Skyhook (4 page)

Ben Cole’s ultimate solution, which had been to simply turn off the main computer.

“So, Ben’s computer was the culprit?” Martin asked. “Not the software?”

“We think so. We’re running all kinds of diagnostics. Have been all night. Our best guess right now is a hardware fault of some sort.”

Martin could see the look of alarm on Ben Cole’s face. He turned to him. “Ben? You look upset.”

“Well…”

“You agree with Joe’s assessment?”

Ben shot Joe Davis a worried look before answering. “Ah …

turning the computer off did unlatch the relays, Mr. Martin, so, technically …”

“Your onboard computer was sending signals to lock the aircraft in its control, right?”

Ben nodded without enthusiasm.

“But,” Martin continued, “why was it diving you to fifty feet and then skimming the water?”

“We don’t know,” Ben answered cautiously.

“Well, hardware or software? Or both?”

There was a flurry of activity to one side of the suite in Anchorage and a woman entered with a note for Joe Davis, withdrawing quickly. Martin saw a broad smile spread over Davis s face as he shared the note with the others and gestured for the chairman’s attention.

“I think we’ve got it!” Davis said, looking at Ben. “Our guys just found a bad circuit board in Ben’s computer aboard the Gulfstream, and it’s the board that governs pitch and altitude as well as the latching relays for the flight controls.”

Martin smiled and exhaled as he flashed a thumbs-up gesture.

“Great!”

But Ben Cole was not smiling, and the chairman noticed.

“Ben? You look unconvinced.”

“Well…”

“Spit it out.”

Ben pursed his lips and smiled as he shook his head. “I hate to be the skunk at the party, and, of course, I haven’t seen what they found, but I really think we need to finish looking through the program to make sure there’s nothing else going on.”

“Ben,” Joe Davis began, reaching a hand toward his sleeve, but Ben Cole’s eyes were locked on Will Martin’s across the transparent divide of the screen.

“Leave him be, Joe,” Martin ordered quietly. “Everyone gets their say here. Go ahead, Ben.”

“Well, first, we shouldn’t try to fly the acceptance test tonight, just in case I’m right. If we blow this one, as I understand it, we blow the on-time acceptance.”

Will Martin was nodding slowly as he watched the young engineer and made quiet note of the perspiration glistening on his forehead.

“Okay,” Ben continued. “This has nothing to do with the fact that we almost died in that Gulfstream last night. I just want to make sure we get this right, and the logic here—that it would be just a circuit board and not involve the software—really scares me.

And after all, we’ve been moving awfully fast.”

“So you think it could be software. Isn’t the software your responsibility as lead engineer, Ben?” the chairman asked. His words and tone were gentle, but the implication was devastating.

Here was the chief software engineer for the project giving his boss a “no confidence” rating on two years of his own work, and in the eleventh hour.

“Yes, Mr. Chairman,” Ben managed, “but what happened last night was too precise—the fifty-foot altitude, I mean—to be explained by a fried circuit board, in my opinion.”

” ; some hard evidence?”

guess,

you

“It’s all guesswork, Mr. Martin, until we find a faulty line of code … but it’s good guesswork. Bad circuits don’t stop a jet at precisely fifty feet. At least, I don’t think they would.

Look, I’m sorry—”

“You made reference a second ago … what’d you say? That we’ve been moving too fast? What do you mean by that, Ben?”

The fact that Joe Davis was looking at Ben Cole with a frozen expression had not escaped Will Martin’s attention.

“What I mean, or meant, sir, is that we’ve been under tremendous pressure on this project, and while I know everyone’s done their best to get it right the first time, the truth is, this is a very complex software program with millions of lines of code, and I’m worried that we haven’t fully tested it yet. At least, not enough to deploy.”

“Okay, thanks for the caution,” Martin began, nodding dismissively at Ben Cole as he straightened his back and surveyed all of them in turn around the table. “Here’s the deal, folks. By the contract, we have until Saturday night to hand this system over to General MacAdams and proclaim it ready, or two very undesirable things are going to happen: One, we don’t get paid the little green government check for one hundred ninety-three million dollars this company has to have by Wednesday to avoid default and stay afloat, as well as pay your paychecks. Two, we go into contract penalty clause territory for late delivery and start losing two hundred fifty thousand dollars per day, which is a million seven hundred fifty thousand a week. We can’t afford either occurrence. We’ve lost two other contracts this year, as you know, our bond ratings are in the toilet, we’ve used up all but a pittance of our credit lines, and we’re down to the crunch.

