“What?” Smitty’s dubious look disappeared, and he leaned in again, waiting for Colt to drop a bombshell on him.
“I think there’s something wrong with the jet’s software. Something happened tonight, and I lost total control.”
Smitty’s eyes grew wide, but he remained silent.
“The jet rolled in on a perfect thirty-degree dive targeting the cruiser. It wouldn’t respond to any of my control inputs, and I almost crashed right into the ship. At the last minute, I regained control and almost blacked out trying to recover. I have no idea what could have caused it, but I need to figure it out before it happens again.”
“Does maintenance know?”
Colt nodded. “I wrote it up, and they ran it through a bunch of checks, but the skipper said they didn’t find anything. They’re going to sign off the MAF and send it up again.”
“Could not duplicate on deck,” Smitty said.
“Could not duplicate on deck,” Colt echoed, parroting the skipper’s own words. To aviators, it was a cop-out. It was maintenance control’s way of saying they investigated the pilot’s concern but found nothing to corroborate the gripe. It would be their way of dismissing his experience and signing it off safe-for-flight, believing as CAG did that the guest pilot had lost his mind.
“Why not get the raw data?” Smitty asked.
Colt opened his mouth to answer but snapped it shut. If he had the raw maintenance data, he could get it to somebody at Lockheed who understood the engineering of how the jet worked, somebody far smarter than a political science major from West Texas.
“Colt?”
But he would need more than just his jet’s data so they could compare his with one that hadn’t been possessed. Without another word, Colt got up from the table.
Adam sat in maintenance control and did his best to avoid looking like he was paying too much attention to Gunny and Sarge bickering over yet another meaningless fact of life aboard an aircraft carrier. It was too early to congratulate himself for deceiving the skipper and CAG with maintenance data for the wrong jet, because sooner or later, somebody would recognize the mistake and come looking for the right data.
“You mean to tell me you do your own laundry?” Narvaez asked incredulously.
“Gunnery sergeants don’t let strangers wash their unmentionables,” Gunny replied, deadpan.
Adam shook his head but decided he needed to permanently delete aircraft 307’s history. While the two staff noncommissioned officers bickered, they weren’t paying attention to what he was doing, and he drilled deeper into the ODIN servers, navigating to the folder where he had hidden the file.
“Hey, Gunny, was wondering if you could do me a favor,” a new voice said.
Adam turned and saw the Navy pilot standing at the counter. As expected, the lieutenant didn’t even acknowledge his presence. Aside from the skipper and a handful of other officers, most didn’t think a lance corporal warranted their time or attention.
“Well, that depends, sir. What can I do for you?”
“The skipper said you guys ran some tests on three oh seven?”
“Ran it through every one in our pubs,” Gunny replied.
“And you didn’t find anything?”
“No, sir,” Gunny said, then spit a string of tobacco juice into his taped-up Gatorade bottle. “Did you want to add more to your write-up?”
It wasn’t unusual for pilots to remember some small tidbit of information and return later to add it to the MAF. Every tiny detail mattered because the maintainers relied on them to diagnose the malady. Just as doctors used every symptom to help narrow down a patient’s illness, aircraft mechanics used a pilot’s experiences to trace the problem to a root cause. But Adam started worrying the pilot had remembered something that might uncover what really happened.
That wouldn’t be good.
“Nothing else to add,” the lieutenant said.
Adam exhaled and turned back to his terminal. He had a feeling he knew what the lieutenant was about to ask, and he wanted to delete the file before Gunny or Sarge turned their focus on him and the deception he was trying to accomplish.
“Anything else I can do for you, sir?”
“Well, I’m headed back to Fallon tomorrow, and CAG wants me to bring flight data back for the Lockheed engineers to go over. Can you make copies for me?”
Adam groaned to himself, but it wasn’t unexpected. He opened aircraft 307’s folder and again glanced over his shoulder to see if anybody would see him making the file appear out of thin air so he could scrub it completely from the servers.
“Sure thing, sir. Come on back,” Gunny said. Then, “Garett, make the lieutenant here a copy of three oh seven’s history.”
“I’m sorry,” the lieutenant said. “Not just three oh seven’s history.”
“Not just three oh seven? Which ones?”
“All of them.”
Adam turned around in his seat and stared at Gunny, hoping the bald staff noncommissioned officer would tell the Navy pilot that was unwarranted and excessive. A simple sleight of hand wouldn’t be enough to disguise the data, because it would be obvious one was missing.
“All of them, sir?”
“That’s what CAG said.”
Sergeant Narvaez stood and walked over to Adam’s desk. “I got this, Garett. Why don’t you take a break and let me handle it.”
He stared at the stocky Marine but didn’t move. If he got up and walked away, Narvaez would quickly realize that one of the files was missing, and he was too good with a computer to not conclude that the data they had copied for the skipper was the wrong one. “That’s okay, Sarge. I can do this.”
Narvaez cocked his head in surprise, then gestured for Adam to continue. He probably thought Garett had finally decided to show some initiative and take his job seriously. “Be my guest,” he said.
Adam inserted a USB flash drive into the Toughbook laptop and created folders for each of the squadron’s jets. Then, one by one, he dragged the files over from the server, intentionally skipping aircraft 307 and creating a duplicate file from aircraft 305. A warning of the error popped up on the screen, but he quickly dismissed it, hoping it went unnoticed.
“I think you made a duplicate,” Narvaez said.
Dammit. Adam’s face flushed, but he tried to act nonchalant. “Did I?”
“I think you copied three oh five’s history twice.”
Adam had one more card to play, and he opened 307’s folder to show Narvaez that it was empty. “See, Sarge? The file’s already been moved over.”
“Did you try looking for hidden files?” Gunny asked.
Gunny had called his bluff, and his heart rate spiked. How the hell did that hunt-and-pecking Neanderthal know to look for hidden files?
“How do you do that?” Garett asked.
“Alt and V, then H twice.”
Adam already knew how but had hoped the senior NCO didn’t. Dismayed, he tapped on the requisite keys, and the file appeared right where it had been all along. Reluctantly, he finished copying the remaining files to the USB flash drive.
“Don’t worry, Garett,” Gunny said. “Lance corporals don’t become gunnery sergeants overnight.”
Once the last file had been copied over, Adam removed the flash drive and handed it over to the lieutenant. “Here’s the data, sir.”
“Thanks, Lance Corporal.”
Adam felt his stomach twist into knots when the Navy pilot spun for the door. Narvaez went back to dogging Gunny for the way he typed, and Gunny went back to the endless paperwork the Marine Corps ran on. Adam stared at the incriminating file on his computer and wondered what Chen would do when she found out the aviator had whatever information it contained.