Skyhook

Skyhook. By John j Nance.

Turbulence Headwind Blackout The Last Hostage Medusa’s Child Pandora’s Clock Phoenix Rising Scorpion Strike Final Approach

utHTiij nnnce

What Goes Up On Shaky Ground Bhnd Trust Splash of Colors

i-teHO JJW)CŁ

g. p. putnhm’s sons

1

m

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either

are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons Publishers Since 1838

a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

375 Hudson Street New York, NY 10014

Copyright & 2003 by John J. Nance

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nance, John J. Skyhook p. cm.

ISBN 0-399-14980-5 I. Aeronautics—Safety measures—Fiction. 2.

Computer scientists—Fiction.

3. Sabotage—Fiction. I. Tide.

PS3564.A546 S58 2003 2002031914 813’.54—dc21

Printed in the United States of America 13579 10 8642

This book is printed on acid-free paper. >

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), UncleJim; 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.

9M7H00K

hoa! 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 Gulf stream 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 Gulf stream. 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 onboard 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 unsafe ing 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 throt tie 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.

/ 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 re experienced. 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 Gulf stream 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 Gulf stream 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.