Lockout

by John J. Nance

  “Okay, I’m going down to the electronics bay. Jerry? I need you to motor your seat as far forward as you can stand again. When you move your seat back, you all but seal off the hatch.”

  “Got it.”

  “Wait…” Carol responded. “Before you go, I need to at least tell you about this one report from a first class passenger.”

  Half out of the right seat, Dan stopped. “Go ahead.”

  “I’m sure it’s useless information, but there’s a young teenage boy, an unaccompanied minor, in the seat ahead of this fellow, and he’s got some sort of computer program running that our passenger thinks could mean that he’s somehow … I’m embarrassed to even repeat this silliness … but that somehow he’s hacked into the cockpit systems and is causing all this.”

  Suddenly Jerry Tollefson was completely engaged. He stopped motoring the seat forward and half turned to his right to ask Carol to repeat the details.

  “The kid’s got a computer program on?” Jerry asked. “A UM? No parents aboard?”

  “That’s right.”

  “NOW?”

  “Yes. Right now.”

  “Jesus!” Seat belt straps were flying as Jerry moved the seat back and scrambled out, brushing past Carol to reach the cockpit door, fire in his eyes as Dan caught his sleeve.

  “What?”

  “Jerry, that can’t be the answer.”

  “Yeah? Then tell me what is? Closest thing to an explanation I’ve heard so far.”

  “At least wait till I strap in,” Dan managed, but the captain was already through the cockpit door with Carol on his heels.

  First class cabin, Pangia 10

  To the passenger who’d reported his suspicions, all concerns that he wasn’t going to be taken seriously evaporated as the captain himself fairly burst into the cabin. The four-striper moved straight to the boy in Seat 3B and leaned over, grasping the edges of the seat, shaking it slightly.

  “Look at me!” the captain demanded. “Are you electronically messing with this aircraft?”

  The girl in the window seat had suddenly snapped awake.

  “What?” the kid managed.

  “Let me see that computer!”

  “That’s my …”

  “GIVE ME THE COMPUTER! NOW!”

  The laptop was rotated on the boy’s lap, and the captain’s eyes narrowed as he took in the instrument panel of an Airbus A330.

  “Listen to me kid, or you’ll spend the next twenty years rotting in a French prison. You’re going to undo whatever you’ve done! You hear me? You reverse that immediately and return full control to my cockpit.”

  “But I …”

  “NOW, DAMMIT!”

  Several first class passengers were getting to their feet, unsure what was happening, as Carol closed in at the captain’s side, a hand on his arm to calm him down. But it wasn’t working, and the commander of Flight 10 leaned over again, his big hand closing on the lapel of the boy’s shirt, his breath in the boy’s face.

  “You little bastard! I swear I’ll beat you senseless right here if you don’t do what I’m telling you to do! RELEASE MY COCKPIT!”

  “Captain …” Carol, began.

  “YOU HEAR ME?”

  “Captain!” she tried again.

  `“WHAT?” Jerry Tollefson asked in a growl, glancing over his shoulder at Carol.

  “He’s trying to answer you!” she said. “Let him speak.”

  Jerry released Josh Begich with a violent lurch and straightened up to his full height, glaring at the terrified boy.

  “I … didn’t do anything!” Josh stammered, his eyes huge, his right hand at his own throat as if to check if it were still intact. “Honest, sir, I …”

  The girl in 3A was gesturing wildly to the laptop, her eyes huge as well.

  “He had a loop going … he was trying to fool me earlier, but it was just a recorded loop!”

  Begich was in total confusion, nodding at first, then shaking his head. Three male passengers had stood and were approaching cautiously, unsure who needed to be brought under control, but Carol was motioning them back.

  Jerry reached down and twirled the laptop once more so he could see the screen.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Ah … Josh … Josh Begich …”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “My dad’s meeting me in New York.”

  “So we’re at flight level three-eight-zero, and so is this display. Our instruments show a heading of two-four zero, and so does the panel on this screen. You’re reading our panel, aren’t you?”

