Chasing the White Lion by James Hannibal (best free e book reader .TXT) 📗

and life experience had taught her the aircraft would take a while to lose residual cabin pressure. The masks were a precaution. Mac should get them down to breathable air before they became necessary.

He was sure taking his time, though.

She released her death grip on the armrest long enough to signal Finn. “Why isn’t Mac diving for better air?”

“The engines. They won’t start at high altitude, but they won’t start at supersonic speed either. We’re in a catch-22. Mac’s gotta slow below Mach 1 while tobogganing downhill.” The Aussie left his seat and plopped down next to Eddie. “What did you do?”

Eddie answered with a series of unintelligible mumbles behind the mask.

Finn pulled it away from his face and let it snap back into place. “Take that off. You look like a nerdy duck.”

The geek pulled the cup down to his neck and shrugged. “I opened a message. It shouldn’t have killed the engines or sent sparks flying from the ceiling.” At the word sparks, he glanced at Darcy.

She shook her head. “It was not me this time. I left all my toys in the cargo hold.”

Through the open flight deck door, Talia watched Mac fight the controls while Tyler jammed a finger into a button on the overhead panel. She heard a thump and a long whine. Lights flickered on. Fog poured from the vents. “Was that an engine?”

“Negative.” Finn said. “We’re still too high to crank the motors. That was the auxiliary power unit. We have air and electricity, but no thrust.”

“So, we can see and breathe . . .”

“But we’re still falling to our deaths.”

As if to emphasize Finn’s point, the nose pitched over, steepening the dive. One by one, lights and systems came back on.

The restored power also brought Boyd’s message back to life. A distorted laugh echoed through the cabin. The blue eyes Talia had seen before—a close-up of the eyes of a white lion—filled every display surface. “The law of the Jungle,” the voice repeated after every laugh. “Kill or be killed.”

Tyler scowled back at them through the open flight deck door. “Shut that racket down!”

“Working on it!” Eddie’s fingers flew across the tablet. “I’m isolating the message source. Cutting off the data flow. That should disable the virus . . . I hope.”

From behind the laughing came another thump and another whine, bigger and louder this time. “Engine one is up,” Tyler yelled at Mac. “Pull out of the dive.”

“Can’t.” There was strain behind the Scotsman’s voice. “Now that the laughing is back, my controls are locked.”

Talia’s gaze fell on the windscreen. Clouds rushed up at them, and beyond she saw a hint of dark blue. The sea. She cringed and looked to Eddie. “How can a message take down an aircraft?”

Another thump. Another whine. Engine two was up, but the dive continued.

The lion’s image dominated the cabin. “The law of the Jungle. Kill or be killed.”

Tyler fought the controls with Mac. “Anytime now, Eddie!”

“Got it!”

The lion disappeared. The laughing stopped.

“Controls are live,” Mac said.

Tyler threw a lever forward and the third engine spooled to life. “Full power is available. We’re at the edge of the Mach. Watch the pull or we’ll rip her in half.”

Blue water glinted with the morning sun, growing in the windscreen as the nose began to track. Talia held her breath. She could swear she saw a wave crest above the horizon before Mac and Tyler had them climbing again. The whole group let out a collective sigh.

“When we catch Boyd, I’m going to kill him.” The statement came from Val, a little behind Talia and across the aisle, red-faced and angry. She had not said a word through the whole ordeal. Her coffee mug hung limp from her fingers, with most of its contents staining her front. “This was my favorite sweater.”

TYLER BANNED EDDIE from any and all digital mischief until Mac had the AS2 safely on the ground.

“You do realize I’m the one who saved us, right?” Eddie asked in his own defense. “I stopped the virus, restoring control. Any monkey can pull back on a stick.”

The look he got shut him up until well after landing.

They parked in a hangar looking out over the tarmac, beach, and blue water. Mac, Darcy, and a couple of Greek mechanics pored over schematics to fix the AS2, while the rest of the team gathered around a monitor on a folding table.

Val placed a hand on the back of Eddie’s chair. “Can you play the full message without bringing the hangar down on top of us?”

“Funny. But I don’t think Boyd intended to crash our plane. This is a canned message, designed to be opened on a regular computer and demonstrate the sender’s power. The virus shuts the computer down in a pseudo-infinite loop to freak out the user without doing real harm.”

“It did plenty of harm to the AS2,” Tyler said.

“Because my tablet was hooked into the aircraft mainframe.” Eddie turned in his seat to face the boss. “Look, this thing is entirely text based, like nothing I’ve ever seen, completely integrated into the message title.”

“Is that how it got into my jet’s comm system?”

“Correct. There are several ground-based SATCOM repeaters, all tethered to the internet. When we pinged one, the message spotted the Dark Web address I created for the Macciano Sisters and jumped on board. Only one frame of the video made it through, but the text, the audio, and the embedded virus kept going.” He waited, perhaps for an attaboy at figuring the whole thing out, but he received none.

Tyler folded his arms. “You’re saying Boyd sent the equivalent of a heat-seeking missile straight through an airplane’s text-and-voice-only SATCOM receiver?”

“That’s one way to put it, and the possibility poses a serious threat to air traffic. But I think it was accidental. Neither the virus nor the AS2 knew what to do when they found each other.” The geek held up both hands like puppets. “Imagine two cats meeting unexpectedly in an alley. They both hissed, batted each