Behind her, the radio crackled over the noise of the remaining engine. The longwave frequency, as Sam tried to raise Samoa and the men assembled there to assist their arrival. George Morrow had arranged it all. He had negotiated the itinerary and the logistics with the navy, had confirmed the frequencies over which the Centauri and the vessels lined up along her route would communicate with each other. Had also sat for hours with Sam and Irene and a naval officer at a table covered by charts of the South Pacific Ocean. They’d dickered over islands and currents and prevailing winds and weather patterns. They had settled on the official landfalls—Honolulu, Samoa, Sydney—and also alternatives, should some mechanical fault occur, should some storm arise along their path. So Irene already knew about Baker Island. She could picture it on the map, nineteen hundred miles southwest of Honolulu, a thousand miles north-northwest of Samoa, an expired volcano colonized by coral and shaped like a potato chip. There wasn’t much in the way of vegetation, just sand and grass, which was why it made a likely spot to land an airplane in a pinch.

Irene glanced again at the fuel gauge. This was certainly a pinch.

Sam had made no move to replace her at the controls. She looked over her shoulder and saw he was busy at the navigation table, radio headset covering his ears, fingers busy at the dials. Though the engine noise was now diminished by half, she still couldn’t hear the pings of Morse code, or whether he’d been successful in contacting the navy. Sam had nearly reached the end of his scheduled two-hour nap; he’d been due to replace her within minutes. A quarter of an hour, and Sam would have sat at these controls, Sam would have possibly noticed the anomaly sooner; Sam with his experience and expertise might have been able to do something about it. Now it was too late. The sun wasn’t due to rise for another couple of hours. How were they supposed to find a few hundred acres of sand in the dark of night? How were they supposed to land on it? They had the cold, clear moon; that was all.