Skyhook

by John J. Nance

  But what could he be missing that was obvious?

  ELEVEN

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, DAY 3 ANCHORAGE HILTON

  April had been battling to ignore the sound of the alarm clock for the previous ten minutes. She gave up and pulled it to her. She’d left a wake-up call for 8 A.M., but it was 5:50.

  Dean, one of her two brothers, was due in at 10 A.M., and she had to get to the airport as well as make a half dozen calls back to Vancouver. And, if her folks were to be released by mid afternoon, there were airline tickets to Seattle to arrange.

  April turned out the lamp on the bedside table and pulled a pillow over her head to try to recapture sleep, but it was no use. After less than ten minutes she sat up abruptly and tossed the pillow across the room in frustration, wide awake. Something was rolling around in her mind and she couldn’t quite capture it.

  Okay. I’ll try the shower.

  Anchorage was hunkered down under a slate sky on a particularly frigid morning when she slid out from under the bedcovers and padded over to the window to look out. She thought about her state of undress, but her silk robe was back in Vancouver, and besides, there were no high buildings across from the Anchorage Hilton.

  April pulled the curtains back to an otherwise exhibitionistic extent and folded her arms beneath her breasts as she watched a flight of four Air Force F-15s landing at Elmendorf one by one. She waited until all four had crossed the threshold and disappeared onto the runway before heading for the bathroom and inserting herself into the comfortable cocoon of hot water and white noise, letting the spray block out all but her thoughts.

  Long, hot, luxurious showers had always been her best thinking time, something her brothers had never understood—especially when they had to wait endlessly for their little sister to release the bathroom.

  But the never-ending supply of hot water in a major hotel was a wonderful luxury, and she’d taken advantage of such opportunities all her life—so much so, Gracie was fond of saying, that her name had become a permanent feature on the environmentalist hit list of international water wasters.

  April closed her eyes and tried to remember what it was about the conversation with her mother the night before that was bothering her so. She’d left the hospital around seven and checked into the hotel, then had gone downstairs for a quick sandwich. But her mother was already ringing her room phone by the time she returned. Rachel Rosen needed to go over everything in great detail once more, and it had been therapeutic for both mother and daughter.

  Something, however, had been bothering April ever since.

  Okay … Dad said the prop threw a blade and everything started shaking wildly.

  She let her mind replay her parents’ narratives.

  Mom said Dad’s description of the prop blade must be right because there was this incredible noise, just as he said.

  She turned around, letting the cascade of water inundate her face, standing in thought a few more minutes, melding her memory of the Albatross with their description of the moment.

  April’s eyes fluttered open as an alternate possibility popped into her head, a slightly bizarre thought that propelled her out of the shower and into a bath towel. She glanced at her watch, calculating the distance to the airport and wondering if there was enough time for a critical errand before her brother arrived.

  ANCHORAGE AIR ROUTE TRAFFIC CONTROL CENTER ANCHORAGE, ALASKA 8:05 A.M.

  April wheeled the rental car into the entrance of the FAA facility and stopped at the guard shack, ready to show her driver’s and pilot’s licenses. As a pilot, it had taken little more than a phoned request and a quick background check to secure the permission needed to visit the windowless radar rooms of the center. Pilots were always welcome, they told her.

  April left her car and walked to the entrance, where the man she’d talked to was waiting with an outstretched hand.

  “Ms. Rosen? Jay Simpson.”

  “Yes. Thanks so much for arranging this at the last minute.”

  “My pleasure,” he said, his eyes appraising her in a way that validated his words. “You said you wanted to sit and watch a sector for a little while, right?”

  She nodded. “That’s what I didn’t get to do at the Seattle ARTCC.”

  “The one in Everett?” he asked, obviously testing her.

  “It’s actually located in Auburn,” she said, smiling at his pleased reaction.

  Simpson handed her a clip-on security badge and led the way through a series of heavy doors into the subdued light of the main control room. The room was lined with glowing computer-generated screens tracking virtually all airborne traffic over the state of Alaska.

  “You already know the basics about our airspace?” he asked.

  April nodded with a smile. “I know you work traffic from south of Ketchikan all the way to above seventy degrees north, Kotzebue and Nome and the Bering Strait on the west, and Canadian airspace on the eastern border.”

  “You got it,” he said, handing her a small brochure. “That’ll give you the statistics if you ever need them.” They moved up quietly behind one of the control positions and waited until the male controller finished handing off a Russian Aeroflot passenger jet to an adjacent sector. Simpson tapped the controller’s shoulder and the man turned and rose from his chair with a smile as Simpson handed April a headset and plugged it in.

  “I’m Rusty Bach, Miss Rosen,” the controller said.

  “April, please. Are you any relation to the author? Richard Bach?”

  “I wish, but no.”

  She could see no evidence of a ring on his left hand, which, she figured, partially explained his enthusiastic reception of her visit.

  “Have a seat, April.”

  She let him guide her through the intricacies of the sector of airspace he was working, quietly pleased it covered the Valdez area and the sea lanes to the south. A steady procession of Alaska, Delta, and American Airlines flights, along with foreign airliners, Air Force jets, and private and corporate flights were all moving in various directions across the screen, tagged by tiny “data blocks” giving information on altitude, speed, and heading.

