Still nothing. The coordinates were completely dead.
Doubt crept into my chest, cold and sharp. Had Marcus pulled the wrong metadata? Had Mark made a mistake? Or had Vance realized I possessed the SD card and called off the transfer?
I reached the exact GPS coordinates and banked the jet in a wide, slow orbit. The moon broke through the cloud cover, illuminating the rolling black waves of the ocean thousands of feet below. I was entirely alone.
Then, the radar warning receiver on my dash chirped.
It wasn't a thermal bloom. It was an active radar ping.
Someone was painting my aircraft.
I froze, my eyes darting to the threat display. My jet was supposed to be invisible to standard radar. The only way someone could paint me was if they were already dangerously close, projecting a massive amount of active energy specifically designed to burn through stealth coating.
The screen flashed, instantly populating with not one, not two, but six hostile contacts.
They hadn't arrived at the drop zone. They had been waiting for me to arrive.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The warning tone increased in frequency. They had established a hard lock on my jet.
I slammed the throttle forward, banking hard to the left to break the lock, but the contacts moved with me, anticipating my evasion. They were incredibly fast. Too fast for a cargo plane.
Through the canopy glass, I saw them bursting through the cloud deck below me.
Six F-16 fighter jets. The Black Falcons.
They surged upward in a perfect, aggressive wedge formation, boxing me in before I could gain altitude. The moonlight caught the dark gray paint of their fuselages and the lethal tips of the air-to-air missiles mounted beneath their wings.
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.
Mark’s coordinates hadn't been a drop zone. They were a kill box.
Vance knew exactly what was on that SD card. He hadn't panicked when Evans and Miller failed to catch me at the hangar. He had simply waited. He knew that if I decrypted the file, my sense of justice—my desperation to prove Mark’s innocence—would drive me straight to these coordinates.
He had lured me here. Just like he had lured Mark here fourteen months ago.
The radio on my dash crackled with heavy static, overriding my secure channel.
“Unidentified aircraft, this is Colonel Vance of the Black Falcons,” the arrogant, heavily accented voice filled my helmet, smooth and terrifyingly calm. “You have entered restricted airspace. Power down your weapons systems and prepare to ditch your aircraft, or you will be fired upon.”
He was reciting the standard military warning protocol. He was making sure that when the Pacific Fleet inevitably recovered his flight data recordings, it would look like a legitimate, authorized interception of a rogue aircraft. He was building his alibi in real-time.
“Are you really going to face us alone?” Vance’s voice sneered through the radio, breaking protocol just enough to taunt me.
I stared at the six jets surrounding me. They were fifty yards away, close enough that I could see the pilots' helmets in the cockpits. They had me outgunned, outnumbered, and locked down. I was flying an unarmed test jet. I had no missiles. No guns.
If I ejected, I would freeze to death in the black water. If I ran, they would shoot a missile up my tailpipe.
A profound, terrifying clarity washed over me.
I wasn't going to die here. I wasn't going to let them win.
I reached down to the center console, my fingers finding the shielded toggle switch for the experimental Aegis jammer. The system Mark had died trying to stop them from selling. The system I had spent the last year perfecting.
I took a slow breath, the plastic valves of my oxygen mask clicking sharply. I pressed the radio transmission button, keeping my voice utterly devoid of the terror tearing through my chest.
“You should have asked who was flying,” I said quietly.