Page 74 of Air Force One
He nodded because he couldn’t speak without whatever pain was choking him blasting out.
“With our kind of training, hers and mine, if she says she’s dug in safe, it means just that and no more. She delivered her man, assessed the weather, the state of her comm gear, and chose to shelter in place. Was even in good enough shape to remember that little radio I gave her. She’ll also know that the Russian presence on Mount Elbrus is going to heat up high for the next little bit. You won’t hear from her until she decides it’s safe to emerge. Waiting sucks, but at least you’re warm, fed, and know she’s alive.”
Over the next four days of silence, that gave Mike exactly seven and a half seconds of comfort.
71
“Harry! Wake up!”
“Sure. Yeah,” he mumbled from where he had sacked out on the cot they kept in their office. Neither of them had left their stations for the three days since the crash of Air Force One, no longer than was sufficient to grab a shower in the CIA gym locker room.
Heidi knew Harry was nowhere near awake. “Sorry guys.” She began plucking tiny rubber dinosaurs from her station and tossing them at him. Tyrannosaur to the chest, raptor to the ribs—the Stegosaur barely longer than her thumb caught his nose. That woke him up for real.
“What?”
“Someone’s booting up SAM 28000.” Unsure of quite what the signal would be, they’d hacked their way into a lot of the US Air Force 89th Airlift Wing’s systems. At least it gave them something to do. Everything else they’d done had led a grand total of nowhere.
At the moment, the maintenance log was open and a new entry stated the date, time, and: Routine power-up test.
In her prowling about, she’d stumbled on a backup copy of the plane’s software. For lack of anything else to do, they’d been poking through it, with a complete lack of insights. She’d had no idea it took so much code to make an airplane fly, even ignoring all the complexities of its service as Air Force One.
With the plane coming online, maybe they could grab the code loaded there and compare it to the backup. Asking the USAF to power up the plane for them would have tipped their hand if someone knew something of what had happened. The CIA’s poking around in USAF’s world also would have pissed them off but good, which had been attractive in its own right.
Heidi liked that last thought. It felt like some of her hacker mentality was coming back online.
They grabbed a full copy of the plane’s live code stack. The big problem now? It was all in flying-ese, not a language either of them spoke.
But she knew who did.
72
Jeremy barely had time to show his ID at the CIA’s front desk before Harry whisked him down into the basement and dropped him in front of a computer.
Harry and Heidi pulled up chairs to either side of him. Harry began explaining before he finished sitting down.
“We found two major code discrepancies between Air Force One’s master backup we scammed and SAM 28000 when they booted up the plane. We tried reading it, but it just doesn’t make much sense.”
The first one was a block of barely smart AI code. It took him longer than it should have to figure out what it was doing because he hadn’t expected it to be doing something so simple. He could have coded that in a hundredth the space. Someone had taken a very polite piece of voice recognition software that could easily handle a vast knowledge base and formulate intelligent responses to a wide range of questions—and forced it to perform one small task.
The second piece of code was much shorter. And once he’d read it, it was dead obvious what it did.
“Uh, what was the date of the backup?”
“Why? What does this thing do? November 11th.”
Jeremy felt that was important. But he didn’t see quite how it fit in.
73
“We really have to stop meeting like this.”
“Yes, Madam President.” Elizabeth and the others had risen as Sarah stepped into the Situation Room.
“Then how should we be meeting?” Trust Miranda to ask one of her questions, killing Sarah’s light greeting. Three others and a dog were in the room. Andi leaned over to whisper that it was a joke and Miranda made a soft Oh in reply; Sarah appreciated the buffer.
“Clarissa, to what do we owe the honor of a visit from the D/CIA?”
Uncharacteristically, Clarissa stayed silent and merely indicated the room’s other occupant. She was a lovely woman, older than any of them, but not by much. Her dark hair looked elegant and her clothes were very high end.
