“How long have we got?” Dodge asked calmly.
Jaggard didn’t answer but pressed keys on his phone. “Put me through to LAX Control. I want the controller of that Southwest plane.”
While he waited for the connection he called out, “Leave the intruders, Socks, you’re on the door codes. Find out what they did and undo it, or just find some way to open them.”
“On it,” Socks said.
“Dodge, you too, leave the intruders alone. Nothing we can do about them anyway. Get over to LAX and try and shut down the UAS system.”
“Can’t do that, guv,” Dodge said. “I’m all over this guy at the moment. He’s having to recode constantly to keep away from me. I take the pressure off and he’ll wipe our arses.”
“If you don’t get over to LAX, you’re going to get your ass wiped by a 787,” Jaggard said. He listened to his phone for a second then pressed a key. A voice came from the overhead speakers.
“This is Victoria Dean. Who am I talking to?”
“Victoria, this is John Jaggard at Homeland Security in San Jose. We believe we may be the target of your rogue 787.”
There was a short silence and Sam thought he heard “Damn,” faintly at the other end.
“Victoria, how long have we got before the plane gets here?”
Her voice came back with urgency. “You better get out of there now, sir, because he’s real close.”
“How close?”
“You in the centre of town?”
“We’re near the airport.”
“Then I give you less than five minutes, no more. You better be leaving, sir.”
“We wish we could,” Jaggard said under his breath, then more loudly. “Victoria, do you know where in the building the UAS computers are located?”
“I believe so, yes, sir.”
“Victoria, I want you to get there now and shut them down. Pull out power cables if you have to, smash them up, I don’t care. Just take that system offline any way you can. If you can shut down the UAS, the plane will return control to the pilot.”
There was a muffled conversation at the other end of the phone then her voice came through clearly. “I’m heading there now, sir.”
Taylor ran along next to her, out of breath after just a few steps. Somewhere along the way he had discarded his suit jacket and his tie was loosened into a loop, like a hangman’s knot, Victoria thought.
Her phone was in her pocket, on speakerphone, and she could hear Jaggard issuing terse orders from its tinny speaker.
UAS was a small, unmanned office next to the central computer room. It was down one floor at the end of a long, dimly lit corridor. Human beings seldom came here except for repair and maintenance work. The corridor seemed endless although it couldn’t have been more than sixty yards.
She beat Taylor to the door, but he was right behind her, despite his laboured breathing. She slammed her security card into the slot by the door and jerked on the handle, but it did not open. The light stayed red.
“Try mine,” Taylor said, handing her his supervisor’s card. Victoria snapped a glance at her watch. Maybe three minutes left, if they were lucky. She slid Taylor’s card into the slot.
The light remained a steady constant red.
“They must have been expecting us,” Dodge said. “They’ve locked down our access.”
“Can you get in?” Jaggard asked.
“I think so,” Dodge said. “It’s a Linux system. I’m going to crash the shell with a buffer overflow and get in via the rhosts file.”
“Do you have time for that?” Jaggard asked.
“No choice. Sam, you gotta keep this bug off my tail for a bit longer, mate.”
“Doing my best,” Sam said.
“Move aside.” It was Vienna’s voice. She moved next to Sam, nudging him with her body, reaching out for his keyboard.
Sam blasted a wide swathe through a pile of crawling fungus on the doorstep of Dodge’s workstation.
“I’m a little busy right now,” he said, lining up his next shot.
“Get out of the way, Sam.” To Jaggard she said, “Dodge is our only hope. If they get him, we are all dead. Dead as in cemetery, not as in reboot your system. Sam hasn’t got the experience.”
“Sam is the only thing keeping me alive,” Dodge said. “You stay right there, mate.”
“Vienna’s right,” Jaggard said. “Sam’s only been on the job for a couple of months. I don’t care what kind of hot shot he is. Move aside, Sam, and that is an order.”
“Sam stays.” A thin, wiry voice came from behind Jaggard and, without even looking, Sam knew whom it belonged to.
Swamp Witch.
She continued, “He’s our best hope right now; the intruders are too fast.”
“I’m in,” Dodge said, and a moment later. “Oh, oh!”
“What is it?” Jaggard asked.
“UAS has its own firewall, inside the system. It’s heavily protected and they’ve locked us out of that too.”
“Can you break it?” Jaggard asked. There was a note in his voice that hadn’t been there before, Sam thought. It sounded a lot like despair.
“I don’t think we have the time,” Dodge said.
Next to him, Vienna glanced upwards and Sam couldn’t help but follow her gaze. Through the large, rounded, tinted windows of the control centre, high in the sky he could see an airplane.
“Smash it!” Victoria cried as Taylor pounded on the doorframe with the butt of a large fire-extinguisher. It left red paint on the door, but otherwise made little impression.
“Give it to me,” she said, and didn’t wait for him to agree, snatching the heavy fire-extinguisher away from him.
She moved to the right and ignored the lock, pounding instead on the hinge side of the door with huge crashing blows, holding the extinguisher high above her head. Each blow sent shock waves through her arms, juddering into her spine, but she kept at it.
Suddenly, there was a crack and the top of the door gave way slightly.
“God, I hope we’re not too late,” she cried and switched to the bottom hinge.
The intruder was everywhere now, crawling in and out of the systems like a creeping black vine. It was all Sam could do to keep Dodge and himself alive. The shape of the airplane was clearly distinguishable in the sky by the eastern tower of the Adobe buildings.
“Give me half an hour and I could bust this wide open,” Dodge said, his eyes focused on his screen.
He hasn’t seen the plane yet, Sam thought.
“We don’t have half an hour,” Jaggard said evenly.
“I know,” Dodge said.
“DOS attack!” Sam said. “Hit ’em with a DOS attack.”
Denial of Service was a common attack used by vandal hackers, saturating the target server with so many simultaneous connections and requests that it would slow to a crawl.
“That won’t get us in.” Vienna’s voice was loud and unsteady.
“What’s your thinking?” Jaggard asked, but Sam could see that Dodge had already worked it out, and was scurrying to set it up.
“Just do it,” Sam said.
“Kid’s a genius,” Dodge said. “DOS attack will clog up the routers, slow down the transmission signal. If we slow it down enough, it should have the same effect as shutting down the servers.”
Sam ripped a jagged hole in the code of one of the branches of the intruder, but it grew back even as he did it.
“Come on, come on,” Dodge muttered, stabbing at the keyboard.
“Too late,” Vienna yelled.
Sam looked up. The nose of the plane seemed to fill the window.
He braced himself for the impact, knowing it would do no good.
The hinge gave way with a final shudder and Victoria kicked the door to one side, dropping the fire-extinguisher and barging into the UAS room.
A long row of metal server racks stared at her, each one alive with flashing lights, blinking and winking behind the fine metal grille of the doors.
The power cables came in through the top, she realised, and traced them back quickly with her eyes to where they disappeared into the top of a large, wall-mounted UPS system.
The mains switch on the UPS was locked in the on position with a heavy brass padlock.
“You got a key?” Victoria demanded.
Taylor shook his head.
“Then get out of the way, and pass me that goddamn fire-extinguisher.”
The tinny voices from the phone in her pocket abruptly vanished, replaced by a roaring static.
“Jaggard?” she asked, as Taylor passed her the fire-extinguisher. There was no sound but the static.
She pounded desperately on the padlock with the heavy red cylinder. The shiny metal loop buckled, but held.
“Jaggard? Are you there?” she yelled. “Jaggard?”