Lockout

by John J. Nance

“A loyal faction of Mossad … perhaps even a faction of the IDF. We can only speculate at this point, but too much is lining up here which smells like a very clever clandestine operation. And remember, his drive for a first strike at Tehran was already blocked before he was thrown out of office because of their extensive civilian safeguards. This may be his only way.”

  “Provoke Tehran, you mean?”

  “Yes,” Walter replied. “And personally at that. The way he appears to be doing it may border on the brilliant, but that depends on what other planned tumblers fall into place. In other words, if he has confederates in the Israeli Defense Force and the Israeli Air Force ready to feed inaccurate tactical and strategic information to the leaders at critical moments in order to make them believe they have no choice, Lavi might just be able to bypass all the normal safeguards.”

  “You mean, feed them disinformation on which Iranian missile sites are fueling, what radars have snapped on, satellite communications, and autonomous launch authority? Having his clandestine confederates feed the Israeli command staff bogus updates in a crisis?”

  “Precisely, Jim. All that, and more. Everything necessary to make it appear that the only responsible course of action for Israel is to launch a nuclear first strike against the mullahs. In the so-called fog of pre-war, with the dice loaded, Mr. Lavi and his commandeered jetliner may be flying one in for the homeland.”

  “Good God.”

  “Walt, how about DIA dancing with NSA before the plane turned? What’s up with that?”

  “We’re working on squeezing some explanations out of NSA. We’re also chasing down a picture of the missing Mojave employee for a face recognition scan. Bet you anything he’s Israeli.”

  “But, Walt, why was DIA on this to begin with? Is there any chance …”

  “That we’re directly involved with helping Mr. Lavi?” Walter sighed, long and ragged. “I hope to hell we’re not involved.”

  “Walt … wait a minute. There’s a loose end bothering me here. Where’s the airplane that Pangia thought they were flying? You said it was missing from that California facility?”

  “We’re tracing flight plans. No luck yet. Apparently when it left California, it was using a bogus call sign.”

  “See, I keep thinking, if this was a purposeful mix-up, who would want to fly off with that other plane? I’m not following that.”

  “Frankly, Jim, neither are we.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Silver Springs, Maryland (9:45 p.m. EST / 0245 Zulu)

  “I think I’ve got it!” Jenny Reynolds jabbed a fist in the air as she turned to Will Bronson.

  “Really?”

  “Yes! I figured out the enabling order, and I’ve reversed it … in theory. Now the small remaining problem is how to get it transmitted to that aircraft on a frequency it’s monitoring.”

  Will rushed to her side looking somewhat bewildered at the complex strings of letters and numbers on her laptop screen. “Didn’t you get a read on the frequency when you picked up the transmission?”

  “Yes, but remember it was a piggybacked signal, kind of like a harmonic. But that’s not the problem. I can transmit it in the clear, but I have to have something to transmit it over, and I don’t have the authority to just tap into any satellite transponder I want to commandeer.”

  The electronic warble of Will Bronson’s cell phone caused Jenny to look up as he pulled it out and studied the screen, a frown darkening his features as he turned away from her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Keep working, please,” he said, getting to his feet and moving toward the far end of the room, his voice low and tone urgent with words she couldn’t hear and was trying to ignore. Normally she could hear the other side of a cell phone conversation, but he was holding the phone so tightly to his ear she could hear nothing.

  Suddenly he was back, standing uneasily beside her, a distracted expression on his face.

  “Okay, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  He shook his head and tried to laugh, but the effort was disingenuous.

  “We need to hurry.”

  “No kidding. What was that call? Why are you looking haunted all of a sudden?”

  Again he glanced toward the door before turning back to her. “Jenny, my agency thinks I’ve gone rogue.”

  “What?”

  “Or some rogue faction at DIA thinks I’m a threat. “

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we’ve got to get that code you figured out transmitted and get out of here.”

  “I thought this was your safe house?”

  “It’s DIA’s safe house, and I’m DIA, and … apparently … some of us are of the opinion that you and I are up to no good, or hell, who knows, maybe they think I’ve kidnapped you!”