  “Captain, he was just trying to fool me …” the girl said again. “He was … just being a dork.”

  “I heard you!” Jerry snapped at her, his eyes boring into Josh’s. “What am I looking at on this screen?”

  “I … it’s a mockup … it’s a cockpit like yours, sir, but … but I’m not connected to anything. I just had it running the heading and everything … where I thought we were.”

  “And if I turn this computer off and rip the battery out?”

  “Nothing will happen to the plane! Honest! I was just … just …”

  “Our cockpit is offline! Is that a coincidence, too?”

  “I heard your announcement, sir, but it isn’t me.”

  Jerry grabbed the laptop and handed it to Carol. “Take it to Dan. See what he thinks.” He turned back to Begich, pressing a finger to his chest. “If I find out you’re lying, kid …”

  “I’m not! I’m not lying … I wouldn’t … really! I swear!”

  Jerry swiveled around, reading the distress in his lead flight attendant’s eyes. He followed her gaze to the three male passengers who’d been standing at the ready. All three were watching him now with deep alarm, saying nothing, as if unsure whether it was safe to even sit down with a madman captain screaming and threatening kids. He shook his head and waved them off. “Sorry to alarm you guys. We thought …”

  One of the men was approaching. Short, rotund, and balding, he nevertheless had an air of authority about him and Jerry shook his head at first when the man’s voice reached him, low and accented.

  “Captain, may I speak with you in the galley there.”

  It was, Jerry realized, more of an order than a request, and for some reason the embarrassment of attacking a snot-nosed teenager cancelled his desire to pull rank and duck back in the cockpit. Instead, he followed the man in, finding a perfunctory outstretched hand, which he took reluctantly.

  “I am Moishe Lavi,” he began, watching for a reaction that didn’t come. “I know a few things about command and leadership, Captain, and I know we’ve got a very big problem, but may I make a humble suggestion?”

  “What, that I cool it? Yeah, you can, because I know you’re right, Mr. … Lavi was it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I apologize.”

  “Tell me what you think is happening to this plane, Captain?”

  Just for a second Jerry thought he saw a means of polite escape, but pilot platitudes such as “We’re working on the problem” or “We have it under control” sounded one light year beyond ridiculous, and so he remained where he stood, knowing somewhere in the back of his mind that somewhere he’d heard the name “Lavi,” and not being able to make the connection was bothering him, too.

  “Actually, sir, I don’t have any good ideas to explain what’s happening to us. Neither the copilot nor I have ever even heard of anything like this before. I … we just left Israel, as you know, and I have to wonder if some enemy of Israel did this … but, I don’t even know how to define “this.”

  “An enemy of Israel?” Lavi looked off balance for the briefest of moments. “You mean the Iranians? Why would you suspect them?”

  “I don’t, at least not an active suspicion, and not just Iran. I mean, we have no explanation for what’s happening, so I suppose that’s a place to start.”

  “I see. And you can’t regain control?”

  What? Jerry thought. Am I
not speaking clearly? He stifled the urge to make a sarcastic comment, still suspicious that he should know this guy.

  “No,” Jerry answered, restraining himself carefully and describing the untouchable video game the cockpit had become.

  “And if nothing changes, what are we to do then, Captain?”

  That’s the question I don’t want to hear, Jerry thought to himself. What if! What if we can’t solve it before we run out of fuel? What if even then, even when all the electrics are offline, we can’t even dead stick it to an engine-out landing?

  Moishe Lavi saw the expression on Jerry Tollefson’s face even before Jerry realized it himself.

  “Excuse me, please, Mr. Lavi,” Jerry said, trying to mask the sudden tension in his voice. “Please go back to your seat. I have to go back up front.”

  Jerry turned without a word and propelled himself into the cockpit, pulling the door partially closed behind him. Bill Breem had surfaced from the electronics bay and was perched on the jumpseat and Jerry registered the fact that Dan had the kid’s computer on his lap, an amused expression on his face.

