Chapter 19

19

Cabrillo killed the call, pulled his Benchmade knife and pried open one of the AK-47 crates. He kept checking the cockpit door to see if any armed crew members were charging out to check on him, but so far, so good.

He next opened up an ammo crate, peeled open one of the ammo cans, and loaded in ten rounds of 7.62x39 into the thirty-round banana mag. That was plenty. If he needed more than ten rounds to do the job, an extra twenty or even two hundred wouldn't get it done, either.

Juan dashed for the cockpit door. If anybody knew where this plane was going it was the pilots. He held his weapon low in case someone was watching on the CCTV or through the peephole in the door.

Ever since 9/11, commercial aircraft featured steel-reinforced, triple-locked bulletproof cockpit doors to prevent terrorists from hijacking flights. But after the Germanwings Flight 9525 pilot's suicide flight in 2015, extra precautions were taken so that authorized flight crew could access a locked cockpit door if necessary. One of those precautions was an emergency keypad used to open the door in case of pilot incapacitation.

Juan glanced at the emergency keypad. The only problem was that if the pilots were actually alert they could easily override the keypad bypass—not that Juan had any idea what that bypass code might be. If he could pry the pad away from the wall he could attach Murphy's virtual lock-picking device—if he had loaded one into his combat leg. Unfortunately, such was not the case.

He considered contacting the Oregon , but there was nothing they could do from their end. He could try a bunch of different combinations, but there was a nearly infinite number of possible permutations for the emergency bypass and getting that number wrong even once would lock the digital system down permanently.

He thought about shooting the door open for half of a nanosecond before deciding that the risk of accidentally killing the pilots was greater than the slim probability of successfully blasting open a bulletproof door.

The other option was rigging a grenade or two to the door and using Kevlar armor plates to keep the shrapnel from slicing into a vital system like the sensitive turbines and crashing the plane.

But the same problem of force presented itself. A blast strong enough to blow the door open would probably kill the pilots as well.

That really left only one possibility.

Cabrillo picked up the cabin phone. A moment later he heard a muffled ringing on the other side of the door. He waited for one of the pilots to pick up.

If he couldn't blast his way in, he might be able to sweet-talk his way through the door—a skill his late wife had blamed for his ability to charm his way into her reluctant heart so many years ago.

As a CIA NOC he had used his natural gift of gab to break into and get out of more sticky situations than he ever did with a gun. Juan possessed the heartfelt empathy of an FBI crisis negotiator and the sale-closing skill of a boiler room telemarketer.

And if all of that didn't work, he would thunder the kind of ominous threats that would cause a blood-sworn yakuza to rat out his own saintly grandmother. Cabrillo put together several talking scripts in his head as the phone continued to ring.

And ring.

And ring.

Clearly nobody was picking up. Why?

Cabrillo had one last ace up his sleeve. He fished out his Thuraya X5-Touch and pulled up one of Mark Murphy's newest apps. He activated the video camera and placed it against the fish-eye peephole in the door. Like every other peephole, the lens was designed to look outward, but its fish-eye distortion prevented anyone from looking inward. The screen on Juan's phone verified this optical reality. He couldn't see a darned thing. He rotated the lens gently against the peephole, imagining he was trying to look around the cockpit interior.

Satisfied he had enough imagery recorded, he tapped on the app's convert button and watched the progress bar race through to its completion. When it finished, it opened a new file called "Converted.mp4." Juan hit the play button. Thanks to algorithmic wizardry, Murph's software analyzed the patterns of light propagation and image formation caused by the lens distortions and made calculations to compensate for them in reverse. In short, Juan was now looking at an algorithm-generated fish-eye view into the cockpit so that he could see what was going on with the pilots.

The only problem was that there were no pilots.

In fact, there weren't any seats, either.

Or yokes, pedals, switches, gauges, mics, or toggles. The entire cockpit was as slick as a Bosch stainless steel refrigerator door—without the ice maker.

It was a completely automated cockpit.

Without any digital or analogue readouts, it was impossible to determine where the plane was headed.

Now what?