So Irene hadn’t given her husband much thought. If there was one thing George Morrow could do better than just about anybody in the world, it was to handle the press. She figured—when she had time to think about it at all—that he had given the world some statement that skirted the truth, that made him out to be a patient, generous husband who wanted nothing for his wife but her happiness. She had, in fact, not the least idea that she had disappeared without trace, that she might now be clinging to survival amid the wreckage of her airplane in the middle of the Sahara, that the attention of the world was fixed on her, that hundreds of people were even now employed in a desperate race against the clock to find her. She would have been appalled; she would have been furious with George.

But she didn’t know any of this. If she had, she would have broken her silence long before she actually did crash in a desert, not in North Africa but in Spain, about three hundred and fifty kilometers northeast of Madrid.

As the Potez hit the ground, Irene expected to die instantly. She had forgotten that there was nobody in the world who had crashed an airplane so often and so skillfully as Sam Mallory. It was almost as if his entire career had been made in preparation for this moment, when the ship he was piloting—the one carrying the only person left to him on earth, in urgent need of medical care—ran out of fuel because some German bullet had pierced the main fuel tank, which went unnoticed until half an hour into the flight, when he was already over the strip of Nationalist territory between the Basques and Madrid.

The impact was like the end of the world. An almighty bang jolted through the metal frame and everything went flying, except Irene. She was strapped down not just to the stretcher but to the main deck itself, so that she was part of the airplane as it hurtled across the surface of the desert, over rocks and through bushes, bouncing and crashing and skidding until it came to rest at last, tail torn away, landing gear collapsed, propeller blades scattered across the desert floor.

Then silence.

The shock of it numbed Irene’s physical pain. She stared at the bare struts that ran along the top of this metal tube in which she was bound, unable to move. She tried to scream Sam’s name, even to whisper it, but she had no strength at all, not even that. Maybe I’m dead, she thought. A shaft of sunlight poured through some broken window. The pain returned. Her ears rang with it. Her lips were cracked and thirsty. She closed her eyes and thought, So this is how I die.