasional touristy side trip.

I know almost nothing about Alaska, he thought, resolving, as he had a hundred times before, to take a four-month vacation when this push was over. Maybe he could see some of Denali National Park on foot. He wasn’t much of an outdoorsman like his dad had been, but the fond memories of camping and hiking the Rockies in his teens with his dad as guide were always hanging there as a Valhalla to be reexperienced. He was sure he could figure out the basics of camping. After all, pitching a tent was just an applied engineering problem.

More radio chatter caught his attention, and Ben forced his mind back to the matters at hand, expecting to hear a decision to reposition to try it again.

“… up there? I’m getting nothing here,” Hammond, the Gulfstream pilot was saying. Ben’s eyes went to the screens, wondering why the altitude readout wasn’t showing the level-off. They’d disengaged at eight thousand, hadn’t they?

“We’re trying to break the link up here, Sage Ten, but the computer’s not responding.”

Ben recognized the test director’s voice. What did he mean, “not responding”?

He heard Gene Hammond’s voice snap back an answer as he came forward in the seat, instantly reengaging. “Crown, we’re dropping through four thousand at the same descent rate, same heading. Do something!”

The altitude readout on his screen showed three thousand two hundred feet, its numbers unwinding.

“Ben! Can you hear us?” Hammond was asking, his words implying a previous call Ben had missed. A rush of adrenaline filled Ben’s bloodstream as he answered, his voice sounding a bit strange.

“I’m here.”

“Do something, dammit! Help us disconnect.”

“Use the guarded disconnect switch,” Ben replied.

“We did. It doesn’t work,” the pilot said as the copilot chimed in, his voice taut with tension. “One thousand five hundred. It’s flying us into the water. What now, Ben?”

“The guarded switch won’t work?” Ben repeated blankly, his mind in a daze. How could anyone think under such pressure? The readout in front of him was still whizzing downward as he reached forward and keyed a disconnect command into the computer, sending it just as rapidly through the telemetry link to the main processor aboard the AWACS.

“One thousand!” The copilot had dropped all pretense of calm now, his voice up a half octave.

“I’m… pulling… but… I can’t override,” Hammond was saying through gritted teeth.

“Five hundred!” the copilot intoned. “Oh, God…”

Ben thought of reaching for the keyboard again to try the same disconnect sequence, but something was yanking him down hard in his seat as the Gulfstream’s nose came up without warning, spiking gravity and making him feel incredibly heavy before returning just as rapidly to the normality of a single G.

And suddenly they were level, the sounds of excessive speed bleeding off in the background.

“Jesus Christ, Crown!” he heard Hammond say on the radio. “It just jerked us level at—”

The copilot finished the sentence. “Fifty feet. On the radio altimeter. We’re holding at fifty feet, three hundred knots.”

“What’s your status, Sage Ten?” the test director asked.

“Our status? We’re into hyperventilation down here, if that’s any clue,” the pilot responded, pausing. Ben could hear a long breath. “The damn thing almost killed us! Whatever the heck is going on in that silicon psycho’s little mind, it wants to fly at fifty feet, and I still can’t disconnect it.”

“But… you’re level?”

“Yeah… for now. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this chat. But we’re just a hiccup from the water and there’s land somewhere ahead. Ben? Get this goddamned electronic octopus off my controls!”

Aboard the AWACS, Major General Mac MacAdams dared to let his breath out as he glanced quickly at the grim faces around him. All of them had been listening on small Telex headsets and unconsciously pressing in behind the pilot sitting at the remote controls as the Gulfstream had dropped toward the ocean.

The test director looked around at Mac and shook his head in shock.

“What the hell was all that about?” the general asked. He could see the test director, Jeff Kaminsky, jaw muscles working overtime as he struggled to answer.

“I don’t know, General. Stand by.” He triggered his transmit button again. “Sage Ten, we’re going to pull the circuit boards on the computer up here and disconnect you.”

“NO!” A voice from the Gulfstream cut in.

“Who’s this?” Kaminsky demanded.

“Ben Cole. Don’t pull any circuit boards! If your computer’s doing this and you get the wrong board first, it could pitch us down.”

Kaminsky glanced at the general in puzzlement as he answered. “You know what’s causing this, Dr. Cole?”

“No… but… I’m guessing. The problem may be down here, but it may not.”

“How about killing the radio links between us, then?” the test director asked.

“Wait on that, too,” Ben Cole replied. “I’m working on it from here.”

“Sage,” Kaminsky said, “we’re still showing you at fifty feet, three hundred twenty knots.”

Hammond’s voice growled back at them. “Yeah, and Winky is goosing my throttles to max thrust. Would someone check up there to make sure there’s not an island ahead or something?”

A shout marked Ben Cole’s return to the channel. “Okay! Our computer’s the culprit. Go ahead and shut down the radio link.”

Kaminsky mashed one of the intercom buttons and relayed the order to another engineer at a console ten feet away. “Shut it off. All right, Dr. Cole, the link is history. Are you released?”

