Chapter 29 - The Secret Files
That evening, after the formal banquet at the officers' club, I returned to my shore command office at the Norfolk headquarters. The quiet of the office was a welcome relief after months of relentless operational tempo. On my desk lay a thick, classified manila folder sealed with red security tape, delivered directly from the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Written across the cover was a single designation: *PROJECT BLACK SKY: POST-MORTEM INTEL.*
I opened the file, expecting to see final judicial summaries on the trials of Richard and Kevin. Both had accepted guilty pleas earlier in the week, trading lifetime prison sentences without parole for confessions that implicated dozens of foreign brokers.
However, as I turned the pages, the nature of the documents changed drastically.
The transcripts were not from my father's interrogation. They were transcripts from an intercepted satellite transmission recovered from the rogue freighter's encrypted black box—recorded just hours before our warship intercepted them in the Atlantic.
The voice on the audio transcript belonged to a foreign intelligence handler, speaking in coded phrases to a contact embedded deep within the Department of Defense.
*“The shipment from Dayton is only the distraction,”* the foreign handler had stated. *“The Whitaker men are disposable pawns. If the Navy intercepts the freighter, let them celebrate. The real payload—the active warhead telemetry chipsets—have already arrived at their destination.”*
My breath caught in my throat. I flipped to the next page.
There was a satellite reconnaissance photograph of a clandestine naval base in the South China Sea, showing a prototype strike drone being loaded with high-tech American guidance systems—the exact blueprints that Kevin had allegedly stolen, but in quantities twenty times larger than what had been found on the freighter.
May you like
Dayton Precision Aerospace had not been the source of the leak. They had merely been the smokescreen.
***
