John J. Nance
Skyhook
Dedication
To all of the members of the James L. Noel Clan—
My Extended Family
The Honorable Judge James L. Noel, Jr.,
U.S. District Judge (1909–1997),
Uncle Jim; Virginia Grubbs Noel, Esq. (1917–2000),
Aunt Jenny
And My Honored Cousins and “Cousins-in-Law”
James L. Noel III & Melinda Caldwell Noel
Carol Noel King, Esq. & J. Stephen King, Esq.
Edmund Orr Noel & Patrice Oden Noel
William D. Noel, Esq. & Barbara Wick Noel
Robert C. Noel, Esq. & Deanne Moore Noel, Esq.
ONE
MONDAY EVENING OVER THE GULF OF ALASKA, SOUTHEAST OF ANCHORAGE
“Whoa! What’s this thing doing?” Captain Gene Hammond asked.
The chief test pilot’s unexpected question snapped Ben Cole upright in his seat, drawing his attention from the maze of computer screens. Instinctively, he pressed the right side of his headset closer to his ear, as if trying to recapture the comment.
“I don’t know,” he heard the copilot respond.
Ben’s eyes flickered to the forward bulkhead of the converted business jet’s cabin, imagining the civilian test pilots hunched over their controls in the cockpit some thirty feet away. He felt the Gulfstream pitch down slightly, the white noise of the slipstream rising as the jet gained speed, the unexplained maneuver sharpening the isolation of being all alone in the stripped-down cabin.
“Crown, are you purposely descending us?” Hammond queried the test director by radio link. “I don’t think that’s the plan.”
Ben felt a sparkle of chills as he forced his eyes back to the display, confirming the lowering altitude and rising airspeed.
“Negative,” the voice from the Air Force AWACS replied. “Stand by.”
The unseen presence of the AWACS, a huge four-engine Boeing, had been reassuring, like a protective parent hovering in the night some ten thousand feet above and several miles behind the Gulfstream. But it seemed dangerously distant. Ben knew that the cavernous interior of the AWACS was crammed full of electronics, a two-star Air Force general, two corporate officers, and a cadre of test engineers, all of them expecting a much-needed flawless performance in the eleventh hour of a top secret program that could make or break Uniwave Industries.
“We’re descending at three thousand, four hundred feet per minute, on a course of zero two five degrees,” Hammond said. The edge in his voice was cutting into Ben’s faith that humans were really meant to fly.
Dr. Ben Cole, a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Caltech, pulled his eyes away from the computer screens and glanced toward the aircraft windows on his left, all of them black portals into the void of a moonless Alaskan night. He swallowed, and the sound was suddenly deafening.
“We’re working on it, Sage Ten,” the test director shot back, using the typically innocuous call assigned to the Gulfstream.
“And down here we’re definitely locked out,” Hammond replied.
Ben fumbled for his transmit switch. “What… what’s going on up there, guys?”
There was no reply at first, the silence conspiring with the dilation of time to feed the rising apprehension clawing at his insides.
“Stand by, Ben,” the copilot replied at last, his voice typically calm and flat. “Your damn program’s diving us. You’re not doing anything back there, are you?”
“No!” Ben replied, much too sharply. “I got all the right signals when we locked the program link. Nothing’s showing wrong here.”
The test director’s voice was back on the radio, overriding Ben’s reply.
“Sage Ten, we’re not asking for that descent. The remote control column up here is commanding straight and level. You sure you’re locked on our signal?”
“Trust me,” Hammond shot back. “We’re straight, but anything but level, and we are locked onto the telemetry. About two minutes after we turned over control to you, this started, just when you checked the speed brake. You’ve got the controls, Crown, and you’re descending us through fourteen thousand now.”
“No, we’re not,” another voice chimed in.
The remote test pilot was sitting in a replica of the Gulfstream’s cockpit safely aboard the AWACS. The plan called for the remote pilot to fly the Gulfstream by high-speed datalink for five minutes before engaging the automatic program they were there to validate — the program Ben had labored tirelessly to perfect for the previous eighteen months of eighteen-hour days. They were down to the wire now, and the thought of a setback was unacceptable.
“If this continues,” the Gulfstream pilot was saying, “we’d better abort.”
“Not yet.” The swift reply from the test director cut through their headsets. “Hang on, we’re… working on it.”
“Ben?” Gene Hammond’s voice was taking on a new level of urgency as he called his on-board test engineer, but as usual, he was trying to wrap his concern in the joking tones of a stressed airman who wasn’t about to admit to the pressure he felt. “Ben, now would be a very good time to tell me what your brainchild thinks it’s doing. A temper tantrum, perhaps?”
Ben mashed the interphone switch again, trying, and failing, to match the casual tone the pilot had adopted. “I don’t know! If they’re not commanding the descent from the AWACS, I can tell you it’s sure not in the program.”
“Is it thinking on its own, Ben?” the copilot added. “You know, making up some solution we don’t know about? You’re not some secret fan of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, are you?”
Ben felt his mind racing through an impossible tangle of technical details in search of a reassuring answer. There was none.
“Maybe we’d better disconnect.”
“Crown?” the pilot transmitted without hesitation. “I’m unsafeing the kill switch down here. If we descend through eight thousand, I’m pulling the plug on Winky.”
Ben suppressed a tiny flash of resentment. He hated the word the test pilots had coined to belittle the complex automatic system. Winky indeed! Pilots and engineers were always on a collision course, he’d been told, and he was realizing the truth of it as he punched the transmit switch again. “We could try a reset,” he added, aware the AWACS above couldn’t hear him on interphone. “They could have screwed up something back there in entering the maneuver plan. The test point altitudes, for instance.”
“Crown?” Hammond was transmitting again. “We’re descending through ten thousand, I’m just short of red-line speed, and your sage advice for Sage Ten would be greatly appreciated right about now.”
“Uh… stand by,” the test director repeated.
There was a pause the length of a heartbeat before Hammond responded. “No… too late. We’re disconnecting.”
Shit! Ben thought to himself. He sighed and sat back, feeling a cloak of disappointment enfold him. There would be corporate hell to pay for a bad test sequence. He wouldn’t be the only one in the crosshairs of company dissatisfaction, of course. There were more than sixty software experts working on the top secret system. But it had been Dr. Ben Cole, the young and the bold, who’d risked his fledgling career and his fair-haired status of “wunderkind” to take the lead position at age thirty-four.
Ben felt the Gulfstream undulate through some mild turbulence. They’re pulling out, he told himself, letting his mind disconnect for a few seconds, entering one of the tiny distractive mental loops that always helped him recharge.
Whatever happened, he would be employable. He could still work most anywhere he wanted to, and maybe he could even throttle some of his eternal ambition in favor of doing a little living. He’d had no life at all for the past two years in Anchorage. He’d been too busy to even have a girlfriend, although he’d dated a few local women and taken an occasional touristy side trip.