Punky groaned, then turned to Jax. “Could this be what Shen Yu gave your officer?”
He shrugged. “Could be, but that’s an awfully big assumption.”
She looked back at the doctor. “So, what you’re saying is that unless you knew where to look, you would have to wait for someone to get infected with the weapon before even having a chance to discover the off switch?”
Tan Lily nodded.
That wasn’t an acceptable answer. There were lives at stake, and Punky knew she needed to stop playing defense if they were going to have any chance of preventing another attack. She needed to get out there and uncover why SUBLIME was after the doctor. And she needed to stop him.
Punky stood, and she looked at Jax. “I’m going to put an end to this.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find SUBLIME.”
A short while later, she had her foot to the floor as she pressed her Dodge Challenger Hellcat Redeye to its limits and screamed west down from the hills toward Interstate 15. She feared the Navy was playing right into the Ministry’s hands by moving the Reagan into the South China Sea, but unless she found out who was after the doctor, there was nothing she could do to stop it.
She didn’t think anybody had followed them to the safe house, but she also hadn’t thought anybody would be so brazen as to ambush her in broad daylight while driving her dad’s ’Vette either. That event had permanently changed her outlook on the world. For better or worse, it had gifted her with a keen sense of paranoia that refused to permit her a moment without constantly evaluating and assessing those around her as either threats, friendlies, or allies.
As she merged onto the interstate, a faded yellow Chevrolet sedan inched closer on her left side, and she turned to study its driver. Friendly.
A lifted two-door Jeep Wrangler moved into the lane behind her, and she ducked her head to look at it through her side-view mirror. Friendly.
A black-and-white California Highway Patrol cruiser raced by in the left lane, its lights off but obviously in a hurry. Ally.
In her rearview mirror, several cars back, she spotted the single headlight of a motorcycle one lane over. There was nothing particularly troubling about it, but she loosened her seat belt anyway and drew the hem of her blazer back around the butt of her pistol. Threat?
The motorcycle quickly accelerated and left Punky’s Dodge Challenger behind.
She breathed a sigh of relief and continued south while scanning for threats, but her mind was focused on the task ahead of her. She just hoped she could convince Camron of the danger.
25
Colt sat with his ready room chair reclined as far back as it could go and had his feet up on the armrests of the chair in front of him, chasing away the remnants of his hangover from the late-night beers in Iwakuni. At the front of the room, a television hung from the ceiling in the corner and streamed various closed-circuit camera angles of the flight deck. For most pilots, watching flight operations was a favorite pastime when not actually flying, and Colt was no exception.
“Attention on deck!”
He popped to his feet before he heard Cutty’s voice say, “Carry on.”
Recognizing the Deputy Air Wing Commander, he relaxed and turned to the rear of the ready room where Cutty breezed past the duty desk with a stern look on his face, focused on Colt. He braced himself for bad news. “What’s up, sir?”
“I’ve asked your skipper to put you on for an Alert Five tomorrow.”
“Alert Five?” The vertigo subsided and his hangover seemed to dull. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t say yet,” Cutty replied. “Just that we’re stopping flight operations early and clearing the deck for a priority mission.”
“So, this is real world?”
Sitting the Alert wasn’t new to Colt, and he understood what DCAG was asking. An Alert 30 meant that aircrew could be anywhere on the ship if they could dress in their flight gear, man up their aircraft, and launch within thirty minutes. An Alert 15 required them to be in the ready room, already dressed in their flight gear, and launch in half that time. But the Alert 5 was the highest level of readiness and the most cumbersome for the pilots tasked with it.
“If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have asked for my best.”
On an Alert 5, Colt would strap into the aircraft with all his systems up and running except for the engines. There was nothing fun about sitting in a jet that wasn’t flying for hours on end, and Colt wasn’t looking forward to it. But the prospect of launching to support a real-world operation intrigued him.
“What can you tell me?”
“You’ll get the full briefing tomorrow.” He looked around, then lowered his voice conspiratorially. “But just between you and me, you might be interested in seeing what flies out here in a few hours.”
“What?”
Cutty just winked. “You’ll see. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and go talk to Bubba in CVIC.”
If anybody could clue Colt in on what was going on, Ensign Dan “Bubba” Gump could. He was the Mace’s intelligence officer and practically lived in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility known as the Carrier Intelligence Center, or CVIC.
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Good man,” Cutty said, before turning to leave through the door at the rear of the ready room.
After he had gone, Colt watched the first Super Hornet go into tension on the television, then decided his time was better spent preparing for whatever was coming. A few other squadron pilots sat in their respective chairs reading paperback novels or studying tactics and ignored him as he walked past the duty desk for the passageway on the starboard side of the ship. The door closed behind him, and he turned left toward the blue tile of Officers’ Country.
Approaching midships, Colt ducked into the alcove for CVIC and entered his code to unlock the door with an audible click. He walked through the large open room into the back where the squadron intelligence officers worked.
During combat operations, the rooms were full of charts depicting strategic and tactical targets, but where they were operating near Taiwan, identifying surface contacts seemed to be the most important task. He spotted Bubba bent over a table, poring over photos of what looked like a naval base. Colt stood behind him and peered over his shoulder, wondering what the spy found so interesting in the art of studying satellite imagery.
“What’s that, Bubba?”
“Huh?” The intelligence officer startled but relaxed when he saw Colt. “Oh, I didn’t see you there.”
“Yeah, you were pretty focused. Where is that?”
“Yulin Naval Base on Hainan Island. Fleet intelligence thinks the Chinese are growing their submarine presence here, but I think there’s something else going on. If you look right here…”
Colt cut him off, uninterested in the People’s Liberation Army Navy order of battle. “Yeah, so anyway, what’s up with CAG assigning us Alert Fives?”
Bubba grunted. “That’s a good question.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
Bubba looked around to see if anybody else was within earshot before leaning in close. Like many intelligence officers, Bubba was a prior-enlisted sailor and understood the importance of scuttlebutt better than most. Like the water cooler in a modern-day office, the scuttlebutt — a cask used to serve water aboard sailing ships of old — was a common gathering place for sailors and a hub for gossip. Over time, the two became synonymous.