Chapter 13 - THE SHADOW AT SEATTLE DISPATCH
At twenty-eight thousand feet, Flight 204 broke through the lower cloud deck into the moonlit valley between the Canadian mountain ranges.
The aircraft was level, but they were flying blind.
No digital screens. No GPS map. No automated throttle management. Only the small three-inch emergency magnetic compass and the analog standby airspeed indicator glowing on the center panel.
"Airspeed stabilizing at two hundred and eighty knots," Michael breathed, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. "Engines are responding manually to throttle inputs. Daniel... we’re flying on pure cable and muscle."
"Check on the passengers," Daniel instructed.
Michael keyed the intercom. "Rachel, report."
"Everyone is secured," Rachel’s voice returned, breathless but steady. "A few bruised knees and some spilled drinks, but zero serious injuries. Daniel... the satellite Wi-Fi just came back online through the secondary passenger network. Marcus sent an urgent message to my terminal from ground operations."
"Put him on speaker," Daniel said.
A second later, Marcus’s voice crackled through the cabin phone patch.
“Daniel! Do you copy? This is Marcus at Seattle Regional Dispatch!”
"I copy you, Marcus," Daniel replied. "We suffered an avionics shutdown. We’ve reverted to direct manual control. We’re currently thirty miles north of Jasper, tracking south toward the border."
“Daniel, listen to me carefully,” Marcus’s voice was laced with pure adrenaline. “It wasn't an automated glitch. Federal agents just raided the secondary server farm of Apex Aerodynamics in Bellevue. They arrested Victor Vance—Vale’s former chief software architect.”
Daniel’s grip on the yoke tightened. "Vance."
“Vance had a live terminal hooked into the Vancouver air traffic control repeater,” Marcus explained rapidly. “He was trying to crash Flight 204 to discredit the Sarah Carter Safety Bill before the Senate committee votes on mandatory adoption tomorrow morning. When Emily pulled the breakers, you broke his remote connection.”
"Is he in custody?" Daniel demanded.
“The FBI has him on the floor in zip-ties,” Marcus confirmed. “But Daniel... Vance triggered an encrypted memory wipe on Vancouver Center’s radar feed before they tackled him. The entire Pacific Northwest airspace sector is currently experiencing a regional radar blackout. You have seven commercial flights in the holding pattern above Seattle-Tacoma International, and nobody has visual approach clearance in the fog.”
Daniel looked at Michael.
The weather at Sea-Tac had dropped to minimums: thick ground fog, zero visibility, ceiling two hundred feet.
Without primary digital flight instruments or automated instrument landing systems (ILS), attempting to land a 787 on manual backup gauges in zero visibility was nearly impossible.
"What about Vancouver?" Michael asked.
"Fogged in," Marcus answered. "Calgary is closed due to a blizzard. Sea-Tac is your only runway with emergency foam trucks standing by."
Emily leaned forward between the pilot seats, placing Sarah’s open notebook on the pedestal.
"Dad," Emily pointed to a hand-drawn chart at the back of the book. "Mom mapped the radio beacon frequencies for Runway 16R at Sea-Tac during the 2013 retrofits. She installed a dedicated, hardwired VHF navigation receiver that bypasses the digital flight computers entirely."
Daniel looked down at the frequencies Sarah had written in her unmistakable, neat cursive:
109.9 MHz — RUNWAY 16R LOCALIZER — THE STRAIGHT PATH HOME.
"Michael," Daniel said, his eyes locking onto the analog radio selector on the lower console. "Tune VHF Nav-One to one-zero-nine point nine."
Michael turned the knurled knob. Click. Click. Click.
The tiny needle on the standby course indicator flickered.
It swayed to the left, hovered, and then locked straight down the center.
Sarah’s analog receiver had caught the beam through thirty miles of fog.
"We have the localizer," Michael said, a smile breaking through the exhaustion on his face.
Daniel looked back at his daughter. Emily’s hazel eyes were bright with tears, but her chin was held high, steady and fearless.
May you like
"Seatbelt on, astrophysicist," Daniel told her softly. "Your mother just handed us the runway."
***
