Caitlin vaguely remembered the film. It had been a favourite of her dad’s, an air force man himself, which was one of the reasons she’d chosen the Murdoch jacket as her cover. She grew up on USAF bases and the culture was as familiar to her as family. She also vaguely knew of Musso, even before reading his bio in the mission brief. The former Marine Corps lawyer had gained some notoriety as the senior officer at Guantanamo Bay back on Wave Day, which, with the disappearance of everyone north of where he stood, made him the senior man in all of Northern Command. He’d quickly struck up an alliance of convenience with a Cuban military officer, who was later ‘eaten’ by the Wave when he strayed too close, but not before the two of them had sent back some of the first close-up images and reports on conditions at the event horizon.

Musso had a second shot at fame a few weeks later, when he led the defence of Guantanamo, and of a few thousand refugees who’d fled there, against an opportunistic attack by the then President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. His bio claimed the Corps ‘let him go’ during the great downsizing of the next few years, but Culver had taken her aside in Seattle to explain otherwise. Musso had been ass fucked after ‘losing’ Guantanamo. He owed his role here to Culver’s patronage.

The general, who towered over her and retained a fighter’s physique, tossed Caitlin’s bag in the back of his Humvee as if they were empty. She hopped into the passenger seat with a thud, its grey-green seat pad being almost nonexistent. Musso joined her up front and immediately flipped the starter switch over, waiting for the dashboard light to go out. Once it had, he pulled the switch, firing up the vehicle. With the drop of the parking brake, the man universally known as Tusk put the automatic into drive and rolled out.

‘Not too shabby for a ride that sat in the open for two years. Hope you don’t mind a detour,’ he said. ‘There’s checkpoints all though Killeen and Fort Hood. Looking for infiltrators.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘But mostly, I think, looking to piss me off. I get stopped and searched at every single one. I ask you – Colonel, do I look like one of Roberto’s scrawny ass little spies?’

‘No, sir,’ she replied with a grin, feeling better about this part of the mission already. ‘No, you do not.’

‘So, we’ll skirt around Killeen if you don’t mind, swing south of the lake and head back to the expressway just before we hit Salado. It hasn’t been cleared yet. Nor has most of Temple, where I’m holed up, but it’ll do.’