Atlantis (9 page)

“This is our only window of opportunity,” Ariana said. “Hie-Tech will be here, if they aren't already, and get a jump on us if we don't do it now.”

Ingram's voice was impassive. “I'm telling you the rules we wrote, Ariana.”

Ariana thought for a second, then keyed the radio. “Dad, I think we should abort.”

“What's that?” her father's voice was now distant and scratchy. “I . . . hear . . . . said. Repeat . . .”

“We're over target area,” Ingram cut in on intercom. “Everything's rolling, but we're scattered on the satellite link.”

Ariana slapped a palm onto her chair arm. “All right. We--” She froze as the plane dipped hard right and alarms began going off.

“I've got controls!” the pilot’s voice was calm and controlled. “Auto pilot is down. Nav link and GPR are down. Argus is off-line to flight controls.”

“Can you handle it?” Ariana demanded. She felt her stomach tighten and her breakfast threaten to come up.

“We're trying,” the pilot responded.

“Abort and return to Bangkok,” Ariana ordered. She was forced to swallow down a trace of acidic vomit that came up her throat.

“Oh hell!” the pilot yelled in the intercom. “We're losing control. There's some sort of strange mist outside.”

Ingram's voice came from the console area. “The wings, the tails, they're controlled by radio. If we're losing all spectrums, then the pilots are losing their ability to control the plane using normal controls.”

“Carpenter!” Ariana called out the name of the woman who was responsible for the master computer. “What's with Argus?”

“I don't know,” Carpenter's voice came back through the intercom. “He's going nuts, spewing garbage!”

“Take Argus off-line on all systems!” Ariana ordered. “Get the back-up going.”

Ariana felt her stomach lurch as the nose tipped over. Mugs and papers crashed to the floor. She couldn't help it now as she leaned over and threw up on the floor to her left. She sat back up. She rapidly typed into her keyboard, bringing up the same view the pilots had, via the front looking video camera. All she saw was a yellowish mist with streaks of black in it, swirling. Visibility was less than fifty feet. If the pilots had lost instruments--the thought chilled Ariana.

“We're working the controls manually,” the pilot announced, as if reading her mind. “Trying to keep it level and steady but all our instruments are lousy.”

Ariana knew that meant the pilots were trying to manhandle the large plane with muscle power, the pilot and co-pilot gripping the yoke with both hands, muscles bulging as they tried to force their commands through the back-up hydraulic system.

Hudson's voice suddenly came over the intercom. “I'm getting a weak FM transmission from the ground!”

“Record and forward to IIC,” Ariana automatically ordered.

“Roger,” Hudson said. The plane rolled left. In the back, one of the controllers had not locked his seat down and he went spinning down the rails toward the rear of the plane.

“We can't keep it up!” the pilot yelled. “I don't have altimeter. I don't know how low we are. I have no instruments and no visual. Controls are not responding. Prepare for crash landing!”

Hudson yelled to Ariana. “Your father is calling.”

A weak voice came over the radio. “Ariana . . . going . . . “

Ariana had no time to respond to her father, even if she could. She tore off her headset and yelled into the corridor, so that everyone in the bay could hear her. “Lock your seats in! Prepare for crash landing!”

Ariana looked at the video displays that showed the pilots' view. Nothing but the strange mist. There was a flash of gold light on the right side of the display.

“What the hell?” the pilot exclaimed.

Another flash of gold, this time to the left, then the screen went dark.

“I don't believe it,” the pilot's voice was almost a whisper in Ariana’s ears. “Sweet Jesus, save us.”

“What's happening?” Ariana demanded. She felt herself press against her seatbelt. She knew the feeling: zero g. That meant they were in a terminal dive.

“We've lost both our--” the pilot began, but suddenly the intercom went dead.

Then all went black as the plane seemed to come to a sudden halt and Ariana was thrown hard against her shoulder straps, her head slamming back against the headrest in recoil.

*****

In Glendale, Paul Michelet threw open the door to the conference room and took the stairs to the IIC two at a time, Freed just behind him. Michelet burst into the control room. “What's going on?”

