A sudden uncoordinated bank to the left almost propelled Dan’s face into the metal frame of the open cabinet, but he managed to pull his head back just enough to avoid the inevitable bolt of electricity that would have accompanied the slightest touch. Frank had braced himself against a non-electrified rack, but his eyes were wide now as Dan looked at the relay cube in his hand and tried to decide what to do. He could hear Carol’s voice from the hatch relaying Jerry’s cry of alarm that they were in a steep bank, and he could feel the big aircraft in a severe sideslip, the rudder commanding a right turn as the wings tilted to the left, the frightening sound of the slipstream hitting the side of the A330 in a way it was not designed to be flown.
Still thrown to the left, Dan turned to reinsert the cube as they hit some sort of turbulence just enough to knock the relay from his hand. He heard it clatter and skitter to the bottom of the cabinet and knew there was too little time to chase it down. He could hear Jerry’s voice clearly through the hatch yelling to restore whatever he’d changed.
The relays all appeared to be identical, and he made a split second decision and grabbed for one off to the right side of the row of cubes, pulling it out and shoving it in place of the first one he’d removed.
And suddenly the severe sideslip stopped, the Airbus returning to coordinated flight, whether in a bank still or not, he couldn’t tell.
“What’s happening?” he yelled at Carol, whose terrified face could be seen through the hatch.
“Jerry says we’re still turning left, but we’re not slipping,” she shouted.
Dan got to his knees and shone the small flashlight at the bottom of the cabinet, being careful not to touch his face to the frame. He spotted the loose relay and gave chase, sticking his arm perilously into a maze of equipment and finally closing his hand around the precious little cube, then scrambling to his feet to plug it back in place of the substitute he’d removed.
“He says the turn is continuing,” Carol yelled. Dan pushed past Frank, motioning for him to stay in place, and climbed the ladder far enough to hear Jerry directly.
“What’s happening, Jerry?”
“Man, don’t do whatever that was again, please! I thought we were going to go inverted!”
“Are we wings level now?’
“No. We’ve turned around almost 270 degrees and are still turning left. Wait… from the horizon it looks like the bank is lessening and the whiskey compass says we’re coming back to the original course.”
“We just did a 360?” Dan asked.
“Apparently. Did you put everything back?”
“Yes. For the moment.”
“I don’t know, Dan. I don’t want to experience that ride again.”
“I need to keep experimenting, Jerry.”
“Well, whatever just happened, this thing has been commanded to return to the original course.”
Dan scrambled out of the hatch and stood at Jerry’s side to eliminate the need for yelling back and forth.
“You think that’s what’s happening? Someone’s actively controlling us?” Dan asked.
“It’s possible. It was weird. The slip stopped, the wings leveled, and then it started turning again to get back to course. Are there any antenna leads down there that might be feeding it commands from a satellite? Can we disconnect them if there are?”
“I hadn’t looked, but there might be.”
Once more, Dan descended the ladder back to the electronics bay, where Frank Erlichman was waiting with a pleading look betraying any attempt to project calm.
“Jerry raised the issue of whether someone’s fighting us move for move,” Dan explained.
“Similar to what would be used to fly a remotely piloted vehicle. I think they call them a drone?”
Dan nodded, as he crouched by the ladder and let his eyes run over the mysterious cabinet.
“Yes. Like a remotely piloted vehicle, an RPV, or these days we call it a UAS, unmanned aircraft system. If that was so, maybe we could disconnect the telemetry antenna and block any further orders from coming in.”
“But what if the relays did not unlatch?”
“Yeah, I know. We disconnect the active control from the ground, but we still can’t regain cockpit control.”
“For there to be active control or just a signal which turned this thing on, there would need to be a satellite connection, and I found a lead in the big cabinet labeled satcom.” Frank pointed aft and Dan followed, as he moved to the open cabinet, looking for the thick wire he had seen.
“I see it. And… there appears to be a cannon plug. Okay, help me with this logic. If this cabinet activated and took away our control in flight, it either did so by some freak accident… in other words turned itself on… or it received a radio signal. If I was going to go to all the trouble and expense of engineering this thing in the airplane to seize control from the flight crew, I wouldn’t depend on VHF radios or anything with limited range. I’d use a satellite link, separate from the passenger system or our cockpit satcom with the company.”
Frank was nodding. “And you think if the antenna lead here is disconnected, it might let go of us, whether we’re being actively controlled or not?”
“I don’t think we’re fighting a live person, Frank. Jerry up there nailed it a while ago, I think, when he said we haven’t changed heading once since this all started. How could that be active control?”
“That is logical,” Frank replied, watching Dan think it over, his eyes glued to the satcom antenna lead.
“Frank, I think we have to disconnect the satellite antenna, at least for a while. If we are under active control, and we don’t disconnect, and we keep turning off different systems, like we’ve already done with the throttles, whoever’s at the remote controls will try to compensate somehow. But if we deprive it of the basic satellite connection…” Dan’s voice trailed off.
Frank Erlichman nodded solemnly. “I see two possibilities. If we disconnect the antenna lead and nothing happens, I would think that proves we were probably not under someone’s active control. That doesn’t mean the satcom couldn’t have been the means of someone on the ground programming us previously. Second, if we disconnect the satcom and this cabinet unlatches and returns control, it proves we were under active control and now we’re free.”
“I think I followed all that, but the bottom line is, we’ve got to try to disconnect. Could you hand me those gloves?”
The cannon plug connector for the satcom antenna was easy to reach, and Dan looked up to find Carol once again in position, leaning down through the hatch as he held onto the lead.
“Tell Jerry I’m ready to disconnect this antenna, but if we’re under someone’s active control, like a remotely piloted vehicle, this could be a big risk.”
She disappeared for a few moments then reappeared, nodding essentially upside down as she stuck her head down far enough to be heard.
“Dan, he says we need to take the risk. Be ready to reconnect it if something bad happens, but go ahead and disconnect now.”
“Okay.” He glanced at his watch, which was showing exactly 0252 Zulu.
Building 4-104, Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado Springs (0252 Zulu)
Colonel Dana Baumgartner yanked the phone to his ear on the first ring. The discovery of what appeared to be both the lock and unlock codes in Gail Hunt’s classified office safe had precipitated a mad scramble to upload the unlock sequence and open the fiber optic channel to NSA’s computers, a process that required a maddeningly lengthy series of steps that had taken the better part of an hour. No way, Dana thought, could anyone have accidentally triggered that satellite array. Sabotage was the only answer.