Outlaw

Ashley squatted down next to him and looked at the notes he had been making. She was unable to decipher his chicken scratch but knew it probably had significant meaning to him. “What’s interesting?”

He shifted in his seat to look at her. “Okay, I look for patterns. If there is normally a lot of traffic on the road, I take note when the traffic is light. If there are no boats running between Hainan Island and Fenjiezhou Island, I take note when there are.”

“But if it’s a tourist destination, then doesn’t it make sense to have boat traffic there?”

He nodded. “Normally, yes. But this time of year, tourism is at an all-time low, and this boat traffic doesn’t fit any existing patterns.” He turned to look at the boat moving steadily across the water toward the uninhabited island.

“It doesn’t look like a military boat to me,” Ashley said.

“It’s not. It’s a fishing trawler.”

Ashley wrinkled her nose. “Help me out here, Tony. I’m not seeing what’s so interesting about this.”

He turned back to her. “Why is a fishing trawler carrying passengers to a tourist destination?”

She felt goose bumps on her arms and stood, her eyes fixed on the screen as the boat slowed to make its approach to the pier. Tony turned back to his console and manipulated the controls to zoom in on the deck of the boat.

Could it be?

“Does that look like…” she started.

“A stretcher?” He nodded. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

She stood motionless as deck hands secured the boat to the pier and lifted the stretcher to carry it from the deck across a gangway. The men loaded it into the back of a utility cart, then drove off the pier into the thick canopy of trees covering most of the island.

Holy shit.

“Commander!” Ed yelled, waving her forward to his station near the front.

“Good work, Tony,” she said, and gave his shoulder a squeeze before turning to walk up the aisle toward her tactical coordinator.

“We just intercepted a phone call that mentions our missing officer,” Ed said with increasing excitement.

“Read the transcript,” she said.

He picked up his logbook and read from it. “The Ministry assesses that the potential… indecipherable… American spy. Movement to…”

She interrupted him. “Fenjiezhou Island?”

He nodded with wide eyes.

“Transmit everything back to base immediately.” She lifted the Styrofoam cup to her lips and drained the remaining coffee, feeling fully awake.

Ed put his headset back on to pass instructions to the rest of the crew while Ashley strode forward to the flight deck. She ducked as she stepped into her seat and reached up to place her headset back on her head. “I’ve got the aircraft,” she said. She reached up to spin a heading into the window on the Mode Control Panel and turned them away from Hainan Island.

“What’s up?” Logan asked.

“I think we found her,” she said with a wide grin.

24

Valley Center, California

Punky blew through the front door and stepped out into the crisp evening air. She was having a hard time believing that what the doctor had just told them was a coincidence. Jax followed her out onto the front porch, and they stood in silence for several minutes before Punky spoke.

“It has to be the USS Ronald Reagan.”

Jax shook his head. “Just because they looked into it over a year ago doesn’t mean they succeeded. You heard the doctor; they hadn’t yet perfected the switch they needed to make something like this work.”

But she didn’t see it the same way. She wheeled away from Jax and walked away from the house while puzzling over the messages the NSA had intercepted from SUBLIME. It seemed pretty clear to her that whatever the Ministry of State Security wanted with Tan Lily, it had to do with the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan. That it was at sea — at that very moment — defending the Strait of Taiwan against the threat of an invasion only made it more likely.

Jax followed her off the steps, then stopped when his phone rang. Punky was deep in thought but still heard his half of the conversation.

“What? When?”

She turned to him and grew concerned when she saw the look on his face.

“What are we doing about it?”

Jax looked at his watch, then furrowed his brow.

“We have her here, but we think there’s something going on.”

Even though Jax had played devil’s advocate and forced Punky to consider alternate explanations for the Ministry’s interest in Tan Lily, his comment to whoever was on the other end of the phone clearly showed he was worried. Like it or not, they had stumbled into the middle of something bigger than benign espionage activities on the West Coast.

Jax looked up and made eye contact with her. “The sooner, the better. Keep me posted.”

He ended the call and joined Punky at the edge of the lawn.

“What was that about?”

“That was my partner, Connor Sullivan,” Jax said. “We found her.”

“Her?”