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Jug paused what he was doing and looked at the memory stick perched between Colt’s fingers. “What’s that?”

Colt told him everything. From start to finish, he told the test pilot everything that had happened to his jet the night before. When he was done, Punky stepped forward and gave him a concise summary of her investigation into KMART and what had happened to them that morning.

“Holy shit,” Jug said. “This sounds like a Mark Greaney novel.”

“It’s not fiction,” Punky replied. “KMART’s Chinese handler killed my partner…”

“I’m sorry.”

“…and we need to figure out what’s going on before something worse happens.”

Jug finished unzipping his anti-G suit and reached up to hang it on a peg bolted to the wall. “What could be worse than trying to ram an eighty-million-dollar jet into a guided-missile cruiser?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Colt said. “Can you look at this data for me?”

Jug took the thumb drive from Colt, then shook his head. “I don’t have the computing power here to analyze the data, but I might be able to get an engineer with VX-30 to look at it. Why don’t I transfer it to my guy back at China Lake?”

“Thanks, Jug.”

He leveled his gaze on Colt, his ever-present playful expression gone. “But if what you’re telling me is true, then you probably don’t have time for that.”

“What choice do I have?”

Colt saw Punky reach into her pocket for her cell phone, then she excused herself and stepped out of the room to answer the call. He knew it had been a long shot that Jug would be able to give him the answers he desperately needed, but he still felt defeated they had come all this way for nothing.

“I’m sorry, brother. Wish there was more I could do.”

He gave Jug a weak smile, changing the subject to keep from dwelling on his failure. “So, tell me about this test you’re here for.”

“We’re calling it Project Rán, named for the Norse goddess of the sea. Raytheon teamed up with Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace to develop an air-launched version of the Naval Strike Missile that could be carried internally by the F-35.”

“I’ve read up on that,” Colt said. “Sounds promising.”

He nodded. “The static tests have had positive results and the strikes against land targets have been successful, so now we’re testing it against a ship.”

“Which one?”

“That Devil Dog Uber that caught fire in San Diego a few years back.”

“The Bonhomme Richard?” Colt whistled. “Pretty big boat.”

“Yeah, well, the mucky-mucks in acquisitions at the Pentagon want to see if this weapon will be the next carrier killer.”

…carrier killer…

Colt felt his heart thudding in his chest as he recalled TANDY’s words and swallowed against the dryness in his mouth. He cleared his throat. “When’s the test?”

“Tonight.”

Colt felt his face flush, but Punky burst through the door and interrupted his thoughts before he could speak them aloud. “Have either of you ever heard of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud?”

Both men turned to look at her, but neither answered.

“I just heard back from my contact with the NSA,” she said. “It seems earlier today somebody at Cal Poly used the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, known as EC2, to modify an electronic waveform of unknown purpose that could be transmitted line-of-sight.”

“You’re speaking Greek,” Colt said.

“It’s a scalable cloud-computing service.”

“Not helping me much.”

Punky rolled her eyes, then looked at Jug. “When you want to run a complex computer program for one of your tests, what’s the one thing you need?”

“Processing power. We have designated computers for tasks like that.”

She nodded. “Think of this like a time-share cloud-based version. The more processing power you want, the more units you rent. You only pay for what you need.”

Colt held up his hand to stop her. “Okay, I get it. It’s a big computer. But what does that have to do with anything we’ve been worrying about?”

“If what happened to your jet was intentional, how would somebody go about gaining control?”

Jug leaned forward and answered for him. “Through a computer virus,” he said. “A virus that could be transmitted wirelessly, maybe.”

“What would that look like?” Punky asked, nodding her head as she saw the test pilot putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

“An electronic waveform transmitted line-of-sight,” he said.

“Bingo.”

Colt shook his head, still trying to make the leap the others had clearly already made. “Okay, so let’s say this Cal Poly waveform is the one that was used to take control of my jet. I still don’t see why we can’t just send the FBI to the campus and raid the computer lab to prevent this new modified waveform from falling into the wrong hands.”

“Because,” Punky said, drawing out her answer. “The wrong hands already have it.”

“What do you mean?”

Punky looked between the two pilots. “Whoever ordered the waveform modification already transmitted it using an X-band transceiver.”

He stared at her with a blank look on his face.

“To a Chinese satellite in geosynchronous Earth orbit.”

“Oh, shit,” Colt said.