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  “I— What are you talking about? This is a Mainland Chinese military aircraft and—”

  “And we have the situation completely under control. Now, I would appreciate it if you and your men could help us extract the wing that’s pinned in the wreckage there. Then we’ll need you to make up a search team to comb the wreckage for any injured citizens.”

  Jeremy had to bite his tongue not to laugh. The major was looking down at Taz as if she was a giant hand grenade about to explode in his face.

  Then his expression shifted, and he looked suddenly dangerous.

  Jeremy clutched his screwdriver more tightly.

  “Well?” the man spoke from behind them, making Taz actually jump in surprise. “You heard the woman. Snap to it, Major!”

  The man wore a full uniform.

  “What the—”

  The man tapped the two stars on his jacket’s shoulders, a lieutenant general.

  “Yes sir!” The major looked absolutely furious as he saluted sharply. Then he turned and screamed at his men to head toward the wreckage.

  The general smiled. “I arrived as quickly as I could. Sorry for the delay. I was busy addressing a perceived invasion, until I was informed that your team had landed. General Chang, at your service.”

  “Much appreciated, sir.”

  “I’ll just go keep the major out of your hair. I would continue to move quickly. Word is spreading rapidly.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He headed toward the wreckage.

  Andi and Holly hurried away to help the Black Hawk crew that was presently rigging a lift cable to the engine section.

  “Next time I tell you to do something in a situation like that, Jeremy, you’ve got to just do it. And a screwdriver? Really?” She tugged it out of his hand and stuffed it back into his pack’s pocket.

  “You were magnificent!” He couldn’t keep it in any longer. “The way you handled Miranda was so perfect. She always needs to know the truth and that’s exactly what you gave her so that she could make her decision. You were so cool with that general, too; they always make me nervous when I have to speak to them. And then that major. Ugh! He reminded me of this Air Force general the day I met Miranda. Though you were even scarier than he was.”

  “Who was that?”

  “General Oswald Harrington.”

  “Oh, Oswald wasn’t ever an officious prick. Though he wasn’t the smartest man ever.”

  “Well, I’m glad General Nason threw him out of the Air Force.”

  Taz stopped and eyed him. “Is that what happened to him?”

  “He pulled a gun on Miranda and was running an illegal drone operation for the CIA. That’s how we got connected to Zhang Ru…kinda.”

  “I’d like to hear that story in order someday.”

  “I probably shouldn’t have said anything, that mission was code-word classified too, just like this one. By the way, what is the code word for this? I must not have been paying attention.”

  Taz shoved him up against the fuselage of the J-20 and kissed him hard.

  He didn’t understand why, but he wasn’t dumb enough to hesitate.

  He wrapped his arms around her and remembered what it had been like to make love to her in the heart of the Baja desert.

  She broke off long before he was ready. In fact, the kiss had only lasted moments, which was probably best under the circumstances—in danger on a Taiwanese beach.

  “What was that for?”

  Taz just grinned up at him. “There is no code word on this mission, Jeremy. I was making it up as I went. And the next time I signal you to leave, you leave. It was all coming apart. If that general hadn’t stepped in, we’d have been in deep shit. I wanted you clear.”

  “Oh.” He still didn’t get why she’d kissed him. “Well, I wouldn’t have left you alone even if I had understood. Besides, you made it up pretty amazingly well,” he nodded toward the wreckage. “I almost wish the general hadn’t showed up. I’ll bet you could have pulled it off. You’re amazing!”

  A Black Hawk was hovering over the wing sticking out of the wreckage. The major’s men were leveraging back pieces of the bandshell’s structure using other scraps as levers. Using a cargo winch, the Black Hawk was able to tug the wing free with only a minimum of damage, and then soar aloft.

  Holly and Andi came hustling toward them.

  Together, the four of them climbed into the last Black Hawk. In moments, it too was aloft, carrying the last section of the shattered fuselage.

