The slap of the helicopter’s rotor reverberated inside Sora’s canopied bed. That was the sound she’d waited to hear since she retired. She threw off the covers and leaped out the bed, hurriedly donning the boy’s clothing she’d lifted earlier.

She had a backup plan now. If she could not get to Hafaro, where she thought her plane might be, she would head for Riyadh and the American Embassy. That was the safest bet of all but she stubbornly clung to the idea that she could get to her Vixen, then to Kuwait and join her father. If nothing else, there was the goose. Getting home would be a long, hard flight in that rate of bolts, but it could be done.

Sora dropped over the outer wall by the kitchen garden near the jeep she planned to commander. She made certain the guards at the main gate did not see her. Using her Swiss Army knife, she hot-wired the vehicle and adjusted the carburettor so that the engine purred more quietly. She rolled away from the palace without headlights, scattering rocks under the tires. Other than a yard dog barking her passage, no one at the palace noticed her escape.

Within minutes, she located the main road leading to the town of Anaiza. And lo and behold, before very long she was rolling jauntily along a huge pipeline. The road ran parallel to it as the huge tubes themselves. She distinctly remembered crossing pipelines on the way to Kuwait. She was unclear about such details on the harried, tension-fraught journey away from the air base.

Everything looked different from the air, she reminded herself. The pipes were massive steel snakes mounted on concrete pylons raised above the desert floor. From the air, those same pipes had been insignificant lines severing the earth with geometric precision, just like roads and expressways. On the ground, they look more impressive.

Their size alone gave her more understanding of how Saudi’s oil reserves had to be. It went beyond Sora’s comprehension to figure out how many gallons flowed through those tubes on any given day.

Now that she was on her way, Sora tried not to think about her father too much. Tommy’s cruptic communique had the niggling habit of returning to mind over and over again. Appa poss. Injury rt. Leg, gunshot. Vix disabled. Sora tried not to think about that, but it was hard not to when scenery was so dull, flat and uninspiring.

A convoy of military trucks, jeeps and armoured vehicles rumbled past while she sat at a crossroads and studied the starts, confirming her directions, wondering what she could do about a tank that was out of gas. Some of the passing soldiers waved as they lumbered on through the night. Has she had any command in Arabic, Sora would have asked for fuel. As it was, she was definitely happier to see them pass without stopping.

She had a drink of water from a pop bottle she’d field in preparation for this journey and placed inside her makeshift haversack. When the convoy passed, the lonely crossroad was clear of traffic as far as she could see. It was nearing 3:00 AM by her watch.