Chapter 2
February 16, 1991
Saudi Arabia

Night in the Arabian desert was dark, darker than any that Lieutenant McDaniel had ever known. Occasionally he could see flashes on the horizon to the northeast, across the border in Kuwait, and streaks of light across the sky: the Air Force doing its work, pounding the hell out of the Iraqis, destroying their ability to resist invasion. So the top brass said, and so McDaniel hoped. His infantry platoon would be on the sharp end of it when the ground campaign started.

They'd been deployed since mid-January, and his men were getting anxious, tired of waiting in this godforsaken desert, ready for something, anything, to break the routine and the boredom. Even if it meant coming under enemy fire. It would be something to tell the folks back home, anyway, better than "What did I do in the war? Sat on my ass and got sunburned, that's what."

Night, dark as sin, and the men under McDaniel's command passed the time the way soldiers everywhere did, and had always done – griping about the food, the water, the heat, the cold, the sand; speculating about what their orders would be and when they would get them; telling all manner of bad jokes, crude jokes, dirty jokes, downright filthy jokes, and even the occasional clean joke when their supply of untold jokes ran low.

"So, you see, there was this guy, falling off the Empire State Building, right? And he's falling, and as he passes the fiftieth floor, someone shouts, 'Hey, how you doin'?' And the falling guy, he shouts back, 'I'm OK so far!'"

There were a few snorts of laughter, and then one of the men said in a thick-as-molasses Tennessee drawl, "Man, that is one fucked-up story. There's no way he'd have been able to talk to that guy on the fiftieth floor while he was falling. He'd be moving too fast"

"Aw, for Chrissake, Futrell, give it a rest already, OK? It's a joke. It's supposed to be funny. It don't have to make sense."

"Oh." There was a long pause, and then, "Well, maybe if it had been funny, I'd have known you were telling a joke."

Even McDaniel, who was officially "not there" so as not to put a damper on the men's conversation, had to laugh at that one. Private Futrell looked around with a deer-in-the-headlights expression, slowly coming to the realization that he'd said something funny.

"You wanna know what's fucked up, Futrell?" Corporal Walton said. "You're so damned dumb, you don't even get the joke when it's you telling it."

There were howls of laughter in the dark, and for a few minutes, they were able to forget the desert, forget the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard waiting for them across the border, forget that, in a few days or a week or maybe a month, they'd get their orders to move, and find themselves under fire. So far, they were OK.


September 22, 2004
The Island

He woke.

His head hurt.

Actually, pretty damned near all of him hurt. Brandon McDaniel felt as if he'd been beaten up, repeatedly, for a week.

Which was pretty remarkable, he thought, considering that he was supposed to be dead.

He opened his eyes. Afternoon sunlight filtered through dense green foliage. He couldn't see the sky. He was lying on a thick layer of damp, fetid, decaying leaves, on a steep hillside. He could hear a faint sound of waves breaking, the calls of strange birds, some animal rustling through the trees not far away.

Brandon slowly sat up and took stock of himself. He had no broken bones, as far as he could tell; not even any serious cuts, just a few scratches on his arms, the blood already dried on them.

He'd just fallen – how far? Thousands of feet, at least; a mile, maybe more. He should be dead. Nobody could survive a fall like that. Yet here he was.

Wherever "here" was. Brandon hauled himself painfully to his feet, feeling every muscle. He hurt too damned much to be dead, for what that was worth.

He headed downhill, slowly, his legs wobbling. It was hard forcing his way through the thick jungle growth, and he made little progress. On the other hand, he thought, the undergrowth was probably all that was keeping him from slipping down the hill and breaking his neck. It would be terribly ironic for him to survive an impossible fall, only to kill himself climbing down a hill…

His running shoes weren't the best for climbing, but he pushed onward, not knowing what else to do. After an hour, he was hot and sweaty, his arms were a maze of scratches, and his khaki pants and Oxford shirt were becoming badly torn. He heard the sound of falling water near him, and headed for it. He found a small stream trickling down the hillside. He knelt beside it, cupped his hands and filled them, drank deeply. The water was warm, and tasted of his own blood and sweat.

He followed the stream bed down, making better time. The sun was low on the horizon when he finally found his way free of the jungle and onto a broad, sandy beach. He was in a small cove, a couple of hundred yards across, with rocky promontories cutting it off on both sides. The waves broke on a submerged reef near the mouth of the cove, leaving the water in the cove itself clear and calm.

He saw something in the water out by the breakers. A seal? Did they have seals in the tropics? Brandon didn't know. And then the figure rode a breaker across the reef into the calm water of the cove, legs kicking, arms reaching forward in an Australian crawl. A person! Another survivor? He didn't know, but he shouted, started waving his arms.

The swimmer made steady progress towards shore, and Brandon waded out waist-deep to meet her – she was clearly a woman. She was naked, he saw as she came closer – no, she had on a black thong bottom, although nothing else – and she was terribly sunburned on her back and legs. And she was clearly exhausted, barely making it the last few yards towards shore.

Brandon caught her in his arms and helped her stagger through the shallows to the dry sand of the beach. She dropped to her knees, then retched, vomiting salt water onto the sand.

Then she looked up at him, blinking rapidly, clearly not sure she could trust her eyes. Her chapped lips formed the word "You", though the only sound her parched throat could make was a hoarse croak.

Brandon nodded, having recognized her the moment he pulled her from the water. "It's me," he said to the woman he had met on the plane, suddenly aware that he didn't even know her name. "Don't ask me how, but we're both alive."

She closed her eyes then, and slowly went limp, fainting into unconsciousness as the tropical sun made its swift descent below the horizon, plunging the island into a night even darker than what Brandon had known in the Arabian desert.