All that left were orders. She got them. She followed them. Predator drones were too dinky to match a Viper. Reaper drones were twice as fast as Predators, could fly twice as high, had nine times the horsepower, and carried ten times the payload. As yet, there were only four, and three were in Iraq. More were in production. Military was working to cross out Viper pilots for good.

B-huts slept six. There were plenty enlisted air-force females at Bagram, but not enough officers to fill a hut. Mary’s had a medic, a Chinook pilot, and a media specialist.

The medic was a disaster jumper named Eve who went for officer training after Kosovo. Now she was senior airwoman, search and rescue. She had a bald patch on her head, where the hair would fall out and only partially grow back; she called it her stress mark. She tried to camouflage the spot with a nonstop brown tattoo to match her hair. It didn’t quite work. Daylong, she looked as if she’d just sat up from bed or got drawn in a Peanuts cartoon. Eve had a habit of singing in her sleep, off-tune, too loud. Lately, Mary had been pulling a hat down past her ears to ward off the freeze, so it didn’t matter.

The media specialist was ROTC from Purdue. She kept every press release she wrote locked in a tackle box. She complained about missing hunting. It was verboten. But base rules hadn’t stopped her. It was the weather that upset her, closing up her favorite mountain grounds with useless snow. She hung out with a trio of army reservists not long out of college. They’d arrived scared and had gotten mostly loud. Mary couldn’t always ignore them.

The Chinook driver was married, with two kids and a husband deployed at Balad in Iraq. Her mother was watching her babies in Carlsbad, New Mexico. She and the mom were on Skype almost always. After a while, Mary started talking to the mother too. She was a broad-faced Korean woman who seemed to have an oversupply of loving attitude.

The day after the nighttime run, Mary woke to a morning blizzard. Blankets of snow whumped against the hut. The plywood bowed and gave, too weak to split. Her hutmates were gone. The heater did what it could, which was never enough, since huts had no insulation. The cold poured in, pushed by the front coming off the mountains. Her sleep bag was for subzero temperatures, and her nose, just the nostrils and tip, stayed out for breathing. Inside the cocoon, she dozed and woke, the go-pills ruining real sleep.