“We lost FM too before the crash,” Hudson pointed out.
Ariana leaned close. “Just because we lost it then, doesn't mean it's down now, right?”
“Well-” Hudson began, but she cut him off.
“Your job is communications. The only way we're getting out of here is by talking to someone, so I don't want to hear what you can't do, I want to know what you can do. Clear?”
Hudson's jaw quivered and his hands went down to his wounded legs. “Clear,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Good.” Ariana put a hand on his shoulder. “I know you’re hurting, but we need you Mitch. Hang tough.”
“Yeah,” Hudson turned his back to her.
Ariana left him and went to console area.
“I've got something strange,” Carpenter called out as she walked in. Ariana and Mark Ingram hurried over to her position.
“What is it?” Ariana asked.
Carpenter was staring at her screen. “You turned on the emergency program to get the lights on,” she said. “That's run off a separate, smaller, back-up computer from the mainframe to keep the two systems from contaminating each other in case one gets a virus or malfunctions.”
“I know that,” Ariana said.
Carpenter looked at both of them. “I took Argus off-line just before we crashed, but-” she paused.
“But what?”
“But it didn't go off. It's been on this whole time.”
Ariana frowned. “So?”
“Well, first, it should be off. I know I hit the shut-down. But that’s only the first weird thing.” Carpenter pointed a long black finger at the massive racks containing the hardware for Argus. “It's on and I can't access it.”
“I don't understand,” Ingram said. “What's it doing?”
“I don't know.”
“Take a guess,” Ariana pressed.
Carpenter frowned. “Well, it's like someone's taken it over. Maybe planted a Trojan Horse program in it that got activated or, I don't know, sending commands into it some other way.”
“Hie-Tech,” Ariana muttered. “Could that have been what caused the crash?”
“I don't know,” Carpenter said. “I don't think so, but it's possible.”
Ariana pointed at the computer. “Shut it down.”
“I told you I can’t get access from my console. The only way I can do that now,” Carpenter said, “is to cut the power coupling going to Argus's base unit. Pull the plug.”
“Do it.”
As Carpenter walked over to the racks, Ariana walked Ingram to his position. “What do you have?”
“I'm putting together the data we recorded just before we went down off of tapes,” Ingram said. His eyes were on his screen. “As you know we lost SATCOM, GPR, and FM first. I've got our last transmissions and our last GPR position. After-” he paused, squinting at the screen.
“What?” Ariana prompted him.
“There's something funny about the GPR data,” Ingram said.
Ariana frowned. The GPR was just a link from the plane to the nearest three global positioning satellites that gave them their location. She waited as Ingram worked his computer.
“Someone piggybacked on the GPR signal in and out,” he finally said.
“What does that mean?” Ariana asked.
“It means someone in the crew was sending a secret message out that we weren't supposed to know about,” Hudson said. “Someone was sending our data to another location via the GPS satellites just as we were sending it to the IIC.” He looked up at her. “We have a spy on board.”
“Great,” Ariana muttered.
“Oh God!” the yell came from the computer racks.
Ariana raced there, the others following. Lisa Carpenter held a gray panel in her hand, but she was frozen, staring at the bulky metal rectangles that held the core of Argus.
Ariana immediately saw what had caused Carpenter's reaction: a golden beam about eight inches in diameter had punched through the skin of the plane underneath the main computer console. A foot from the computer hardware, the beam split into four smaller lines of two inches diameter, each one going into a different box. The gold lines pulsed and rippled and as they watched a new two inch line split from the main beam and probed its way blindly to the left, finally hitting another piece of Argus. There was a brief hiss, then the line was in. The main gold beam widened by a couple of inches.
“What the hell is that?” Ariana demanded.
“I have no idea,” Carpenter said. “But I know why I can't access Argus now. This thing is taking control of it.”
“Cut the power!” Ariana ordered.
Carpenter pointed at a black cable lying on the floor. “I already did that.
Whatever that thing is, it's not only controlling the mainframe but it’s also powering Argus.”
Conners had given the order for the satellite carrying Bright Eye to change orbit over twenty minutes ago. Since it was in a fast polar orbit, execution required a firing of booster rockets to maneuver the angle of flight over the target area. The computer told her that she had a TOT of another twenty-two minutes before Bright Eye made the pass, which gave her time to reflect on the secretive history of the equipment she was about to use.
She knew that Bright Eye had gone into orbit a little over a year ago. Although Star Wars had been officially cut when the Democrats took over the White House as part of the ‘peace dividend’, Conners knew what had really happened. The Black Budget people had simply kept Star Wars, renaming it the Odysseus Program, and kept eighty percent of the funded programs alive behind a veil of secrecy that had existed in bureaucratic Washington ever since the end of World War II.
Conners knew now that the military-industrial complex Eisenhower had railed against as he left office had been only the tip of the iceberg. Very little of what was really going on was visible to the public eye. Billions and billions were spent every year on classified work and the War on Terror insured that it would continue indefinitely.
What Conners also knew, having worked at the National Security Agency and being affiliated with the NRO, National Reconnaissance Office, which oversaw almost two-thirds of Black Budget operations, that many of these projects were valid national security endeavors and not a waste of money. In fact, many great strides had been made in varied scientific fields through Odysseus Projects, the results slowly filtered out to the rest of the scientific community to not draw suspicion.
Much of the laser work for Bright Eye project had helped other scientists in the medical field. But no one outside of the intelligence community had any idea that something like Bright Eye was beyond the conceptual stage and actually in orbit.
Bright Eye had evolved from a Navy program, which in itself had begun with a problem that needed to be solved. With the growing advancement in the threat posed by submarines, particularly missile carrying ones, the Navy had begun to place greater and greater emphasis on being able to track enemy submarines, especially those that carried ballistic missiles.
The first step in that process had started in the fifties and sixties when the Navy had developed a sound surveillance system, codenamed SOSUS, to track submarines. The first SOSUS systems were laid along the Atlantic Coast. Then the Navy put in a SOSUS system codenamed Colossus along the Pacific Coast. Then, with further advances in technology, the Navy moved part of the system toward Russia to catch Soviet subs as they put to sea, putting systems off the two major Russian submarine ports at Polyarnyy and Petropavlovsk.
Over the years the Navy added to the SOSUS system. They put a line of hydrophones off Hawaii in the Pacific. Each of these individual listening devices was as large as an oil storage tank, towed out to the designated point, sunk to the bottom of the ocean and linked by buried cable to the next listening device in line, eventually being brought to shore in Hawaii, an intricate and expensive project.