Chapter 4 - BEYOND THE ARMORED DOOR
The journey down the aisle felt like walking through a dream under heavy gravity. Two hundred and eighty-nine pairs of eyes tracked Mara as she followed Odette toward the front of the aircraft. Passengers reached out, clutching their seats, their faces pale, watching the woman in the white shirt walk with a strange, unnatural purpose toward the locked door at the end of the aisle.
Odette tapped a rapid security code into the keypad beside the reinforced cockpit door. A sharp electronic beep chimed, followed by the heavy clunk of magnetic deadbolts disengaging.
Odette pushed the door open, step-aside, and Mara stepped through into the cockpit.
The atmosphere inside the flight deck was suffocatingly hot and thick with the smell of scorched insulation and sweat.
The two pilots were both in their late forties. The Captain, a burly man with silvering hair named Miller, was wrestling with the yoke, his forearms bulging against his short-sleeved white uniform shirt. The First Officer, a younger man whose face was slick with perspiration, was rapidly flipping switches on the overhead panel while staring frantically at a flashing red master caution light.
"We have a primary flight control computer failure!" First Officer yelled without turning around. "Elevator response is down to twelve percent! The trim system isn't responding!"
"I told you, hit the backup flight control logic switch!" Captain Miller bellowed, his voice raw.
"I did! It's locked out! The system thinks we're at a thirty-degree angle of attack!"
"Who the hell is this?" Miller growled, chattering his teeth as the plane shuddered again, glancing back for a split second to see Mara standing in the narrow doorway.
"Captain Mara Dalton," Mara said, her voice dropping into a low, calm, resonant register that cut through the cacophony of warning chimes. She didn't ask permission. She stepped into the narrow space between their seats and leaned over the center console. "Step back from the primary display. Let me see the telemetry."
"You can't just—" First Officer began.
"Shut up and let her look!" Odette snapped from the doorway, her voice ringing with an authority that shocked both pilots into silence.
Mara ignored them both. Her eyes raced across the electronic flight instrument system (EFIS). Her military training kicked in with terrifying speed, filtering out eighty percent of the noise and focusing entirely on the critical data vectors.
Altitude: 33,200 feet, dropping at 800 feet per minute.
Airspeed: 240 knots, dangerously close to stall speed for a loaded 787.
Hydraulics: Systems A and B showing normal pressure. System C was fluctuating wildly between zero and 3,000 PSI.
"It's not a computer failure," Mara said instantly.
Captain Miller blinked at her, his hands still gripping the vibrating yoke. "What?"
"Look at your air data reference units," Mara pointed a slender, steady finger at a small sub-panel on the left display. "Your primary pitot-static sensors are icing over, giving the flight control computer corrupt airspeed data. The computer thinks you're overspeeding, so it's automatically commanding the tail elevators to pitch the nose up to slow you down."
"So we're pitching up?" First Officer asked.
"No," Mara said coldly. "The computer thinks it's pitching you up, but because you're fighting it manually, you're overriding the physical surfaces. You're flying the airframe into an aerodynamic stall. In about two minutes, the computer is going to execute an automated stall-recovery maneuver that will roll this plane sixty degrees to the right and dump the nose straight into the Atlantic."
The two pilots froze.
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"How do you know that?" Miller gasped.
"Because the same automated control logic was installed on the F-16 Block 50 software update six years ago," Mara said, leaning over Miller's shoulder and grabbing the overhead panel selector dial. "And because I watched a jet do it in front of my own eyes."
