Lockout Read online

  “What in holy hell was THAT, Dan?”

  “I …”

  “You almost killed us!”

  “I … I don’t know, Jerry, I …”

  “Where the hell was your airspeed control?”

  “I had the autothrottles on …”

  “You WHAT?”

  “The autothrottles, I had them on and …”

  “No you didn’t…they weren’t even armed! I turned them off when I killed the ILS and told you to fly the damned approach manually. You were supposed to be flying this mother, not programming her!”

  “I don’t know what to say, Jerry, other than I humbly apologize, and I recognize that you saved us.”

  Tollefson was shaking his head in utter amazement, his left hand still on the yoke and shaking slightly as he tried to get a handle on what to say and how to answer the tower controller who was waiting for them to change to Ground Control.

  “Where in the hell did you learn to fly, Horneman? Microsoft?”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Three Years Later

  National Security Agency, Ft. Meade, Maryland (9:05 a.m. EST / 1405 Zulu)

  Jenny Reynolds sighed and let her mind refocus as she forced herself to stop tapping out a desktop drum solo with her pencil. Two hours trying to unravel a mystery message had passed her personal breaking point.

  Jenny shook her head in a gesture no one noticed and forced herself to disconnect from the puzzle. An hour ago she’d yanked off her iPod headset to concentrate, but the challenge of an uncracked code would not stop chewing on her. Why had a simple unidentified satellite burst managed to offend her so profoundly?

  NSA’s satellites and computers picked up endless bursts every hour that she couldn’t translate, at least at first—transmissions with no known syntax, no known purpose, and no recognized source. Of course, there were also sophisticated communication “gamers” all over the planet who loved to stick a finger in the NSA’s eye from time to time with sequences which were exactly what they appeared to be: garbage. Gobbledygook uplinked just to worry Washington and give Ivan, Ahmed, or Chan a good laugh, especially since that scumbag Snowden defected.

  But this transmission was different somehow. Not a game. Wrong point of origin, wrong frequency, wrong everything. It was there, just out of reach, teasing her to recognize something in the encoding.

  And, there was that other disturbing reality: People didn’t waste time encoding messages hidden in frequency harmonics and piggybacked on routine transmissions unless there was a very specific purpose to be served.

  I’m trying to be the perfectionist again! she thought, well aware that her penchant for being perfect tended to irritate her geeky coworkers—as did the fact that she liked to dress well. “Learn to call for help every now and then,” she’d been told in her recent job review. It was a slap in the face that still stung.

  Jenny slipped her feet back into the black pumps that gave her a fighting chance of seeming taller than her petite five feet, and she force-marched herself through the labyrinth of cubicles to her boss’s corner office.

  As usual, Seth Zieglar’s lanky six-foot frame was pretzeled nose-down in his computer, yet he was acutely aware of the skirt leaning into his doorway.

  “You clattered?” he asked without looking up.

  “Sorry?”

  “Your stilettos,” he explained, looking over and smiling. “They’re like your signature. Along with your Georgia accent, that is.”

  “They’re called pumps, Seth.”

  He pulled off his glasses, his voice characteristically laconic as his eyes took in her black skirt and tailored, slightly frilly white blouse. “Whatever they are, may I say without fear of receiving sexual harassment charges, that they become you?”

  “As long as you don’t call them FM boots again. That wasn’t even subtle.”

  “Never! I’ve been appropriately reeducated. Although … now that you’ve once again voluntarily instilled the image of hooker boots in my head …”

  “Seth!”

  He raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry!”

  “I’ve got a problem.” She laid her notes on his desk and sat down beside him. “You said I should call for help, so … ‘Help!’”

  “Sweet! See? Wasn’t that hard, was it?” He pointed dramatically at her face. “I especially liked the tentative curl of your lower lip.”

  “Jeez, Seth!”

  “Okay … all seriousness aside, what’s up?”

