"Is that a bad idea?" Groves asked.

Joe swung off the road and stopped the car. Its nose pointed at barbed wire fence and white flakes. The fence posts were split pine, as gray as bones, spaced eight feet apart and leaning from habit away from the wind. There was no proper gate with crossbeam or hinges, just a section with two strands of barbed wire stretched to a stick hung by plain wire to a post, so stick and section could simply be unhung and dragged out of the way. Inside the fence was meagre grazing land, brushwood and sage flattened by the headlights. Yucca spines dipped and waved in the snow.

"Stallion Gate," Joe announced.

"There's no one here." Groves looked up and down the road. "There's supposed to be a half-track and two jeeps waiting for us. You're sure this is it?"

"Yes, sir." Joe pointed to the slightly whiter double track of an access road that ran  under the bottom wire. "They would have come to the gate. I'll see if I can raise them."

The field radio was a pre-war crank model with a range in good weather of forty miles, and the answer, when it came, hovered on static. The party from the Alamogordo base had lost a track and lost time, but would still meet them at the fence.

As Groves slumped back in his seat the entire car moved on its springs. "I'm supposed to be in Washington tomorrow and here we are twiddling our thumbs at a barbed wire gate."

"Joe, you're the only one who's ever been here before," Oppy said. "What's your advice?"

"The weather's getting worse. I suggest we wait."

"Sergeant, I have never accomplished anything by standing still." Groves sat forward, decision made. "There's no more than an inch on the ground. We'll meet them en route."

It took ten minutes for Joe to put chains on the rear tyres, untie the gate, drive through and, for etiquette's sake, tie it up again. Everyone got back into the car, slapping flakes from their coats, and they started off on the faint trail that wandered across the field.

Joe drove in second gear, trying to keep his lights on the ruts without getting his wheels into them. Fuchs studied a grazing service map.

"How do you think they lost a track?" Oppy asked.

"Link pins," Groves said. "Tanks, half-tracks, bulldozers, same thing. If they had trouble with a drive wheel, they'd be stopped dead."

Joe shifted to low as the road vanished.

"We're almost in Mexico. How much snow can there be?" Fuchs wiped condensation from the windshield. "They said they were coming to meet us, yes? We should be seeing them any minute."

After a long silence, Joe said, "We should have seen them half an hour ago."

Snow rushed in sheets against the car as it pushed over the rise and fall of the ground. When Joe found the road again, he was happy to lay his wheels in the ruts and try to stay in them. He put his head out of the window to avoid Fuchs' urgent wiping. There were signs of humped earth, craters, moments of impact frozen in the snow.

"It's like sailing." Oppy was delighted. "Same dark sky, same white, same swells."

"I remember my first time at sea," Fuchs said, suddenly talkative. "It was when the British shipped us to Canada as enemy aliens at the start of the war. U-boats attacked the convoy. They sank the ship just before us."

"I didn't know you were an enemy alien," Groves said.

"I'm British now," Fuchs assured him.

"German and British," Groves added drily.

Implode. Explode. Two events at the same time. On the troopship to Manila, Joe had watched the ocean. For lack of anything else to do, there being no women on board, and no card-playing either  because the officers were so wound up about going to serve under MacArthur Himself, Joe stood on deck and observed the sea. He watched for big events and little events, from surfacing whales through families of dolphins to haphazard flying fish. One day he noticed something new: contradiction. The wind was stiff and easterly, driving rows of whitecaps from stern to bow. But the ship was plunging, trudging like a farmer in boots, through heavy swells churned up by storms a thousand miles ahead in the west. The surface of the water, the ragged spume, was merely sliding, a deception, over the true internal intent of the sea. The hidden intent. Joe remembered because it was the first moment he realized he and everyone else on the ship might not be coming back from Manila.

"Sir, I think we're there." Joe killed the car engine and lights. An easier snow of fewer, fatter crystals fell.

Fuchs sat bolt upright and said like a vaudeville comic. "Was is't das?"

Heading over a rise and towards the car were three men carrying rifles.

"Mescaleros," Joe said. "Apaches."

"Talk to them," Oppy said.

Groves said as Joe got out, "Keep them away from the car so they don't recognize us."

Two of the men were father and son, each almost as big as Joe, both in snowshoes. They had long hair, wool hats, greasy jackets, one sheepskin and the other corduroy. Clothes and hair were dusted with snow and their faces shone with sweat. The third man had a slightly squarer head, shorter hair, a plaid Pendelton jacket, rags wrapped round his hands and feet. Navajo, Joe thought. None of them looked like they would recognize Groves and call Tokyo. But what the hell was a Navajo doing down here?

"See the horses?" the old man asked Joe.

"Horses?"

"Horses everywhere," the old man said.

Joe passed out cigarettes. Apaches were Chinese to Joe. Navajos were thieves. Likewise, Apaches and Navajos thought all Pueblos were women. The Navajo moved close enough to take a cigarette and stepped back. Flakes drifted down. The storm was resting, not leaving. The Navajo's rifle was casually held towards the car.

"They kicked off the white ranchers," the father said. "They", Joe knew, meant the Army. "Still horses, though. If we don't take them, they just shoot them."

"They come over in planes and machine-gun them," the son said. "Sometimes, they bomb them. Day and night."

"Could be Texans," Joe said.

The Apaches erupted. They slapped each other on the shoulder and they slapped Joe. Even the Navajo laughed nervously.

"Those bastards," the son said. "Army planes, they're crazy."

"Army bought the ranchers out," the father confided, "but they made it in one payment so the ranchers had to give it all back in taxes, and if the ranchers try to get back on the land, they bomb them."

"Sheep up north." The Navajo had a high voice and clipped his words in half. "Someone in Washington says an Indian can only have eighty-three sheep. Part of the War Effort. What do sheep have to do with the war?"

"Nothing," Joe said.

"Indian Service comes and kills the sheep. Shoot you if you get in the way."

Joe remembered now. Near Gallup, a gang of Navajos had taken a couple of Service riders hostage and then vanished. Across the state, newspapers were treating it like an uprising. The Indian Service and the FBI were looking for the fugitives all the way north to Salt Lake City. Not south, with Mescaleros.

The young Apache looked speculatively at Joe. "You ever fight in Antonio?"

"Yeah."

"You fought my brother in Antonio. They put up a real ring at the motor lodge behind the cafe. Kid Chino?"

"He was drunk, he shouldn't have got in the ring."

"He was sure sober when you were done." He stomped his snowshoe for emphasis. "That was the soberest I ever saw him."

Joe recalled the brother, all piss and steam the first round, throwing up in the second.

"Pretty good fighter, your brother."

"A good boy." The old man glared at the son with him.

Joe passed the cigarettes round again. The Apaches examined the lighter, a Zippo. "Battery C, 200th Coast Artillery" was engraved on one side.

"Bataan." The son handed it back.