Page 73 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

“Harry! Wake up!”

“Sure. Yeah,” he mumbled from where he had sacked out on the cot they kept in their office. Neither of them had left their stations for the three days since the crash of Air Force One, no longer than was sufficient to grab a shower in the CIA gym locker room.

Heidi knew Harry was nowhere near awake. “Sorry guys.” She began plucking tiny rubber dinosaurs from her station and tossing them at him. Tyrannosaur to the chest, raptor to the ribs—the Stegosaur barely longer than her thumb caught his nose. That woke him up for real.

“What?”

“Someone’s booting up SAM 28000.” Unsure of quite what the signal would be, they’d hacked their way into a lot of the US Air Force 89th Airlift Wing’s systems. At least it gave them something to do. Everything else they’d done had led a grand total of nowhere.

At the moment, the maintenance log was open and a new entry stated the date, time, and: Routine power-up test.

In her prowling about, she’d stumbled on a backup copy of the plane’s software.

For lack of anything else to do, they’d been poking through it, with a complete lack of insights.

She’d had no idea it took so much code to make an airplane fly, even ignoring all the complexities of its service as Air Force One.

With the plane coming online, maybe they could grab the code loaded there and compare it to the backup.

Asking the USAF to power up the plane for them would have tipped their hand if someone knew something of what had happened.

The CIA’s poking around in USAF’s world also would have pissed them off but good, which had been attractive in its own right.

Heidi liked that last thought. It felt like some of her hacker mentality was coming back online.

They grabbed a full copy of the plane’s live code stack. The big problem now? It was all in flying-ese, not a language either of them spoke.

But she knew who did.