The man-high steel tube fell, much of the walls of the two structures going with it. He could hear screams as it slammed into the ground, taking out the nest of smaller piping underneath. A dust cloud rose; within, something sparked violently and then there was fire and more screams—high-pitched and desperate.
Michael stopped drumming. Marlon was staring. Rusty had pushed himself back up to a sitting position on the sand, shaking his head as if dazed. Michael snatched his weapon from the ground and ran toward the buildings.
He saw one of their attackers, on his back with his arms outstretched as if he had been trying to escape the fate he had seen falling on him, the bottom half of his body crushed under a section of brick wall. The thick tube of the RPG launcher lay near him.
“Oh, fuck,” he breathed. He stopped. His weapon drooped in his lower hands. “Fuck.”
He stared at the body—at the beardless, smooth face of a child, a face he recognized: Raaqim, the boy who had spat at him yesterday.
None of them were soldiers. None of them looked to be older than their midteens, while the youngest couldn’t have been more than ten. The weapons they’d brandished were a strange collection of ancient single-shot rifles to modern automatic weapons, probably scavenged from a dozen different sources. The RPG launcher had been the most sophisticated and dangerous piece, but it had no more rounds left.
Twenty kids, all told, and not all of them boys. Their surprise attack had cost the lives of three UN soldiers, but twelve of the twenty kids were dead; of the survivors, all had serious injuries. The unit’s medic had done what triage she could; the four worst they’d choppered out to Baghdad after frantic communications to Colonel Saurrat and Barbara Baden; the medic didn’t seem to have much hope any of them were going to make it. They’d laid out the dead children in the lobby of the main building, covering the bodies with whatever sheets they could find, and they’d permitted the villagers to come in to identify the bodies and take them away for burial.
The wails and screams, the accusing glares, the accusations, were something that Michael knew he could never forget. Dabir, his ancient body shaking with rage, had screamed curses over the body of Raaqim. A woman in a black abaya and head scarf had charged at Michael after seeing her granddaughter’s body. She’d reached him before anyone could stop her, beating at him with her fists as she screamed in Arabic, her fists making the tympanic rings boom and crash in a mockery of his playing. Michael endured the beating, his arms at his side like a stunned spider while two soldiers grabbed the woman’s arms and pulled her away, still screaming and wailing, tearing at her clothes, gesturing with hoarse, sobbing cries.
He was weeping with her suddenly, the tears coming unbidden and unstoppable, hot and harsh, his throat clogged with emotion. Michael had left then, going outside into the heat and glaring sun. He slumped against the side of the Administration Building, his back on the rough stone wall, staring outward toward the oil derricks.
He touched his chest where the woman had struck him, so softly that he made no noise at all. His throat openings pulsed and yawned, silent. Under the bandage the medic had wrapped around his head, the scabbed track of the bullet throbbed and burned. Part of him wished it had killed him instead.
Afterward, he’d tried to call Kate and hadn’t gotten her; he sent her a text message: FUBAR. That said it all.
“Hey.” A shadow drifted over him. Michael glanced up.
“Hey, Rusty.”
“Bad deal, huh?”
“Yeah. The fucking worst.”
With creaks and groans, Rusty sat down next to Michael. “Kids. I don’t want to fight kids.”
“None of us should have had to.” Michael glared outward. Against the sky, the derricks were ink lines drawn on a blue canvas, and he’d killed children for their sake. He imagined the blood flowing dark like oil. “This shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have been able to happen.”
Rusty said nothing more. He and Michael sat there for a long time, each lost in his own thoughts, until the sun slid away and abandoned them in the cool shadow of the building.
The old man Dabir stared with slitted, dark eyes at the nervous squad with Michael. He barked something in Arabic and spat on the sand between him and Michael. The squad’s translator spoke to Michael without taking his eyes from the old man or his finger from the trigger of his FAMAS. “He says you are the afterbirth of a syphilitic camel and that you are not welcome here.”
Michael might have laughed at that, before. Now it only made him feel ill. “Tell him . . . tell him that I want him to know that I had no choice. He needs to know that.”
That earned a bark of dry, hollow laughter from Dabir. “Allah always gives us choices,” the old man said through the translator. “What choice did Raaqim have? You come here, you take away his father’s job, you ruin our family, you take the land that belongs to us and our people, you steal our oil. Why shouldn’t my grandson defend what was his? Why shouldn’t he fight to take back what you’ve stolen?” Dabir glared at Michael. “I am proud of my grandson. His was a good death. Are you proud, you abomination in the eyes of Allah?”
Michael clenched his jaw at the torrent of vitriol from the man. “You don’t know,” he told him. “You don’t know the suffering the Caliphate has caused with its oil policies. You don’t know—”
“Suffering?” Dabir interrupted as the translation was given to him. “Look around you, Abomination. Do you see people here with automobiles and televisions? Do you see mansions? Do you see stores full of things to buy? I have seen pictures of your West. I have seen the way you live. Suffering? You know nothing of suffering.”
“People have lost jobs from the lack of oil,” Michael persisted. “Some are going hungry as a result, or can’t pay for care that they need, or have lost their houses. And some have even died.” It was what Fortune might have said. The words tasted as dry and dead as sand.
“So you come to steal the job from my son, who has been taken away?” Dabir waved a hand toward the buildings of the wellhead and spat again. “You come to steal the food from our table? You come to kill my grandson?”
“Your grandson tried to kill me. I was only defending myself.” It should have sounded angry; it sounded apologetic.
“Raaqim was defending the land that is his from you. You come here saying you want to ease the suffering of all people, but it is only your people you care about, and you bring the suffering and the pain and the death here instead. You want to leave it here when you go.” The old man spat again. “You wonder why we hate you, Abomination? Because you do not see us. We will fight you with an army of children if we must. We will fight you with an army of old people, because there is only one way to make any of you see. Only one way.”
The translator was still speaking the last few words when Dabir reached under his white thobe. Michael saw the gleam of metal, but before he could react, the others already had. Two of the FAMAS opened up, and the old man danced spasmodically backward to the barrage of sound, an ancient handgun flying from his grasp and splotches of arterial red spraying over the bone-colored clothing. Dabir thumped loudly to the floor of the house as the FAMAS went silent. Someone screamed inside the house and a figure hurled itself from the darkness of the interior toward Michael. He struck at it with all his hands, using his full strength with his adrenaline and fright; the figure slammed hard against the door frame of the house. He could hear the crack of bones and glimpse the deep lines and liver spots on her half-covered face even as he realized the ancient frailty of her body. She was unconscious by the time she slumped, half over the body of Dabir. “Pull them all out!” someone ordered behind him. “Anyone moves or resists, shoot.”