There was a long pause before the pilot’s voice returned from the Gulfstream.

“No,” Hammond said. “Dammit, it’s still locked up. Ben? What the hell’s going on back there?”

The channel fell silent for several long seconds as one of the test engineers on the AWACS rose quickly from his position and came forward, pushing in alongside the general and Kaminsky. Mac MacAdams noticed the man first. The haunted look on his face meant a new emergency. The general put his hand on the test director’s shoulder and turned him toward the worried subordinate.

“What?” Jeff Kaminsky snapped.

“There’s a… problem ahead,” the test engineer said.

Kaminsky’s attention was shifting slowly to the engineer as he kept one eye on his readouts. “Spill it,” he said.

“Ahead, on my radar, about forty miles, there’s a big ship.”

Jeff Kaminsky swiveled around to look the engineer in the eye. “What do you mean, ‘big ship’?”

“Sage Ten is at fifty feet,” he said. “I know this part of the Gulf, and this target’s big.”

“He’s in Sage’s way? A big ship?”

“Yes, sir. Dead-on collision course. He’s on a heading of one hundred twenty degrees, about a right angle to our guy.”

“He’s big enough to have a superstructure fifty feet above the water line?”

“If it’s a supertanker out of Valdez, yes. The hull will be higher than that. If he hits, he’ll broadside the hull. Even if he misses, he’ll hit one of the ridges on Hitchinbrook Island twenty miles farther.”

The general caught the tech’s shoulder. “You’re saying it’s a loaded tanker?”

The man nodded. “He’s a loaded thousand-foot-long supertanker southeast-bound making eleven knots on my scope, coming out of Hitchinbrook entrance to Prince William Sound. Ships like that usually stand at least seventy feet above the water when loaded,” the engineer said, wondering why the general turned suddenly and disappeared.

Jeff Kaminsky sighed and nodded, then turned back to his screen. “Keep me informed,” he said, regretting the utter uselessness of the remark.

“Sage Ten, Crown,” Kaminsky said. “How’re you doing on the disconnect?”

The chief software engineer Kaminsky had met several times replied, his voice taut, “I can’t just kill the computer without knowing which channel I’m dealing with.”

“Dr. Cole? Listen to me. You’ve got about two minutes maximum to knock that thing offline and give your pilots control again.”

“I’m trying… stand by,” Cole replied. “I may need more than a couple of minutes. I’m running a critical diagnostic.”

“You don’t have more than that, Doctor. You may just have to yank the plug, so to speak. Reset the computer or something drastic.”

“What’s going on?” Hammond cut in. “Why two minutes?”

Jeff Kaminsky sighed quietly to himself as he decided how much to say. “There’s… a possibility of an obstruction ahead of you. It’s imperative you either change course or climb, within… a couple of minutes.”

Some twenty feet to the rear in the AWACS cabin General MacAdams replaced a handset and pointed to a window on the communications panel as he caught the attention of a young sergeant.

“Quickly and quietly dial me up on UHF frequency three twenty-two point four.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said, punching in the numbers and giving a thumbs-up.

Mac plugged into the console and toggled the radio to transmit.

“Shepard Five, this is Crown.”

The reply was instantaneous.

“Shepard Five.”

“Max speed and lock him up. Inform me when you’re within firing range.”

The lead pilot of a flight of two F-15 fighters from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage gave a brief acknowledgment. Mac could imagine them going to afterburner, the two fighters accelerating to more than twice the speed of sound in an emergency dash across the eighty miles separating them from the slower Gulfstream.

Mac forced his mind away from the horror of the situation and focused instead on being grateful for having the foresight to launch the two fighters as a precaution against something unforeseen that might threaten civilian interests.

That “something” had occurred. One Exxon Valdez oil spill was enough.

“You have both targets on radar?” Mac asked the sergeant, who nodded toward his screen.

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me decreasing range, down to six miles.”

Ben Cole felt his mind accelerating to a speed he’d never experienced as he worked through the logic of the problem, eliminating possibilities one by one, struggling hard to make sure nothing he triggered would cause a sudden pitchdown. He was aware of the radio discussion about an object in front of them, but it was a shadowy snippet of information rumbling in the background. The main event was unfolding all around him, but a part of his consciousness was perversely standing to the side, exhilarated to be watching himself trying to master such a complex problem.

The software commanding the Gulfstream was his, and there were only a finite number of possible reasons it wouldn’t release, half of which he’d already eliminated. The remaining ones, however, were even more complex, involving safety procedures to use in case of radio link failure. The system was supposed to be able to fully control an Air Force jet anywhere over the planet.

Seven down, four to go! Ben thought, feeling the timeline stretch even more. He had a minute left. It was a numbers game now, but he should have plenty of time.

“Ben, dammit, talk to me!” Gene Hammond was saying over the interphone. “We’re getting something on the radar ahead, about thirteen miles.”

He took his hand away long enough to punch the interphone transmit button. “I’m working on it. Hang on.”

“We don’t have much time, Ben! In about a minute we’re going to merge with whatever the hell that is.”

