Maggie and Logan smile at him from the photo taped to his dash.
Get me through another day. Get me home, is all I pray.
Come on. This is taking way too long.
Scanning the old men, the kids, the dog, the burnedout cars, the idling trucks growl as beggars pass by pushing carts.
Radio chatter. A blur in his periphery.
Pop-pop!
Gunfire. A muzzle flash in the market and Hayes in the lead Humvee is frantic over the radio to the crew in the rear.
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“T-Bone! Heads up! Behind you!”
Wham! The Hummer behind Jake is ablaze! A beggar’s cart tips.
“Ambush! Ambush!”
Hayes opens fire with his M2 lighting up the target behind Jake. People are scrambling, screaming.
Jake is trapped.
The air splits. The beggars fire an RPG!
Thump! The ground shakes. The rig in front explodes, burning fragments rain on Jake’s rig. A large chunk thuds on his hood.
A head.
Mouth agape, Mitchell stares wide-eyed at Jake.
Oh, Christ!
Mitch!
Oh, Jesus!
To his right, smoke puffs from the burned-out car. A grenade rips at the lead Humvee. Vibrations. Shadows in Jake’s mirrors; out of nowhere several men are splashing water on his rig. No. The smell. It’s gasoline!
They’re going to kill him.
The convoy is returning fire. The guys from the lead Humvee are on the road burning. A soldier shooting is on fire, shrieking.
“Grease the mothers!”
Ghost figures swarm all sides of Jake, climbing onto his rig.
They’re all over him.
Pop-pop!
The American soldier’s trying to pick them off. Rounds whiz-clang off his truck.
Jake reaches for his sidearm. The mob is pulling at his doors. Coming through his windows, smashing the windshield.
He’s going to die.
Someone slams the sidearm from his grip. He claws for his knife, grabbing it in time to slice across an attacker’s throat-his blood spraying. Jake meets his eyes, meets his hate, smells his breath.
Mitchell’s head watches from his hood.
Jake’s door rips open.
They have his arm, someone has his ankle. Jesus. He glimpses a smoke cloud, a grenade sizzling toward his cab.
No. No. No.
The searing inferno concussion ejects Jake, propel ling him skyward, arching clear as the ground rises, slam-pounding his breath from his chest.
In the brilliant sun the last thing he sees is Maggie smiling on the beach and Logan running to him with open arms.
22
Cold Butte, Montana
After Samara finished the breakfast dishes, she made tea and turned on her laptop.
Jake was on the road. Logan had left for school.
She had two hours alone before she had to leave for the clinic.
Using an array of IDs and passwords, she clicked along a complex network of Web sites to check a number of Internet accounts.
The e-mail she was expecting had not arrived yet.
Samara clicked to her hidden folder to visit the joy in her life: her husband, her son, her mother and father. She smiled at their faces in the photos as her heart filled with love. For each day brought all of them closer to eternal happiness.
As it had been destined.
Samara shut off her computer and gazed at the boundless Montana sky. Soon the world would know the pure, unassailable truth of her action. Soon her name would be spoken by every human being on earth.
Samara Anne Ingram.
Her father, John Ingram, was a British archeology student who had been completing his Ph. D. on a dig near Mosul when he’d met Amina, a nursing student working at the site. They fell in love and Amina returned to London with him.
After they’d finished their studies, John and Amina were married in London, where Samara was born. Her parents settled in the city’s East End, where her father taught at a small college and her mother worked in a hospital.
Samara’s life with her parents was a happy one.
Until she lost them.
She thought of them every day, recalling her mother’s sweet smile and the way she filled their house with the aroma of samoon or khubz, delicious breads Samara loved to eat with jam and honey.
Her father would sit in his study for hours, smoking his pipe, pondering artifacts of Assyrian ivory, or frag ments of ancient pottery. Often, they’d all go to a local teahouse to talk about art, history or Samara’s goal to become a nurse like her mother.
She wanted to help people.
Samara dedicated herself to studying and was ac cepted into university, where she met and fell in love with Muhammad, a medical student from Iraq. He was the intelligent, handsome son of a doctor in Baghdad. Muhammad got along well with Samara’s father and, of course, charmed her mother, who loved to cook for him.
After Muhammad received his degree in medicine and Samara graduated into nursing, they were married in a small ceremony in London. Then they moved to
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Baghdad, for Muhammad believed with all his heart that their purpose in life was to alleviate suffering.
“Together we will help a great many people who need it, Samara.”
But he’d cautioned her. Life would not be easy in Iraq. They would have to grapple with the devastation of the Gulf War and the sanctions.
Nearly a year after they arrived, Samara faced her greatest challenge-but it had nothing to do with any hardships in Baghdad.
Samara was working a night shift when her super visor called her to the phone. It was a British diplomat who’d located her through her British passport. He told her that her mother and father had been on vacation in Greece when their rental car left the road and struck a cliff side.
They were killed instantly.
Samara collapsed.
Only last week she’d learned that she was pregnant and had planned to call her parents in a few days. Over whelmed, Samara feared for her baby. Muhammad rushed to her side. She could not have survived without him. They traveled to London together. He helped her bury her parents, then helped her mourn them while ensuring she channeled love and healthy energy to their baby.
“It’s just the three of us now. We must work together to get through this,” Muhammad told her on the return flight to Iraq.
It was a difficult time but Samara drew upon Mu hammad’s unyielding love and resolve and gave birth to a healthy baby boy.
Ahmed John.
Their miracle.
Her little son helped mend the hole in her heart. Day by day she was able to move forward with life which, in Iraq, was getting worse.
In the years after Ahmed was born, the sanctions continued exacting a heavy toll on the country. Vital medicine was in short supply and not getting through to the people whose lives depended on it.
Muhammad and Samara didn’t care about Saddam, didn’t care about politics. They wanted the suffering to stop. They wanted to help the children, women and men dying needlessly in their crowded hospitals. Each day they struggled under a regime that seemed to be hated by much of the world.
And each day Samara wondered how much longer things could continue.
Then came the day the world stood still.
The day the planes crashed in New York, Pennsyl vania and Washington, D.C. “What madness,” Muham mad whispered as they watched news reports. “Now more people will suffer, Samara.”
Their sadness was compounded when they learned that two student friends they’d met in London, stock traders, had died in the towers. In the time that followed, the people of Iraq grew uneasy as the United States focused its anger on Saddam.
The attack unleashed a global storm of accusations and debate over Iraq.
Some eighteen months after the hijackings, fears in tensified as foreign jets screamed over the city. Huge lineups formed at passport offices, people scrambled to leave Iraq, others hid valuables and moved to the coun tryside.