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  She checked her watch. Chipped bezel, smashed face, hands jammed at the moment of egress: four-ten.

  She unbuckled the watch and threw it away.

  Sun high overhead. Merciless heat.

  She peeled off her gloves and tucked them in a pocket. She unclipped her survival vest, unzipped her flight suit and tied the sleeves round her waist. An olive-drab T-shirt blotched with sweat.

  Her face was glazed with perspiration. Half-remembered advice from survival school, Thompson Falls, Montana. Her instructor, Major Coplin: ‘Don’t towel sweat. It has a function. Let perspiration cool your skin by slow evaporation.’

  She should have retained the parachute. Used it to make a headdress. Hung it for shade.

  She spoke, just to break the awful silence:

  ‘Get it together, bitch. Don’t let morphine mess your thoughts.’

  The chute lay a hundred yards distant, pasted to the side of a dune.

  Best move before analgesia wore off.

  She slung the survival vest round her shoulders and began to crawl.

  A journey out of nightmares. Fingers raked mineral dust. Massive muscular effort to advance a single inch.

  Steep gradients. Sliding sand. Every time she stopped for breath she began to lose ground.

  She paused at the top of each dune and sat a while, raised her head greedy for any kind of breeze.

  An ass-skid descent. She spread her arms to slow her slide. An uncontrolled tumble might rip open her fractured leg. Jagged bone could tear through skin. Turn a painful injury into a life-threatening crisis. She would quickly bleed out, fresh arterial blood soaking into sand as she struggled to push flaps of wet muscle back into her calf and choke the wound with a boot-lace tourniquet.

  She crawled the steep gradient on her belly and dug deep with her hands like she was swimming through dust.

  She hauled herself to the crest.

  The chute was gone.

  She looked around. The breeze had dragged the parachute a quarter mile distant, far out of reach.

  ‘Christ.’

  She lay in the sand awhile, head in the dust, robbed of strength by an enervating wave of defeat.

  Fierce, unwavering sun.

  She galvanised heavy limbs, took off her T-shirt, draped it over her head and shoulders. The sweat-sodden cotton burned dry in seconds, leaving salt rime at the seams. The sun seared her bare back.

  She unzipped a vest pocket. Three small water sachets bound by a rubber band. Vinyl envelopes of vacuum-sealed liquid squirmed between her fingers. She ran her tongue over parched lips. She gripped a tear-tab, fought the urge to rip open a packet, throw back her head and suck it dry. Three hundred and seventy-five millimetres in total. Best conserve liquid as long as possible. She rezipped the pocket.

  She shielded her eyes and scanned the horizon. Distant mountains veiled by heat haze. Venusian peaks. Cliffs, buttes and mesas, insubstantial as cloud. Might be the Panamint Range. The plane was on target approach when the engines crapped out. Seven minutes from the drop, crew psyching themselves to launch the ALCM. Which put her somewhere in Death Valley and a long way from help.

  No smoke plume. No sign of wreckage.

  She cupped her hands. Loud as she could:

  ‘Pinback? Guthrie?’

  She held her breath, listened hard.

  ‘Hello? Can anyone hear me?’

  Silence.

  She thought back to her final moments aboard the B-52. The plane tearing itself apart. Thick smoke. Shudder and jolt. Flickering cabin lights. Shrill stall warnings, Master Caution and ENGINE FIRE panel alerts. Frantic chatter over the interphone as Pinback and Hancock fought to save the plane:

  ‘Two’s down. Shutting crossfeeds.’

  ‘We need to put her on the deck.’

  ‘No time. Give me more thrust.’

  ‘That’s all she’s got.’

  ‘Nose up. Nose up.’

  ‘Power warning on Four. Wild RPMs. We’re losing her.’

  ‘Restart.’

  ‘Nothing. No response.’

  ‘Full shut down and restart.’

  ‘Negative. She’s not spooling.’

  ‘Hit the ignition override.’

  ‘She’s stone dead. Time to call it.’

  ‘One more go. Come on, girl. Give me some lift.’

