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  “Roger that, Eight-Four,” the controller said. “Godspeed.”

  Parson brought up the flight plan page on his FMS, then entered his new waypoints.

  “So where’s this place we’re going?” Colman asked.

  “Johnston Atoll is several hundred miles west of Hawaii,” Parson said.

  “Oh, man.”

  “Yeah. We used to use it as a place to burn up chemical weapons.”

  “Sounds like what’s in store for us.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ve been there in a C-141, back before they shut it down,” Dunne said. “Sometimes when you flew in, you’d see this great old big column of smoke, and the controllers would warn you not to fly through it.”

  “How long is the runway?” Parson asked.

  “It’s been a while,” Dunne said, “but I want to say it’s nine thousand feet.”

  “Sounds like a hellhole,” Colman said.

  “It’s a pretty place, actually,” Dunne said, “but it’s gotta be contaminated to a fare-thee-well.”

  “Wonderful,” Colman said.

  Parson pressed some buttons on his center console, looked at his CDU screen. “Well,” he said, “the FMS says it’s only sixteen hours away.”

  “And we got five hours’ worth of gas,” Dunne said.

  “All right, let’s prioritize,” Parson said. “First we need to get fuel again. Then we’re going to make a decision about what to do with that fucking bomb. And we’re not just going to hope it’s a dud. You heard what happened to that C-17.”

  “What did the sergeant major say about her friend’s suggestion?” Dunne asked.

  “I don’t know exactly what he has in mind,” Parson said, “but after we refuel, we’re going to find out.”

  Instinctively, Parson checked his aeronautical charts for places to land if the aerial refuel didn’t happen for one reason or another. The Madeira Islands lay ahead and a bit to the south. Normally, he would never plan a mission in which his crew’s lives depended on an aerial refuel. The tanker could abort for its own emergency. The aerial refuel door might fail closed. Valves might not open. So he’d always have a divert location in mind; he never left himself without a backup plan.

  But that was normal ops. He slapped the chart down onto his side console, set a frequency in HF number two, and made another radio call.

  “Hilda,” he said, “what’s the status of an AR for Air Evac Eight-Four?”

  “We have a KC-135 launching from Lajes any minute now,” the flight manager said. “Texaco Six-Eight should reach you in about three hours.”

  Parson looked back at Dunne and said on interphone, “Let me see that fuel sheet again.” Dunne handed him the Form 4054, with its columns of numbers. Parson scanned the form, checked his watch, looked at the fuel flow gauges.

  “All right,” Parson said over the air, “that’s closer than I’d like, but it’ll work.”

  Parson imagined the Stratotanker lifting into the air from Lajes Field on the island of Terceira, near Santa Maria, in the Azores. The thunder of its engines rolling across Terceira’s windswept pastures. He hoped it wasn’t late.

  Setting a course across the water with this fuel situation ran against all his training and instincts. The ocean had never seemed so vast. He wondered if this was how the early navigators felt when they sailed into the unknown, with all the experts telling them they’d reach the edge of the earth and fall into the void, ship and crew plummeting forever.

  With a few hours to sweat before the tanker rendezvous, Parson told himself to turn his thoughts to something more useful than pointless worry. He decided now was a good time to find out what Gold’s friend was suggesting.

  “Cargo,” he called. “Pilot. You can tell Sergeant Major Gold she can come up here if she wants.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you know about this sergeant major?” Dunne asked.

  “Mainly that she’s a mystery,” Parson said. “I don’t get how she does what she does, but I’m glad she’s there.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Shooting people who don’t like us is the easy part. Understanding them and getting them to understand us is a lot harder. That’s where she comes in.”

  “I wouldn’t want that job.”

  “Me, neither.”

  When Gold appeared on the flight deck, she sat again at the nav table. She donned her headset and said, “What can I do, sir?”

  “Tell me about your friend’s idea,” said Parson.

  “I have a digital camera. Mahsoud says the EOD people can better help us if they can see the bomb. He says we should take a photo of it and send it to somebody. Can you do that with the computer over there?” Gold pointed to Dunne’s panel.

