Outlaw

“Has the compressor stall cleared?” Rucas asked.

“Affirm,” Colt replied. After shutting down the left engine, the RPMs had dropped and the banging and accompanying vibration stopped.

“Copy that. Do you feel comfortable bringing her back single engine?”

“No problem,” he said, adding a touch of bravado for Doc’s sake.

“Okay, I’ll let the Air Boss know. He wants to bring you back, but he’s talking it over with CAG and the captain now.”

Colt understood that the decision was out of his hands. If either the commander of the air wing or the carrier’s commanding officer felt it was safer to divert him, they wouldn’t hesitate to send him to Kadena. It was almost a certainty that if he had been a first-tour nugget, that decision would have already been made.

But Colt was a senior lieutenant with several hundred traps under his belt. Aside from the deployments he had made during his first sea tour, he had volunteered to support air wing training while instructing at TOPGUN — the US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School — and had flown from aircraft carriers in both the legacy and Super Hornet as well as the new Joint Strike Fighter.

“Standing by,” Colt said.

“Diamond one hundred, Tiger. Switch strike.”

“Diamond.” Colt switched from the Hawkeye’s control frequency to check in with the ship. “Strike, one zero zero, Mother’s two eight zero for fifty-five, angels twelve, state nine point oh. Emergency aircraft, single engine.”

On board the carrier, a sailor took note of his side number and annotated his fuel state as nine thousand pounds while another sailor interrogated his transponder code. Only after ensuring he was squawking a friendly Mode IV code and that his side number matched the transponder’s Mode II would they permit him to enter the fifty-nautical-mile Carrier Control Area.

“One zero zero, sweet, sweet. Mother is VFR, case one. Contact Marshal.”

“One zero zero,” Colt replied, then switched to the Marshal frequency.

He reached up with his right fist and slapped down on the handle near his right knee to extend his tailhook as he repeated his check-in with the Marshal controller.

The controller’s reply sounded rote. “One zero zero, case one. BRC is zero one five, expect to Charlie on arrival. Report see me.”

He reached down to the Course Select switch and held it to the right, watching a needle swing through the symbol for the ship’s TACAN — or tactical air navigation station — on the display between his legs and steady up on the ship’s heading, or Base Recovery Course, pointed north-northeast. Then, he pointed directly at the ship and scanned the ocean’s choppy surface for the speck of gray they expected him to land his seventy-million-dollar fighter jet on.

He leveled off at two thousand feet and angled his jet to the right to enter the holding stack above the carrier on the downwind leg. Crossing inside ten miles, he spotted the aircraft carrier and reported it to Marshal. “One zero zero, see you at ten.”

“One zero zero, switch Tower.”

Colt switched to the tower frequency.

The voice of the USS Ronald Reagan’s Air Boss boomed over the radio. “One zero zero, Tower.”

“Go ahead, sir.”

“Charlie.”

2

Shanghai Pudong International Airport

Shanghai, China

Lisa’s ears popped as she chewed a stick of spearmint gum.

She sat buckled into the R4 jump seat on the starboard side of the aft galley as she tugged at the hem of her dress and inched it toward her knees. The last time she had worn the uniform, they were referred to as stewardesses, but she doubted the dresses had gotten shorter over the years. Or even that she had become more modest. More than likely, it was just the sheathed ceramic blade strapped to her inner thigh that made her self-conscious.

She glanced over her shoulder at the other flight attendant. The perky twenty-something-year-old brunette had her phone pressed to the door’s tiny window and snapped pictures of Shanghai, oblivious that she was sharing her galley with a spook.

Instagram or TikTok? Lisa wondered, then turned back to her own window to look down on the largest city in the People’s Republic of China. As usual, smog blanketed the city, but even through the haze at five thousand feet, she could tell Shanghai had changed over the last quarter century since she’d first visited. China had been a sleeping dragon then.

And now, the dragon was stirring.

The Airbus A330-900neo continued its descent into Shanghai Pudong International Airport, located on the coast, nineteen miles east of the city’s center. She leaned back from the window and mentally ran through her emergency procedures, doing her best to fulfill her flight attendant duties, even if it was only just a cover.