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When he nodded, she pulled her phone out of her pocket and placed a call. The two pilots could only hear her half of the conversation, but they watched transfixed as the NCIS agent took charge of the investigation and satisfied whatever had tickled her curiosity.

“Yeah, it’s me… hey, this is a long shot, but can you pull some passenger manifests for me?” Punky turned her back on them as Colt and Jug traded confused looks. “Santa Cruz Island… oh, really?”

Jug leaned over and whispered conspiratorially to Colt, “What do you suppose is going through her mind?”

Colt shook his head. “I’m afraid to find out.”

“Yes, I guess the Island Packers… what about flights?” Punky ripped a sheet of paper from the bulletin board mounted in the hall, then dug into her pocket for a pen. “Go ahead with that info… say that again? RLC?” She stopped writing and shot Colt a look. “Did you say Santa Maria?”

Colt grimaced when he saw the look on her face.

Punky ended the call. “She’s on Santa Cruz Island.”

* * *

“Who’s on Santa Cruz Island?” Colt asked.

“TANDY,” she said, with an edge to her voice. Her eyes glossed over, focused on a distant scene.

“That’s a pretty big stretch.”

Punky turned and looked through the open hangar doors at the Carbon Cub sitting idle on the ramp next to the larger Joint Strike Fighters. He could see her wheels turning but didn’t know what was going through her mind. Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long.

“Not long after the police were called to the scene of an accident in the Santa Maria valley, a helicopter owned by RLC took off from Santa Maria airport and flew to Santa Cruz Island,” she said, filling them in on what she had learned from her phone conversation.

“Who’s RLC?” Colt asked.

She waved it away. “Totally legit. It’s a Louisiana-based company that flies roughnecks to and from oil rigs off the coast. But this trip to Santa Cruz Island wasn’t part of their normal routine.”

“And you think TANDY was on that flight? That’s pretty thin.”

“What about the missing hikers?”

Jug added his two cents. “Hikers go missing all the time.”

“On an island visited by a helicopter that departed an airport less than twenty miles from where my partner was shot dead?”

Neither pilot responded. Colt knew the evidence was circumstantial at best, but she was like a dog with a bone, and he knew she wasn’t about to give up on this. At last, he spoke up. “So, what do you want to do?”

Punky didn’t answer right away and instead turned to look at Jug. “If you were going to transmit a signal line-of-sight and get the greatest range, where would you do it?”

“At the top of a mountain,” he replied.

“Any mountains on Santa Cruz Island?”

He shook his head. “There’s some definite elevation on the island, but maybe only a couple thousand feet.”

“Is there any way we can search for it? Some sort of electronic surveillance equipment?”

Again, Jug shook his head. “The F-35C has the AN/ASQ-239 electronic warfare suite. Once the engineers in China Lake have identified the waveform, we can use it to search for and jam the signal—”

“What’s the other jet for?” Colt interrupted him, looking out at the jets on the ramp while feeling the familiar stirring in his gut of the sky calling his name. He had been ostracized from the Abraham Lincoln air wing, but his reputation was still mostly intact across the rest of the fleet. It might be enough.

Jug looked at the jets, then to Colt. “Uh-uh,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“If you’re hell-bent on going forward with this test, let me at least take the other bird and search for the signal. If we can pinpoint their location…”

“No way, Colt. Even if the other jet wasn’t on tap to be a spare, are you forgetting that you’ll be searching for an individual who is allegedly in possession of a weapon designed to defeat the JSF’s defenses? In a JSF?” Colt opened his mouth to argue, but Jug cut him off. “Besides, you need to stay behind and wait to hear back from our engineers.”

“What about your plane?” Punky asked Colt.

He wasn’t sure whether he should laugh at that or not. The Carbon Cub was an amazing plane, but it wasn’t designed to search for hostile forces and lacked the JSF’s EW suite. Even if he did take her flying, there wasn’t much he could do other than fly really low and scare TANDY. Finally, he answered her. “Nope.”

“I’m serious,” Punky said, unrelenting. “We can fly over to the island, find her, and then I can… arrest her.”

There was a long enough pause that Colt knew she wasn’t thinking about arresting her. But before he could answer, Jug jumped aboard Team Punky. “I can get you a pair of night vision goggles, but unless you know where to look, they won’t help you much.”

“You said there was a helicopter from the Mobile Bay?”