“No!” she shouted, completely forgetting that she was sitting in the darkness on the side of a ridge and not in a jet being targeted by a supersonic missile. She panted as she waited for the screen to go dark, an undeniable clue that she had failed.
But after what seemed like an eternity, the jet returned to stable level flight, and she felt her body sag with relief. “It missed,” she gasped. “It missed.”
She knew it was only a temporary reprieve. The other jet wouldn’t hesitate to take a second shot given the chance, and she needed to finish her mission before that happened. She turned forward and looked at the air-to-surface radar page she had pulled up, watching the target data transfer to the Joint Strike Missile.
“Just a little longer,” she whispered.
Jug almost blacked out when the jet abruptly banked left and snapped back with a rapid onset of G-forces. His anti-G protection suit inflated, attempting to squeeze the blood pooling in his legs back up into his brain, but he was already behind the power curve and his vision narrowed to the size of a soda straw. But it was enough to see that the DAS had identified the missile and was directing the EW suite to jam its seeker while automatically dispensing chaff to further disrupt it.
He couldn’t move his head to gain sight of the missile, but when the G-forces increased even further, he knew impact was imminent. He thought about reaching for the ejection handle, but his arms were pinned to the controls, and he couldn’t lift them against the overwhelming force.
Suddenly, the Gs subsided, and his heart regained its foothold and pumped blood furiously into his brain. His vision returned, and he saw the missile streaking past his jet before disappearing into the darkness over the Pacific Ocean.
“Goddammit, Colt!”
“Get outta there, Jug!”
He shook his head to clear the fogginess of the uncontrolled missile avoidance maneuver, but he felt more disoriented than he had only moments before. On the one hand, he was thankful to still be alive. But, on the other, he knew Colt only had one more air-to-air missile to bring down the hijacked jet before whoever was controlling it could launch both Joint Strike Missiles at the unsuspecting aircraft carrier.
He glanced down at his display and saw his weapon bay doors opening. “Oh, shit.”
Colt had closed the distance between the two aircraft to less than five miles, capitalizing on the loss of speed the hijacked jet had suffered while avoiding his missile attack. His heart hammered in his chest and a sour taste coated his mouth as he thought about how close he had been to killing his friend.
“Get outta there, Jug!”
He didn’t want to bring down the other jet but couldn’t see any other way around it. If he didn’t stop Devil One soon, he would be in the launch window for his Joint Strike Missiles, and thousands of sailors and Marines aboard the Lincoln would suffer because of his failure. With a silent curse, he refocused his radar onto the F-35C and prepared to fire his second, and last, AIM-120D AMRAAM.
Colt wasn’t much for appealing to the man upstairs when he needed something and thought it was disingenuous to only pray during his low points, but he was out of options. He closed his eyes briefly, said a clipped and hurried prayer, begging for divine intervention, then placed his finger on the trigger.
He opened his eyes and looked at the screen displaying a close-up view of Devil One from his IRST. His prayer had gone unanswered, and he saw the other jet’s weapon bay doors opening. If he didn’t shoot him down before the anti-ship missiles fell away, it would be too late.
“No, no, no…”
Suddenly, two light-colored shapes fell in tandem and dropped clear of the Joint Strike Fighter in his crosshairs.
“We’re too late, Colt,” Jug said.
God help us.
“Vampire.”
50
Tiffany grew tired of waiting for the helicopter to return, and she clicked her flashlight on to survey the area around the woman’s body. On the uphill side, in an area with sparse scrub brush, she saw a single boot print and froze. She had never been remarkably skilled at tracking, but she knew enough to estimate that it had been made that day. Most likely by the woman’s murderer.
Carrie’s murderer, she reminded herself.
Turning off her light, she knelt in the darkness and calmed her breathing while listening to the normal sounds of the island’s fauna. She had never been terribly brave either, and she struggled with her decision to either wait for the helicopter to return or man up and find out for herself where the boot prints led.
She took one more deep breath, then turned on her flashlight and scanned up the slope for the next print while bringing her handheld radio to her mouth. “Chief, it’s Tiffany,” she said.
“Go ahead.”
“I found a set of fresh prints leading away from location three—”
The Blacktip chief cut her off. “Do not follow that trail, Tiffany. We have officers coming.”
She took another halting step, then paused. “But what if the other hiker is hurt?”
If Chief Romero responded, she didn’t hear it. Her breath caught in her throat and a chill ran down her spine when she heard a woman’s voice high above her and shrill with fear, screaming, “No!”
“I’m going,” she said.
“What was that?”
Good, she thought. At least now I know I wasn’t making it up.
She turned and cast her light onto the next boot print. Then the next. With each one, she felt a renewed confidence that she was doing the right thing, and the fear that had held her back faded away into the night. After several minutes climbing the hill, her flashlight’s narrow beam reflected back at her from half a dozen tiny specks on the ground. She crept closer and knelt over one, examining the spots of light until she recognized what they were.
“Chief, I’ve got six or seven spent ammunition casings about twenty yards up from location three.”
“Tiffany…”
She pressed the radio to her chest to muffle his reply when she heard the scrape of a boot heel against a rock only a few yards above her head. She kept the light at her feet but gradually brought it up in short, sweeping arcs to search for the source. Things always seemed much closer than they actually were at night, but she would have wagered anything she was less than ten yards from whatever had made the noise.
Tiffany heard the muffled chief’s voice shouting against her chest, but she held down the push-to-talk to silence him and lifted the beam of light higher. She reached what looked like a narrow ledge protected by a boulder on one side and paused. Holding the light there, she scrunched up her face while trying to figure out what seemed off about that spot. Then she heard the scraping sound again, and the pieces fell into place in her mind.
She clicked off her light and dropped to the ground. Bringing the radio to her mouth, she keyed the microphone switch and whispered, “Chief, I see camouflage netting.”
After calming herself, Punky rose from between the solar panels and moved across the trail toward the ridge’s east slope. She closed her eyes and pictured where she had seen the very first muzzle flashes as she flew over the island in Colt’s Carbon Cub. Looking over her shoulder at the antenna, she referenced the flashing red lights and figured they had come from less than halfway down the slope.