She is strong, Zuwayy thought. But they were wasting too much time with her. She was a novelty because she was a woman—one of the few captured—but it was too risky keeping a woman imprisoned in a place like this. “Has she made any contact with any of the others?” Zuwayy asked the jailer. “Talking, tap code, hand signs, anything?”

“No, Highness. When they were together, they did not even look at each other. They never tried to communicate.” Very well-trained indeed. He examined her face once more. Her eyes were ready to roll back into her head; her tongue was swollen and almost black; and blood was seeping from her eyes, ears, and mouth. “Get rid of her,” Zuwayy said. “She’s practically dead already. Bury her in the desert. The last thing we need is for her to be caught in here like this. Make it quick, and make it untraceable. I want to see the others.”

Zuwayy was almost out of the cell when he heard her mutter behind him—and it didn’t sound like “Help me, please” this time. He turned and went back to her. She had completely slumped against her chains now. He grabbed her hair and yanked her head up. “What did you say, bitch? Repeat! What did you say?” She muttered something unintelligible. He put his ear as close as he dared to her lips. “Speak up! What did you say?”

Through her cracked lips and swollen tongue, he heard her utter, “M ... Me .. . McLanahan,” just before she passed out again.

JAGHBUB, LIBYA
 SEVERAL HOURS LATER

It was hard, steamy, sweaty work—no other way to describe it; and there was no other way to do it except virtually by hand. At first Patrick McLanahan spelled the flight crew in the cockpit while the plane was being refueled—they had to use water pumps and fire hoses to get the fuel out of the underground storage tanks, and then gravity- feed it into each of the Megafortress’s twelve fuel tanks. Patrick kept one engine running through the entire refueling just in case they came under attack and he had to start all the other engines, but he acknowledged to himself that there was almost no chance of getting the Megafortress off the ground unless they had at least twenty minutes’ warning. But in about a day, the EB-52 Megafortress bomber was fully fueled.