  62

  The interior of the 767’s cargo bay was an ideal space for studying the wreckage of an airplane. Miranda would have to remember that if such a situation ever came up again.

  The parts of the Chengdu J-20 were laid out on tracked pallets that were secured to the cargo deck. There was plenty of room to circle around each section because, even in pieces, the jet didn’t begin to fill the vast cargo bay. The lighting was bright and even, as would be appropriate for handling cargo.

  If she had any complaint, it was that the pieces were not in order. The cockpit was at the rear, next came one of the wings. The heavy twin engines were at the center of lift over the wings for balancing purposes. And then close behind their pallet of seats was the midsection that included the bomb bay, engine intakes, and the attachment point for the canard wings that they hadn’t been able to recover from the wreckage.

  “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “With a little sleep?” Holly stretched.

  Miranda looked at her watch. “It’s eight a.m.”

  “Miranda! That was so fifteen times zones ago.”

  Which was an inaccurate statement. They’d only crossed nine time zones to reach Taiwan and were through no more than one on their return to JBLM, where they’d refuel and offload the team before continuing to Groom Lake and offloading the Chengdu.

  “I can’t. This is probably my only opportunity to study the plane. Once it arrives at Groom Lake, I doubt they’ll want our help. Do you realize that this aircraft has the Xian WS-15 engines? Everyone thinks that they’re still in development. With these engines, the J-20 is capable of fuel-conserving supercruise at Mach-plus speeds. Have you ever studied the configuration of a supercruise engine?”

  “New one on this girl. Okay, you’ve convinced me. Sleep is for wimps and dipsticks anyway. Let’s start there.”

  Miranda extracted her new camera and a fresh notebook from her pack.

  Mike and Andi were still in their seats. They would have very little to say about the J-20. Yes, Andi was right, they each had their expertise.

  Jeremy, being the systems specialist, had started in the cockpit. Taz was with him.

  Miranda had thought that Taz knew very little about crashes, but at Fulong Beach, she had acted as if she knew a great deal. On the helicopter flight back to Songshan Airport, Mike had assured her that Taz knew exactly what she was doing. And sure enough, the remaining pieces had arrived in quick succession.

  Perhaps that she was inspecting the cockpit with Jeremy proved the point.

  Yes, Miranda would focus on her own specialty, learning as much as she could about this aircraft in the next eleven hours.

  There would be time to learn more about Tasia Flores later.

  Miranda knelt to peer at the midsection of the fuselage.

  Holly knelt beside her.

  “Let’s work the engines from front to rear. First we’ll image the shape of the underbelly air intakes, at least where they weren’t damaged too much by impacting the sand.”

  “What’s that?”

  Miranda held up her new camera. “It’s a hundred-and-thirty-four-megapixel 3D camera by Matterport. It is really intended for creating true 3D images of a room for creating virtual tours and the like, but I wanted to test it on a crash. If we could accurately record the damage in 3D for later inspection, that could be interesting.”

  “Goodonya!” Holly offered what Miranda had assessed to be her highest praise—it consistently topped th
e chart in her notebook of Aussieisms.

  Miranda liked the feel of that.

  63

  Jeremy sat in the hole left by the ejection of the pilot’s seat. The scorch marks of the rockets had turned the floor black, so he’d tossed down an in-flight courtesy blanket to keep his pants clean. His nose was even with the edges of the cockpit. It made him feel munchkin tall.

  He could identify all of the instruments, even if they were labeled in Chinese. Most were lifted from Russian designs, which in turn had been lifted from Western designs. All of the stealing from each other did offer a layer of translation.

  Without the engines running, the console was dead and inaccessible.

  Or was it?

  The engine throttles were pulled back to shutdown. If this was even loosely based on the Russian Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker, then the switch at the lower right would be the fuel dump. Which was pressed. That would explain why the jet hadn’t exploded on impact, the pilot had dumped the fuel before beaching the aircraft.

  Once he had the general flow of the fuel system figured out, he could see what logically must be the hydraulic system’s controls.

