Frank nodded, too, his smile quite thin, the tension starkly transmitted by the tightness of his facial muscles. Small talk was difficult in the constrained space with the noise levels of cooling fans and slipstream, and Dan averted his gaze back to the strange cabinet, determined to give it a few more minutes before deciding precisely where they were in the process. The satcom antenna leads were dangling loose where he’d left them nearly a half hour before. No further orders could be received from anywhere as long as those two halves were disconnected, if there had indeed been any external control to begin with.
But that same nagging feeling that he hadn’t thought this through enough was rising again, the same feeling he had when playing chess and a gleeful move to place his opponent in check was about to turn out to be premature—the opponent poised to take advantage of the one move he’d failed to consider.
Why am I assuming there is a person on the other side of this nightmare? Dan thought, wondering if the personification of a nemesis wasn’t obscuring some larger truth. Why would anyone or any entity do this to us?
Carol’s head had disappeared from the hatch, and Dan found it suddenly unsettling to not see her there. He had all but ignored the beauty of her auburn hair cascading down through the hatch, so great was his forced discipline to concentrate on the nightmare at hand. Nothing wrong with concentrating! We’re in trouble. No time for thinking sex-related thoughts, although she was a very attractive woman. But here he was facing an uncertain future, his mind suddenly grasping for relief—something good to think about—and Carol’s femininity triggered a moment of regret that he’d paid far too little attention to his love life in the past few years.
My alleged love life, he thought, triggering a random pain that echoed back to his teens and threatened to open doors of longing he’d long since tried to nail shut. He forcibly switched off those thoughts and turned his mind back to the life-threatening dilemma at hand.
There’s always a reason for anything that takes time and money, and whoever built this thing obviously has a huge investment in it working. But to do what? Kill us?
Dan looked at the cabinet again. Obviously designed to switch off the cockpit and hand the control to… someone? What if, he mused, it was a two-stage deal? First, remove control from the cockpit, then stage two, switch the active control to someone on the ground through satellite interface? What if only stage one had occurred, and that had been an accident?
And what if someone below was trying to “fix” that mistake right now and reverse stage one?
The two disconnected ends of the satellite communications antenna were suddenly mocking him, and Dan called Frank out of his brief reverie as he pointed to them.
“Follow my logic. We disconnected and nothing has changed for a half hour. That proves we weren’t under active control, so it should be okay to reconnect, especially if someone below accidentally triggered this thing and might try to use a satcom signal to reverse their mistake.”
“So… reconnect?” Frank asked.
“Yes. Why not?”
“How much time do we have?”
“Before what?”
“Before running out of gas.”
“Maybe two hours. Maybe a bit more.”
“Then we should do it quickly,” Frank said.
“Agreed,” Dan replied, adjusted the gloves, and grabbed the two ends, screwing them back into uniformity.
When the job was complete, Dan sat back, aware Frank was looking at him.
“What?”
“That was precisely my question, Captain. What do we do now?” Frank asked.
“We start experimenting again and yanking relays, as fast as we can.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Silver Springs, Maryland (9:25 p.m. EST / 0325 Zulu)
“So where do we run to, Mr. Bond?” Jenny asked, only slightly amused with her reference.
Will Bronson had been all but hunched over the steering wheel, guiding them into the night traffic southbound toward the heart of DC and obviously deep in thought. He looked over now almost in lack of recognition, a smile returning uneasily to his face as his eyes focused on her.
“Sorry. I was concentrating on where to go.”
“Any Starbucks will do,” Jenny said, not in jest.
“Too public, and a public server will be child’s play to trace.”
“Who cares, Will. We’re running out of time. If I had a portable hot spot… wait, I do!”
“Jenny, we’re being watched!”
“Okay, and I’m willing to trade my damned job for a planeload of passengers. Aren’t you?”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point, Will? I think I have the code figured out, but we need to be broadcasting it everywhere. I have only one transponder I know that might be usable. Who else can we turn to?” Jenny fumbled in her purse, pulled out her smartphone, and worked the screen to trigger its internal hotspot.
He was shaking his head and breathing a bit too hard, and Jenny heard the indecision in his voice.
“I think I know where to go for a secure channel, but… you’re right about the lack of time.”
“Then hush up for a moment and let me work this,” she replied, head down, making a tiny mental note that “hush up” might be too Southern a way to shush a spy. Then again, he was acting less and less like a serenely confident operative.
She pulled her laptop out of its case and fired it up, connecting to the cell phone’s Wi-Fi channel, then retracing her previous steps to the entry portal of the satellite array she had previously tried. She entered the appropriate string of keystrokes and tried to suppress the urge to scream “Dammit!” when the entry denial included confirmation that her previous attempt had never made it through their firewalls.
“This isn’t working, Will,” she said in disgust, tucking back an errant cascade of hair behind her ear.
“Okay, then we’ll have to find that secure entry point.”
“No. No, you don’t understand,” she said, turning to him. “I only had one satellite channel, and it won’t let me in. We don’t just need a place to get into the Internet, we need a transponder or about a dozen of them. I think I’d better call Seth at home, and in the clear.”
“No!”
“Why not? No way he’s the bad guy. I know you can’t guarantee that, but I can.”
“You can’t call him in the clear, Jenny. And I promise you he doesn’t have the horsepower to intervene and find a transponder for us.”
“Yeah? Well, Sherlock, find me someone who does, or I see no choice but to try.”
“I’m working on it,” he replied, negotiating Dupont Circle and steering them down Massachusetts Avenue.
Quietly, she opened a direct to text program and typed the most innocuous message she could think of.
“Seth, I’m with Will and have unlock solution for P10, but one hour left and can’t broadcast. Need advice! Jen”
Jenny hit the send button and simultaneously collapsed the program just as an oath reached her from the driver’s seat.
“Oh, crap!”
“What?”
Will Bronson was staring intently into the rearview mirror.
“We’ve got a tail.”
“What? Really?” Jenny whirled around in the seat, her eyes jumping through a series of headlights behind them, none of them close enough to finger as a tail.
“I don’t see who you’re talking about.”
“He’s back there. Came around the circle trying to stay aloof. Obviously a solo, not a team, which is good.”