Unknown Rider полностью

“Look,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do for him. You heard it same as me.” She opened her mouth to argue, but he placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “If you really want to do right by him, then help me figure out what is going on so we can stop more people from dying.”

Her resolve seemed to harden as she considered his words. Finally, she said, “What do you think I’ve been doing? Rick was following a foreign intelligence operative code-named TANDY…” She trailed off, and her eyes glassed over.

“Is that who we heard on the phone?”

“I don’t know,” she said, struggling to fight back tears. “But who else could it be?”

Without realizing it, he reached up and felt for the thumb drive in his flight suit breast pocket. He wasn’t sure how KMART and TANDY fit into what had happened to him the night before, but finding out what was wrong with the F-35 was his priority. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I need to go to Point Mugu.”

He could tell she was losing her patience. She took a deep breath and looked around before speaking. “Okay, here’s the deal. And this is classified.”

He nodded.

“The NSA has been intercepting communications between our two subjects for several months. Last night, KMART sent a message to his handler stating the ‘target aircraft survived’ and that the ‘operation failed.’”

“What operation?”

The words aircraft carrier flashed in his mind.

“We don’t know,” she replied, glancing away to watch a twin-engine Cessna taxi to the runway. “But it gets worse. Last night, KMART told his handler that you had downloaded information that could compromise him—”

“What makes you think it’s me?”

“This morning, he used your name.”

He knew she had said the Chinese knew who he was, but it just didn’t make sense. Sure, he was a TOPGUN instructor and helped develop tactics for the fleet, but… “Wait, are you saying those men were targeting me because of information they think I have?”

She pulled the rag away from her head and locked eyes with him. “What did you download, Colt?”

He opened his mouth to deny it, but a horrifying thought stopped him. If the Chinese were worried the information he had downloaded compromised their spy aboard the Lincoln, then that meant they were somehow responsible for the erratic behavior of his jet. “Nothing,” he said, but even he knew it sounded unconvincing.

“I need to know,” she pressed.

Despite all the training he’d received at SERE school in resisting interrogation, he found himself hopelessly unprepared to combat her fierce blue eyes. He likely would have failed the course in Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape if he had been questioned by a woman as determined as Punky. At last, he sighed. “I downloaded the squadron’s maintenance data.”

She cocked her head to the side. “Why?”

“I’m going to take it to a test pilot friend who’s way smarter than I am. Maybe he can get it to engineers who can decipher what happened.”

“Jug,” she said, putting the pieces together.

He nodded. “You coming or not?”

They both heard the sirens at the same time and turned in the direction of the abandoned Corvette. Sooner or later, he knew the police would figure out who the car belonged to, and they’d spend the rest of their afternoon answering questions in an interrogation room instead of stopping whatever plot the Chinese had concocted. He knew she probably had broken protocol by leaving the scene, but he wasn’t burdened by such bureaucracy.

“Let’s go,” she said.

Colt wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he turned toward the dark gray experimental plane he had parked on the ramp a week earlier before flying an F-35 from Marine Corps Air Station Miramar out to the Abraham Lincoln.

“Is that your Carbon Cub?”

Colt stopped. “You know what that is?”

She gave him a wry smile. “Sure,” she said. “I’ve got almost a hundred hours in one.”

Colt took off from the shorter 3,400-foot runway, though the Carbon Cub needed only a fraction of that. The plane was designed for Short Takeoffs and Landings, or STOL, and when he wasn’t flying fifth-generation fighters in the Fallon Range Training Complex, he was flying his pride and joy in the Nevada backcountry.

“Experimental Carbon Cub Four Four Three November Alpha, switch So Cal on nineteen six,” the air traffic controller said.

“Nineteen six,” he said, then reached up to dial in the new frequency.

After checking in, Colt steered the bush plane north of La Jolla, shooting the gap between Mount Soledad and the Mormon Temple, then leveled off at fifteen hundred feet. Crossing the shoreline, he banked north and passed underneath the Seawolf Corridor.

“Want to take the controls for a bit?”

“Sure,” Punky said. “I’ve got the aircraft.”

“You’ve got the aircraft.” He relinquished controls to the NCIS agent in his back seat, then went heads-down in the cockpit to enter their planned route to Point Mugu into his navigation system.