Fly by Wire: A Novel (44 page)

^{Get the gun--go for the gun!}

^"Jammer!"

^{It came out of nowhere. Sorensen's voice.}

^{Davis stopped, fell still. He allowed his gaze to settle, tried to make sense of what he saw. Fatima was lying in a heap on the sidewalk. She was completely motionless. Sorensen closed in, both arms extended with her gun trained fast. She hovered over Fatima for a moment, then kicked away a gun lying on the sidewalk. Sorensen bent down cautiously and checked for signs of life. Apparently there were none. She pointed her weapon toward the sky and backed closer to Davis.}

^{"Are you okay?" she asked.}

^{Davis had ended up on his knees. He eased back, grimaced as the pressure came off his ravaged thigh. "Yeah, Honeywell," he said, his breath coming in massive gulps. "Yeah, I'm just great."}

^{Then Davis heard a faint sound, distant but undeniably familiar. It seemed like something from a dream and brought a thousand emotions at once. He spotted the source -- his phone lying on the ground next to Fatima s body, half buried in a grainy footprint of slush.}

^{Davis scrambled over and swiped it up. "Jen? Is that you?"}

^{"Dad! What's going on? What's all that noise?"}

^{The voice of his daughter hit him like a train, dragged his head to another place. A place he couldn't be right now.
Noise? Nothing, sweetheart. Just a friend shooting the terrorist who was about to kill me. How was school today?
The phone beeped. He had another call waiting.
Sorry, the president of the United States is on line two. He's waiting for me to save a hundred airplanes from crashing.
Davis forced himself back.}

^{Jen was saying, "I have to talk to you about Bobby--"}

^{"Sweetheart . . ." he stammered, "not now! I'm in the middle of something really important. I will call you back as soon as I can." He was about to hang up when he added, "But I'm glad you called, Jen. Really glad." "Dad--"}

^{He cut her off and picked up the other call. "Davis here."}

^{"Where the hell have you been?"}

^{He recognized the voice. "Sorry, Mr. President." There was a very brief pause as decorum and apologies ran their course. Davis ended it by saying, "Have you got those communication links established?"}

^{"Yes. There are--" the president paused and Davis heard chatter in the background, "ninety-six airplanes still in the air. I think we have some kind of channel to all of them."}

^{"Think
isn't good enough, sir. If you fail to connect to one aircraft, we've lost two lives and probably more on the ground."}

^{"I know, I know. We're doing our best, Davis."}

^{"Okay, here's how I believe this works. At the top of the hour, in five minutes, every one of those airplanes is going to have its flight control computers take over, like an autopilot you can't disengage. The aircraft will run a course to the nearest target -- that is, the nearest oil refinery -- then go into a dive and strike it."}

^{Davis saw a police car pull up. Bystanders were pointing at him and Sorensen. He pulled away from the phone and said to her, "Quick! Go run some interference. I can't be interrupted."}

^{She nodded and hustled off.}

^{Townsend's worried voice dueled with the approaching sirens. "Davis? Are you still there?"}

^{"Yes. Now write this part down. Tell the crew of every airplane that the sequence is initiated by the airplane clock. They can defeat the takeover by resetting it. Move it back a few hours, even a day -- whatever it takes to get on the ground. If they can't get that done before the top of the hour, the software is going to take over. But control can still be regained -- all the crew has to do is turn off both battery switches on the overhead panel. Have you got that?"}

^{"Battery switches -- yes."}

^{"Turn them off for ten seconds, then back on. The airplane should still be flyable in the down time and come back up clean. The clock is the key -- that's what cues the entire sequence."}

^{"We've got it," Townsend said. "We're sending it now."}

^{"Good. I'll keep the line open." Davis looked at his very accurate watch. Four minutes.}

^{Townsend s voice came back, "All right, we've sent the word. So now we just wait?"}

^{"Hell, no -- I mean, no Mr. President. Now we get to work. Keep double-checking that the word has gone through. Have all the airplanes contact you once they're under positive control. Some of these planes will take hours to get on the ground. Have NORAD launch their air defense fighters. Get. them to escort as many as possible -- but no shooting. They can help identify airplanes that are having trouble. Send out these same instructions to every country that can help. C-500s are flying all over the world and we have to track them all until the last one is safely on the ground."}

^{Davis heard more chatter over the line. He looked for Sorensen and spotted her engaging the police. Her gun was on the ground and she was showing an ID. He wondered which company -- CIA or Honeywell? She was going to have some explaining to do.}

^{A woman in EMT gear came trotting toward him. She had a medical kit in her hand and said in French, "I am told you have a wound."}

^{Davis didn't fight it. He kept the phone to his ear, but stretched out his injured leg and pointed to the spot. The woman went to work, cutting away his trouser leg. He thought,
My best pair of Dockers, shot to hell.}

^{"You must he back," she ordered.}

^{The woman put a blanket over his shoulders, and Davis leaned back gingerly. He could no longer see Sorensen amid the gathering storm of authorities and onlookers. Bystanders were circling around Fatima s body as well, while a pair of policemen tried to push them back.}

^{The phone on the White House end had gone to speaker. Davis heard the president still giving orders. He heard information coming from a half-dozen voices, an accounting of airplanes safely on the ground. The numbers were rising rapidly. And there were no shouts of imminent disaster. Not even one. He checked his watch. Twenty seconds to spare.}

