Navy Justice. Geri Krotow

       CHAPTER ONE

      0615 Monday Morning Whidbey Island, Washington

      JOY ALEXANDER FORCED herself to ignore the clock and leisurely sip her morning coffee. She had more than an hour until her first day at the law firm—her first civilian job after a decade in the Navy. Since the law office was seven minutes away, tops, and she’d already showered, she could afford to enjoy the view a bit longer.

      Five minutes. She waited for the satisfaction she usually felt when she thought about her new life, her new career. But this time she didn’t feel it. Had to be first-day jitters, that was all.

      The blue of the water changed to gray as the Strait of Juan de Fuca glistened in the morning light. Even though she’d planned to make the switch to civilian life for the last three years of her career as a Navy JAG, right now it felt as though it’d happened in the blink of an eye. She stretched her arms over her head, enjoying the taut feel of her muscles after last night’s yoga class. She’d traded years of Navy PT tests and the sweaty gym for poses in a pristine studio, and she had no regrets.

      The flutters in her stomach were purely physical reactions to her excitement at her new job.

      The rumble of jet engines reached her ears a split second before two Navy F-18 Growlers shot across the sky, overflying her house, leaving the Whidbey Island airspace for the Pacific Ocean. She wondered if an aircraft carrier was waiting for them. She watched their shapes grow smaller as they gained altitude and distance. A second round of jet noise rushed over her house, but this was lower, slower. Turbojets. Sure enough, a P-8 Poseidon, followed by its predecessor, the P-3 Orion, flew by and their flight appeared slow and laborious after the showiness of the fighter jets.

      The P-8 and P-3 platforms didn’t land on carriers, but instead performed reconnaissance and antisubmarine missions. No doubt a Naval exercise was afoot. She’d often observed the aircraft over the past year from her home base of Naval Air Station, Whidbey Island. They always made her feel comfortable—they were that familiar to her.

      She tried to ignore the pang of nostalgia; it would do nothing but increase her anxiety about starting her civilian life.

      Joy had no room for anxiety in her carefully structured routine.

      Scanning the horizon yielded nothing in the way of wildlife, the real reason she loved sitting out here. Not one whale spout. A cargo ship and a smaller fishing vessel floated in the distance, and she wondered if the small boat was out there to whale watch. Maybe it belonged to an amateur photographer, hoping to get shots of the Navy’s power. Aviation buffs were serious about observing Naval flight operations and referred to the loud noise of the jets as the “Sound of Freedom.”

      She certainly felt it was. She’d proudly been part of supporting the operators who served all over the globe in missions that ranged from humanitarian aid to the ugliest aspects of war.

      Would working in a civilian firm ever be as rewarding? She doubted it. But it was time...

      A single burst of bright light came out of nowhere, as if an invisible finger had lit a match against the sea. She gasped at the immediate appearance of a fireball, followed by dark smoke.

      As the reality that she’d seen an explosion registered, the tiled floor of her sunroom shuddered, and a soft boom rolled across the beachfront.

      Normally, she’d associate the blast and its vibration with one or both of the F-18s breaking the sound barrier. But she’d seen the explosion. Had it been an aircraft exploding?

      No, the fireball was too low.

      Fighting her shock she forced her gaze to remain steady on the same distant spot where she’d identified the cargo ship with a fishing boat in the foreground. Her observation could prove instrumental in helping Search and Rescue.

      She blinked as the reality registered.

      Only one of the two vessels remained. The smaller fishing boat was gone, vanished in the few minutes it had taken the smoke to appear.

      She waited for her brain to make sense of the images. Migrating whales, inbound storms, cargo ships—those were all common sights on the ocean. But clouds of dark black smoke rising above the horizon, spewing from the flash of a fireball? Never.

      It was what had preceded the explosion that made her hands shake, made her know with certainty that while she’d resigned her Navy JAG commission last month, she would never let go of her sense of duty. Something, no, someone, had done this on purpose, possibly as a threat to the aircraft. The timing of the blast was too close to the overflight.

       You could be wrong.

      Joy stood in her sunroom and ignored her internal prosecutor as easily as she denied the pain from the hot coffee that spilled on her hands. She placed her cup on the mosaic-tiled café table she’d brought back from Italy and grabbed her binoculars, a gift from her parents when she’d resigned her commission. She dialed the area into focus with the familiarity born of long watches on board a Navy ship. From her sunroom she was more accustomed to looking for whale pods or bald eagles.

      She saw ominously dark smoke and snakes of bright flame reaching toward it. She adjusted the focus. Was she sure that had been a small vessel? It’d had a low profile; probably wasn’t anything bigger than a fishing boat. The cargo ship was still there, but too far away to make out many details.

      What had made that little boat explode? She rested the binoculars on her chest as she scanned the horizon, even though she knew it by heart. Her home sat on a West Beach cliff, and the only land nearer to the explosion was farther north, toward the base, where the land curved westward into the strait.

      This hadn’t been some kind of base exercise gone wrong. The Navy didn’t drop weapons in Puget Sound.

       Calm down and think.

      What had she seen?

      It was always the Navy’s fear that a terrorist would procure a rogue weapon like a surface-to-air missile, a SAM, and take out a plane. It was a threat for anyone who flew after 9-11.

      Had she just witnessed that fear come true?

      She shook her head. No. If one of the aircraft had been shot out of the sky, the explosion would have been greater, the impact louder and more tangible. Plus, the explosion had occurred well after the aircraft flew by.

      She’d never served downrange, never had a Patriot missile fly over her head on its way to attack an enemy missile, never had to worry about getting into bio-chem gear. Her entire Navy career had taken place in courtrooms Stateside and overseas, with one carrier tour at sea and one trip to Guantanamo Bay to serve as defense lawyer for a suspected terrorist.

      Where she’d worked with an enlisted SEAL, a man she’d never forget.

      She squeezed her eyes shut against the intrusive memory.

      She wouldn’t think about him today. She’d spent enough time obsessing over the man who’d rattled her scrupulous professional demeanor.

      The last trial of her Norfolk tour that resulted from the brief time in Guantanamo Bay had almost done her in. It had convinced her that her Afghani defendant was innocent, however, and she took the case to trial in Norfolk.

      That took