  That meant the electrics were—

  “Hey!”

  “What?” Taz was leaning against the plane with her arms crossed on the cockpit’s edge and her chin on her arms. She’d been just standing there watching him.

  Jeremy took a guess and stabbed a button.

  The cockpit instruments lit up.

  Taz peeked at them in surprise. “What did you do?”

  “The battery. There would be a battery so that the instruments would work even if the engines weren’t running. In fact, it’s probably in the cockpit so that the radios would function in case there’s a catastrophic failure farther back in the aircraft.”

  “A catastrophic failure like the fuselage being broken into three parts?”

  “Yes, exactly like that.”

  He wasn’t sure why she was suddenly smiling at him.

  “What?”

  She just shook her head in a flurry of hair, but her smile didn’t go away.

  He turned back to study the console before he did something stupid.

  “I wonder…” A light stuttered at him. He clapped his hands; it blinked on, then back off.

  “What now?”

  “They installed a Quick Access Recorder. A QAR should record most of the airplane’s data.” He only had to poke around a little before he found where the memory stick was stored. He popped it out. And checked the interface.

  “Can you read it?”

  “Standard interface. No problem.”

  “So what does it say, Jeremy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you said you could read it.” She was squinting at him and that laugh was really close to the surface again.

  “I can. With an adapter on my computer.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  Jeremy pushed to his feet and climbed out of the cockpit. “What are you talking about?”

  “I assumed you were such a super nerd-boy that you could just read it. Like a book.”

  He was finally getting a feel for her sense of humor. The first time they’d met, she’d never shown a single hint of one…in fact, she’d rarely spoken except when he asked a direct question. But now…

  “Well, I could just read it…” he headed toward his pack, which was still at the far end of the cargo bay up by the seats.

  “But…” Taz was definitely teasing him.

  He leaned in close, until he could feel the warmth of her cheek close by his, and her hair just brushed against his skin. “But I don’t like to show off too much.”

  Taz’s laugh of delight caused Holly to stand too quickly and bang her head on the engine’s rear cowling. That would pay her back for all of those arm punches. Or at least a few of them.

  At the seats, they pulled on headsets, then he fished out his laptop and plugged in the right adapter.

  Mike and Andi were eating a meal of zapped burritos and a can of Coke. They had their microphones swung up out of the way.

  Jeremy ignored the growl in his stomach and studied the screen. He could make sense of many of the data streams just by their configuration. He began pairing them off with the software’s labels: altitude, airspeed, engine temperature…

  At some point, Taz must have left him because she handed him a too-hot burrito, which he almost dropped on his keyboard, and a can of soda. He took a bite—almost crunching down on his microphone—sucked in cool air, and went back to unraveling the data.

  The number strings that must be global positioning didn’t make any sense until he remembered this was a Chinese aircraft. He flipped his filter from GPS to BDS—the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System.

  There.

  He sent the feed to his course-mapping software, which quickly traced the path of the J-20’s final flight.

  “Weird flight path. Pretty slick, Mr. Trahn.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Was Taz teasing him again? Hard to tell.

  “What’s that?” Taz was leaning so close to view the screen that her shoulder rubbed against his when she pointed at the data stream. She was very distracting or he might have noticed it sooner. Maybe not, the blip wasn’t very big.

  “A voice track. Voice-activated.” That’s why he hadn’t picked up on it sooner, it only occurred in a few places in the timeline. He patched it into the intercom, isolated the peak Taz had spotted, and hit play.

  A short bit of Chinese sounded over the headphones.

  Andi snorted her Coke on a burst of choking laughter. “Play that again! Play it again!”

  Jeremy could hear her despite her mic being off.

  Andi laughed even louder the second time.

  “Okay, what did we miss?” Holly and Miranda came over, donned headsets, and joined the group.

  Jeremy just pointed.

  Andi was still giggling as she swung her microphone down, which turned it back on. “Please tell me there’s more.”