^{He felt a twinge of pain from something the woman was doing to his wound.}

^{"Keep still, please," she said.}

^{Davis tried, and with his head resting on frozen concrete, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.}

^{He pictured the cockpit of a C-500 and imagined the flash messages crews were getting at this very moment, imagined them resetting clocks. Others -- those who didn't read the message right away, or who spent too much time deciding if the crazy instructions were some kind of twisted joke sent by a flight dispatcher -- would get the scare of a lifetime. They'd be riding in an airplane that no longer responded to their commands. At that point, they'd realize the situation was dead serious and start powering down electrical busses in a frenzy to save their airplanes.}

^{Davis hoped that's how it was all happening.}

^{He racked his brain for anything else, any uncovered angle. Nothing came to mind. When he opened his eyes again, he was staring straight up at the night sky. There were still clouds above, but the ceiling had gone to a broken layer, the moon and stars filtering down through vague, misty gaps. It was heavenly. Davis spotted a glimmer up high, a tiny set of sequenced flashing lights -- an airplane soaring miles overhead. There was a chance it was a C-500, the crew fighting for their lives. But more likely it was something better.}

^{Still, he couldn't pull his eyes away as he watched the blinking beacons. They carried on true, no turns or swerves or dives. Just kept going, steady and serene. At that moment, Jammer Davis very much wished he was up there, slipping smooth and quick through the cold winter air.}

^EPILOGUE:

^{Rub al-Khali, Yemen}

^{Four days later}

^{The terminal meeting had been prearranged, the purpose being to conclude affairs after the last decimating attack. It was held, by Dubai's arrangement, in a region referred to as the Empty Quarter, a name that had been coined a thousand years ago but stood as accurate today as it had then. Deep in the ungoverned desert of northern Yemen, Rub al-Khali was as barren as the moon, an endless ocean of sand dunes that flowed to the Saudi border and beyond.}

^{The night was clear and cold, a deep burgundy sun having surrendered hours ago to the full moon that now cast its silver veneer over the desolate terrain. A single large tent was the sole convenience, and acted as focal point for the heaviest security effort to date. Three dozen armed men patrolled a perimeter that was defined by a convoy of six Chevy Suburbans. The trucks were parked in a rough circle, although large gaps gave the image of a wagon train come short. Two helicopters also lay in wait, their anxious pilots chain-smoking, ready to launch on a moment's notice. It helped no one's nerves that the men inside the tent were arguing vociferously.}

^{All six members of the CargoAir board of directors were present -- Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Russia, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Switzerland. Their bellowing voices competed for attention, competed for air. It would have been worse had the sound not been muted by the heavy fabric of the large tent.}

^{"Enough!" Luca Medved screamed, having had enough. "We are wasting time! There is no use speculating with regard to how our plan failed. We cannot go back. Our only option now is to disband. It is time for each of us to pull his ripcord and escape the entire affair."}

^{"I would like nothing better" Singapore shouted, "but with what means? My accounts have been frozen, every single one!"}

^{Five sets of eyes went to Switzerland.}

^{"As have mine," he said defensively. "I tell you, I have operated from these tax havens my entire professional life, but never have I seen such a level of government involvement. Switzerland, the Bahamas, Lichtenstein -- all of them. Banking laws that have been on the books for five hundred years are being ignored, thrown away only for us. We have bitten off too much."}

^{"You were supposed to be the expert," Saudi Arabia accused. "Now is not the time to realize this could happen."}

^{There was finally a break, a moment of stillness.}

^{It was Medved, the Russian, who filled the void. "But what bothers me most, gentlemen, is what has
not
happened. Why are we not sought individually? Our personal finances have been shut down, and we can no longer access the wealth of our nations. Clearly, they know who we are. Yet our names are not in the newspapers, nor our pictures on television. And here we sit, united as ever.
Why?"}

^{Quiet fell again, for none could answer that question.}

^{Ten miles to the west, a U. S. Air Force B-2 bomber was gliding smoothly at twenty-four thousand feet. It was, like the C-500, a flying wing design. Indeed, from an aerodynamic standpoint, there were great similarities between the two aircraft. The glaring difference involved payload. On this night, the jet designated
Spirit of Texas
was carrying twelve GBU-31 JDAMs -- two thousand pound bombs that were guided by an intensely accurate marriage of inertial and satellite inputs.}

^{The weapons operator in the right seat monitored his display. They had been watching the site for two hours, long before the target set had become complete. Under magnification, the right seater momentarily amused himself by distinguishing which of the guards were smoking and which were not. He confirmed his coordinates before announcing, 'Target locked, weapons master arm shows a green light."}

^{The pilot in command keyed his secure radio. "PORTAL, Plank 21 is inbound hot, standing by authorization."}

^{The transmission traveled by satellite link, and settled in a bunker seven thousand miles west and four miles down. "Roger, Plank 21. PORTAL, here. Confirm no change in target status."}

^{"Plank 21, negative. No vehicle movement, and all choppers still cold." The aircraft commander adjusted his course ever so slightly. He didn't have to wait long for a response.}

^{"Plank 21, PORTAL. You have authorization Golf Oscar. You are cleared hot."}

^{"Plank 21 copy, Golf Oscar."}