Ghost Ship (NUMA Files 12)

Kurt didn’t respond, and Hale straightened up and made his way toward the door. He stopped to offer one more comment before he left. “I’ll give you this, Kurt. You put on one hell of a show.”

As dusk fell, Kurt and Joe were driven to an American air base and a battleship-gray C-17 that sat on the tarmac, illuminated by a series of floodlights.

They entered from the tail ramp, cleared by a loading officer, who was busy strapping down a Humvee and some other tarpcovered equipment, and were offered seats near the front.

Kurt dropped into his seat, dejected and exhausted. Joe offered a few jokes to cheer him up, but Kurt didn’t have it in him. He sat in silence and stared straight ahead as the huge four-engine transport taxied and then took off into the dark sky.

As they climbed to altitude, Joe fell asleep, but Kurt found he couldn’t close his eyes. He racked his brain for one more avenue to explore, one tiny thing they might have missed that could lead them to Sienna, the other hackers, and whoever was behind a plot that Kurt was certain hadn’t truly begun to unfold yet.

Try as he might, he came up empty. And as the drone of the engines and the chill of the cabin numbed him, he stood and walked toward the front, stopping to stare through the small window in the aircraft door.

The sky was dark up ahead, but with a line of light on the horizon. Silver lining, Kurt thought, how ironic. As drained as he was, it took Kurt a minute to realize that there should not be a silver lining up ahead. If they were headed to Guam, they would be flying into the teeth of the night. They’d only been airborne a few hours and, despite the time zone change, it couldn’t be anywhere near dawn yet.

He looked backward. The sky behind them was pitch-black. “We’re going the wrong way,” he said to himself.

Before he could hazard a guess as to why, the cockpit door opened and a familiar figure stepped out.

“Hiram?” Kurt said.

Seeing Hiram Yaeger outside of the NUMA building was like running into the high school principal out on the town somewhere. It was off-key somehow. Adding to that effect was Hiram’s clothing: instead of his trademark T-shirt and jeans, Yaeger was zipped up in an olive drab military flight suit, with his ponytail tucked up into an Air Force ball cap pulled down tight over the top of his head.

“Are you undercover?” Kurt asked, half joking.

“In a way, I am,” Yaeger replied. “Dirk wanted me to brief you in person.”

“Brief me about what?”

“The mission.”

Kurt paused. “I thought there was no mission,” he said. “In fact, Tim Hale gave me the distinct impression that if I pushed it any further, I might end up in a stockade somewhere.”

Hiram laughed. “Hale is actually rather fond of you, from what I hear. He was very impressed with everything you two accomplished in such a short time.”

“So why the cold shoulder?”

“It was for Colonel Lee’s benefit,” Yaeger said. “And anyone else who might have been listening, for that matter. We think the Korean Security database has been hacked. And we’re not too sure about our own or the DOD’s. So we figured we’d lay out a story for Colonel Lee to enter into his system while I came here with handwritten notes to get you up to date.”

“Handwritten? That must have been hard for you,” Kurt joked.

“You have no idea,” Yaeger replied. “Might as well be using a slide rule or an abacus.”

Kurt laughed, happy to see a friendl

y face in an unexpected place for the second time in as many weeks. “So what tidings do you bring, O messenger of the realm?”

Yaeger waved at a pair of seats that faced each other. Kurt took one seat as Hiram sat across from him and zipped the flight suit down far enough to pull out a manila folder he had tucked inside. “An awful lot has happened while you were napping in that Korean hospital.”

“Good or bad?”

“A little of both,” Hiram said. “As soon as Joe positively identified Sienna Westgate among the group of people that had been smuggled out of North Korea, the administration went into overdrive. Brian Westgate was called in to explain himself. In the middle of a tirade about how Phalanx was unbreakable— even if someone had Sienna in their clutches—he suffered a mental breakdown of some kind and what we thought was a stroke. Turns out he’d been given the same treatment as you. They pulled a chip from his occipital lobe. A team from the FBI found prescription drugs in his house that had been tampered with and laced with memory-inhibiting compounds. He’s recovering and under guard for his own protection.”

“Does he remember anything?” Kurt asked.

“Not much. Seems they worked his mind over worse than yours.”

Kurt sat back. He’d harbored a natural dislike of the Internet billionaire ever since he’d learned of Sienna’s engagement to him. And from the beginning of this mystery, he’d been certain Westgate had some part in it. Finding out that Westgate had been given the same rough treatment and had been used as a pawn in some bigger scheme put Kurt in the odd place of feeling he’d misjudged the man. He could only imagine what was going through Westgate’s mind at this point.

“They pulled him from the yacht,” Kurt said, remembering what he’d heard. “After they escaped in that pod and the storm had passed, they put him in that raft and waited for someone to find him.”