  “Probably,” Dunne said. “I’ve never done that with satcom, but this thing does have a USB port.”

  “So we need a way to get the image from the camera into the computer,” Parson said. “Anybody got a card reader?”

  “Not with me,” Colman said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have one, either,” Gold said.

  “I didn’t bring mine,” Dunne said. “But on a plane full of military people, I know somebody did.”

  “I’m on it,” Parson said. He turned the wafer switch on his comm box to PA and told his crew and passengers what he wanted. From downstairs he heard the bustle of baggage being unstrapped and passed around. Boot steps and thuds. After a few minutes, a loadmaster climbed the flight deck ladder. When he slid open the door, he had a cord dangling from his fingers.

  “Got it,” the loadmaster said. “It belongs to one of the aeromeds.” Gold took the card reader and passed it to Dunne.

  “Tell whoever it is I said thanks,” Parson said. “Sergeant Major Gold, tell your friend the same. What’s his name again?”

  “Mahsoud.”

  This development put Parson in a better mood. Progress, he thought, or at least something like it. Our chances are still a million to one, but at least we won’t ride it down without a fight.

  All his career, the Air Force had sent him to classes on something called CRM, crew resource management. The idea was to encourage aircraft commanders to listen to the rest of the crew and to encourage crew members to speak up. You never knew who might have the nugget of information—or inspiration—that solved a problem. Parson considered it the Air Force’s effort to teach and institutionalize what a good leader would do naturally.

  He didn’t know how useful this particular nugget would become, but he intended to find out. As far as Parson was concerned, Gold and Mahsoud had just got promoted from passengers to crew.

  GOLD LOOKED FORWARD TO TELLING MAHSOUD how Parson had taken his suggestion. For the moment, though, she decided to let him rest. She sat at the nav seat and watched the crew. At the moment, they didn’t seem as busy as before. Eventually, Parson turned to her.

  “I guess we never got around to telling you our new destination, did we?” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “They’re sending us all the way across the Atlantic, over Central America, and into the Pacific, to a place called Johnston Island.”

  “Oh, my God. Why?”

  “They’re worried about that stuff on board. If we roll the airplane up into a ball on Johnston, we won’t hurt anybody but ourselves.”

  Gold pondered that for a minute. The thought of that much more flying sickened her, but she had to admit it made sense. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, and if you were one of the few, you were just out of luck. A military concept she knew quite well.

  “Will you need to get more fuel?” Gold asked.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Parson made a PA announcement to inform everyone else. Gold heard the groans from downstairs. She looked around the flight deck, dreading the hours ahead. Then she wondered if she should take those hours for granted. Apparently, the bomb was not supposed to go off until the plane descended to a certain altitude, but how stable was it
? With an armed high explosive in the tail, she thought, our lives could end at any moment. But wasn’t that always true? She knew a colleague struck in the temple by a sniper’s bullet, dead before he hit the ground. A teacher who suffered an aneurysm in her sleep, never to wake. Friends killed by traffic accidents, drunken drivers. Mortality was a silent enemy, invisible but ever present and ever patient.

  She knew of wise people who said, “We are not promised tomorrow.” But, dear God, we’re not even promised the next five minutes.

  Up ahead, through Parson’s side window, lights gleamed in the distance like swirls of ocher in a sea of ink. Some shone from above the waterline, illuminating hillsides.

  “What’s that?” Gold asked. She didn’t really feel like talking, but she forced herself. Better than sliding into quiet depression.

  “The Madeira Islands,” Parson said. “Portugal owns them.”

  “Where the wine comes from,” Gold said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Madeira wine. It’s a long-lived red. Back in the days of sail, traders could ship it because it wouldn’t spoil at sea.”

  “Oh.”