  “What, Dan?”

  Dan shook his head. “Carol told me what went on. This is just a clever recording. I changed a bunch of parameters and nothing changed up here.”

  The sigh from the captain’s mouth as he slid back into the command chair was almost heartrending, Dan thought.

  “I thought …”

  “I know. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy.”

  “One other idea, Dan.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “If the engines stopped, and the RAT wasn’t deployed, and the battery was disconnected, there’s no way whatever or whoever is holding us hostage could not let go, right?”

  There was desperation in Jerry’s voice, but what was pulling at Dan was completely frivolous—the fact that the last line of defense for electrical and hydraulic failure had a derisive acronym: RAT, the Ram Air Turbine.

  “Dan?”

  “Jerry, the only way that would happen, if nothing else we try works, is when we run out of fuel and the engines stop. Even then, a total disconnect would only occur if we slow down so far the engines can’t provide windmilling voltage. Then, provided we could keep the RAT from popping out and giving us electricity, which, by the way, we can’t, because it’s automatic, and provided I could find and disconnect the only battery bank downstairs, then the remaining problem is, we’d have no basic flight controls and we’d be descending, with all instruments blank, unable to influence anything. I don’t really think that’s a good solution.”

  “I wholeheartedly agree, that’s not a solution,” Breem added, his voice no longer carrying a sarcastic tone.

  “I’m not an idiot,” Jerry said. “I know that. But in that moment of complete disconnect, we could then deploy the RAT, power up the controls, and maybe get her back.”

  “For how long?” Dan asked. “To glide down somewhere? We’d be out of gas, and we can’t artificially turn off the fuel since nothing up here works.”

  “We haven’t tried to use the engine cutoffs.”

  “Jerry, I don’t think we want to just try that. You want to gamble, knowing that if it works and the engines stop, we still can’t get them back and fly the airplane manually …” he let the thought trail off into the oblivion it deserved.

  “What else have we got?” Jerry asked.

  “Methodical analysis. We’re off the emergency checklists on this. Yes, we have no formal guidance, but this stuff isn’t metaphysics. Therefore, we have a lot of deduction and methodical analysis to go through, step by step. Let me get back downstairs and see what I can find … if anything. Captain Breem, did you have any insights down there?”

  Bill Breem shook his head and looking a bit pale. A bit different when you’re facing the monster yourself, isn’t it, Captain Bligh, Dan thought, making sure those thoughts weren’t being transmitted in his expression.

  “I’ve only been in that compartment a few times, gents,” Breem said. “But you’re right; I’ve never seen a cabinet like that or even heard of it.”

  “Well, we know the flight controls worked on this ship out of Tel Aviv, and no one’s been in here with a welding torch, so presumably any huge switch array that’s been thrown down there can be unthrown, so to speak.”

  “And if it can’t?” Jerry asked.

  “Too early for apocalyptic thinking, my friend. Do you want the worst case? Ultimately?”

  “Yeah, Dan. Give me the worst case.”

  “Worst case is we all die. But the inconvenient truth is, we’re all going to die someday anyway, so all we can do is delay that inevitability as best we can, and when you work back from that premise, there is hope.”

  First class cabin, Pangia 10

  Forty feet aft of the cockpit Moishe Lavi had regained his seat and settled in, his eyes focused somewhere far away, as Ashira could clearly see. She knew this look, this sudden air of detachment, always the face he showed when something very strategically challenging was roiling his fertile brain. She had learned how to bide her time in learning what it might be, and even then—even in the throes of sexual delight when his guard was down and his cock was up and in total control—he would sometimes mislead her with an ease Prince Machiavelli would have admired.

  She watched now in silence, her own stomach contracted at the news of the pilots’ loss of control and now Moishe’s studied response. She waited patiently for his return to the mundane cabin of the aircraft, trying to guess his mind.

  As Moishe Lavi returned to his seat, Carol quietly pulled open the cockpit door and stood just inside, her eyes wide as she waited for at least one of the pilots to turn toward her.