So, if we’re not sure we can be safe, we don’t fly. But if there’s any way we can patch the situation together sufficiently so we can be safe and still dazzle MacAdams and get this damn Boomerang Box system accepted, I say we find a way to do it. Now.

Tonight. We need creative thinking, but with lightning speed.

Understood?”

There were nods in all directions with the sole exception of Ben Cole, who was looking ill as Martin continued. “We add whatever safeguards we need to make absolutely sure the damn thing doesn’t misbehave tonight, and then we fly it and sign off the final acceptance test. MacAdams is ready. I’ve already talked to him and assured him that we’d have an answer on what the problem was in a few hours, and now we’ve got it. A bad circuit board in a single computer. And, Ben?”

Ben Cole looked up, startled. “Yes, sir?”

“If you’re still worried after tonight, you and your team can keep looking for the glitch. It’ll take the Air Force three weeks to gear up to install the first black box on a real airplane anyway. That should give you time.”

“Mr. Martin, I don’t want to be a roadblock,” Ben Cole began.

“Then don’t,” Martin said, flashing a perfunctory smile. “Let’s find a way to get this accomplished.”

“Sir,” Ben began, but Martin cut him off.

“Ben, I need solutions overriding cautions now. Are you really prepared to tell me there’s no way to safeguard the system against diving the Gulfstream during the test, or once again failing to release the controls, once that circuit board is fixed?”

“Well, no … the circuit board was probably … almost surely … the reason we couldn’t disconnect. And I can rig a protective circuit that we didn’t have last night to prevent any dives or turns… . But this is almost certainly a compound problem. I mean, there’s a software logic problem somewhere. We wouldn’t have leveled at fifty feet otherwise.”

Will Martin got to his feet and looked across the electronic divide.

“You were aboard the Gulfstream last night, weren’t you, Ben?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And … that must have been a pretty terrifying episode for a non-pilot.”

“I think it was terrifying for the pilots, too, sir.”

Martin looked at the table and nodded before snapping his eyes back to Ben’s.

“When something shakes you that badly, it can affect your judgment. I understand that’s where your passion is coming from regard

ing tonight’s test flight. That’s why I want you to sit this one out. Stay home. Have a beer, watch TV, chase your wife to the bedroom, and let someone else from your team fly the test.”

Ben started to protest but the chairman had his hand out in a stop gesture. “No, I mean it. In the aftermath of last night’s problem, you’re not going to be as cool and focused as you should be. Hell, I wouldn’t be either.”

Will Martin turned and left the room, leaving Ben Cole searching for a reply as Joe Davis leaned over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Ben. Cook up that protective circuit you mentioned, pick your crew for tonight, and go home.”

“Joe, this could be a disaster,” Ben began, but the project manager waved him away.

“We’ve got our orders, Ben. Let’s get moving. We’re not going to let it be a disaster.” The older man picked up his coffee cup and hurried away, leaving Ben alone in the teleconferencing chamber.

The screen went dark, making the enclosure suddenly feel half its size, and Ben looked at it in a quandary. A half dozen things he should have said to Martin were echoing through his mind, including the useless but vital fact that he was no longer married.

But Martin should have remembered that, Ben thought. He’d flown to Anchorage two years before for Lisa’s funeral.

April scooped up the receiver on the first ring and snapped off an urgent hello, instantly relieved to hear Gracie’s voice on the other end.

“Okay, the Coast Guard’s launching a search for your folks.”

“Thank God!” April Rosen sighed as she massaged her temple and sank onto the edge of her bed. “I couldn’t get their headquarters in Juneau to do anything, since the FAA claims Dad didn’t file a flight plan and no one’s heard a distress call.” She reached for a Kleenex as the tears escaped her self-control. “Where are you?”

“In my sensory deprivation chamber. My windowless baby-lawyer office.”

“How’d you get the Coast Guard to listen?”

There was a chuckle on the other end and April pictured Gracie O’Brien leaning back in her plush leather office chair. April had surprised her with the expensive chair when her best friend landed the coveted junior associate position with the mega law firm of Janssen and Pruzan.