  Jeremy isolated the audio track from the other data streams. “Four bits.” He hit play.

  64

  Taz watched Andi sober immediately before she started the translation.

  “This is Captain Chen Bo of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. I have been ordered by General Li Zuocheng to test Taiwan’s defenses with a solo intrusion of a Chengdu J-20. I am told that if they retaliate, the President says we are ready. I do this willingly to honor my country.”

  “Fuck me,” Holly sounded as if she’d just had the air kicked out of her gut.

  Jeremy paused it, “That’s the first segment. He recorded that shortly after crossing the midline of the Taiwan Strait, though a hundred kilometers north of Taipei.”

  “His tone,” Andi shook her head. “Play it again.”

  Taz just didn’t know Mandarin. She had no ability to read the pilot’s mood.

  Andi looked impossibly sad after the second playing. “He doesn’t sound honored. He sounds miserable. Who the hell is General Li Zuocheng?”

  Jeremy did a quick search.

  When Taz saw the result, it was her turn to curse.

  “He’s one of the vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission. The second most powerful person in China,” Jeremy told the others.

  Miranda nodded as if pleased. “I thought his name sounded familiar. Good. Now I know why.”

  “He’s also…” Taz felt as if she was going to choke, “…Mei-Li’s lover’s grandfather.”

  Mike tipped his head enough that Taz could feel his neck pop even if she couldn’t hear it.

  They all waited.

  “There’s the first piece,” Mike was nodding to himself. “I was wondering when it would start coming together.”

  “It’s coming together?” Taz wasn’t the only one who was shocked.

  “At JBLM, Chen Mei-Li said she’d been ‘owned’ by General Zhang Ru, apparently as a sexual slave. She worked out some sort of trade to get free of him, a
trade which placed him on the CMC. And now it makes sense. She somehow connected Zhang Ru and Li Zuocheng, one of the vice chairmen. As a bonus, she gets rid of Ru and pairs up with Zuocheng’s favorite granddaughter as a lover instead. And between them, they somehow have enough power to leave the country to attend the University of Washington. My guess is that it is far more about safety than about either of them needing an advanced education. She was incredibly smart.”

  Taz juggled the pieces in her head—and they fit. She should have seen it.

  “Hey, Mike?” She waited until he looked at her. “Totally the A-10.”

  “Thanks.” He’d got the compliment, of course. Not Mr. Warm-and-fuzzy, I’m-just-a-little-Mooney-passenger-plane. He was totally the A-10 Thunderbolt II close-air-support jet fighter.

  Holly, just out of Mike’s sightline, offered her a firm nod of “You got it right, girl.”

  Surprising, but better than being fed to a float of salties.

  “Play the next piece, Jeremy.”

  “Okay, this is after the pilot arrived just offshore from Fulong Beach, but hadn’t overflown it yet.” He hit play.

  Everyone turned to Andi, who just nodded when it was done.

  “It’s not so funny now. The pilot is some kind of pissed. The literal translation is: ‘You cow-sucking baboon’s ass, Ru.’”

  “Ru, not Li?”

  “It’s definitely Ru he’s angry with.”

  “That fits, too,” Miranda was nodding. “At the table with Drake and Lizzy, Ru sent a text. He said he had ordered a crash as a token of good faith. He was giving the J-20 to Drake for helping him to stop the Chinese President from invading Taiwan.”

  Taz felt the shock down to her boots. Miranda had been at the center of a piece of global politics. Did she even understand that?

  No one else looked surprised, as if Miranda did that all the time.

  Holly just slouched in her seat and grinned at Andi. “You Chinese people have very weird curses. You shoulda been an Aussie; you’d fit right in.”

  Andi barely smiled at Holly’s attempt to lighten the mood. “The reason I laughed so hard the first time is that it’s from this great, one-season science fiction show called Firefly. The show’s curses were all in Mandarin to get around the censors, but it’s become a thing. Chen Bo must have been a fan because the curses weren’t authentic Chinese. They were all made up for the show.”