“We're losing contact with the
Lady Gayle
,” the senior tech told him.

“That's impossible,” Michelet sputtered.

“What about the plane's transponder?” Freed asked.

“We’re getting the HF transponder intermittently,” the tech said. He pointed at the board. “We've got location but it's losing altitude fast.” He checked his computer screen. “Eight thousand and descending.” He stared. “That's strange.”

“What?” Michelet demanded.

“It's just going straight down, no forward velocity. Like it just came to a halt in mid-air. That's not possible. And the descent--” the man paused, not believing what his instruments were telling him.

“Go on!” Michelet ordered.

“The descent is not terminal now. It's like it's being controlled but that's physically impossible given the rate and speed of the plane.”

“Put the
Lady Gayle
on the speaker,” Michelet said.

There was a burst of static, then they could hear the pilot's voice. “
Lady Gayle
.. . . attitude . . . two . . . four . . . power . . . . Mayday . . . . there's . . . . God . . . . strange . . . . Jesus!” then suddenly the static was gone.

“She's down,” the tech said.

*****

175 miles above the southwest Pacific, a KH-12 spy satellite began receiving electronic orders from the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. At that location, all Patricia Conners, the imagery operator knew, was that the person ordering the new mission had a sufficient CIA clearance and went by the code name Foreman. What Conners found strange about the request was that Foreman only wanted a large-scale shot covering a section of north-central Cambodia.

Conners thought such a request a waste of the advanced equipment. The KH-12 she was tasking was one of six in orbit. They were the cutting edge of satellite technology, carrying an array of sensors. To keep them in orbit and available for taskings such as this, each one was refuelable, a classified operation which space shuttle crews accomplished every few missions.

She had a model of the KH-12 on top of a bookcase along one wall of her office. It looked like the Hubble Space Telescope with a large engine attached to provide maneuverability. The body of the satellite was 15 feet in diameter and almost 50 feet long. It was a tight fit in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle. Two solar panels were extended out of the body once the satellite was in orbit to provide power, each over 45 feet long and 13 feet wide.

Inside her office two floors underground, beneath the main NSA building at Fort Meade, Conners could not only change the KH-12's orbit, she could down-load real time images from the satellite and forward them to any location on the planet. She did this through the large screen computer that sat in the center of her desk.

On the left side of the computer she had a large framed picture of her grandchildren gathered together at the last family reunion, all six of them, two via her daughter and four from two sons. On the right side of the computer was a pewter model of the Starship Enterprise, the one from the original TV series. Stuck on the side of her monitor were various bumper stickers from the science fiction conventions she religiously traveled to every year, ranging from one indicating the bearer was a graduate of Star Fleet Academy to another warning that the driver braked for alien landings.

Conners' attention was fixated on the computer screen. She watched her display as, with the burst of a booster engine, the particular KH-12 she had commanded shifted its orbital path and moved northwest. The satellites were positioned so that any spot on earth could be looked at within 20 minutes of getting a mission tasking. Conners estimated a time on target of twelve minutes.

She got a thrill every time she did this, knowing that she was one of the few people on the planet who actually “drove” a spacecraft, even if from the safety of her chair and office. She actually had a set of astronaut pilot wings that her late husband had made for her. They were pinned to the front of a baseball cap, the one her husband had always worn when he went fishing. The cap rested on top of her computer monitor.

Conners spent the intervening minutes double-checking all systems. As the KH12 swooped across Cambodia, infrared cameras took a series of pictures with other imagers recording their own spectral data. The satellite's telescope had an electro-optical resolution of less than three inches but they wouldn't even come close to needing that on this shot.

Conners quickly typed in new commands, getting a new screen. She looked at the map of the target area. With the regular spectrum camera she knew that great resolution wouldn't help much with the triple canopy jungle. The best effect would come from the infrared and thermal imaging. Of course, she didn’t know the objective of the search.

