Ruby pressed Play again. She sat up when she saw the first older dead man in the captain’s chair.

What in the hell? she thought, looking at the white-haired guy. He didn’t look military. He looked like a lawyer or a businessman or something.

The moment she saw the blue patches on his face and the dried blood, she knew what had probably happened to make the plane crash.

There had been a sudden loss of cabin pressure, Ruby realized.

The bluish face on the screen was almost identical to a picture of a plane fatality victim she had seen in one of their training manuals about cabin pressurization system failure.

At high altitude, pressure system failure was extremely deadly. First, the rapid change in pressure often induced nosebleeds. Then because of the low percentage of oxygen at 40,000 feet, a rapid loss of consciousness would almost immediately occur. Even after only thirty seconds of losing oxygen at a high enough altitude, pilots could become completely incapacitated.

A sudden loss of cabin pressure knocking out everyone on board also explained the challenging search for the plane, Ruby realized. If the autopilot was on at the time, the only limit to how far the plane could have traveled was based on how much fuel was in the tank. If the Gulfstream’s tanks were even relatively full, it could have come from virtually anywhere, Ruby realized. South America. Heck, maybe even Europe, she thought.

Ruby shook her head when she realized that the plane might have even had military-grade radar-jamming capability.

No wonder they had been so frantically looking for it.

It had been a true ghost plane.

She watched as the camera lit over the rest of them. Still no uniforms. They all looked like civilians, four civilians. Even the pilots’ uniforms looked like commercial ones.

She remembered the dataplate again. The blank dataplate.

What in the hell was going on? she thought.

She watched it a second time. She had the odd urge to wipe her hand on her uniform shirt after she finally handed back the phone.

“You tell anybody you have this?” she said.

“Just my buddy Matt. The guy I was talking to when you spoke to us last night.”

“The deck ape?” Ruby said.

Steve laughed.

“That’s Matt,” he said.

“Okay, Steve. Listen to me. Don’t tell anybody else about this video, okay? And tell your buddy Matt to shut the hell up about it, too. Keep it to yourself.”

“Why?” he said.

Ruby turned back to the gray boat looming there. The dividers up there on the deck. The big stone-faced petty officer guarding the rail.

“Silence is golden,” she finally said.

15

An hour and a half later, a Chevy Cobalt drove out of the base without incident. Then a Nissan Altima came in. Then a Kia Soul headed out, and the guards by the fence came out of their shack and stopped it.

On the side of the guardhouse were two signs: POSITIVE ID REQUIRED and RESTRICTED AREA AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—KEEP OUT.