“We’re close,” Lieutenant Fahd said, consulting the electronic map on his dashboard. “Another five kilometers.”
A moment later, hearing approaching sirens, he called a halt a hundred meters from a road junction. A line of emergency vehicles—two fire engines, an ambulance, another fire engine—came racing along the crossroad, bound for McLean or some other trouble spot. The gunner on the lead Humvee tracked each vehicle in turn. After the last of them had passed by, the convoy continued to sit, while Lieutenant Fahd scanned the terrain ahead with a pair of binoculars.
Beyond the junction, the land to the left of the pike rose up to form a wooded ridge. The land on the right was flat woods, the trees serving as a screen for a cluster of houses. The pike itself—four lanes, two on either side of a broad grassy median—ran straight and level for about a kilometer before turning sharply to the right.
“Do you see something?” Mustafa asked.
“No,” Lieutenant Fahd said. “Just a funny feeling . . .”
While the lieutenant scanned the woods again, Samir stared at the billboard that stood at the southwest corner of the junction at the base of the ridge. The ad, which showed a bare-chested Oded Fehr caressing an Uzi while Natalie Hershlag pouted beneath silk sheets, was for an Israeli action film Samir knew he had seen—twice—but whose Arabic title he could not, just now, recall. Vandals had given Fehr a yarmulke and horns, and put a swastika on Hershlag’s forehead. These additions, like the ad itself, were weathered and faded, but the white cross spray-painted on the billboard’s lower right corner was fresh and unmistakable.
“All right,” the lieutenant said, still uneasy, and regretting his decision to let the helicopter go. “Proceed.”
As the convoy started forward, Samir slipped his hand into his pants pocket, struggling a bit because of the flak jacket, and also because of the numbness that flooded his body. In grasping the phone he pushed the first button without meaning to. Then dread paralyzed him.
The lead Humvee rolled past the marked billboard. The second Humvee. The third. Samir closed his eyes.
He forced them open again. He turned his left hand palm upward, looked down at the faces of his sons. Malik, he thought, Jibril. God help me.
He pressed SEND.
A final text message had alerted Bar Abbas to the convoy’s arrival at the junction. He picked up the remote-control box and pressed the test button. The green lamp flashed reassuringly. Then, as he lifted the safety catch on the detonator button and looked out at the kill zone, the red lamp came on.
“Good for you, Samir,” Bar Abbas said. “I guess Idris and I were wrong about you.”
He crouched to shield himself from the coming blast and the sound of music filled the foxhole. Bar Abbas had had Green Desert on the brain for several days now, so it was a moment before he realized that the tune wasn’t in his head. He looked down at the wooden planks that lined the foxhole’s floor. He’d assumed there was nothing beneath them but dirt, but apparently someone had hidden a CD player under there and queued up track 17 from Son of Cush, “Good Riddance (Enjoy the Virgins)”—a catchy, sarcastic ballad about a suicide bomber.
The ballad was almost to the end of its first verse, counterpointed by the sound of the approaching Humvees, when Bar Abbas figured out it wasn’t a CD track he was listening to.
It was a ringtone.
On the morning of 11/9, Mustafa and Samir had rushed to Ground Zero along with every other cop, firefighter, and EMT in Baghdad. But because they were Halal and not true first responders, there was never any chance they’d be ordered into the towers, something that Samir had always been secretly grateful for—and secretly ashamed of. He sometimes wondered, if he had gotten such an order, whether he would have been able to obey it.
The other thing he thought about, when he thought about that day, was the jumpers: the victims trapped on the upper floors who’d plummeted to their deaths, many not so much leaping as falling as they climbed out broken windows to escape the heat and smoke. But some of them really had jumped. Samir remembered one old man in particular, up in the Windows on the World restaurant, clasping his hands in prayer as he surrendered to gravity and God. There too, Samir wondered what he would have done, and what it would feel like to knowingly step into a hundred-story void.
Now at last he had an answer. The first seconds after he pressed the SEND button were pure freefall, the Humvee seeming to roll straight down rather than forward. Now, Samir thought, as he waited to hit bottom. Now . . . Now . . . Now . . .
Around the sixth or seventh Now he panicked and tried to tell the Humvee driver to stop, but the hiss of air that escaped his fear-constricted throat didn’t even qualify as a whisper. Now . . . Now . . . The Humvee hit a bump in the road and Samir opened his mouth again and screamed out “STOP!” but no one heard him, because the bomb had gone off.
The blast was near the top of the ridge, and the main force of the explosion was directed straight up in the air, but the pressure wave that rolled down the ridge and across the pike was still powerful enough to rock the Humvees sideways on their suspensions. The exposed gunners got the worst of it, feeling, to a man, as if they’d been swatted with a brick wall. A shower of debris followed: dirt and mud, stones, tree branches. The gunner in the unarmored Humvee was knocked cold by a hunk of timber from the foxhole’s roof that glanced off the top of his helmet.
“Stop!” Samir screamed, again, as debris continued to pelt the Humvees. “Stop!”
“Go! Go!” Lieutenant Fahd commanded his driver. It was the first rule of the Red Zone: You don’t stop in the middle of an ambush. But the splintered trunk of a Douglas fir had fallen across the Humvee’s hood, and the startled driver had thrown the engine into reverse, stalling it. While the driver wrestled with the starter, the lieutenant impatiently opened his door and got out to move the Christmas tree.
The air had cleared enough now that the Marines could see the blast crater up on the ridge. Incredibly, men were moving along the edge of the crater and in the wreck of foliage that surrounded it. Because they had been lying flat, most of the militiamen had survived the blast, though those closest to the foxhole were bleeding from their ears and noses and staggering like drunks.
The Humvee gunners, more than a little punch-drunk themselves, spent the first few seconds just gaping at the scene. Then Salim noticed the rifle rounds plinking off his turret armor and his training took over. “Chris-TIANS!” he shouted, bringing his gun up to fire. The gunners on the lead and rear Humvees followed his example.
The Barad .50-caliber machine gun had an effective range of two kilometers and could destroy even lightly armored targets. At close range against unarmored personnel it was murderous, not so much shooting the targets as exploding them. With three such weapons aimed at the ridge, firing at anything that moved, the number of surviving militia fell rapidly.
One of the last Minutemen standing tried to aim a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with one hand, his right arm having been shattered by blast debris. A machine gun cut him in half at the waist, and as his torso toppled backwards, his finger squeezed the trigger. The grenade flew up in a high parabola, arcing over the pike and landing in the woods on the far side, where it exploded harmlessly. But a Marine in the unarmored Humvee, scrambling up to take the place of the unconscious gunner, heard the explosion and assumed that a second wave of ambushers was attacking from the north. While his brothers continued to fire on the ridge, he swung his gun around and opened up on the woods—and the houses beyond. His first burst hit a propane tank, blasting the roof off a bungalow and sending a ball of fire into the air.
Mustafa had gotten out of the Humvee to help Lieutenant Fahd with the tree. When the lieutenant saw that Mustafa had left his helmet in the vehicle, he was furious. “Idiot!” he shouted. “You want to get shot in the h—”