She believed that knowing what she was looking for would greatly increase her efficiency. She was the expert on the KH-12 and the other satellite systems the NSA controlled and she knew that she was the best-qualified to judge how the systems should be used. But she usually had no need to know, therefore she didn’t. One of her favorite pastimes was looking over the imagery requested and trying to figure out exactly what the requester was looking for.

Conners downloaded the data the KH-12 transmitted to her, making a copy for NSA's computer bank--every piece of downloaded data ever picked up by a satellite was somewhere in the NSA system--and bounced a copy to the designated MILSTARS address for Foreman indicated in the original tasking.

Out of curiosity Conners pulled up the downloaded data and ran it through her computer to the printer. She wasn't supposed to do that, since she certainly didn't have a “need to know” but Conners thought it was a stupid regulation. She was a human being after all, not part of some machine with no curiosity. Besides, she rationalized, the more she knew, the better she could do her job.

She made a cup of tea while the machine gently hummed, spewing out three pages. Taking a sip, she looked at the first one. Her initial impression was that the printer must be broken. It was a thermal image and the center of the shot was a fuzzy, white haze in the shape of a triangle.

“What the heck?” Conners muttered as she fanned through the optic and infrared shots. All showed the same triangle in north-central Cambodia.

“But that can't be,” Conners spoke the words aloud. There were no atmospheric conditions, which could block all three types of imaging.

She quickly sat down at her desk and checked the printer, running a test. It was working fine. She bit the inside of her lip. The next possible problem was the computer on board the KH-12. She checked--the satellite was now heading south toward Malaysia. She gave the commands for the imagers to take some shots. As the data appeared on her screen, there was no triangular blur on it. She sent it to the printer. The paper showed clear images.

Conners sat back at her desk and looked at the three images Foreman had requested. There was no type of man-made interference that could do that as far as she knew. Conners stared at the three pictures once more. But something had.

CHAPTER TWO

The golden retriever watched the frisbee fly just over her head, then followed it, waiting until it landed before reluctantly retrieving the disk via a very slow walk.

“Lazy dog,” Dane laughed. “I remember when you used to jump for it.”

The dog gave him a look, its golden eyes and white snout telling him that she was too old for such youthful maneuvers, but her wagging tail indicated she did enjoy the sport.

The two were standing on a grassy lawn, which had been disfigured by the treads of heavy equipment. To the right, smoke still wafted from the ruins of the factory complex. Firetrucks, bulldozers, backhoes and cranes all crowded around the rubble. There was an air of desperation in the air and the sound of jackhammers punctuated the steady rumble of the other heavy gear as they tore at the twisted steel and shattered concrete. It was morning and Dane was glad to see the sun after working most of the night under the blaze of the large Klieg lights that had been hastily rigged around the area.

Dane knelt and took the dog's head in his callused hands, rubbing her behind the ears. “Good dog, Chelsea, good dog.” He wearily sat down next to her and they both looked at the destroyed factory with sad eyes. Chelsea leaned her head against his shoulder.

“How can you do that?” A woman's high-pitched voice shrieked to his left. The owner of the voice came into view, a woman in her fifties, her eyes red from crying. She was hastily dressed and her hair was in disarray. “My husband’s trapped in there and you're out here playing with your dog! Have you no decency?”

Dane slowly stood. He spoke slowly, as if he'd said it before but was repeating it with respect for the woman's grief and anger. “Ma'am, Chelsea,” he patted the golden retriever on the head, “has been working all night long. You might not believe it, but she gets very depressed doing this. I have to keep her spirits up so that she can keep searching.

“Right now the fire department is clearing out another section for us to get into and search. I'm sorry about your husband and I hope we'll find him alive in there, but there's nothing I can do right now except keep Chelsea ready to go.”

The woman had been staring at him, hearing the words but not really registering it. Dane had seen and heard it before. In New York City, right after 9-11, with Chelsea just a puppy, he'd had a grief-stricken FBI man from the local office threaten him with a gun to get back in the building and look for his colleagues after catching Dane and Chelsea playing. That had been the worst ever, with so few survivors and so many dead. Dane had refused any more calls for eight months afterward.