Skyhook

THIRTY SEVEN SATURDAY, DAY 6 OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, WASHINGTON 11:15 A.M.

Mike Sanborn wheeled his jeep around the parking lot for the second time in an hour, looking for the man he’d spotted on the first circuit.

He’s still there. Just sitting down the slope a bit.

He parked and pulled on the government jeep’s parking brake, remembering to grab his ranger hat from the right front seat before getting out. The chief ranger was always riding him about the hat, which he more or less hated. It should be on the top shelf of his bookcase on display, he thought, not on his head. He was too barrel-chested and stocky to wear the damn thing. He had to agree with the innumerable kids who’d pointed to him and his full, black beard and turned excitedly to their parents to announce that there really was a Smokey the Bear. It was a part of the act he could do without.

Mike closed the door behind him and stuffed his hands in his pants pockets to foster a casual air.

Not that it seemed to matter. The man he was concerned about had his back to the parking area and was just staring off to the northeast, where Mount Baker could be seen rising majestically into an unusually blue sky.

Mike turned to look for Mount Rainier to the southeast, forgetting that the Pacific Northwest’s preeminent volcano couldn’t be seen from where he was standing.

The hat threatened to blow off as a twenty-knot gust of wind tugged at it from behind. We did name it Hurricane Ridge, after all, he laughed to himself.

Mike stepped over the guardrail and moved down the slope until he was standing alongside the seated figure, a man in his late fifties, he figured.

“Hello there,” Mike said, keeping his eyes on the horizon, then turning to the fellow. “You ever see it so beautiful up here?”

The visitor looked up, recognizing the uniform and smiling thinly as he nodded. “Yeah. It’s something.”

“Mind if I join you?” Mike asked, sensing a deep sadness, his training as a counselor a decade earlier coming on-line.

The man was looking over at him again. “Am I not supposed to be here?”

“Oh, no,” Mike said quickly. “You’re just fine. The park’s open.”

“Then… if you’ll forgive my being antisocial, I’d really like to be alone.”

Mike felt himself nodding thoughtfully, but unwilling to turn away as he kicked at a small rock with the toe of his highly polished shoe. “Ah, you know, I realize I’m prying, but sometimes when someone is feeling really down, or… or when something’s really wrong, it can help to talk with a complete stranger.”

“Not today. Please. I appreciate your concern, but… not now.”

Mike nodded again, his eyes on the ground. “Okay. I, ah, wish you well, sir.”

The sound of an aircraft in the distance caught Mike’s attention and he hesitated, watching the way the man instantly looked in that direction, his eyes tracking the single-engine aircraft as it approached the ridge at a slightly higher altitude. He’s a little low, the ranger noted, recalling the rule that prohibited private pilots from flying closer than two thousand feet over a national park. But being a cop was the part of the job he never liked. So what if the pilot was a bit low, as long as he didn’t scare or endanger anyone? He would be the last ranger interested in turning him in, though there were a few of his brethren who would leap at the chance.

Mike turned and began walking back up the slope toward the jeep, but the rising buzz of the private plane caused him to turn again to watch the approach.

The plane was a low-wing version, and the seated man had unfolded his arms now as he watched it approach, his interest obviously high. Mike unconsciously grabbed his hat once again as another heavy gust blew across the ridge. The little plane was bucking the strong winds as well. He could see its wings rocking, its speed diminished against the headwind, almost crawling toward them with at least a thousand feet to spare vertically. The pilot guided it to within a quarter mile and then banked sharply to the right and almost immediately turned back, as if he wanted to get a close view of the parking area and the ridge from the left seat. Mike squinted hard as he looked at the aircraft, almost imagining he could make out a face in the left window.

The man was on his feet now, shading his eyes against the sun and looking at the plane as if he might recognize it. Mike expected him to wave, but instead the man sat back down as the aircraft turned and disappeared off to the north, folding his arms around his legs again as before, his body rocking back and forth gently.

Mike made a mental note to cruise by again in an hour. There was a dangerous drop-off very close by, and suicidal visitors were not unknown to the park.

Gracie closed the Cherokee’s throttle as she flared over the Sequim Valley runway, letting the main gear of the craft kiss its home landing strip again. She could see Rachel standing by the hangar. She ran the engine shutdown check as Rachel climbed up on the wing and opened the door.

“Gracie, thank you for coming, honey!”

“I think I spotted him on Hurricane Ridge. The color of the car seemed right. Only two in the parking area, and one was a ranger’s jeep. Someone was standing down the way a bit. I think it was the captain, and we need to get up there.”

Rachel backed away from the door as Gracie followed, closing the Cherokee’s door behind her and locking it before sprinting across to the car and climbing in the passenger side, then jumping out again before Rachel could get behind the wheel.

“You mind if I drive?” Gracie asked.

Rachel hesitated in thought and looked down at the keys, before thrusting them toward Gracie.

“It would be smarter right now. I’m pretty wrought up.”