  April noticed another controller quietly plugging into the same position to watch over their shoulder. Safety backup, she figured, and probably a standard procedure with a visitor present.

  “How low can an aircraft still be tracked by your radar out here?” April asked. “Let’s say … here.”

  “Well, you’re pointing to the area over the water east of Whittier,” the controller replied. “We can track targets pretty well down to eight hundred feet over the water out there. Sometimes less.”

  “But if they’re very low, such as a hundred feet or so …”

  “Then we can’t give them flight-following services, you know, keep them clear of other traffic, because we can’t see them. They become stealth aircraft. Maybe we’ll get an occasional transponder hit, but that’s all.”

  They talked between radio calls, and she let the conversation drift to other areas before asking one of the key questions that had sparked the visit.

  “Rusty, I understand you record virtually everything these scopes see, and in the case of an accident, you can reconstruct what was showing at the time. Right?”

  He smiled. “That’s a bit oversimplified, but it’s essentially correct. If it formed a target on this screen, it’ll be on the tapes, digitally. Why do you ask?”

  She smiled her most alluring smile and felt an instant, resonant response. “I’ve flown out there in a seaplane before, really low,” April said, “and I wasn’t able to reach you guys to even ask for flight following. I remember wondering if you could see me, or if the radar tapes were at least watching me.”

  He shook his head, doubly eager to impress her now. “I sure wish we could. But we can’t. Now … there are a lot of military radar sites around the state, and there’s the Coast Guard’s vessel-traffic radar in Valdez, which can see you down to the water. But we can’t use those signals.”<
br />
  “Yes, but about the tapes you do have; you keep those for months, right?”

  He raised a finger, his eyes on a flight approaching the edge of his sector. “Alaska Three Twelve, descend now and maintain one-one thousand. Anchorage altimeter three-zero-two-two.”

  The voice of the commercial pilot boomed through her headset and she reached up to turn down the volume. “Roger, Anchorage, Alaska Three Hundred and Twelve out of flight level three-three-zero this time for one-one thousand. Beautiful day out here south of Anchorage, Center.”

  “Thanks!” Rusty replied, laughing. “I really needed that, stuck as I am in a windowless room.”

  “Sorry,” the pilot responded. “If you like, we could describe it to you.”

  More laughter.

  “Negative, Alaska Three Twelve,” Rusty was saying, “but you can tell the next guy. Contact the Anchorage Center now on one twenty-two point six.”

  The pilot repeated the frequency change as Rusty turned back to April, trying hard to keep his eyes above her neckline. She glanced at her watch, feigning surprise as she got up to go, thanking him profusely.

  But Rusty gently caught her sleeve and pressed a business card in her hand.

  “My number. Just in case, you know, you want someone to show you around,” he said. The hopeful look in his eyes was unmistakable, and she smiled and patted his shoulder.

  “Thanks, Rusty. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  As the comely female visitor departed, the controller who’d been shadowing Rusty Bach unplugged and moved to the far end of the room to a small workstation. He keyed in his password and called up a series of databases, paging back to the flight plans from two days before. The information he was searching for eluded him, however, and he collapsed the screen and pulled a phone to his ear instead, to punch in the number of the acting facility chief.

  “Ralph? Ed here. Something odd. Maybe it’s nothing, but … thought you might need to know.” He described April’s questions in detail, and the area south of Valdez that had seemed to interest her.

  “What’s your point, Ed?”

  “Okay, you recall the search-and-rescue effort out there yesterday morning, just about the same place?”

  “Yes. They found survivors of what I guess was an old Grumman that went down the night before.”

  “Right. You know the name of the captain? I can’t find a flight plan.”

  There was hesitation on the other end. “No … not offhand. You think her visit was connected?”

  Ed snorted and shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know. I just get curious when someone starts asking how long we keep tapes, can we see to the waterline, and that sort of thing. Kind of what a smuggler would ask, you know?”

  “Yeah … or a seaplane pilot.”

  “Could be.”

  “Forget it, Ed.”

  “Okay.”

  In an office one floor away, the acting facility chief replaced the receiver for a moment and checked a phone number on a business card he’d stuffed in his pocket, then raised the receiver and punched in the number. He thought better of it then and hung up, recalling that all government phones were subject to monitoring. Instead, he pulled out his personal cell phone and entered the same number.

  TWELVE

  WEDNESDAY, DAY 3 ANCHORAGE AROUND 9 A.M.

  In the mind of the marginally overfed yellow feline named Schroedinger, the fact that the human with whom he shared his house had yet to feed him had risen to the level of an issue demanding immediate resolution.

  Schroedinger made a smooth leap from the floor to the desk where Ben Cole’s laptop computer was blinking dutifully through a procession of pictures, some including the image of Lisa—the long-absent woman who used to be in charge of keeping him fed and relatively content.

  Ben’s head was down on the desktop, his hair a mess, his elbows splayed out on both sides where he’d shoved papers and journals aside, some falling to the floor. He was sound asleep, and Schroedinger wasn’t impressed. Ben had a bed, and that’s where he should have been sleeping. When he was in it, he usually arose in time to serve the proper amount of food and water. But when Ben didn’t spend the night in his own bed, Schroedinger knew his breakfast would be seriously delayed.

