They were very close to the ground. It was morning, not night, and Mustafa could clearly see the American capital across the river ahead. He also saw an airport off to the right, but they weren’t turning towards it. Instead they were headed straight for a large pentagonal building on the near side of the river. This was deliberate. The pilot had the plane under control and he was calm, smiling like a man on his way into paradise.
“Hey, moron!” Mustafa shouted at him. “You’re going to murder us all, what’s wrong with you?”
The pilot gave no answer, just dipped the nose of the plane a bit farther. Mustafa made a grab for the controls and woke for real aboard the cargolifter even as its wheels bumped the runway at Andrews.
Across the aisle, Amal let out a sigh of relief and then laughed. “Now that’s a landing!” she said. Samir, tearing at his armrests in the next row forward, added: “Already I hate this country.”
THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA
A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE
Green Zone
The Green Zone is a heavily fortified region of Washington, D.C., that served as the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority. It measures roughly 10 square kilometers and is surrounded by a blastproof concrete wall topped with electrified razor wire. Entry into the Zone is only possible via helicopter or through one of seven tightly controlled checkpoints.
The Green Zone includes the National Mall, a large open park space lined with monuments and government buildings that is claimed by some sources to have been the original inspiration for the Zone’s name. By 2004, however, with the American insurgency in full swing, “Green Zone” was understood to be a reference to the fact that this was an oasis of relative safety in an increasingly dangerous area. The rest of Washington—and America—became, by extension, “the Red Zone.”
In January 2009, control of the Green Zone passed from the Coalition Authority to the newly installed American government. Many of the Coalition troops have since withdrawn to bases outside Washington. However, a sizeable garrison of UAS Marines remains within the Zone to safeguard the Arabian, Persian, and Kurdish embassies, and to help American security forces defend against the continuing insurgent attacks.
NOTABLE SITES IN THE GREEN ZONE
· The White House
· The Capitol Building (undergoing reconstruction)
· The Washington Monument
· The CSA Treasury Building
· The Smithsonian Creation Science Museum
· The Watergate Complex
Mustafa woke again, from a dream of smokeless fire. He was lying on a four-poster bed with an embroidered canopy. Samir was a snoring lump on a second bed to his left, and to his right was a massive oak chest of drawers. A sign atop the chest, just legible in the faint glow of a nightlight, claimed that all three pieces of furniture were the onetime property of Pope Urban II. As for the room, it had originally been an office; looking between the bedposts Mustafa could see a windowed door, the words ASSISTANT CURATOR painted in reverse on the glass.
He sat up, remembering a helicopter ride from the airbase and a hasty meet-and-greet with a Marine Colonel Yunus who had been assigned to act as their host. Mustafa estimated he’d gotten to sleep between eleven and midnight. His watch now said 11:30, which, whether a.m. or p.m., seemed unlikely.
He got up and slipped out quietly. The hall outside the office brought him to a room painted with a mural of a deluge. Three of the walls showed only clouds and rain and wind-tossed waves; inset against the fourth was a scale model of an ark. A bearded white patriarch stood at the ark’s stern, gazing towards the center of the room, where a jagged pedestal like the tip of a drowning mountain jutted up from the blue carpet. The skeleton of a dinosaur with sickle-shaped claws on its hind feet was set on the pedestal, poised as if it were about to take a leap at the ark, but the placard at the pedestal’s base suggested it would not make it. “Velociraptor antirrhopus,” the placard read. “Extinct, 2349 B.C.”
A doorway in the wall opposite the ark led to a gallery containing the bones of many more of the Flood’s victims. The gallery had a skylight as well, and looking up Mustafa saw stars.
Wandering farther through the museum, he came upon Colonel Yunus in a room that looked like a tourism ad for Giza. “Good morning,” the colonel greeted him.
“So it is morning, then,” Mustafa said.
“Yes, about half past four. Were you able to sleep at all?”
“Some. The accommodations are quite comfortable.” Thinking of the velociraptor: “And unusual.”
The colonel smiled. “I don’t know how much you remember from our conversation last night, but this building really is a storehouse of wonders. During the initial occupation a large number of troops were housed here, in part to prevent looting. Now that the Americans have retaken control the museum is mostly unoccupied, but a few of us have been allowed to remain as unofficial caretakers until the new government has the money to reopen the place.”
“Thank you for sharing it with me.”
“You are welcome. I was just about to pray. Would you like to join me?”
“I would, thank you.”
“And your friend?”
“Samir is not observant, I’m afraid.”
“Ah. Well,” the colonel said, pointing, “there’s a washroom that way, and you’ll find some spare prayer rugs tucked behind Pharaoh’s palace.”
“You pray in here?”
“Sometimes, yes.” Smiling again: “I have a theory that a Muslim helped design this room. It turns out if you draw a straight line from the Sphinx to the part in the Red Sea over there, it corresponds almost exactly to the Qibla direction.”
“Interesting symbolism,” Mustafa said.
“Yes, there’s a lot of that in the Green Zone. It’s a weird place.”
Amal woke among lionesses.
At last night’s meeting with the colonel she’d been sufficiently alert to understand that Mustafa and Samir were being given VIP accommodations while she was being relegated to women’s quarters, which annoyed her until she realized which women she’d be bunking with.
The Women’s Combat Support Unit, aka the Lionesses, had been formed in 2007 as part of the broader counterinsurgency strategy known as the Surge. In addition to their reluctance to show gratitude, most Americans had a deep-seated cultural aversion to having their homes ransacked, but research had found that a feminine presence could help moderate this. Lionesses were assigned in pairs to accompany Marines on patrol in the Red Zone. When a house was searched for weapons or insurgents, it was the Lionesses who interviewed the occupants, preserving the honor of the women and keeping the men calm; they could often get answers where a male interrogator would be met by stony silence, or violence. The Red Zone being the Red Zone, violence did still sometimes occur, but as their nickname implied, Lionesses could also fight, and with a ferocity that took insurgents by surprise.
They lived along with the Marine garrison troops in the former residential and business complex adjacent to the Arabian embassy. Most of the male Marines occupied apartments in the Watergate East and South buildings; the Lionesses were housed on the top two floors of the Watergate Hotel, which had been turned into a high-security women’s dorm.
It was like college, but with more guns. Amal shared a room with a girl from Nablus named Zinat. Barely nineteen, Zinat had followed her six brothers into the military in order to earn a scholarship and pursue an engineering degree. When Amal asked what sort of engineering she was interested in, Zinat said, “Cars. Fast cars.”