  “Can’t we just explain it to … them? You want me to talk to someone … a proof of life kind of thing?”

  He was shaking his head vigorously.

  “If there was time, Jen, yes, but remember we don’t know who sent the first messages, and they came from your building. Get finished, and let’s get out of here.”

  “Is someone on the way?”

  He leaned in close to her, eye to eye. “Jenny, just work as fast as you can. We need to go, or we might not have the chance to solve this. Just save your work and don’t try to transmit it yet.”

  She nodded slowly, momentarily lost in his eyes again. “Okay. But why? If I have a chance to transmit it, why not try?”

  “There’s a good reason!”

  “Which I need to know.”

  “It has to do with monitoring. I don’t want anyone cancelling out whatever you send. We could have only one chance.”

  “And time is running out, right?”

  “One shot, Jen! You want to gamble?”

  She snapped back to the computer, re-focusing on where she’d been when his phone rang. Both of them stared at the screen in silence for a few moments.

  “I know a transponder you could use clandestinely, but we can’t trigger it out of this place,” he added.

  Jenny sighed and bit her lip, racing her mind’s eye around a planet full of communications satellites and trying to recall a classified vulnerability she’d read about within the last few weeks. It was a geosynchronous communications satellite over the eastern Atlantic, which would cover the Mediterranean and some of the Middle East, but what was the vulnerability?

  “Jenny?”

  “Shh-h. I’m thinking.”

  “About what?” Will got to his feet and stood aside quietly, watching her as she tapped a pencil on the desk and then started nibbling the eraser like a crazed chipmunk, occasionally shaking her head as if in deep dialogue with an unseen colleague. He was wholly unprepared for her to turn suddenly and yelp.

  “What?”

  “I think I’ve got it. I hope I’ve got it!”

  “Okay. Can I ask what?”

  She was already back at the keyboard typing frantically, bringing up a series of pages of some technical site and landing finally on a blinking cursor. She typed in a series of keystrokes and waited as some distant server considered her request.

  The screen filled suddenly with a blue background and a series of open fields.

  “Yes, yes, yes! I did remember. They were testing this one transponder and someone left the portal open with a very mundane sign-in code.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I’ve got one shot at uploading the reversal string and firing it toward the Med. If we’re lucky, it will repeat three or four times before self-cancelling. But, hopefully, that will be enough.”

  “And the frequency is the same?”

  “I’m not certain, Will, but I think this covers the same spectrum.”

  “Will NSA intercept it?”

  “Yes, but not immediately.”

  “Then for God’s sake, don’t do it! Not from here.”

  “Will … why?”

  “Save your work. Here’s a flash drive. Save it, and let
’s get the hell out of here.”

  “What aren’t you telling me, Will Bronson?”

  “That we may have every cop in the Beltway looking for us! Please, let’s go!”

  She worked quickly to transfer the computer code to the flash drive, her head spinning with the pressures of time and Will’s sudden panic over transmitting. But the opportunity was there and the transponder was waiting, her finger poised over the execute key he hadn’t seen her pull up. She glanced over as he moved to the window to check outside, and tapped the key, immediately collapsing the transmit page. Maybe it would be tracked and maybe it wouldn’t be, but she’d taken her best shot. He was wrong to want to wait, she was sure of that, yet something wasn’t quite making sense about his concerns.

  Just as suddenly, he was back at her side, nodding as she ordered the computer into hibernate mode and snapped it shut, handing him the flash drive.

  “Okay. Done.”

  “What do you mean, done?” he asked, searching her eyes.

  “I mean it’s on the flash drive and saved, I’m ready to get back to that transponder when you think it’s safe, and I’m ready to get out of here. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Although I’m worried we may have blown the one chance to stop this,” Jenny said, wondering why she was lying about it. What was she doing, testing him?

  Will was already turning toward the door, his hand on her shoulder.

  “Worry not. I’ve got it under control.”

  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 in
ability 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.