Chapter 5
The polar night was a sight to behold. The world looked cold.
Countless stars jeweled the black sky above.
Below was nothing but a darkened void. There were no cities for hundreds of miles, and even if there had been, tonight a dense layer of clouds was obscuring the ground.
The isolation was absolute. Like no other place on earth.
“Not directly over the Pole,” he said, “but you can see it from here.”
Captain Bill Fowler looked out the side window.
Somewhere in the darkness, roughly ninety miles away, lay the geographic point where Robert Peary had planted the American flag over a hundred years earlier.
The place where curving lines of longitude met on every map.
There was nothing to mark the spot on a permanent basis, no flag or marker, because there was no land upon which to place anything.
The North Pole was simply a concept, a geographic curiosity beneath a continuously drifting sheet of ice.
“It’s down there somewhere,” Fowler agreed. He tinkered with the radar display. “This storm looks wicked.”
“Yeah, glad we’re above it.”
An Arctic low-pressure system was churning up a maelstrom, but they were flying high enough to top out the cloud cover and turbulence. The ride at 34,000 feet was smooth. Better yet, an 80-knot tailwind was giving Hemisphere Flight 777 a solid push to New York.
Long-haul flying over the Arctic and across open ocean was a serious departure from Sharpe’s last job—flying F-22 Raptors in the Air Force. Traveling at supersonic speed, turning and burning… there was no other flying like that in the world. It was the best job he’d ever had.
At least it had been until he’d been given a “career broadening” staff assignment.
It was a misstep the Air Force had been making for years, pulling seasoned pilots at the top of their game out of the cockpit and forcing them into administrative posts.
Like so many of his brethren, Sharpe hadn’t been interested.
He’d made the jump to the civilian world, trading “major” for “first officer.”
All told, he’d been with Hemisphere for two years now and was enjoying himself. So far, he had no regrets.
A chime sounded as the jet’s satellite datalink downloaded a message. Sharpe called it up but saw a blank text field.
“Huh. Never seen that before.”
Fowler glanced at the empty screen. “Me neither, but the sat coverage up here can be spotty. If it’s something important, they’ll resend it.”
Sharpe closed the empty message. “I could use a cup of coffee. You want one?”
The skipper thought it was a terrific idea.
He rang the flight attendant call button.
UNKNOWN TO THE crew, the message wasn’t for them. Deep within the jet’s labyrinthine network, a digital back door had been cracked open, and a sleeper agent planted years ago, designed by Dr. Chen’s capable protégé, stirred from its slumber.
From thousands of miles away, an unseen hand guided the malware’s path. The Thirteenth Bureau, the tech-savvy arm of China’s MSS, had made its move. In the face of a potential national catastrophe, they had unleashed their ultimate fail-safe.
The silent attack began in the plane’s communication system. The message that went unseen by the crew was rerouted, and a spurious signal whispered into the jet’s vitals. Four temperature sensors, two placed in the heart of each engine, registered a sudden, impossible spike.
This false data triggered a chain reaction.
The digital engine controls, designed for absolute safety, interpreted the phantom heat as a dire threat.
Fuel lines clamped shut, and the engines, performing exactly as they had been programmed, began to shut down.
Within seconds, warnings were cascading to the flight deck.
Sharpe gaped at the instrument panel, a sea of flashing red and amber lights, and exclaimed, “Engine failure! Both engines!”