Almost as if Jug had forgotten Colt already ruled out the use of his airplane, he continued helping Punky formulate her strategy for flying the twenty-five miles across the Pacific Ocean to Santa Cruz Island to hunt down the Chinese intelligence operative who had murdered her partner. “When you get airborne, you can call Raptor Two Four on Cobalt.”

“What’s Cobalt?” Punky asked.

Jug read off the frequency, then realized it was in the ultrahigh frequency band. “Just come up Guard when you get to the island, and I’ll have them reach you there.”

Punky nodded, and Colt held up his hands. “Are you guys forgetting that it’s my plane you’re talking about taking?”

“Well, if you’re staying here, what else is she going to fly?” Jug asked.

“No way.” Colt shook his head, unable to believe what he was hearing. He had let other instructors on the staff fly his plane, but he was in the cockpit with them. The idea of letting a woman he had just met fly his pride and joy was ludicrous — especially given the head wound she had received during the assassination attempt earlier that morning.

“Colt.”

He looked into her pale blue eyes and felt his resolving waning. Part of him knew he should trust her instincts the same way he trusted his own in a dogfight. But another part of him couldn’t bear the thought of sitting on the sidelines while she went on the offensive. “No,” he said, but with less conviction.

“Colt,” she said again. “You know it’s worth looking into.”

He did, but that didn’t make it easier for him to accept. “Fine,” he said at last. “You can fly to the island, satisfy your curiosity, then come back.”

Jug cleared his throat. “Let’s get you those night vision goggles.”

38

A little over an hour later, Jug watched Punky taxi away from the hangar in Colt’s Carbon Cub. She handled the airplane like a pro, but he still understood why Colt was nervous just handing the keys over to her. He would have felt the same way if she had suggested taking his Mooney.

After her plane disappeared around the corner to takeoff on Runway 27, Jug returned to the makeshift paraloft and suited up for his flight. He had verified with the Mobile Bay that the airspace was still clear and that conditions remained ideal to execute the test. Despite Colt’s best efforts at convincing him to postpone it, he felt a stir of excitement as he walked back through the empty hangar and onto the dark flight line to man up.

Walking up to his jet, Jug took a moment to appreciate the beautiful lines of the plane. Some considered the F-35C ugly in comparison to fighters of the previous generation, but he didn’t agree. The composite skin had RAM, or Radar Absorbent Material, baked into the body panels, giving it a darker gray look compared to non-stealth carrier aircraft. But its sharp, crisp lines looked elegant from any angle. His jet’s canopy was tilted forward in the open position, and a boarding ladder dropped down from an oddly shaped panel on the left side of the jet below the ejection seat.

Spotlights shone down on the aircraft, casting shadows across the ground as he walked closer and greeted his plane captain. Then, as he had done on every flight before, he completed an exterior preflight inspection, spending a few extra minutes inside the weapon bays with the ordies, inspecting his weapons for the mission. Underneath the nose and hidden behind a durable sapphire window was the EOTS, that combined Forward-Looking Infrared and Infrared Search and Track functionality. It was used for both air-to-surface and air-to-air targeting and would see action in both arenas during the test.

Following his walk-around, Jug climbed the ladder and stepped down into the Martin-Baker Mk16 ejection seat, spending a few minutes calming his nerves by methodically strapping himself into the seat and connecting his life-support systems to the jet. With each buckle that snapped together, he felt his stomach settle just a little bit more as everything going on around him faded away until he was left with total focus on the upcoming mission. It was the final step in combining man and machine and making them one.

Nothing would get in the way of that.

* * *

As Punky climbed away from Runway 27, she reacquainted herself with the Carbon Cub’s controls. The tower controller cleared her to depart to the west, and she turned left slightly and went feet wet just south of Port Hueneme.

Unlike the two naval aviators, Punky had never flown over the ocean at night. Her eyes strained to see anything that even remotely resembled a horizon, but she finally gave up and focused on the synthetic horizon displayed on the Garmin glass panel Colt had installed in the plane. Every private pilot had at least three hours of night time and ten takeoffs and landings in the dark, but even her own experience of double that was woefully inadequate to prepare her for the flight to Santa Cruz Island.