“I’ll have to explain this to you later, kid. It’s like the facts of life.”
Dan returned to the underdeck area with renewed hope, but the look on Frank Erlichman’s face was funereal.
“What’s wrong, Frank?”
“I traced the autothrottle circuit. I doubt we can touch it.”
“Show me. What do you mean?”
Frank led him forward to a separate electronics rack, pointing to a large electronic box and the nomenclature on the identiplate.
“I think this is what you were looking for. But please look at the wiring harness. I traced the basic wires and they go to the cabinet, and then another autothrottle related box, then back to the cabinet, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to be sure you can regain control by cutting anything.”
“It would be a gamble, in other words?”
“A big one.”
Dan looked at his watch, the gesture well understood by Frank who had an ashen look about him.
“Okay… let’s think about this. The engine power is frozen at the same level as when this happened,” Dan began, counting off points on his fingers. “That means they’re not controlling it, most probably, they’ve just disconnected our ability to set it. Regardless of the back and forth wiring, the big question is: Which one of these boxes, if turned off instead of on, would restore our ability to move the throttles?”
“You’re playing, I think, with fire,” Frank said. “These are computer controlled and not as simple as the radio.”
“Well… you may have a point. We turned the radio on but still can’t transmit on it because we didn’t turn on the audio selector panel.”
“We can probably find that circuit.”
“No… let’s… could we try a few things for the throttles and be ready to reverse if it doesn’t go right?”
“There are no switches. You mean, pull the racks out from their plugs?”
“How about stripping a section of wire, cutting it in the middle, and if all hell breaks loose, just re-twisting the ends together.”
“We can’t do that with gloves, and there is substantial voltage.”
“I have to try.”
Once again Dan stuck his head above floor level to brief Jerry and the others on what he was about to do and position Carol to relay any information from Jerry if there was a change.
With five minutes of work stripping wires, they were ready, and Dan used a glove to insulate his hand while running the exposed wire into a pair of uninsulated nail clippers.
“Okay. Here goes.”
The sound of the click as the clippers snapped through the 18-gauge wire was almost inaudible, but Dan could feel the tiny impact in his gloved fingers. At first, it seemed as if there were no further reaction, until he realized he was leaning forward slightly against the deceleration of the airplane.
The power is coming off! he thought to himself, just as a voice yelled down from the flight deck, relaying Jerry’s words.
“PUT IT BACK! PUT IT BACK! THE ENGINES ARE COMING TO IDLE!”
“OKAY!” Dan yelled back over his shoulder as he prepared to re-mate the cut wires, positioning them so he could make firm contact and then twist them back together. He could feel the big aircraft continuing to slow. He was too far ahead of the wing mounted engines to actually hear them, but the decreasing sound of the slipstream told the tale. The thought crossed his mind with lightning speed that if the engines didn’t rebound when he touched the wires, they were truly at the end of the line, and the thought made him almost desperate to touch the wires together again, just as something else was warning him to wait.
What the hell am I missing? Dan thought. The pressure to act was accelerating to unfathomable levels as he forced his mind to divulge whatever it was thinking in the periphery of the subconscious.
Oh, jeez! Yes!
Dan turned to yell at the face he saw watching him from the hatch.
“PUSH THE THROTTLES UP! SEE IF THEY RESPOND!”
“What?”
“TELL THE CAPTAIN TO PUSH THE THROTTLES UP!”
Carol nodded and disappeared, and the seconds slowed down to an agonizing pace as time dilated and Dan lost track of reality. The two ends of the wire were still in his respective hands, and the big jet was getting progressively slower. Without more power they would slow and stall, and unless the autoflight system was truly engaged, they would fall out of the sky.
Dan tried to force himself to touch the wires and finish it, but another part of his brain was screaming to wait a few extra moments in case deliverance was at hand. When a surge of thrust reached his consciousness, Dan was unsure whether he was imagining it or feeling it.
Carol’s voice from above broke the suspense:
“IT WORKS! HE SAYS IT WORKS! WE HAVE MANUAL THROTTLES!”
Dan looked at Frank, realizing neither of them had been breathing. He gasped for breath then and smiled at the shaken passenger.
“Thank God!”
“Indeed.”
“Let’s get these wires taped and very far apart.”
“I can do that for you!” Frank said, a very large grin on his face. The jet was reaccelerating, the slipstream sounds rising back to where they’d been.
“I’m going up for a minute. Standby to reconnect those wires if something goes wrong.”
Dan all but levitated out of the hatch to find an ebullient captain fine-tuning throttles he could actually control.
“Jesus Christ, Dan! Well done! God, I’m not going to buy you a beer when we get on the ground, I’m buying you a friggin’ brewery!”
“Full manual control of the engines?”
“Yes! Goddamit, yes! And I can hear air traffic control on the radio. Bosnia, I think. One-twenty-one-five,” he said, citing the emergency frequency. “I can’t talk to them, but I can hear the buggers. I don’t know how fast we’re going, but I’m gonna slow us down a bit by feel to conserve fuel while you work the rest of your magic!”
“We’re just starting the process, Jerry.”
“I know, but hell, you can try to kill me in Anchorage anytime, Bro!”
Dan smiled, a cascade of emotions coursing through his head, all of which he forcibly suppressed.
“You have no side stick control, though?”
“No. And all the displays are fiction. But I’m pretty sure I can feel this baby well enough to slow her down without stalling.”
“Pretty sure?”
“All I’ve got. But we can control something for the first time in hours! How’d you do it?”
“The truth?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I guessed, Jerry.”
“Okay.”
“And the next guess might not be as lucky.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Silver Springs, Maryland (8:45 p.m. EST / 0145 Zulu)
Jenny Reynolds sighed. Her laptop was fighting back, and she was getting seriously pissed.
She sat back for a second, rubbing her eyes before casting them around the surprisingly spacious apartment. She’d only imagined what a clandestine “safe house” would be like, but never had she actually been in one.
Jenny glanced at her watch, reading nearly 9:00 p.m. The Pangia flight would be over Tel Aviv in less than two hours now, and Will had apparently pried enough information out of his unsuspecting confederates at the Pentagon to confirm that nothing aboard had changed: The pilots were still unable to control the jet, and the rising level of alarm from Washington to Tehran was becoming deeply worrisome. Worse, Will had had the temerity to lay the singular hope of deliverance on her shoulders.
“I’m just guessing, Will. Let’s get real here. Even if I can figure out how to reverse whatever that original order was, that might not be enough to solve it. They could be taking telemetry orders from some live control room now and impervious to anything I send. Besides, this server is blocking me at every turn, and even if I write the right code, I don’t know how the hell we’re going to get it broadcast on the right channels in time.”