  “We have a signal!” she said, causing both pilots to turn toward her.

  “Sorry?” Dan managed.

  “On one of the cell phones we gathered. We have a signal, and we have an operator!” She held out the handset, and Jerry grabbed it with the zeal of a starving dog lunging for a scrap.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  First class cabin, Pangia 10 (2330 Zulu)

  Ashira had been ready to offer at least one of their top-of-the-line satellite phones to the crew, but Moishe had vetoed the idea, directing her instead to hide the transceiver. There were many things Moishe did that irritated her, but his order had mostly twanged her suspicions.

  Ashira was watching him closely, but Lavi was paying no attention, as he sat hunched over a laptop computer that seemed to have his undivided attention. Finally he looked up, locking eyes with her as he snapped the lid closed.

  “So, we are returning.”

  Ashira’s eyebrows had arched slightly. “To Tel Aviv?”

  “Yes … and no. We may fly over our homes and then head for Tehran.”

  “WHAT?” she managed.

  Moishe Lavi looked almost smug, and while he sometimes reacted to stress this way, it made no sense.

  “How do you know this?” Ashira asked, her mind whirling through all the ways any in-the-clear communication could be intercepted and used against them.

  “I have Internet … I have email … I have sources, Ashira, and I remain in charge of me. You should know that.”

  Cockpit, Pangia 10 (2340 Zulu)

  Feeling as if another lifeline had been snatched away from his fingertips, Jerry stopped the constant re-dial attempts and placed the borrowed cell phone in his lap, forcing himself to sit in thought for a second.

  “Did they hear you?” Dan was asking. “Did they understand we’re locked out of the system?”

  “I think they did … but they said it was coming through badly … like every other word. You heard my end.”

  “What were you responding to when you said, ‘We couldn’t be if we tried’?”

  Jerry turned toward his copilot with a crooked smile. “They asked if we were hijacked.”

  Dan shook his head in amazement. “If we can’t believe all this, I wouldn’t expect them to. That was operations in Chicago?”
>
  “Yeah … and one of our vice presidents, no less … if I heard him right.”

  “Okay, Jerry, I’m going down to the electronics bay again. Please motor your seat full forward.”

  The captain gave a perfunctory nod as his first officer lifted the floor hatch and once again carefully squeezed behind the captain’s seat. He descended the diminutive ladder into the crowded corridor of electronic racks and blinking lights carrying his airline-issued iPad which was already keyed to the limited electrical schematics pilots were allowed to view. Bill Breem had begged off going down again, describing his wiring knowledge as too rudimentary to be helpful, an uncharacteristic admission stated with a degree of embarrassment.

  Even knowing electrical and electronic circuits as well as he did, Dan had never seen the real engineering schematics for the Airbus A330 either. But there was an innate logic to the way even Airbus organized the hundreds of miles of wires that formed the electronic keel beam of the plane. Most of the complex cable harnesses, as they were called, were buried behind baffles and conduits or beneath the floor panels he was standing on, and as he snapped on the interior lights and looked carefully in all directions, nothing seemed out of place.

  Where the hell do I begin? Dan wondered. How would you disconnect an entire cockpit, yet continue to feed it bullshit flight information for the displays?

  The presence of the unfamiliar cabinet toward the rear of the compartment had been his target before descending the ladder, but there was always an ethereal hope that he’d missed something big and obvious on the first excursion beneath the cockpit. But nothing looked even remotely like a single switch that could reconnect everything, restoring their ability to actually fly the airplane.

  Dan moved carefully aft, shining his flashlight around on the various exposed electronic racks, trying to take nothing for granted. But even the electronics boxes with blinking diagnostic lights appeared to be normal.

  He reached the unknown cabinet and whistled to himself. The size of it was larger than he’d remembered. Almost eight feet in length, about five feet high, and spanning perhaps three feet laterally, the side made out of what looked suspiciously like a weight-wasting stainless steel. But despite his best effort, he couldn’t locate even a hint of a hatch or service door.