  ‘Losing airspeed. Can’t keep the nose. I’m getting hydraulic failure. Oil pressure is dropping through the floor. I got red lights all over.’

  Momentary pause. Pinback running options, trying to figure some way to save the plane.

  ‘All right. That’s it. She’s going down. Out of here, guys. Eject, eject, eject.’

  The crew punched out one by one as the plane slowed to a fatal stall. Tripped their ejector seats before the crushing g-force of a nosedive froze them in their chairs. They adopted the posture: elbows tight, back straight, then wrenched the trigger handle between their legs. Hatches blew, rockets fired. Pilots through the roof, navigators through the floor. They must have landed miles apart.

  Channel select from Guard to Alpha.

  ‘This is Frost anyone copy, over?’

  NO SIG.

  ‘Pinback? Early? Anyone out there, over?’

  NO SIG.

  ‘Come on, guys. Sound off.’

  No response.

  She set the handset to Acquisition, held it up and watched numerals flicker as it scanned wavebands.

  Nothing. No military traffic, no civilian.

  Sudden signal spike. A weak analogue broadcast. She held the handset at arm’s length, swung it three-sixty and tried to get a lock.

  FM interference replaced by Hendrix. Churning guitar reverb floated across the dunes. ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. Woodstock. Face-paint peace signs. Get Out of Nam. The ghost of old wars.

  A voice cut in. Click of a pre-recorded message interrupting the transmission:

  ‘You’re listening to Classic Rock, Barstow. We have suspended our normal programming at this time as part of the National Emergency Broadcast System. Please stay tuned for important updates and announcements by Federal Authorities regarding current quarantine regulations and refuge centres in your area. Remember, it is your responsibility to stay informed.’

  Another snatch of improv feedback.

  Click. ‘You’re listening to Classic Rock, Barstow. We have suspended our normal programming at this time as part of the National Emergency Broadcast System …’

  She checked battery levels and switched the handset to transponder mode. The screen flashed BEACON to let her know a homing signal was broadcasting on SARSAT 406.025 MHz.

  The sun was getting high overhead. Several hours must have elapsed since Liberty Bell went down. The Vegas garrison would have been manning their comms gear, waiting for the B-52 to confirm target strike. Instead, the plane was out of contact and long overdue. Trenchman should have scrambled a TRAP team a while back. Fired up the Chinook and sent it west. She should be back at the compound by now, lying in a bunk, leg in fresh plaster, sipping Coke through a straw.

  Pang of pure grief for all the times she took air con and ice cubes for granted.

  Insidious thought:

  The boys back at Vegas have a single chopper. They need it. They won’t send it into deep desert to search for a downed plane.

  She told herself to shape up.

  Hold it together. They won’t abandon you. They won’t leave seven guys to die of thirst in the desert. And they sure as hell won’t forget the warhead.

  She inspected her weapon. A 9mm Beretta with a twelve-round clip slung beneath her left armpit in a passive retention holster. She blew dust from the pistol. Function check: she shucked the slide. She dug a plastic bag from her survival vest, wrapped the gun and returned it to her shoulder holster.

  This is not adversity. This is not your Great Test. You’ve got a bust leg and you need a drink. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

  A fierce struggle to stand upright. She balanced on her good leg and looked around at
surrounding dunes.

  An impact crater fifty yards to her left.

  She crawled on hands and knees.

  She slid into the bowl-depression and dug. She excavated a heavy nylon pack. The ejector seat survival kit. The pack had been strapped beneath her chair and released by barometric trigger as she plummeted to earth.

  She brushed sand from rip-stop fabric and pulled zippers.

  Emergency gear packed for patrol over the pack ice and sub-zero waters of the Bering Sea.

  A life raft and a plastic oar.

  An Arctic immersion suit.

  Woollen mittens.

  A woollen hat.

  ‘Fucking sweet.’

  She rubbed her eyes. Merciless glare. Forearms already cooked red. Couple more hours in the sun would inflict first degree burns. Weeping blisters. Peeling skin.

