Chung ran the checklist items for bleed air tests, running hot air from all the engines inside both wings. He visually inspected from his windows as much as he could, and there were no signs of anything abnormal. The test card had them doing some slow-speed maneuvers while heading to the southeast and over the South China Sea.
“This jet is good to go. Continuing to Woody. I’m scanning the island from here and can see the radar energy and EMI coming off the southern end. We are also not getting lit up, so we continue to be invisible. Good for flight test on the wing, in addition to our flight test for the radar controllers,” Dai announced.
Chen set up the radar controllers on the island to be ready for the unexpected, as in, anything could happen. On the ground, the radar was empty, including the off-shore live weapons range. The controllers kept their eyes open, but nothing was there.
“Hey, Chung, rather than squirt the laser, let’s just do a low pass, past the radar controllers and air traffic controllers in the tower. Right across the whole airport and island. Will scare the hell out of them because they can’t see us. Don’t even know we are coming.”
Chung started laughing.
“Descent checklist,” Dai ordered. “Take us down to one thousand feet above sea level. I’ll get us in lower as we get closer.”
Dai started his descent about fifty miles out, heading southeast, and feet wet over the dark water. Their airspace was clear, and not a soul was expecting their high-speed, low-level arrival.
Jeanie was monitoring China on her monitors and screens while everyone else on the team was traveling to their locations on the globe. She checked some of the telecommunications companies and verified from the text chatter that the Black Scorpion was now airborne. Jeanie also scanned SOSUS, the navy’s sound surveillance system, or underwater listening posts, and it turned up nothing. At least she had some previous firm data to work with so far.
Jeanie then started looking at the data traffic on ChinaSat 2 C and was able to see that the jet was in contact with the satellites for the oxygen systems. As predicted, she thought, the maintenance team was monitoring Black Scorpion live.
She moved the mouse with her right hand and was in a flurry of typing with her left. Searching for GPS satellite NAVSTAR 76 USA 266 was easy, but writing the last lines of malicious code was the difficult part. Some hundreds of lines of her malware code had to be specifically placed into millions of lines of the aircraft code, ensuring the malware would be hidden forever and do its job. Completing the placement of the malware in the jet’s source code was the crème de la crème for Jeanie. She was excited.
Next step was to just wait and watch on the screen, as she executed the command with one click. Her code immediately traveled along the undersea internet cables. Watching the live Submarine Cable Map from Global Bandwidth Research, Jeanie could visually watch the signal rapidly move across from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles, over the Pacific on cable EAC-2C2 and into landing point Tseung Kwan O in Hong Kong. In separate routing, it also went to the US-China cable across the Pacific Ocean floor, and simultaneously to Guam’s Asia-America Gateway undersea cable and landing point as a backup. To think that for a person, a trip like this took months only a mere fifty years ago was mesmerizing, as today it only took mere seconds.
Waiting the few seconds, Jeanie glanced up at the article pinned in her cubicle, looking forward to the day she could use Google’s “Faster” cable, which moved info at sixty terabits per second. The article mentioned that it was the fastest undersea submarine cable ever built at ten million times faster than a cable modem, at the cost of $300 million. It was posted next to her bikini picture with Mark, which made her smile.
“Adios, mischievous code. Now we wait,” Jeanie announced, sending and uploading the code to both the jet and the two pilots’ phones. Done, she happily told herself.
With near-immediate turnaround time, her screen already displayed the aircraft flight instrument system, a software depiction that she made based upon the ones and zeros being received into her office. Her software interpreted the numbers into pictorial form, displaying all the cockpit instruments live. She could also see an electrical bus on a second screen, allowing her to monitor and control all electrical systems as needed. Black Scorpion was flying and airborne, and she could see everything as if she was behind the controls or in a simulator.
The same system was also set up for Ford’s laptop in Diego Garcia. When turned on, it would display the same information and allow either of them to make changes remotely on the Black Scorpion without either Dai or Chung knowing what was going on.
Jeanie looked across her monitor, confirming what she was expecting from an aviation data sheet on generic aircraft. “Hydraulics, oxygen, weapons, voltmeter, ammeter, fuel, fuel flow, exhaust gas temperature, navigational aids, radios, compass, attitude, radar, oil, and pressurization. Even circuit breakers… list goes on. Got them. Bingo.”
Michael and Rex were in their basement again after Michael had just completed his Social Committee shift at the Woodloch Pines Resort. “Rex, you don’t have to say anything and can just listen. It’s OK. Watch me,” Michael told Rex.
Young Rex leaned forward, then glanced at his wall map of the world, wondering where they were going to hear from first.
“W99ZNX, this is W87YYT, over,” Michael transmitted, his mouth close to the microphone.
Static came over the radio, and Michael was able to adjust the digits on the two-meter radio to get the right band and frequency to listen clearly.
“This is W99ZNX in Nova Scotia, Canada. Go ahead,” came a reply.
A huge smile came across the ten-year-old’s face. “Dad, this is awesome. That guy lives way up here,” Rex said, pointing at North America, and Nova Scotia, Canada, specifically.
“Loud and clear, my friend. We live in central Pennsylvania, USA, near Scranton. How goes the weather up there?” Michael asked his new amateur-radio friend, waiting for a reply.
The voice signal traveled from the microphone in the Miller basement to the coaxial cable connected to the rear of the transceiver. From there, his voice traveled up the cable that was stapled-gunned to the wooden two-by-fours in the basement, through the first floor hugging the chimney, and up into the attic antenna. The signal then transmitted through the atmosphere, hitting the ionosphere, then ricocheting back to earth. It repeated this pattern many times, up and down, as the radio waves spread out over earth.
Sitting in the attic was their “stealth antenna,” named as such because there was no way Michael Miller’s neighbors or the Town of Hawley, Pennsylvania, was going to allow him to erect an enormous metal ham radio tower antenna. The Miller makeshift polarized 144 MHz antenna was designed to fit in the sixty-foot-length attic. Michael and a friend from Woodloch Pines built a ground plane antenna and a vertical dipole antenna, doing some back-of-the-napkin math regarding power ratios, transmitter power, and signal loss to coax cable. Michael chuckled at how complicated his friend made it, and told him all he wanted was just for it to work.
“Weather is stormy up here in Canada, eh. Something we are used to. Another one and half to two meters of snow coming tonight and tomorrow.”
Rex couldn’t believe he could talk with someone that far away.
“And from there, you’ll taxi to park at Hangar Two at Bangalore, refuel, and RTB,” Ford told Zeke and Smitty, his two pilots. Ford had just completed the brief in Diego Garcia, and tomorrow night would be their goal for launch.