Chapter 3 - Voices from the Past
"Lajes Approach, this is Commercial Flight 409, declaring an absolute emergency!" Miller shouted into his headset, his voice shaking. "We have suffered a total primary flight control failure and a medical incapacitation of our First Officer. Requesting immediate vectors for visual emergency landing!"
The radio crackled with static, cutting through the tense silence of the cockpit. For a long, agonizing moment, only white noise answered them. Then a crisp, deep masculine voice broke through the speaker, carrying an uncanny, haunting authority that made the hairs on the back of Caroline’s arms stand straight up.
“Flight 409, this is Lajes Base Command. We have your telemetry on secondary radar. You’re coming in hot and heavy. Who is currently at the controls of that aircraft?”
Miller glanced sideways at Caroline, unsure of what to say.
Caroline reached out, plucked the boom microphone from Miller’s headset, and pulled it close to her lips. The microphone felt heavy, like a loaded weapon she had sworn never to touch again.
"Lajes Command, this is former Captain Caroline Vance, call sign Valkyrie-Six. Taking manual control of Flight 409 under emergency federal aviation provisions."
A sharp intake of breath echoed through the radio receiver. The radio channel went dead silent for three full seconds—a silence so profound it felt as though the entire Atlantic Ocean had frozen over.
“Valkyrie... Six?” the voice on the other end responded, the professional cool cracking slightly, revealing a tremor of pure, unadulterated shock. “My God. We thought you vanished off the face of the earth after the Nevada incident. Is that really you?”
Caroline gripped the yoke tighter, her knuckles turning white. The voice on the radio belonged to Colonel Thomas Hayes, a man who had commanded the black-ops testing wing where Marcus had lost his life.
"It's me, Tom," Caroline said, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp register. "Save the reunion for the debriefing. We have three hundred souls on board and a corrupted flight control computer that’s trying to drive us into the sea. I need local weather updates and immediate clearance to punch through this storm front manually."
“Negative, Flight 409,” Hayes’s voice came back, urgent and strained. “You don't understand. The software failure you're experiencing isn't an accident. Project Vanguard systems were integrated into the civilian retrofit upgrade of that specific Boeing chassis last month. Someone attempted a remote diagnostic override from a mainland server uplink twenty minutes ago. They locked out your manual backups.”
Caroline’s blood ran ice-cold. Someone was hacking the plane from the ground?
"Who?" she demanded. "Who has access to the Vanguard backdoor protocol?"
“That’s classified, Caroline,” Hayes replied grimly. “A defense contractor named Sterling-Vance Corp has been running unauthorized stress tests on civilian hulls using military-grade remote uplink feeds. But more importantly... you can't land that plane on standard instruments. The firmware patch they uploaded has disabled your glide-slope indicator. You're going to have to land completely blind by manual dead reckoning.”
"Then talk me down, Tom," Caroline ordered, her voice brooking zero argument. "Give me the vector headings, set the emergency runway lights to maximum intensity, and clear the tarmac. I'm bringing her down."
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Miller stared at her in utter disbelief, sweat dripping off his chin. "Land blind? In a crosswind like this? We'll overshoot the runway and plow straight into the Atlantic cliffs!"
"Not if I flare at precisely two hundred feet," Caroline said coldly. "Watch my airspeed, Miller. If I tell you to dump flaps, you dump flaps. No hesitation."