Gracie waited until she heard the click of Rachel’s seat belt, her feelings alternating between the heartache of what Rachel was going through — hurt and apprehension — and her own continuous embarrassment over being chewed out by Ben Janssen a few hours before. All of it, Gracie reminded herself, didn’t compare to the nightmarish pain that had propelled the captain to Hurricane Ridge.

“Hurry, Gracie,” Rachel said quietly, her hand massaging her forehead, her eyes closed. “Please.”.

With the wooden boat hauled onto Jim Dobler’s tug, Scott McDermott looked at his watch and turned to April, who was helping stow the various ropes they’d used.

“You’re sure the pieces you saw were from your dad’s plane?”

“Yes. They had the same colors, and I saw the same piece of cowling before, when the plane was there. They took it. No question.”

Scott fell silent for a few seconds. “I’ve got about four hours’ fuel, and I’m going to use it to check out any ships that went through this area in the past six hours.”

April sighed and wiped her forehead, her parka open in the cool breeze.

“You really think it could have happened this morning?”

“Yes. Yesterday, when we flew by, there were no ships in the area I could see, and whoever did this probably wouldn’t have tried a night recovery.”

Jim had joined them, wiping his hands on an oily rag that was making them even dirtier.

“Am I right, Jim?”

“About a night recovery? Not advisable but not impossible. I think you’re probably wasting your time, Scott. Once someone hauls wreckage like that up on deck, they can take off at ten to fifteen knots and cover a lot of distance. Could be halfway to anywhere by now.” He turned and left to take care of another pre-departure duty.

“I’ve got to try,” Scott said.

“Okay,” April replied, fatigue vying with disappointment. “Let’s go.”

“No. April, I think you ought to go back with Jim.”

“Why? I’m paying you.”

He smiled and nodded, glancing off to sea for a few moments.

“Yeah, well, there are times I like to fly alone, and this one’s on me, okay?”

She cocked her head. “Straight up, Scott, why don’t you want me along?”

“First, I think you’ll be more productive and relaxed with Jim.”

“That’s a smokescreen. What else?”

“Because I may press a few limits and I don’t necessarily want passengers or witnesses, okay?”

April nodded. “That I understand. You have the satellite phone. Can you call if you spot someone churning away with a wrecked Albatross on deck?”

“Immediately.”

“Because, otherwise, I think we’re screwed. Without that tape, or the wreckage, I’ve got zip to convince the FAA they’re wrong about my dad.”

Scott put his hands on April’s shoulders and drew her closer. She looked up at him and started to speak.

“It’s going to be okay, April. I know it.”

“Well… I can hope,” she said. He could see she was rapidly losing the battle to stay composed, the adrenaline and exertion and disbelief of finding the wreckage gone washing past her emotional limits and down her face. She closed her eyes and let him enfold her, her head on his chest. Scott tightened his arms around her and rocked her gently, patting her as she sobbed. There were disturbing feelings there competing for his attention. Knight-to-the-rescue feelings, and more. But they were far too confusing, and he forced himself to shove the deeper emotions aside and concentrate on the mission as he waited for her tears to subside.

The tenor saxophone had been staring him down for weeks, sitting on its stand in the corner of his living room, but Ben had put off trying to play it until the crunch at work was over. That, as he reminded himself, had followed the year-long period of grief and agony over losing Lisa, a year in which all the music in his soul had gone silent.

He sat now on the black leather couch, staring back at the instrument he’d played so well for so long, recalling the times Lisa had pushed him to take it downtown to a restaurant that featured blues and jazz every Sunday where he’d join the paid musicians he knew for a few sets. He’d loved those sessions, all the more because of Lisa’s smiling face looking up at him from the nearest table, her lips mouthing suggestive things only they understood until neither of them could stand it. A hurried trip back home and a trail of clothes from the garage to the bedroom made those wonderful nights so memorable. The saxophone had been the midwife to those evenings. “The joy of sax!” Lisa had dubbed it.

Sometimes, Ben recalled, they hadn’t made it home before their passion for each other overwhelmed them. The memory of several risky sessions in the backseat of their car made him smile.

He knew what she would say now about the sax, if she could peek into his life for a moment: “Play it for me!” she would tell him. “Life goes on.”

And now his last excuse for putting it off was apparently gone.

Ben sighed and got up, intending to pick up the sax and begin the long process of getting back his proficiency as a musician, but a glimpse of his computer screen flashing at his desk in the corner stole his attention.

Later, he mouthed to the sax, turning instead to his desk, where the screen was urgently reporting that new e-mail had arrived.

Ben triggered the appropriate keys, recognizing the communiqué as unwanted spam. He deleted it and began to turn away when an idea flitted across his mind. He triggered a web search engine and punched up his list of favorite websites, scrolling down until he found the one that provided a direct link to the FAA’s command center in Herndon, Virginia, a program that let anyone track any airborne aircraft.

He found the right page and queried the database, pleased to see that he could effectively replay a particular point from the previous Monday evening, and entered the time they had begun plunging toward the Gulf of Alaska.

Seconds rolled by before the screen lit up with the response from the FAA’s computers, and he worked to zoom in on the appropriate area.