  She sat down beside him. “The computers snagged this burst transmission about three hours ago. The thing was trying to ride undetected on a routine satellite uplink from the UK. The source, however, I think is somewhere off the Irish coast, and while there’s one US Navy ship splashing around in the area, this isn’t a syntax the navy ever uses. Frankly, I don’t know what the heck it is.”

  “Well … any guesses?”

  She sighed, another sign of defeat she hated. “It’s … probably a programming order of some sort. It’s asking another computer to do something. Closest thing in my experience would be the multiple-repeat commands we learned to send from the Jet Propulsion Lab in California to distant spacecraft. You know, ‘Hey there, V-Jer, turn your antenna towards this, fire your rockets at that, and give us a precise readback.’ Orders we wanted to absolutely make sure got through without error.”

  “But what’s the urgency, Jen? What’s worrying you?”

  “Dude, what’s it programming? That’s what’s bothering me.”

  “Okay,” he said, stroking his bony chin.

  “I mean, is this a targeting order for a remotely piloted vehicle, like a Global Hawk or a Predator? Is it a test? A … a programming order for a spacecraft that the owner of the satellite doesn’t want seen?”

  “You’ve run all the usual …”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, unconsciously running a hand through her mane of perpetually curly chestnut hair. “I jammed it through the main supercomputers, and they can’t match it.”

  Seth leaned forward, studying her. “You’ve got a hunch though, don’t you?”

  “No … not a hunch, really. Just a worry.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, just that … if something sophisticated and in motion is being programmed, we need to know what it is and where it’s headed or pointed. I mean, taking into account everyone in the world who wants to harm us and the fact that the only countries on the planet who remain our friends are Monaco and McMurdo Sound in Antarctica …”

  “McMurdo is not a country, Jen.”

  “My point exactly. Anyway, it makes me real nervous to have what feels like a targeting sequence being sent to an unseen, unknown receiver.”

  “Was there a latitude or longitude in the message?”

  “Maybe. There are numbers.”

  He nodded. “Okay, then pull our esteemed friends at the North American Air Defense Command into this, and if they act puzzled, light up Defense Intelligence.”

  “Whoa, Seth! I’m worried, not professionally suicidal. You want DIA pulled in on nothing more than a wild suspicion of mine?”

  “We at least need to know if this is one of ours, right?”

  “You think it could be a US military thing? Like a black project?”

  “They don’t tell us, Jen. That’s why they call them black projects.”

  “Would they tell us if we asked real nice?” she countered, tilting her head.

  “Not directly, but something would be said. Or someone very authoritative with dark glasses and a black suit would be sent over to make us calm down. And, by the by, just because the navy hasn’t used a particular code pattern doesn’t mean they couldn’t be doing so for the first time.”

  “You are kidding about that, right?”

  “About what? The navy?”

  “The strange guys with dark glasses and black suits?”

  He looked at her for a few seconds and smiled. “Maybe.”

  “That scares me, Seth, and I think you know i
t. I’m not in covert ops.”

  “None of us is. That’s why men in black scare us.”

  “Okay, stop it. Seriously? Please. I don’t want to know about that stuff.”

  “Remember, Jen,” he chuckled, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!”

  Jenny shook her head in mock disgust and rolled her eyes. “Why do you like torturing women, Seth?”

  “I don’t! At least, not women in general. Mostly I just like torturing you,” he grinned.

  “As I always suspected.”

  “Seriously, Jen, they’ll let us know if it’s out of our bailiwick. Don’t worry.”

  She sat in thought for a few moments. “I checked on airborne traffic, including drones passing through the area that might have birthed the transmission.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing out there but regularly scheduled commercial flights, and none of them could use a transmission like this.”

  Seth was sitting quietly, waiting.

  “Am I … missing something?” Jenny asked.

  “Now that, my resident perfectionist genius, is the real question. And if we figure it out, we’ll probably discover it’s just some idiot in Iowa programming his toy helicopter.”