  The guys back in Vegas had looted plenty of supplies from abandoned supermarkets. Cans, water, cigarettes, pharmacy shelves swept clean. She wished they had had the foresight to snatch some high factor sun cream.

  She took out the life raft. Rip cord. Gas-roar. Tight-packed polyurethane plumped and unkinked as buoyancy chambers filled with CO2.

  A black one-person raft with a low tent canopy.

  Frost dragged the raft to the crest of a dune, oriented it to catch the near-imperceptible breeze, then climbed inside, glad to be out of direct sunlight.

  She drowsed in the shade, choosing to conserve sweat until the noonday heat began to abate.

  She closed her eyes and breathed slow, worked to induce sleep. No sound but the oceanic diastole/systole surge of pulsing blood vessels in her ear canal.

  She felt the raft buoyed by swells. She heard waves lap the side of the boat.

  She slept, and dreamed she was adrift on a vast, moonlit sea.

  6

  Adrift on a storm-lashed ocean. The blackest night. Driving rain. The raft rode thunderous, titanic swells. She gripped the side of the boat, tried to stabilise the roll, braced for the inevitable capsize.

  She jolted awake and shook off heart-pounding delirium. She wiped sweat from her eyes, licked parched lips.

  She pulled back the raft canopy.

  Mute desert. Cruel, unrelenting light.

  She tried the radio. Hendrix and the Emergency Broadcast announcement.

  She pictured the deserted streets of Barstow.

  Crow-pecked bodies and burned out cars. A dead neon pole sign: Classic Rock FM. An edge-of-town office with a sixty-foot mast.

  The abandoned studio running on back-up power. Scattered papers and toppled chairs.

  An unmanned production desk: preset sliders and twitching output needles.

  An empty sound booth.

  ‘… We have suspended our normal programming at this time as part of the National Emergency Broadcast System. Please stay tuned for important updates …’

  The looped transmission would run until power failed, console lights flickered dark, and Jimi was abruptly silenced.

  Selector to BEACON. She set the radio aside.

  She flexed her leg. Intense jolt, like a high-voltage shock.

  ‘Jesus fuck.’

  She lay back, waiting for the agony to subside. Pulsing pain, like someone driving a nail into her flesh.

  A second morphine shot. Stab. Press.

  She closed her eyes and rode a warm rush of well-being. Slow, shivering exhalation.

  She tossed the hypo in the sand.

  She tore the corner of a water sachet and sucked it dry. She had left her survival vest outside the tented raft. The sachets had cooked in the sun. Hot like fresh brewed coffee.

  She ripped open the empty pack and licked residual drops of moisture from the plastic.

  The sun had moved from its zenith. Shadows lengthened and coagulated in the depressions between dunes.

  She wanted to hear the heavy beat of chopper blades. She wanted to look up and see the belly of a descending Chinook fill the sky.

  She reached down and unlaced. A swollen foot prised from her boot. Gym sock peeled away, fraction at a time, teeth clenched against the pain.

  She gently rolled the right leg of her flight suit. Her foot and calf were swollen, skin livid and stretched tight. She caressed her shin, traced her tibia with the tip of an index finger, gently probed for some kind of subcutaneous ridge that might indicate splintered bone. Nothing. Maybe her leg had suffered a hairline fracture rather than an emphatic break. Or maybe her leg was intact. Maybe she had suffered some kind of catastrophic sprain that would subside in a couple of days.

  She gripped her ankle and checked for a tibial pulse. She flexed her toes. Still got circulation. Still got feeling.

  She eased the sock back over her foot. She slid her foot into the boot, barked with pain as she pulled laces taut.

  A plastic oar. She broke it over her good knee, and tossed the paddle.

  She snapped the shaft in two.

  Nylon cord ran around the lip of the raft. A handhold to help a downed airman pull himself into the boat.

  She sliced the cord with her knife.

  An improvised splint: oar sections either side of her injured shin, lashed in place with nylon cord. Snorts of discomfort turned to a thin, growling scream by the time she tied the final knot.

  She punched the vinyl floor of the boat, lay and tried to get her breathing under control.

  Fuck self-pity. Injured leg. Fleeting. Inconsequential.

