Dan was shaking his head no as Jerry raised a finger.
“Wait… Dan. This airplane is crammed full of computers and that snot-nosed kid I wanted to kill may be more expert than we know. Carol? Bring that kid up here, will you?”
“Certainly,” she replied, disappearing back into the cabin as Dan smiled to himself. Captain Tollefson was once again in the game.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Aboard Gulfstream N266SD (0120 Zulu)
Major Sharon Wallace was studying Paul Wriggle from across the Gulfstream’s cabin. They were rocketing on the heels of a tailwind toward the nation’s capital for what would quite likely be the end of their program. Discovering that their misplaced Airbus was over southern Europe with a locked out crew had impacted her commander hard, and she could only guess at his blood pressure, but it couldn’t be good. The words didn’t need to be spoken. They all knew.
Sharon unconsciously twisted her hair through her fingers, a nervous habit that normally the rest of her compatriots loved to tease her about.
The general was hunched over the satellite phone waiting for the team to assemble below in the Springs, Lieutenant Colonel Don Danniher was flying the Gulfstream alone, and the other two pilots they’d begun the day with would be on final approach now for Colorado Springs in Pangia’s A330.
Wriggle was a good man, she thought. A good leader who did not deserve this kind of stress, and for the moment—with a single satellite phone in the cabin—all she could do was sit and watch him deal with the nightmare and wait for his orders.
Across the cabin, Paul Wriggle forced himself to focus as he sat with the secure satellite phone pressed against his ear, listening to the voices of his executive team back on the ground at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
He could visualize the cramped suite of nondescript offices they had purposefully selected in a back building on the base, as well as the underground chamber they’d built surreptitiously below one of the basements—a wonderfully clever design for security all around. Teaming with electronics and secure fiber optic connections back east, the 24/7 security had been expensive but well worth it. Even the Peterson base commander had no idea of what was happening in building 4-104.
“We’re all here, sir. Finally.”
“Okay,” Wriggle began. “This is an emergency meeting of Air Lease Solutions,” he said, using the code words to expunge all use of military references. He knew very well the prime security directive against talking “around” classified information, but in this case there was no choice, and even though the line was approved for classified information, it made him very nervous.
“We all understand down here, Paul,” Colonel Dana Baumgartner, his second in command said. The use of the general’s first name was a reciprocal code.
“Has everyone there received and read my message on what’s happening?”
“Everyone,” Baumgartner replied.
“All right,” Wriggle began, “Obviously, this is not a drill. The entire program is imperiled, as are the people out there who’ve been inadvertently involved. First, have you checked whether we somehow uplinked a transmission of orders?”
“We have checked,” Colonel Baumgartner replied, “…and the answer is absolutely not. There were none. Our last test run was three weeks ago. It was a good, routine test by all parameters, but, of course, there were no operational receivers in the… air… to receive. The test sequence was the same one we’ve run for two years. No change. But nothing has been triggered in the last, well, three weeks. And as you know, we only trigger the test to keep everything open while we complete the network.”
Paul Wriggle was rubbing his forehead.
“That’s our machine out there,” the general said. “That wasn’t supposed to be the case, but it is, and from the sound of it, sometime this morning she either listened to something we sent, or misinterpreted something someone else sent, and she took action as a direct result. I suppose it’s also possible that she unilaterally decided to turn herself on. Unfortunately, the best fit is an unfortunately timed test transmission.”
“We’re… well, Paul, we’re absolutely sure nothing was voluntarily transmitted.”
“Voluntarily? Why the hesitation, Dana?”
“Because we’re just now checking the last twenty-four-hour history of all our servers, and I just got word that one bank of computers may have been off line for a few minutes yesterday evening, and we don’t know why.”
“Off line? Why would that cause an unwanted transmission?”
“It shouldn’t, but we all want 100 percent certainty, so we have to know why anything dropped off line, and what it did when it came back on.”
“Does anyone else but us have, maybe, a copy of the standard test sequence? Or could someone have cracked into a copy of the overall form of code we use? Could this be sabotage, in other words?”
There was a burst of conversation in the background before another team member answered, the voice recognizable as their chief scientist, a brilliant civilian named George Choder.
“No one is supposed to have a copy of anything, and certainly initiating an… order, for want of a better word… would take the entire string, and we haven’t even finished writing that yet. Plus, no one knew our… machine… was anywhere other than California. But despite all that, I wouldn’t rule out sabotage. This could not happen accidentally.”
“Suppose our machine heard just a test transmission. Could it obey and lock up based on that?”
More conversation in the background, now even more intense, as many seconds passed.
“We… don’t think so, but we don’t know, Paul. But we want to emphasize that there was no purposeful test transmission this week! We weren’t ready for live tests, so… I don’t know the state of our machine’s programming.”
“You mean, the other end, our, ah, operational machine, could have been receptive? It could have reacted to whatever it heard?”
“We don’t understand the question,” Dana Baumgartner said.
Wriggle sighed out of frustration at the elliptical conversation. It would be far easier to just say “airplane,” but anyone overhearing would then have zero doubt what they were discussing. “What I’m saying is,” Wriggle continued, “…can you guarantee me that if our machine was operational, and if it heard the test sequence whether recorded or live, that it absolutely could not trigger it’s lockout function? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, we’re not saying that at all, Paul. We’re saying we can’t guarantee that, because no one was ready for the machine to fly… to operate, I mean. We hadn’t checked that part of the programming. It wasn’t ready.”
“Then we’ve got a huge problem,” Paul Wriggle said. “Regardless of how she got out of our hands, that machine is our responsibility, and we’ve got to get her to release control. I mean now. Who’s our programming expert for the receiving end of the equation?”
“Well, sir, that spotlights another worry,” the colonel replied. “That would be one of our people who has been on vacation, but she didn’t come back as scheduled two days ago, and we’ve been frantically trying to locate her for the past hour.”
“Give me the initials.”
“Golf Hotel, sir. She was supposed to be up in Rocky Mountain National Park, but we can’t find her, and the phone and her iPad are both turned off…”
“I apologize for sounding suspicious, folks,” the general continued, knowing the potential effect of his voicing a loyalty doubt, “…but we’re in very dangerous territory here. Does Golf Hotel have the ability to trigger an uplink signal remotely, by herself?”