  “But, if we get this wrong …”

  Seth sighed openly, a weary look crossing his angular features as his thoughts focused inward for a second. “Well … if we get it wrong and something really skanky happens … like another 9/11 … nobody will ever love us again. Ever. Not even our mothers.”

  “Jeez, Seth.”

  “Welcome to life on the edge, Miss Reynolds.”

  She got to her feet and paused at the door, looking back.

  “And for the record, y’all? I don’t have an accent.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel (4:15 p.m. local / 1515 Zulu)

  First Officer Dan Horneman checked his watch as he arrived at Gate B5 at Tel Aviv’s airport. It was the last place he expected to be this afternoon. He had picked up an extra reserve trip from New York to Tel Aviv because it offered a four-day layover, and even if he’d stayed in the mid-level hotel Pangia rented for its crews, that would have been a great deal. Four days to relax and enjoy Tel Aviv … now shot to hell, along with the extra money! Dan had indulged himself and rented a shamelessly expensive suite at the King David Hotel and quietly cancelled the company room. He had barely settled into the luxurious digs when crew scheduling found him by phone to assign an unwanted return trip, and suddenly Dan was back in uniform, dragging his brain bag to the gate as a last-minute replacement copilot, and trying to adjust to the idea of another all night flight.

  A female voice somewhere behind him failed to register at first, but its familiarity persisted at the margins of his memory until he turned to see the smiling face of Janice Johnson, her shoulder-length black hair pulled into a small pony tail riding behind her Pangia uniform hat.

  “Hey there, fellow misfit,” she said, giving voice to their shared outlier reputation: she for simply flying while female, he for having, as she teased him, more money than God.

  Dan smiled in return as unbidden memories of their brief dating history flashed like a slightly dated movie trailer through his mind—a recent anthology that included a hedonistic week in Maui which had been as glorious for the companionship and intellectual ferment as it had been for the rather unbridled sex.

  “Janice! Did you just fly this bird in?”

  “Yep. And I hear you’ve been drafted to fly her back with our resident self-appointed diety. Captain Skygod.”

  “Captain who?”

  “Breem. Bill Breem. God’s gift to aviation. A legend in his own mind.”

  “Oh! I thought I was flying with Jerry Tollefson.”

  “Tollefson is your captain. You guys are the relief crew, but el supremo Breem is the primary captain.”

  “He’s that bad?”

  “To start with … spoiler alert … he and Jerry Tollefson hate each other. I mean, frothing at the mouth homicidal hate!”

  “The old North Star Airlines versus Pangia Airways rivalry again?”

  “No, no, Danny. Worse. Breem was a longtime captain with Stratos Air. He lost his 747 captaincy when Stratos Air was bought by Pangia, before Pangia bought us at North Star. Breem’s been madder than hell about everything ever since.”

  “Is Breem still a training captain?”

  “Oh, God, no! Not for years,” Janice replied. “But he still looks down his nose at anyone who wasn’t hired by the original Stratos Air, and he complains about North Star captains constantly. Breem’s pushing sixty-three now, and we’re all counting the days till he’s gone.”

  “Sounds like a wonderful evening.”

  “Good luck, dude,” she said with a smile as she leaned in and brushed his cheek with a kiss. “Miss you!”

  “Why did we stop dating, by the way?” Dan asked, smiling in return“Because we could never get together on the same continent,” she said, waving as she pivoted with her bags and headed for the exit.

  Dan stood for a few moments in thought, amazed at the ridiculousness of the constant internecine warfare among angry pilots from the different airlines that had been cobbled together to form Pangia.

  It was less of a war within the flight attendant ranks, but there were bruised feelings, lost seniority, and simmering upsets there as well—such as the famous thirty-year war between Pangia’s two most senior flight attendants stemming from a stolen boyfriend in the late seventies. Now at ages seventy-six and seventy-eight respectively, the two were the oldest flight attendants still flying, but neither would retire before the other.