“Well, I had a little help from one of the senior partners, Dick Walsh,” Gracie was explaining. “Dick put pressure on the right people in Washington, D.C., for me.”

“Wow. You work with someone that powerful?” April asked.

“You could say that. Until last year, Dick was the Secretary of Transportation, and they kind of own the Coast Guard. Now he plays golf and calls in favors.”

“However you did it, thank you. Oh. You did give them the coordinates of the last fix I got, right?”

“No, April Rosen, I told them to look for your folks somewhere in the North Pacific where the waves are blue and fish swim. Of course I gave them the coordinates. They’re launching both a C-130 and something called a Jayhawk chopper out of Kodiak, which is only two hundred miles away, so they’ll be all over the area in a couple of hours. It’s just a matter of a little waiting time now.”

“I’m pacing a hole in the floor up here.”

“April, I’m sure your mom and dad are okay. I just feel it. After all, you said yourself that there’s been no distress call and no emergency locator beacons heard in the area, and you know those beacons are picked up by satellite almost immediately.”

“I know, but…”

“This is premature panic, Miss Icewater-In-Her-Veins Newly Minted Cruise Line Vice-President. Take a deep breath.”

“Seriously, I’m scared, Gracie,” April replied. “I’m sorry. I know I’m overreacting, but I love my folks and this is exactly why I paid for that GPS tracking system Dad didn’t want… so I could make sure they had help if anything happened.”

“The day’s clear up there. If your folks are floating around, they’ll find them.”

“Think so?”

“Yes, I think so. But I also think that when they’re found, they’ll be aboard the Albatross tied up to some obscure pier with a dead battery waiting for a passing boat and boinking their brains out in the meantime.”

“Grade!”

“Well, your parents are pretty lusty. You know that.”

“Yeah, I know. They embarrass me.”

“That’s their mission as parents. Especially yours. I just hope I still feel that lusty at their age. Of course, it would be nice to be married to a male of the species by that time, too.”

The comforting, familiar banter trailed off for nearly half a minute until April broke the silence with a sigh. “Grade?”

“Yeah?”

“What… do we do if the Coast Guard can’t find them?” she asked, the words constrained by the sudden lump in her throat. “What if.

. . something terrible’s happened?”

“April, listen to yourself! Who was the wise young woman who recently advised a certain panicked, unemployed female law graduate to hang in there and keep applying? I seem to recall her telling me, and I quote, that the saddest people of all are those who refuse to take risks and pursue their dreams.”

“You were probably listening to some sappy New Age priestess on a twenty-five-watt talk show,” April replied, chuckling in spite of herself. “Was she selling crystals?”

“As I recall,” Gracie said, “this little girl had dark hair, big boobs, and answered to the name of April. And her parents were having a ball flying all over creation, scandalizing their uptight daughter and pursuing their dreams.”

“My parents are juvenile delinquents,” April said, laughing and crying at the same time. “And if I get them back safely, I’m going to kill both of them!”

“Okay, now you’re scaring me, April. You’re sounding like my parents. I think the phrase is anal retentive.” Yeah, that’s the ticket. You’re definitely anal retentive.”

“I am not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And my boobs aren’t that big, either.”

“Right. Tell that to all the men who can never stop talking to your

chest. I’ve had a raging inferiority complex since I was twelve years old because of your enormous boobs.”

“Cut it out, Grade!”

“April, just hang tight. Seriously. I’ll call the second I know anything.”

“They’re going to call you?”

“No, they’re going to call the former Secretary of Transportation, who’ll call me the second the Coast Guard confirms that Captain Arlie and Rachel are just fine.”

“Grade?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Say a prayer, okay?”

“Already have,” Gracie said quietly.

COHST GUflRD DISTRICT 17 RIR OPERRTIONS CENTER

KODIRK, RLRSKR

The pace of operations in the Coast Guard’s Kodiak Air Station command post had been at high pitch for the previous hour as two C-130 rescue aircraft searched the area south of Prince William Sound, steadily reporting their progress. With an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter inbound to the search box at 140 knots, the two C-130s had divided up the standard search pattern and begun flying separate back-and-forth grids south of Valdez, the crews carefully searching the waters on both sides for any sign of a downed aircraft, oil slicks, or survivors. The first hour had ticked by with no results, leaving the officer in Juneau who had refused April Rosen’s request feeling somewhere between smug and relieved as he monitored the radio traffic and waited.