  Carefully, he padded over to Ben’s face, boosting the volume of his purr to its highest intensity. At least this morning there were none of the empty bottles that had occasionally heralded an even deeper unconscious state, and an even later meal.

  Schroedinger extended a paw, keeping his claws carefully retracted as he patted Ben’s closed eye with no response. You had to be careful with humans, he’d found. They became unmanageably agitated over the smallest of things, and their eyes were very sensitive.

  He patted again, but there was no response—other than the obnoxious, rhythmic buzzing sound that humans made when they slept. Once more he tried, moving closer this time and pushing against Ben’s face with the top of his head before using his move of last resort: a loud, protesting “Meow!” delivered right in his human’s ear.

  “Wh … What?”

  Ben Cole snapped upright, a look of complete confusion on his face as Shroedinger stepped back and repeated his verbal protest, expecting immediate compliance with the business of feeding the resident feline.

  Instead, Ben was up, looking at his watch and making upsetting noises.

  “Oh dammit! It’s … jeez! Ten after nine! How in the world?” Ben turned back to the desk and realized where he was, and where he’d been. “I was only going to rest a few minutes!” He’d put his head down just past six, after working through the night, and now this. His team would have arrived back at the lab at seven and well noted the absence of their leader by now. This was deeply embarrassing. Sleeping late was a personal failure.

  Ben grabbed for the phone to call the lab, cautioning himself at the same moment that explaining his tardiness by admitting he’d worked all night could spark a major security investigation. After all, he could take nothing home at night but his mind. So if he was working late, what was he working on? The possibility that a midnight-oil session might involve illicitly removed materials was well understood by Uniwave’s security department, especially since they were operating under the incredibly stringent military requirements of a black project.

  Ben heard one of his programmers answer the line. “Gene? Yeah, Ben. Hey, I’m really embarrassed, but I took some cold medicine last night and … I guess it must’ve really knocked me out. I just woke up.”

  There was a chuckle from the other end and relayed assurance that they understood, but only Ben could forgive Ben, and that wasn’t happening.

  “Let me hit the shower and I’ll be there by, ah, ten or so.”

  “We’re fine, Ben. Take it easy. You needed the rest.”

  Ben replaced the receiver, feeling an overwhelming need for coffee as he touched the laptop’s mousepad with intent to shut it down. The pressure to run to the shower and then dash to his car was intense, but the reality that he’d downloaded forbidden classified information to his hard drive was scaring him. The computer files would have to be fully erased with a special program before he could leave the house.

  The screensaver slide show had dissolved, leaving in its place the final report on the search Ben had launched at 5 A.M., for a line-by-line comparison of two versions of the Boomerang Box’s master program. He started to save the message for later, but realized with a start that it, too, would have to be erased.

  Once more he glanced at his watch in agitation, shoving an even more disgruntled Schroedinger aside as he plopped back in the desk chair to scan the report before erasing it. There was no reason it should show anything different from the four or five dozen comparison searches he’d made during the night, each of which had turned up nothing.

  If there’s anything wrong with this damn program, I can’t find …

  Ben felt his mind snap to a halt and change direction as he returned to the top of the screen and realized what he
was seeing.

  What in the world?

  Unlike each of the previous searches, this one had yielded something. There were long lists of numbers, each of them representing a specific line of computer code, and each significantly different from any of the code lines on the original completed master program. He knew almost every line of the original version and had instructed the computer to compare the version of the program he’d used aboard the Gulfstream with the original control version.

  And now this.

  Ben paged down the list, passing a hundred lines before realizing that more than two thousand lines were different, or new, and all in one section. He ordered the computer to show him the raw machine language on several lines he’d selected at random, fully expecting to see something familiar. Perhaps his workstation had gone into some kind of loop and just repeated a rogue line of code several thousand times.

  No … it’s all different! he concluded, trying to decipher what kind of program the code represented. There were shorter off-the-shelf sub-routines throughout modern computer programs, but none of what he was seeing corresponded to any of the standard ones, and some of what he was looking at appeared to be written in a machine language he’d never seen, if that were possible.

  Ben glanced at his exasperated cat and pointed to the conundrum on the screen.

  “What do make of that, Schroedinger?”

  The yellow tomcat meowed again and took a few steps toward the kitchen, lowering his already low opinion of human intelligence as he realized that Ben was failing utterly to get his priorities straight.

  A slow whisper of trouble worked its way into Ben’s mind, beginning with the realization that someone had purposely inserted unauthorized instructions into a top secret defense program. But who? And why? And what? A virus, perhaps? That was a worrisome thought. In the first few seconds of his mushrooming understanding, the muttered possibility that someone was playing a trick was shouted down by the voice of reason. No, this wasn’t a trick or an accident. Whoever had added the sophisticated lines had obviously been trying to fix something, an explanation at once eclipsed by the roar of reality that all legitimate additions had to have his personal approval. That final fact triggered an inescapable shout of alarm in his head.