  A Pangia captain was approaching the gate with a fistful of papers, his eyes on the paperwork as he passed by. Mid-thirties, Dan judged, and with a squarish, friendly face framed by sandy hair that he remembered all too well. Jerry Tollefson hadn’t noticed him yet, but before Dan could snag his attention, another captain in full four-stripe regalia strode into Tollefson’s face without offering his hand.

  “So you’re my relief crew tonight.”

  “If you’re flying Flight 10, Bill, that would be correct,” Tollefson replied, his voice cautious and all but icy.

  “I thought you were still on your initial operating experience trip. What’d you do, son, scare off the check pilot?” Breem chuckled.

  “Actually, I think what did the trick was finding out you were coming along,” Jerry replied, his eyes boring into Breem, who wasn’t about to flinch.

  “Well, they warned me a boy captain from North Slope was playing relief crew.”

  “North STAR, Bill,” Tollefson corrected, rolling his eyes. “Our airline was quite profitable and had a name.”

  “Oh, sorry. It’s hard to remember the name of the different little operations we’ve bought over the years. No disrespect intended.”

  “Right, like calling me ‘boy captain?’”

  Bill Breem responded with a snort. “Well, how old are you, Jerry?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “I rest my case. You’ve done damn well getting to four stripes in a major international airline by age thirty-five. I’ve just been around a lot longer and so, sometimes, I’ll admit, it seems like I’m surrounded by boy wonders. I apologize if the term offended you.”

  “It did, but I accept your apology.”

  “Good. See you aboard.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Gate B5, Ben Gurion airport, Tel Aviv, Israel (4:40 p.m. local / 1540 Zulu)

  Two black sedans with heavily tinted windows slid to a stop in a scene so familiar that few of the ramp workers took anything but passing notice. Two men with dark glasses, dead serious expressions, and equally serious automatic weaponry emerged from the lead car and in a fluid and practiced routine, scanned the surrounding tarmac for threats. Satisfied, the two moved to the second vehicle and opened the rear door, ushering a short, bald, older man and a stunning younger woman to th
e jetway stairs. In less than two minutes, the lead driver was back behind the wheel, escorting the second car from the airport and disappearing into the busy streets of Tel Aviv, their presence on the ramp nothing more than a whispered myth.

  The rapid entrance of Moishe Lavi and the woman to the forward-most seats in the unoccupied first class cabin of Pangia Flight 10 had been witnessed by no one but the flight attendants. Not even the pilots had been briefed that a former prime minister of Israel was joining them, and the lead flight attendant had been warned to collect all her crew’s cell phones until after takeoff, assuring that no one who noticed could report Lavi’s presence.

  Still grieving the loss of the trappings of great power, Moishe Lavi settled uncomfortably into the elaborate sleeper seat, motioning immediately for his companion to lean close and take a new round of notes in the non-stop soliloquy of action items and ideas he’d been firing at her since arising at 5:00 a.m. Instead of complying, Ashira Dyan settled into her own seat and smiled, shaking her head slightly as she mouthed a warning in Hebrew to wait. Lavi started to protest but thought better of it and smiled back with a nod, his mind replaying the delicious memory of her naked form gliding across the hotel room a few hours earlier after she’d pulled away from his embrace.

  Ah, sweet Ashira! he thought. Only thirty-four years old with a perfect body and shoulder-length black hair. She was like so many accomplished Israeli women who could melt you with their femininity, or effortlessly break your neck with their military training.

  Especially Ashira, whose prowess as a power-hungry she-wolf entranced him even more. She was a decorated major in the Israeli Defense Force, well trained in intelligence, and a perfect secretary when she needed to be. He was well aware that the only reason she was playing the role of his mistress was the eternal seduction of great political power.

  Of course, now that he’d been thrown out of office, how long would that last?