I know almost nothing about Alaska, he thought, resolving, as he had a hundred times before, to take a four-month vacation when this push was over. Maybe he could see some of Denali National Park on foot. He wasn’t much of an outdoorsman like his dad had been, but the fond memories of camping and hiking the Rockies in his teens with his dad as guide were always hanging there as a Valhalla to be reexperienced. He was sure he could figure out the basics of camping. After all, pitching a tent was just an applied engineering problem.
More radio chatter caught his attention, and Ben forced his mind back to the matters at hand, expecting to hear a decision to reposition to try it again.
“… up there? I’m getting nothing here,” Hammond, the Gulfstream pilot was saying. Ben’s eyes went to the screens, wondering why the altitude readout wasn’t showing the level-off. They’d disengaged at eight thousand, hadn’t they?
“We’re trying to break the link up here, Sage Ten, but the computer’s not responding.”
Ben recognized the test director’s voice. What did he mean, “not responding”?
He heard Gene Hammond’s voice snap back an answer as he came forward in the seat, instantly reengaging. “Crown, we’re dropping through four thousand at the same descent rate, same heading. Do something!”
The altitude readout on his screen showed three thousand two hundred feet, its numbers unwinding.
“Ben! Can you hear us?” Hammond was asking, his words implying a previous call Ben had missed. A rush of adrenaline filled Ben’s bloodstream as he answered, his voice sounding a bit strange.
“I’m here.”
“Do something, dammit! Help us disconnect.”
“Use the guarded disconnect switch,” Ben replied.
“We did. It doesn’t work,” the pilot said as the copilot chimed in, his voice taut with tension. “One thousand five hundred. It’s flying us into the water. What now, Ben?”
“The guarded switch won’t work?” Ben repeated blankly, his mind in a daze. How could anyone think under such pressure? The readout in front of him was still whizzing downward as he reached forward and keyed a disconnect command into the computer, sending it just as rapidly through the telemetry link to the main processor aboard the AWACS.
“One thousand!” The copilot had dropped all pretense of calm now, his voice up a half octave.
“I’m… pulling… but… I can’t override,” Hammond was saying through gritted teeth.
“Five hundred!” the copilot intoned. “Oh, God…”
Ben thought of reaching for the keyboard again to try the same disconnect sequence, but something was yanking him down hard in his seat as the Gulfstream’s nose came up without warning, spiking gravity and making him feel incredibly heavy before returning just as rapidly to the normality of a single G.
And suddenly they were level, the sounds of excessive speed bleeding off in the background.
“Jesus Christ, Crown!” he heard Hammond say on the radio. “It just jerked us level at—”
The copilot finished the sentence. “Fifty feet. On the radio altimeter. We’re holding at fifty feet, three hundred knots.”
“What’s your status, Sage Ten?” the test director asked.
“Our status? We’re into hyperventilation down here, if that’s any clue,” the pilot responded, pausing. Ben could hear a long breath. “The damn thing almost killed us! Whatever the heck is going on in that silicon psycho’s little mind, it wants to fly at fifty feet, and I still can’t disconnect it.”
“But… you’re level?”
“Yeah… for now. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this chat. But we’re just a hiccup from the water and there’s land somewhere ahead. Ben? Get this goddamned electronic octopus off my controls!”
Aboard the AWACS, Major General Mac MacAdams dared to let his breath out as he glanced quickly at the grim faces around him. All of them had been listening on small Telex headsets and unconsciously pressing in behind the pilot sitting at the remote controls as the Gulfstream had dropped toward the ocean.
The test director looked around at Mac and shook his head in shock.
“What the hell was all that about?” the general asked. He could see the test director, Jeff Kaminsky, jaw muscles working overtime as he struggled to answer.
“I don’t know, General. Stand by.” He triggered his transmit button again. “Sage Ten, we’re going to pull the circuit boards on the computer up here and disconnect you.”
“NO!” A voice from the Gulfstream cut in.
“Who’s this?” Kaminsky demanded.
“Ben Cole. Don’t pull any circuit boards! If your computer’s doing this and you get the wrong board first, it could pitch us down.”
Kaminsky glanced at the general in puzzlement as he answered. “You know what’s causing this, Dr. Cole?”
“No… but… I’m guessing. The problem may be down here, but it may not.”
“How about killing the radio links between us, then?” the test director asked.
“Wait on that, too,” Ben Cole replied. “I’m working on it from here.”
“Sage,” Kaminsky said, “we’re still showing you at fifty feet, three hundred twenty knots.”
Hammond’s voice growled back at them. “Yeah, and Winky is goosing my throttles to max thrust. Would someone check up there to make sure there’s not an island ahead or something?”
A shout marked Ben Cole’s return to the channel. “Okay! Our computer’s the culprit. Go ahead and shut down the radio link.”
Kaminsky mashed one of the intercom buttons and relayed the order to another engineer at a console ten feet away. “Shut it off. All right, Dr. Cole, the link is history. Are you released?”
There was a long pause before the pilot’s voice returned from the Gulfstream.
“No,” Hammond said. “Dammit, it’s still locked up. Ben? What the hell’s going on back there?”
The channel fell silent for several long seconds as one of the test engineers on the AWACS rose quickly from his position and came forward, pushing in alongside the general and Kaminsky. Mac MacAdams noticed the man first. The haunted look on his face meant a new emergency. The general put his hand on the test director’s shoulder and turned him toward the worried subordinate.
“What?” Jeff Kaminsky snapped.
“There’s a… problem ahead,” the test engineer said.
Kaminsky’s attention was shifting slowly to the engineer as he kept one eye on his readouts. “Spill it,” he said.
“Ahead, on my radar, about forty miles, there’s a big ship.”
Jeff Kaminsky swiveled around to look the engineer in the eye. “What do you mean, ‘big ship’?”
“Sage Ten is at fifty feet,” he said. “I know this part of the Gulf, and this target’s big.”
“He’s in Sage’s way? A big ship?”
“Yes, sir. Dead-on collision course. He’s on a heading of one hundred twenty degrees, about a right angle to our guy.”
“He’s big enough to have a superstructure fifty feet above the water line?”
“If it’s a supertanker out of Valdez, yes. The hull will be higher than that. If he hits, he’ll broadside the hull. Even if he misses, he’ll hit one of the ridges on Hitchinbrook Island twenty miles farther.”
The general caught the tech’s shoulder. “You’re saying it’s a loaded tanker?”
The man nodded. “He’s a loaded thousand-foot-long supertanker southeast-bound making eleven knots on my scope, coming out of Hitchinbrook entrance to Prince William Sound. Ships like that usually stand at least seventy feet above the water when loaded,” the engineer said, wondering why the general turned suddenly and disappeared.