He could find nothing with the Gulfstream’s call sign, Sage 10, but there was one for the AWACS listed as Crown 12. He pushed the program forward in time, watching the blip designating the AWACS move steadily toward the east at the very time the Gulfstream, with him in it, would have been diving toward the water.

The article he’d seen in the Anchorage Times hadn’t given a call sign for the lost amphibian, but it didn’t seem to matter. Without a datablock, he couldn’t tell where the Gulfstream was anyway.

I should have known. This is a time waster.

Ben exited the program and got up, then sat down again, wondering if there was a way to get raw air traffic control data from recent days.

There was a possibility, he decided, that an old friend and reformed hacker named Hank Boston might know a path. Hank, whose infamous screen name was Mastermouse, had quit breaking into computers about two steps ahead of the FBI in the late eighties, and had shifted instead to a lucrative business in protecting computers from people like himself. Ben chuckled at the thought that he’d learned more about computing from the University of Mastermouse than from Caltech. The best part was how much Hank loved airplanes. If there was a way to see what the FAA’s radars had recorded, Hank would know how. Any contact, however, might be monitored, which meant he had to be very careful not to reveal too much.

It might as well be in writing, Ben concluded, pulling an e-mail form onto his computer screen and typing in a message. The effort was probably wasted, he told himself. Hank could be on vacation, in jail, or in some public arcade hunched over a computer game, oblivious to the rest of the world while he saved the earth from the fifty-thousandth alien attack he’d repulsed — for a half-dollar per game.

He sent the e-mail and sat in thought for a moment, wondering what was motivating him so urgently to find out whether the lost amphibian had been close to Sage 10 Monday night. The answer was ridiculously simple and naive and altruistic: revulsion at a senior pilot losing his livelihood to the unknown force of a passing aircraft whose interference might be cloaked in the secrecy of a black project. It was too much to bear, and too great a price to pay. It wasn’t his problem, of course, but in some ways it seemed like it. It was as if the ultimate cause of the Gulfstream’s dive had been his failure to spot the flaws in the program.

Hey! Don’t forget the fatal flaw was the autopilot system. You had nothing to do with that.

But the expected relief from feelings of guilt wouldn’t come.

A “new message waiting” notice was flashing on the screen. Ben clicked through the appropriate sequence to bring up the email, which was from Hank.

That was fast! he thought.

The message was vintage Hank:

As promised, within a half hour the follow-up e-mail arrived with a lengthy address and additional instructions, which Ben carefully entered. A long listing of database storage disks covering various dates and radar sites suddenly appeared under the FAA’s logo, and he tried to ignore the reality that somehow he was almost instantly inside an FAA computer.

The names of the various air traffic radar sites were unfamiliar, but he called up an Alaska map and quickly scanned back and forth between the place names for the area south of Valdez and what was on the radar list. One name in particular stood out, and he selected it. The screen indicated a download of the requested clip, and Ben waited in apprehension, wondering if there was any way the altered identification codes his computer was sending could be discovered and the connection traced back to him.

The download complete, Ben broke the connection, collapsing the communications program and changing his computer’s individual ID code back to normal. He called up the radar information for Monday night then and worked to convert the format to something he could display, finally succeeding. A few more keystrokes and the picture enlarged to full size before him, each recorded sweep of the radar beam bringing a vastly clearer picture than what he’d seen from Herndon.

This was, after all, the raw data. He worked to refine it before identifying the Gulfstream, a task that proved simple once he’d located the AWACS on the screen.

Ben worked through the data, isolating the various blips as they appeared and disappeared, creating projections of their positions and moving them back and forth until the conclusion became obvious.

My God, if that’s the amphibian coming from the southeast to the northwest, we crossed right over or under him at fifty feet! And immediately after that encounter with us, he disappeared for good.

The newspaper article he’d cut out earlier about the crash was sitting next to the keyboard. He reread it now, memorizing the name of the grounded pilot and querying an on-line phone book for his phone number.

Rosen, Arlie. Sequim, Washington. The phone number followed.

Ben copied down the number and punched it into the desk phone before thinking about the possibility that Uniwave — or someone else — might be bugging it. He hung up quickly. The cell phone would be safer, though even digital phones could be monitored by sophisticated agencies. Ben dialed the number and heard the line ring through to a voice mail message. “Ah, Captain Rosen, this is… Ben Cole in Alaska. I’m in Anchorage, and I noticed an article about the loss of your aircraft earlier this week, and there’s something I think you need to know as soon as possible.” He left his number and broke the connection, not entirely sure what he would have said had the pilot answered in person.

Schroedinger was sitting on the adjacent windowsill, watching him with intense disinterest, and Ben looked at him thoughtfully.

“So what do I say to him, boy, when he calls back? ‘Hi, I’m with a government project I can tell you nothing about, but Monday a private jet registered somewhere else making a flight that officially never existed may have theoretically knocked you out of the sky? All you have to do is illegally hack into a government computer and risk ten years in prison and you’ll find the evidence?’ Not exactly a brilliant move.” Ben shook his head in true confusion, acutely aware of the danger.

But the alternative of silence was even worse.