  It figured Parson wasn’t a wine drinker. The one time she’d seen him drink came right after their medal ceremony, when he had a Scotch. It was at an outdoor reception with a cash bar, at Fort Myer, next to Arlington National Cemetery. At least he’d bought good stuff; he’d splurged on Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Parson tried to order one for her, but she couldn’t stand the scent of it. He took two sips of his own, then said, “For those who can’t be here,” and poured the rest into the grass.

  Gold sat in the darkness of the flight deck for a while, until the lights of Madeira receded under the left wing. She decided to check on Mahsoud again.

  The aeromeds were working on him when she returned to the cargo compartment. He looked pale, and the medics had attached some sort of clip to his finger. The clip glowed from the inside with a red light, and it was connected to a cord that led to an electronic monitor.

  “What’s all this?” Gold asked.

  “A pulse oximeter,” one of the medics said. “That LED shines through his fingernail and tells us the oxygen content in his blood.”

  “What’s wrong with his oxygen content?”

  “His system isn’t processing oxygen efficiently because of the damage to his lungs.”

  Gold felt something turn cold inside her chest. If the medical people were this concerned about Mahsoud’s vital signs, then his hold on this world must have loosened some.

  “How are you, my friend?” Gold asked.

  He smiled, drew a long breath, and said, “Fine,” in English. Almost turned it into two syllables.

  “The aircraft commander likes your idea,” Gold said in Pashto. “They are going to take and send a photograph. They have already found the equipment they need.”

  “I am glad to be of assistance.”

  “There is something else I should tell you,” Gold said. “We have a long way to go.” She explained where and why.

  “I heard Major Parson’s announcement,” Mahsoud said. “I could not understand it all, but it seemed to make the Americans very unhappy. I knew it was not good.”

  Gold tried to judge Mahsoud’s reaction, but he gave little by way of cues. He’s probably received worse news in his young life, Gold thought. She knew his mother and two brothers were dead, but she did not know when and how they’d died.

  “Very few people from your village have seen a tropical island,” Gold said. She regretted the words immediately. Worried that they sounded patronizing.

  “None that I know of,” Mahsoud said. “Few have seen even Kandahar.”

  Gold admired his strong front, but she felt heartsick. Mahsoud needed a real hospital. Not some sandy strip of pavement on a dot in the Pacific. She hoped somebody was thinking far enough ahead to send doctors and medical gear to meet the C-5 at Johnston.

  She decided to ask Parson about that. To his credit, he seemed to be in a mood to listen to people. Gold climbed the flight deck ladder, thinking how to frame the question.

  In the cockpit, the crew looked busy again. She could hear what sounded like urgent crosstalk on the interphone, but without her headset, she could not make out the words. The trouble seemed to have something to do with a message on Dunne’s computer. She looked over his shoulder:AIR EVAC EIGHT-FOUR—

  TEXACO SIX-EIGHT CANNOT REFUEL YOU. IT ABORTED

  WITH AN ENGINE FIRE ON TAKEOFF. CONTINGENCY

  PLANS IN PROGRESS.

  12

  So this is how it will end, Parson thought. For all my efforts, I could change nothing but the coordinates of the crash site, the location of the last-known position. A burning oil slick for an epitaph.

  Of course the tanker aborted, he realized. It rolled out of the factory during the Eisenhower administration, and it belonged in the boneyard, not in the air. And now it probably sat on the hammerhead at Lajes, surrounded by fire trucks and wrapped up in foam.

  Parson felt no panic. He found himself in an emotional netherworld he’d visited just once before, in the snows of the Hindu Kush. He remembered the cold of the Afghan mountains, so bitter it sapped away not just body heat but reason itself. The snow falling so heavily the air seemed fibrous with it, covering the tracks that were leading him to Gold. The prospect of finding her alive so remote and his own imminent demise almost certain. Each breath of that frigid air scorching his lungs. Darkness coming on, so that he could barely read his compass.

