The sailor handed him a satellite phone. “It’s for you, sir.”
Colt took the phone and brought it to his ear. “Lieutenant Bancroft.”
“Colt, it’s Cutty.”
His heart raced with anxiety. Even though he knew he had done everything by the book, he still had a nagging doubt that second-guessed every decision he had made. From shooting down the Chinese fighter to running out of gas going after the attack helicopter, he knew he was about to be put under the magnifying glass again. “Sir, what’s going on?”
“First thing’s first,” the old man said. “Are you okay?”
He felt himself relax. “Yes, sir. I’m fine.”
“Fever? Headaches? Nausea?”
“No, sir. I’m fine.”
“No symptoms?”
“Sir, what kind of illness is this?” he asked, worried that DCAG seemed more concerned with him being sick than what he had just gone through.
Cutty sighed heavily into the phone. “We don’t really know, to be honest. Lots of people are in really bad shape.”
Colt thought back to Sierra and wondered how she was handling things. “How’s Doc doing?”
“She was the one who examined the first person to get sick.”
Colt felt a knot in the pit of his stomach. Though he knew Doc often ran sick call with the other medical officers on the ship, it was more likely that the flight surgeon had been called to check on someone he knew. “Who was it?”
Cutty paused, and Colt knew it was a violation of patient privacy to reveal that information. But laws like that had a way of being overlooked when an aircraft carrier was being sidelined because of a strange illness. “Andy Yandell,” Cutty said. “He’s a…”
“COD guy,” Colt finished for him. “Yeah, I had a few beers with him in Iwakuni the other night.”
“I know. That’s why I asked how you were feeling. We still don’t know where he got it.”
It could have been that he was being overly paranoid, but he started to feel his stomach churning. “I feel good, sir. What do you want me to do?”
“Normally, we’d want you back out to the ship to do a complete medical workup on you…”
Colt had expected as much. One didn’t run a seventy-million-dollar fighter jet out of gas and crash it into the South China Sea without having some sort of investigation launched into the incident.
“…but with the ship in quarantine, we’re going to keep you and Rucas there until things settle down.”
“Rucas is here?” In the excitement of shooting down the Chinese helicopter and flaming out near Scarborough Shoal, Colt had forgotten all about his wingman. As if in answer to his question, Colt heard his name being shouted from across the tarmac. He turned and saw Rucas with a wide shit-eating grin on his face. “Never mind, sir. He just found me.”
“Sit tight, Colt. I’ll be in touch.”
“Aye, sir.”
He ended the call just as Rucas reached him and pulled him in for a hug. He was still soaking wet from his brief dip in the South China Sea, but the other fighter pilot didn’t seem to mind. “You made it!”
“Did I?” Colt asked, still trying to process everything that had happened.
Rucas released him and stepped back. “Just what do you think you were doing out there?”
He scrunched up his face in confusion, but one of the SEALs walked up and answered for him. “His job, I reckon.”
Colt glanced over at the SEAL and did a double take. “Senior Chief?”
“Hey, flyboy.”
Rucas saw the bewildered look on Colt’s face and the bemused expression on the SEAL’s. “Do you two know each other?”
Colt opened his mouth to answer, but the SEAL was quicker. “Yeah, your flyboy here crashed his jet on my island last year.”
“I didn’t crash,” Colt said. “This is Senior Chief Dave White.”
“Seems like a dark cloud seems to follow you wherever you go,” Dave said, though Colt could tell the SEAL was only poking fun at him. “First you crash on my island…”
“I didn’t crash,” he said again.
“…then you eject from a perfectly good airplane.”
“First of all, I didn’t crash, I landed. Second, it wasn’t a perfectly good airplane, it was out of gas.”
“I seem to remember that being your excuse last time too.” Dave stuck out his bearlike paw to Colt. “Thanks for saving our bacon, flyboy.”
“So that was you, huh?” Colt accepted the offered hand and squinted at a dark smudge on the SEAL’s face. “What’s that?”
Dave reached up and touched his forehead with a grimace. “Oh, just hit my head trying to fend off that helicopter while you took your sweet time getting to us.”
Colt rolled his eyes. “Glad I didn’t drag my feet any longer — it would have really messed up your devilish good looks.”
Dave grinned. “We need to stop meeting like this.”
“Yeah, I thought you said you’d be in touch. What gives?”
“I definitely will.” He paused. “But I got a plane to catch right now.”
Colt looked over Dave’s shoulder and saw a patient being loaded onto the Gulfstream. “Where you headed?”
“Back to San Diego, my man.” Dave nodded at Rucas, then turned and jogged to the business jet medevac.
Colt watched him leave before turning to his wingman, whose face registered nothing but confusion. “What the hell was that all about?”
Colt shook his head. “Long story.”
50
The strange humming noise was becoming more prominent. It wasn’t getting louder. It was just becoming more difficult to ignore. With the humming came a faint glow that was also becoming more difficult to ignore. Like a wedge, it was breaking apart the dark nothingness that had defined her for the last… How long had it been since she’d seen the light?
“She’s coming around,” the unfamiliar voice said.
Her eyelids flickered as if attempting to open but failing to do so. The humming was persistent, and the glow of light was filling her awareness to the point that she could no longer avoid it and retreat inside her comforting darkness. Lisa Mourning opened her eyes but quickly snapped them shut.
The split-second view she had managed to take in was terrifying. She was in a brightly lit tube with wires and hoses and vaguely familiar machines all around her. And then there were the people. They looked friendly enough, but she knew looks could be deceiving.
“Lisa,” another voice said. “Can you hear me?”
It’s a trap.
She knew her captors had used deceit to unbalance her and cause her unending pain. This had to be just another one of their ploys to catch her off guard, to humiliate and hurt her. She couldn’t give in to the temptation, no matter how badly she wanted to go home.
Home.
A faint memory flickered.
We’re here to bring you home, Lisa.
With tentative curiosity, she opened her eyes again and struggled to keep them open so she could examine her surroundings. She didn’t recognize the two people hovering over her, but bits and pieces of information she knew came from her past began to fill in the void.
She was in a plane.
No, this is a jet.
The humming came from the jet engines.
She was strapped to a bed softer than anything she had ever felt before — especially not a concrete floor, wood box, or canvas stretcher. It was warm and soft and felt sinfully exotic.
“How are you feeling, Lisa?” the man standing over her asked.
She parted her lips to answer but felt a stiffness in her jaw she didn’t recognize. She probed the inside of her mouth with her tongue and registered a few simultaneous realizations. She was missing a few teeth she used to have, and her mouth was bone dry.