He forced himself to ignore the pilot and stay focused. There was an additional possibility he hadn’t considered. Should he take time and probe it? That hadn’t been in his plan ten seconds before.

No! Stay with what you were doing, he chided himself, tuning out the pilot’s voice booming in his ear again.

“Ben, old boy, what say we just reset that damn computer of yours and let the two of us up here deal with the consequences, okay? The possibility of a sudden pitchdown won’t really matter much if we don’t regain control.”

More silence.

Two possibilities left. Has to be one of them.

More keystrokes, his fingers flying with nimble certainty over the keyboard.

“Ben, dammit, disconnect the thing NOW! Please, Ben. Your tip depends on it. Ben? For crissakes answer me! BEN?”

One more. Murphy’s law dictates the solution will be the last one I try.

He fired off the final string of orders, but nothing changed, and the realization was a sudden slap. He’d been wrong, it wasn’t any of them.

What now? Maybe a power supply lock! Oh, Lord, let it be power supply.

“Ben, I’m sending the copilot back to either get you on channel or kill you. Please, guy, shut down that damned computer now! We’ve got eight miles left.”

Ben could hear the forward cabin door being yanked open as the copilot burst through.

“Ben? What the hell are you doing? Pull the plug!” the copilot yelped, but Ben shook his head before looking up suddenly. “I don’t believe this,” Ben said.

“What?” the copilot asked, even more alarmed.

“It won’t respond!”

For several critical minutes General MacAdams had stood in silence watching the Gulfstream’s radar target close at 340 knots on the huge thousand-foot-long supertanker. The Coast Guard had confirmed the identity, but warned there was no time for the tanker’s captain to change course.

Mac felt himself running the alternatives over in his mind again and again, but the equation always yielded the same result.

“Eight miles to go, sir,” the sergeant said quietly.

MacAdams sighed and raised the microphone to his mouth, hesitating before pressing the transmit button. “Stand by, Shepard. Launch on my command only.”

“Roger, Crown. We’re still locked, range twenty miles, and we’re slowing.”

The sergeant was intoning the decreasing range as he watched the general for any indication the impending deaths of the three men below could be averted.

“Six point five. Six point four. Six point three…”

The general sighed and punched the transmit button again.

The copilot had spotted a crash axe along the cabin wall and grabbed it before arriving at Ben Cole’s side. “Show me where to whack it! We’re down to seconds.”

“No need,” Ben replied. He reached over with one hand and toggled the interphone. His other hand reached for a single switch on the side of the main computer tower. “Hang onto your controls. I’m disconnecting.”

There was an immediate jump in G forces as the pilot yanked the jet into a climb.

“Shepard, this is Crown. On my mark… NO! Hold it.”

The sergeant was shaking his head energetically and pointing to the radar screen. “I’ve got an altitude and course change, sir.”

“Negative launch, Shepard. Safe your weapons. Acknowledge.”

“He’s coming up fast,” the sergeant was saying as the fighter lead replied.

“Roger, Crown, negative launch. Weapons safed. Standing by, and we have the target climbing steeply.”

“Jeez Louise,” the sergeant chimed in. “He’s climbing like a… a…” The sergeant glanced up nervously at the general, who smiled back in relief as he shook his head.

“Climbing like a striped-ass ape? Don’t worry, I’ve heard just about all of them.”

“I was gonna say a homesick angel.”

“Sure you were,” MacAdams chuckled, taking a very deep breath as he tightened his grip on the mike and pressed the transmit button to send the F-15s back to Elmendorf.

When the copilot had returned to the cockpit, Captain Gene Hammond, the chief test pilot for Uniwave, turned control over to him and came back to talk to Ben Cole, unsure whether to hug him or punch him out.

“So, Ben, what happened with Winky?”

“I… really wish you wouldn’t call it that.”

He could see the pilot’s features harden in a flash of anger.

“When a stupid piece of silicon tries to kill me, I’ll call it anything I damn well please. Now what the hell happened?”

“I don’t know.”

The pilot looked perplexed as he gestured to the array of computers. “But… you said you needed time, and you disconnected it successfully.”

“No, I said I had to check to make sure it wouldn’t plunge us nose down if I turned the computer off, which is what I finally did. I had to check a series of… of readouts. The program was holding the latching relays closed, but in a complex sequence, and I don’t know why.”

“You don’t know what went wrong?”

“No.”

“You don’t even know if the problem will repeat?”

“No.”

“But you told General MacAdams we’re through for the night. You do realize the company brass were listening, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

Hammond sighed and shook his head. “Then God have mercy on all of us, Ben. At best, we’ve got one more shot at a test flight to make this salable, and I’ll bet with MacAdams right now we’re hanging by a thread.”

“I know it,” Ben replied quietly, his mind already chewing over the chances of finding and fixing in time what might be a single glitch in a software program of more than six million lines of binary code. With any luck, he thought, he could complete the job by the time he reached the age of seventy.

But Uniwave would need the problem solved in forty-eight hours.