  She closed her eyes and stroked the Ranger emblem stamped on the leather sheath of her knife.

  Injured leg. An inconvenience, nothing more.

  She limped across dunes. She paused for a compass bearing. Flipped the lid of the lensatic, watched the liquid-damped needle swing and settle. Maintaining steady progress north. She snapped the case shut.

  Backward glance. A trail of footprints. The raft was a distant dot.

  Maybe if she covered a few miles she could raise someone on the CSEL. If she couldn’t bounce a signal off a satellite, if the MILSTAR network were down, NCASEC and TACAMO off air, she would have to coax an unboosted analogue transmission across the mountains to habitation. Tough job. Distant crags were marbled with uranium ore radiating magnetic anomalies that could potentially jam a radio signal.

  She kept walking. Each jolting step made her leg burn like she was hung over a fire rotating on a spit, but if she stopped to rest, she might not be able to get moving again.

  Nagging doubt: hard to know where the parachute brought her down. Maybe she was walking deeper into the wilderness, walking further from help.

  Her father had been a Ranger. If he were here, keeping pace as she trudged through the desert, he would say: over-deliberation fucks you up. A samurai will reflect for seven breaths then commit to a decision. So roll the dice and God bless you.

  A monotonous landscape.

  She glanced at a map before the flight. Geodetic data tacked to a noticeboard in the briefing room. A USGS chart: California/Nevada border. Blank terrain. Terra incognita. Mile upon mile of jack shit.

  She couldn’t recall topographic detail, but she remembered names. Memorials to early settlers that headed west in covered wagons and found hell on earth.

  Furnace Creek.

  Dante’s View.

  The Funeral Mountains.

  A glint in the periphery of her vision. She stopped, turned and shielded her eyes.

  Something metallic at the tip of a high dune. Probably a fragment of fuselage. Couldn’t be much else.

  Hard to estimate distance. Rough guess: quarter of a mile. She couldn’t discern shape. Too much glare.

  Quarter of a mile. A lot of energy, a lot of sweat, to reach a hunk of scrap metal. Her leg hurt so much she wanted to fall to the ground and puke. But a scrap of wreckage might provide a little shade, a spot to rest until nightfall.

  She limped towards the distant object. Each step was teeth-jarring torment. She absented herself from her body, put herself on a wooded hillside, enjoyed the cool hush of the forest floor and l
et the pain and exertion happen somewhere else.

  The top of a dune cratered like a volcano. An ejector seat sitting upright, bedded in sand.

  Someone strapped to the chair. An arm hung limp. The sand-dusted sleeve of a flight suit. A gloved hand.

  ‘Hey.’

  No response.

  Frost climbed the dune on hands and knees. She caught her breath, rested in the shade. Then she gripped the back of the chair and pulled herself upright.

  A dust-matted body strapped in the seat.

  She brushed sand from the name strip: GUTHRIE.

  Legs askew, head slumped on his chest. His face was veiled by a helmet visor and oxygen mask.

  Frost checked the seat restraints. Jammed.

  The guy had been killed by some kind of release failure.

  The moment Guthrie, the route navigator, reached between his legs and wrenched the yellow egress handle a roof hatch would have blown. He would have been propelled up and out the plane, hitting 12g in half a second. A mortar cartridge behind the headrest would have immediately fired and deployed a drogue to stabilise the seat as it fell. Guthrie would have remained strapped in the chair, breathing bottled oxygen during freefall. At twelve thousand feet a barometric trigger should have unlatched the chair harness and released his main chute. The seat should have fallen away, letting Guthrie float to earth unencumbered.

  Instead he remained shackled to his chair, achieving a terminal velocity of over two hundred miles an hour before he slammed into the ground.

  Dead on impact.

  Frost crossed herself. She wasn’t religious, but she half-remembered Guthrie pocketing a rosary as they suited up.

  It should have been possible to hit a manual release to ditch the seat. He should have pulled a shoulder-mounted rip to deploy the chute. Maybe air-pressure and g-force pinned him to the heavy steel frame as it fell to earth at sickening speed.