The wind across the deck picked up as the boat gained speed away from the pier, catching the wool blanket and peeling it away from her battered feet to expose her naked body from the waist down. But she ignored her nakedness and focused on the warmth draped over the upper half of her body. It was a foreign but welcome sensation. And she savored it.
But the boat ride was short-lived. In what seemed like only a few short minutes, the boat slowed and made its approach to a pier with a flurry of activity as sailors scurried around to tie off the boat to their new home.
Her captors lifted the stretcher off the deck and carried it to the gangway to transfer her to shore. They placed her in the back of a gas-powered cart that immediately began driving. She bounced in the stretcher as the cart motored away from the pier and began a quick climb into the hills rising away from the coast.
She had no idea where she was but knew her torture was far from over.
23
With a yawn, Lieutenant Commander Ashley Mitchell reached up and pressed the button to engage the autopilot. She was fighting fatigue and needed to stretch her legs. She unbuckled from her sheepskin seat and turned to her copilot. “You’ve got the aircraft. I’m going into the back to stretch for a few minutes.”
Logan nodded as she took her headset off and set it on the glare shield. Ashley contorted her body and lifted a leg over the center pedestal, then left the flight deck and made her way to the back.
She stopped to pour herself a cup of coffee before moving to where her sensor operators were busy scanning the electronic emissions from Hainan Island and cataloguing them. Her tactical coordinator, Lieutenant Edward Turner, saw her approaching and removed his headset. “What’s going on?”
“Just stretching my legs.” She took a sip of the hot coffee. “Get anything yet?”
He shook his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. But we still have time.”
She had commanded missions in the South China Sea countless times, but there was an urgency with this one she hadn’t felt before. Partly, it was because the fleet of fishing vessels they had observed in the East China Sea had moved south, as they suspected. But mostly, it was because a missing American intelligence officer drove the stakes even higher.
“Keep me posted,” she said.
Ed nodded and placed his headset back on his shaved head. She moved down the aisle to watch her sensor operators manipulating the plane’s surveillance equipment. Each had an insulated coffee mug in a cupholder at their console to stave off the fatigue she knew was taking a toll on each of them.
As she reached Petty Officer Delgado’s station, she leaned over and saw him position the electro-optical sensor’s crosshairs on a small boat. He scrunched up his face and made notes in his logbook, cross-referencing the sensor’s position with a digital map of the waters around Hainan Island.
“Where is that?” she asked quietly.
Tony continued scribbling notes into his logbook, then reached up to shift the sensor through its various modes, switching between electro-optical and infrared as he took temperature readings to compare with their catalog of Chinese naval ships. She tapped him on the shoulder, and he jumped as he ripped his headset from his head.
“Sorry, Commander,” he said.
Ashley smiled at him and patted him on the back. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” She nodded to the screen. “Where is that?”
Tony sat back down and zoomed in on the digital map he had been referencing. “Fenjiezhou Island. It’s about fifty miles north of Sanya, a mile off the east coast of Hainan Island.”
“Military base?” she asked.
Tony shook his head. “Actually, it’s a tourist destination. Mostly uninhabited except for tourists vacationing there and the resort staff. Which is interesting…” He trailed off in thought.
Ashley squatted down next to him and looked at the notes he had been making. She was unable to decipher his chicken scratch but knew it probably had significant meaning to him. “What’s interesting?”
He shifted in his seat to look at her. “Okay, I look for patterns. If there is normally a lot of traffic on the road, I take note when the traffic is light. If there are no boats running between Hainan Island and Fenjiezhou Island, I take note when there are.”
“But if it’s a tourist destination, then doesn’t it make sense to have boat traffic there?”
He nodded. “Normally, yes. But this time of year, tourism is at an all-time low, and this boat traffic doesn’t fit any existing patterns.” He turned to look at the boat moving steadily across the water toward the uninhabited island.
“It doesn’t look like a military boat to me,” Ashley said.
“It’s not. It’s a fishing trawler.”
Ashley wrinkled her nose. “Help me out here, Tony. I’m not seeing what’s so interesting about this.”
He turned back to her. “Why is a fishing trawler carrying passengers to a tourist destination?”
She felt goose bumps on her arms and stood, her eyes fixed on the screen as the boat slowed to make its approach to the pier. Tony turned back to his console and manipulated the controls to zoom in on the deck of the boat.
Could it be?
“Does that look like…” she started.
“A stretcher?” He nodded. “Yes. Yes, it does.”
She stood motionless as deck hands secured the boat to the pier and lifted the stretcher to carry it from the deck across a gangway. The men loaded it into the back of a utility cart, then drove off the pier into the thick canopy of trees covering most of the island.
Holy shit.
“Commander!” Ed yelled, waving her forward to his station near the front.
“Good work, Tony,” she said, and gave his shoulder a squeeze before turning to walk up the aisle toward her tactical coordinator.
“We just intercepted a phone call that mentions our missing officer,” Ed said with increasing excitement.
“Read the transcript,” she said.
He picked up his logbook and read from it. “The Ministry assesses that the potential… indecipherable… American spy. Movement to…”
She interrupted him. “Fenjiezhou Island?”
He nodded with wide eyes.
“Transmit everything back to base immediately.” She lifted the Styrofoam cup to her lips and drained the remaining coffee, feeling fully awake.
Ed put his headset back on to pass instructions to the rest of the crew while Ashley strode forward to the flight deck. She ducked as she stepped into her seat and reached up to place her headset back on her head. “I’ve got the aircraft,” she said. She reached up to spin a heading into the window on the Mode Control Panel and turned them away from Hainan Island.
“What’s up?” Logan asked.
“I think we found her,” she said with a wide grin.
24
Punky blew through the front door and stepped out into the crisp evening air. She was having a hard time believing that what the doctor had just told them was a coincidence. Jax followed her out onto the front porch, and they stood in silence for several minutes before Punky spoke.
“It has to be the USS Ronald Reagan.”
Jax shook his head. “Just because they looked into it over a year ago doesn’t mean they succeeded. You heard the doctor; they hadn’t yet perfected the switch they needed to make something like this work.”
But she didn’t see it the same way. She wheeled away from Jax and walked away from the house while puzzling over the messages the NSA had intercepted from SUBLIME. It seemed pretty clear to her that whatever the Ministry of State Security wanted with Tan Lily, it had to do with the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan. That it was at sea — at that very moment — defending the Strait of Taiwan against the threat of an invasion only made it more likely.