Lang nodded. “They’re a mess. We’re cleared into Bakersfield. Sounds like that’s the nearest base they’ve got operational.”
“What about Edwards or Twenty-Nine Palms?” Bornmann asked.
“Blown away,” Lang said.
“We need a better story before we divert into Los Angeles,” Sweeney said, fidgeting with his notes. “Let’s stick with the idea that we’re a medevac. There’ll be casualties in L.A., too. We can say we have room to evac some of their—”
An alarm sounded in the cockpit. Bee bee bee bee bee.
“Oh fuck,” Bornmann said. “Strap in.”
“Bogies at four o‘clock!” Lang yelled.
The Osprey was already rolling to its portside. Cam banged against the curved wall with Deborah and Medrano on top of him.
Through the tangle, looking forward, Cam saw Sweeney hanging onto Bornmann’s seat. Then Sweeney opened his arms. He leapt for the same area where the rest of them were piled on the wall, which had almost become the floor. Cam felt the port engine screaming somewhere beneath him. The fuselage shuddered as if buffeted by the wind.
“Strap in!” Sweeney yelled. “Strap in! Strap in!”
The Osprey carried no armament. Nor was its top speed any match for fighters, much less ground-to-air missiles. Their only hope was evasive action, and the plane lifted and spun. Cam was still pulling free of the others. He grabbed at a cargo belt but swung away from the wall, wrenching something in his wrist and back. Deborah hung beside him from one hand. Everyone else seemed to be roped to the fuselage above. Huff clawed at his jacket. With that slight help, Cam kept his grip, but the accelerating torque was too much for Deborah. Her arm twisted and then her hand sprung free.
“No!” Foshtomi shrieked, snatching at her. Foshtomi had deftly slid behind two straps. They sawed into her waist — but even bent in a horseshoe, Foshtomi didn’t have enough reach to catch the other woman.
Deborah tumbled away from them. She smashed into the ceiling and then the far wall. Then the dizzying sideways-and-up motion changed as the Osprey plummeted to the starboard. It threw Deborah back into them. Cam was too off-balance to grab his friend even when her leg thumped him in the chin, but Foshtomi seized Deborah’s waist, trusting the straps to hold them both. She’d never lacked for confidence, and Cam felt another glint of admiration for her.
“Here!” Foshtomi yelled. “Here!”
Unbelievably, the aircraft leveled out. The six of them worked to clip themselves down in a furious panic. Cam finished with himself — the canvas belts seemed too thin — and turned to help Foshtomi with Deborah. Somehow they wrestled her in between them. Deborah’s forehead was swollen with a fat goose egg that had been cut open on one side, throwing blood through her yellow hair. Her blue eyes were groggy and dim.
Up front, Lang chattered in Mandarin again as his hands danced over the consoles. The Osprey was climbing now and Bornmann hollered back, “Missiles! Two fighters on our tail! We’re going to ditch this bitch if we can just—”
The wall exploded. Fire and heat burst through the rear of the plane in a hundred tiny holes. Metal fragments clattered through the fuselage. Then the fire was replaced by smoke and sunlight. Air whistled through the holes at a deafening pitch. Most of the swirling black fog was stripped away, but it was replaced by the red mist streaming from Foshtomi’s chest.
“Sarah!” Cam yelled, fumbling past Deborah to help her.
The explosion must have been a near miss, he realized. Otherwise they’d be gone. But the damage was bad enough. Wind and sunlight howled through the aircraft as he tried to catch the meaty organs spilling fromFoshtomi’s side. Herintes tines were hot. Her face was white and dead. Cam screamed and tried to apply pressure anyway, his arm trembling against the wild force of their descent.
The Osprey was in a tailspin.
No, Cam thought. No! He glanced forward again, looking for the sky — for God — for anything other than this horror. Beyond the pilots, he saw a patch of blue. Then the horizon tilted into view.
The hard orange color of the desert filled the windshield. The ground was very close.
It’s not supposed to end like this! he thought, but the Osprey caught its starboard wing against the earth and whipsawed into an uneven leaping cartwheel as the fuselage disintegrated.
23
In the cyclone of bodies and metal, Deborah felt a snapping pain through her left shoulder. She breathed hot dust and smoke. Then it was done. The tornado stopped, but the pain stayed with her, crippling that arm.
She was outside the plane. The ground beneath her was tough and dry, and she felt a breeze and daylight. Despite the curtains of dust, she saw most of the fuselage nearby. Then the hazy sun disappeared. When she lifted her head, she’d moved into the shadows beneath the high, broken line of one wing.
There must be other survivors.
“Bornmann!” she shouted, rasping for air. “Cam? Hey!”
Why didn’t they answer?
Somehow she staggered up, twisted nearly in half by the dislocated shoulder. Her ribs on that side were hurt, too, and she was covered with grit and blood. Most of it wasn’t her own. Foshtomi, she thought, trying to calculate how badly the other woman was hurt by how much of her uniform was soaked. Is there any way she’s still alive?
Gnarled oak trees and scrub brush covered the hillside. The brown plants were peppered with gray and white debris. Fire licked at the brush in several places. The Osprey had flung jagged chunks of aluminum and steel into the hillside along with wiring, glass, and plastic. The wind stank of jet fuel.
Deborah didn’t think to run away, not even faced with the rising flames. She was nothing without her squadmates. She barely remembered the self-doubt she’d felt before Walls led them out of Complex 3. Deborah had come a very long way just to find herself back where she’d begun, as a reliable cog in the machine, but she was pleased to be that woman again. It was all she’d ever wanted. Her suffering had reinforced everything that was best in her — her willingness to give of herself. The team needed her, not only as another gun but as a doctor, especially now.
She turned into the wreckage. There was a man crumpled beneath a flat chunk of a propeller blade. She hurried toward him but Sweeney was dead, his neck wrenched backward. His legs were broken, too, and maybe his spine. Looking away, Deborah noticed one of the engines behind her. In one sense, she was still inside the plane. The main bulk of the aircraft surrounded her, forming an uneven barricade.
The sky reverberated with the distant roar of jets. That seemed unimportant. Within two steps, she spotted two more human shapes. Deborah heard someone groan and lurched closer. “Bornmann?” she said. “Hey—”
The first man was Lang. A small area on the left side of his face was unharmed. Otherwise she might not have recognized him. Impact had rubbed most of the skin and muscles from the side of his skull.
Translator, copilot, commando — Lang might have been the most versatile element of their team and Deborah paused over his corpse, feeling demoralized and lost. Then she banished her grief with a bit of gallows humor she’d learned from Derek Mills, the pilot of the shuttle Endeavour. “Pilots are always the first to the scene of a crash,” he’d said when they were planning their descent from the ISS. She had to honor Lang. Her sense was that their pilots had pulled the Osprey out of a death spiral, bringing the aircraft up at the last minute. If they hadn‘t, she would have been killed, too, so she moved past him with a firm sense of gratitude.
The next man was Captain Medrano. He groaned again. “It’s me,” Deborah said meaninglessly. He was barely conscious. His arm was broken and his face was cut. His pulse was steady, though, and her cursory examination detected no other bleeding or major injuries.