She turned and looked at him in horror as he showed her some kind of harness.

“What?” she shrieked.

“Gotcha,” the helmeted crew chief said with a grin. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. Roy will land it. Maybe even on the boat, if we’re lucky.”

The officer who met her on the chopper pad’s edge was fair-haired and clean-shaven and, like almost everyone else in the coast guard, looked young enough to still be in college.

“Welcome to the Surmount, Lieutenant Everett. I’m Lieutenant Martin,” he said, shaking her hand as he led her up a short set of steps through a doorway.

Inside, there were three blue-uniformed seamen on the bridge. She dropped her bag in an unobtrusive corner, the air-conditioning delicious after the humid heat in the chopper.

“So you’re the investigative team,” Martin said as they watched out the pilothouse glass where a team of coasties with a hose was already refueling the Dolphin.

“The first,” she said. “There are four of us altogether. The others are on the way. So what do you have? A downed aircraft?”

“It’s a plane,” Martin said, nodding. “One of our guys on watch spotted it on our radar about five hours ago. We do long-range drug-interdiction patrols out of Miami Beach, so we thought it was a boat in distress on the water at first.

“But as we approached, we saw its tail fin barely sticking up out of the water. That was only from its rear section. It’s actually broken in two. The front part is under a hundred feet of water. I was about to call the local airport on Little Abaco for any missing aircraft, but then I saw the bulletin. My father’s buddy Al Litvak works at the naval safety office, so I called him first directly. You know Al?”

“Yes,” Ruby said. “He’s one of my boss’s bosses. You said there was a bulletin?”

“Yep. It was on our OPREP board. I saw it when I came on watch. It said something about a missing air force jet to be on the lookout for.”

She thought about that. No one had told her about a missing jet.

“So it’s a jet? What kind? Do you know?”

Martin took out an iPhone and brought up a picture.

“Not a military one, as far as I can tell. It’s some kind of corporate jet. Our diver took a photograph of a dataplate on a piece of debris near the tail section. Gulfstream, it says. See?”

She looked at the image. Gulfstream was all it said. There was nothing stamped in the boxes for model and serial number and FAA certification.

Maybe it was an EC-37B, she thought. The EC-37B was the new military version of the Gulfstream 550 that had electronic warfare capability. It could jam radar and other electronic systems.

Perhaps it was on a test flight? Which was maybe why it hadn’t been picked up by local airports’ radar?

Ruby peered at the photograph again. She had never seen a blank dataplate before. It was like staring at a car license plate with no number on it.