  Like then, death was not a risk now but an apparent certainty, and it brought a strange calm, a clarity. He felt he’d already used up his quota of luck and now lived in some cosmic debt. But his passengers and crew—they were another matter. So many of them so young. And Parson could not lose another crew. The best friends he’d ever known had died in the shoot-down of his C-130 years ago or had been slaughtered by terrorists shortly after the crash. The thought of something like that happening again turned his stomach, brought bile to his throat. So he’d fight the inevitable, past all realistic hope, against logic itself. Somewhere outside hope and logic, he made a call on HF:

  “Hilda,” he said, “Air Evac Eight-Four received your L-band message. Tell me about these contingency plans.”

  “We have another tanker coming to you from Mildenhall,” the flight manager said.

  All the way from England, Parson thought. They’ll never make it in time. “I don’t think that’s going to work,” he said.

  “Opec Five-Two is already airborne,” the flight manager said.

  “What is their position?”

  “Ah, I’m afraid I don’t have that information.”

  “When did they take off?”

  “Approximately two hours ago. We launched them as a backup for your primary tanker.”

  Parson tried to do some rough mental math, made difficult because he was starting to get tired. If he stayed on his current course, he’d run out of fuel long before the Mildenhall KC-135 could reach him. The only way to rendezvous with that aircraft would be to turn and go find it. In the vastness of this black Atlantic. Parson switched to the other HF radio.

  “Santa Maria,” he called. “We have another problem.” Parson explained his situation, how he needed a turn toward the northeast to go off track and look for the tanker. He knew that would play havoc with transatlantic flights. The trouble was that this far out over the ocean, there was no radar coverage. Controllers kept track of airplanes the old-fashioned way, with position reports. Pilots would call in their time, speed, and altitude at a given waypoint, and estimated arrival time at the next. They had to get there within three minutes of that estimate.

  With an emergency aircraft cutting north, and no way for controllers to watch for potential collisions, airliners would have to change their courses and altitudes. That was not figured into their fuel planning. Some would probably divert into the Azores. Those that had not reached the midpoints of their routes might turn back to their departure a
irports. An international incident all by itself.

  After perhaps twenty minutes, Santa Maria said, “Air Evac Eight-Four, that’s approved. Turn right, heading zero-six-zero. Cleared for course deviations as needed. Please keep us advised.”

  “Zero-six-zero,” Parson said. “Thank you, ma’am.” Then he said over interphone, “We just fucked up a lot of vacations.”

  “You’re breaking my heart,” Dunne said.

  That encouraged Parson a little. If Dunne could crack a joke, then his head was still on straight. If Parson was going to pull off the impossible, he’d need the flight engineer’s input. At the pilot’s instrument panel, Parson had nothing to tell him fuel quantity, hydraulic pressures, or the status of the electrical systems. These things he’d get from Dunne or not at all.

  The copilot, Colman, was also new, but at least he hadn’t done anything stupid. Parson felt he owed these guys his very best, no matter how hopeless it seemed. He remembered an instructor who once said, “Fly it until the last piece stops moving.” Well, this machine was still in the air.

  Colman turned a knob to set an indicator bug on his HSI, pressed HEADING on his nav select panel. The aircraft banked to the right. Then Parson entered a frequency into his air-to-air TACAN, waited for a signal from the tanker’s transmitter. Nothing.

  “Still out of TACAN range,” Parson said. “Let’s see if they’ll talk to us.” He dialed the HF tanker frequency and called, “Opec Five-Two, Air Evac Eight-Four.”

  “Air Evac Eight-Four, Opec Five-Two. Go ahead.”

  Well, at least the damned radios are working right, Parson thought. “Opec Five-Two,” he said, “We have turned onto an intercept course. What is your position?”

  The tanker pilot read off his coordinates, and Parson began to do the math. With the KC-135 heading southwest at around pointseven-five Mach, the two planes’ closure rate had them meeting in about three and a half hours.

  Parson told his crew what he had calculated, and he said, “Engineer, what’s our burn time now?”

  “At cruise speed, about three hours,” Dunne said.

  “What if we slow it down to max range speed?” Parson said. He knew that by flying more slowly, they could squeeze out more air miles per thousand pounds of fuel.