After Colt’s jet slowed on the runway, he had just enough speed to round the corner at the end and coast onto the taxiway before coming to a complete stop. He set the parking brake, safed up his ejection seat, and opened the canopy to breathe in the fresh, salty ocean air and enjoy the first moment in over twenty-four hours when somebody or something wasn’t trying to kill him.
“Hey, flyboy,” a voice called to him from the darkness. “You okay up there?”
He whipped his head to the right toward the barren ground just beyond the paved taxiway but saw nothing other than grass and low bushes between him and the black ocean crashing against the rocky shore. “Who’s that?”
A light blinked on then off, and Colt homed in on the unmoving shadow that seemed to be its source.
“You need some help getting down?”
“I can manage,” he called out, feeling silly for answering a phantom.
Colt removed his helmet and set it on the forward glare shield before lowering the boarding ladder and unstrapping from the ejection seat. With trembling arms, he pulled himself out of the seat and lifted a leg over the side, fishing for the top step with the toe of his boot.
“Damn, son. You just gonna park that there?”
He cursed under his breath while trying to ignore the unseen heckler and focused on descending from one peg to the next before finding solid ground. He stood at the bottom of the boarding ladder and began peeling off the flight gear, letting it fall to the ground in a heap at his feet.
“Seriously,” the voice said, much closer this time. “You look nothing like any flyboy I’ve ever seen before.”
Colt turned to the nose of the plane just as a bush rose from the ground and took a step toward him. He took an involuntary step backward before recognizing the faint outline of a man draped in a specially made camouflage ghillie suit. “What the hell?”
The man reached up with one hand and pulled the hood from his head, letting it flop down onto his back. Even in the darkness, he could tell the man had his face painted and had gone to considerable length to keep from being seen. He stepped up onto the taxiway and crossed the short distance to where Colt stood with his mouth agape. “Senior Chief Dave White,” the man said, holding out his hand. “What the hell you doing on my island?”
The next morning, Colt opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling of the storage shed. It took him a moment to remember where he was, and with the memory his heart started to race, pretty much eliminating any chance he had of falling back to sleep on the canvas cot underneath a well-used poncho liner.
He hadn’t thought he was going to be able to sleep after the SEAL led him to where Jug had shut down his jet on the transient aircraft ramp and then set them both up with a place to crash while he called back to the beach to figure out what to do with them. The accommodations reminded him more of Boy Scout camp than anything else he had ever experienced in the Navy, but after what he’d been through, he was thankful for the respite.
After a brief awkwardness between the pilots, probably owing to the fact Colt had tried shooting Jug down, they settled into a mutually agreed-upon silence and tossed and turned on their cots until sleep finally claimed them. For Colt, it was a matter of minutes.
“You awake?”
He turned his head and saw Jug sitting on the edge of his cot. His poncho liner was folded neatly underneath his pillow, and it looked like the test pilot hadn’t slept a wink.
“You sleep at all?” Colt asked.
Jug shook his head. “Not much. No way I could sleep after what just happened.”
Colt pushed himself up onto his elbows and appraised the other pilot. “Look… Jug, I didn’t…”
He waved the comment away. “I’m not talking about that. Hell, I would have done the same thing had I been in your shoes.”
Colt swung his feet out from under the poncho liner and was surprised to see he was still wearing his black leather Red Wing flight boots. He must have been more overcome by exhaustion than he thought. He sat on the edge of the cot and faced his friend. “What’s eating at you?”
“This thing isn’t over,” he said. “We still don’t know how they managed it.”
Colt shook his head. “Punky found the source of the waveform up at Cal Poly, and—”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Then Colt understood. Somebody in the Navy had fed the enemy the information they needed to make such a feat possible. And just because they had foiled the attempt to sink an American aircraft carrier with a hijacked Joint Strike Fighter didn’t mean they were out of the woods. They still needed to find out who had turned on the Stars and Stripes and sold out their country.
Colt leaned forward and placed a hand on Jug’s knee. “You and I did our part,” he said. “We stopped the attack from happening. I know Punky is looking into who gave up the classified information, and I’m sure after last night there will be plenty of admirals willing to turn up the heat. But we did our job.”
