On the final landing of the tower, Joe stopped and felt inside his shirt for the papers from Pollack. The Casa Mañana was there, folded, tucked away. He was more in shock than in pain. The head wound had stopped bleeding and become a mat of damp hair. He could imagine the reaction he’d get when he arrived at the bunker.

Going down the wooden ladder to the ground, he heard a new sound, like a finger stroking the teeth of a comb. Not the lost B-29. Once a year, rains brought a generation of toads. Waking in their desert burrows, gathering around temporary pools, the amphibians sang, mated and spent their whole conscious lives in a single night. This was the night.

Painfully Joe slipped behind the steering wheel of the jeep and with his left hand reached for the key. It wasn’t there. It couldn’t be gone; orders were for keys to be in the ignition at all times. He felt around the floor under the seat. He got out of the jeep and felt on the ground. No key.

He had been the last man to drive the jeep. Augustino had been the last man in it. The captain lay, arms and legs outspread, face tightly pressed against the ground, as if turning from the glow of lights. He pulled the dead man’s pockets out. No key.

The field radio. Joe went to the “privy,” the heavy crate that held the firing switch. The radio was gone. Of course. Jaworski was an old soldier; he knew to take the radio with him, just in case.

The crate’s door was padlocked. In the shadows of the tower legs he could find no loose bars or hammers. Coaxial cable ran out the top of the eight-foot crate and up the tower, and from the bottom as a buried conduit. In either case they were out of reach. Leaning on the crate and trying to push it over, he was surprised to learn how weak he was.

How big the valley is, he thought, as he staggered back from the tower. Mountains stooping to the plain. Far-off electric echoes over the music of toads.

He started to run.

32

The wide excavation road ran straight to South-10,000. Yucca lined the shoulders. There was a perfume to the air, the scent of cactus flowers, the stir of moths and bats.

The bullets must have been .22-shorts, he thought. Running had started the bleeding again; he was aware because of the cold. Loudspeakers barked. Mainly he heard his heart and lungs and the sound of his shoes on blacktop.

He was better than a mile from the tower now.

A Very rocket hung like a star. There was a short siren. Five minutes.