The church was located in the town of Herndon, in western Fairfax County. The men of the militia began assembling there after midnight, arriving singly or in pairs and dispersing their vehicles throughout the surrounding neighborhood so that their gathering would not be noticed from the air.

By 2 a.m. there were sixty men in the pews. The church lights were kept low and there was no music or singing, just the soft voice of the preacher reading from the climax of the New Testament: “The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East. Then I saw three evil spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet . . . They gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.”

The sermon that followed was long and full of assertions that a more critical Bible scholar might have taken issue with. But the men of the militia, many of whom expected to die this coming day, listened attentively and without objection.

Sitting alone in a pew at the back of the nave was a man with a plain silver cross in his lapel. He was the militia’s chief strategist and he had provided the intelligence that had resulted in this gathering being called, although he had lied about where his information had come from.

The strategist’s Christian name was Peter Lightfield. He claimed to be a descendant of Thomas Jefferson; in truth he knew nothing of his ancestry, having been raised in a series of foster homes. To his secret masters in Al Qaeda, he was known as Ibn Abihi, “his father’s son,” and Ibn Abihi was also how he thought of himself, though for reasons of personal amusement he preferred the Aramaic rendering: Bar Abbas.

Bar Abbas sat through the reading of the scripture and the first few minutes of the sermon, but got up before the preacher could start blaspheming against Islam. If anyone had asked, Bar Abbas would have said he was going to check on the progress of the bomb-laying team, which was true—but first he had a different call to make.

He stepped out into the narthex and went downstairs to the church basement, which was divided into three rooms. The front room contained mostly paper: old church newsletters, handbills attacking the Coalition Authority and threatening retaliation against collaborators, and stacks and stacks of comic-book tracts that explained, using crude images and semiliterate prose, the connection between the Antichrist and the Arab and Persian governments.

A padlocked door gave access to the church armory. As was the American custom, every weapon carried a scriptural reference—either an actual Bible verse or a coded citation. The sights of the assault rifles racked along the front wall were all engraved with the legend JER50:14 (“Take up your positions around Babylon, all you who draw the bow. Shoot at her! Spare no arrows, for she has sinned against the LORD.”). The grip of a .45-caliber handgun was stamped PSA110:5 (“The LORD is at your right hand; he will crush kings on the day of his wrath”) and the stock of a machine gun read JDG15:16 (“Then Samson said, ‘With a donkey’s jawbone, I have made donkeys of them. With a donkey’s jawbone, I have killed a thousand men.’ ”). The lid of a crate of hand grenades had been stenciled with the words of 1st Samuel, chapter 17, verse 45: “David said to the Philistine, ‘You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, whom you have defied.’ ” And a case holding the militia’s prize possession, a Scorpion man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher, was painted with a verse from Revelation chapter 12: “Satan was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.”

The third room was a disused janitor’s closet that now held random junk. Sitting on a chest-high shelf was a dusty laptop; it looked like it hadn’t been touched in a long time, but its battery was fully charged and it started up immediately when Bar Abbas pressed the power button. While the operating system loaded, Bar Abbas retrieved a webcam from behind a box of crèche figurines and plugged it into the laptop. He opened a videoconferencing window and entered a series of passwords. There was a burst of sand-like static, and then he was staring into the face of Idris Abd al Qahhar.

“You are late,” Idris said.

“I had to wait until the service started.” Bar Abbas glanced at the armory’s outer door, which he had bolted behind him. “We’re less likely to be interrupted this way.”

“Did you locate Samir Nadim?”

“Yes,” said Bar Abbas. “I gave him the cell phone and told him what to do. But I don’t know if he’ll go through with it.”

“You told him what would happen if he didn’t?”

“Yes, and from the way he reacted, it’s clear he loves his sons’ lives more than his own. But that may not be enough when the moment comes. He seems . . . weak-willed.”

“He is a coward,” Idris said sternly. “You have a contingency plan?”

Bar Abbas nodded. “I’ll be there to set it off if he doesn’t.”

He might have asked, Why involve this Samir at all? but Idris would likely regard such a question as impertinent. Bar Abbas assumed it was a subterfuge of some kind: Military investigators would find the modified cell phone on Samir’s body, and Idris would use that fact to cast him and his colleagues as traitors, and discredit whatever government agency had sent them on their mission to America. Hearing the way Idris said “He is a coward,” Bar Abbas decided there might be a secondary motive, as well: Perhaps Idris, for personal reasons, wanted Samir’s last hours to be filled with fear and torment. This was not professional behavior for an Al Qaeda leader, but Bar Abbas, who had tortured a number of his own enemies in the past, was in no position to pass judgment.

“What about the other matter?” Idris said next. “Have you investigated V. Howell Industries?”

“I took a squad of men to the address you gave me,” Bar Abbas told him. “The offices were abandoned—but recently. It looks like they cleared out in a hurry.”

“They knew you were coming.”

“If they did, it wasn’t any of my people who warned them. There wasn’t time.”

“And you found nothing?”

“There were some artifacts in one of the rooms. Books, mostly.”

“Books about what?”

“The history of Arabia,” Bar Abbas said. “The real history, I mean.”

Idris’s face expanded on screen as he leaned forward. “What did you do with these books?”

“Burned them in a dumpster behind the facility.” Or most of them. Bar Abbas had saved a few volumes for himself.

“And the other men who were with you . . .”

“They were curious, but nobody read anything they weren’t supposed to. Anyway,” he couldn’t resist adding, “it doesn’t matter. Once God lifts the mirage, everyone’s going to know the truth.”

“Yes, but until that day, there are certain truths we don’t want widely known . . . What else did you find?”

“A Texas state flag. That was in another room that was being used as a dormitory. There were some empty pill bottles in a wastebasket.”

“What kind of pills?”

“The bottles weren’t labeled, but I’d guess Valium or some other sedative,” Bar Abbas said. “Almost everyone takes something to sleep here.”

“What else?”

“Just some personal effects. Somebody must be a Green Desert fan—I found a copy of the Son of Cush CD under one of the dormitory beds.”

“Son of Cush? What is Son of Cush?”

“Alternative punk rock,” Bar Abbas explained, which judging from Idris’s expression didn’t clarify matters. “Don’t worry, none of the songs are about Osama bin Laden.”

“If it’s music, you should destroy it anyway.”

“Already done.” Bar Abbas lied. He looked up, hearing a board creak overhead. “I should go. I still have preparations to make.”

“You’ll contact me again when it’s accomplished?”

“If I can,” said Bar Abbas. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s because God had other plans.”

At that same hour not far away, two disciples crouched on a wooded ridge overlooking the Jeff Davis Pike.

The lead disciple’s name was Timothy. He was tall and thin, and paler than any man who ever sat at the foot of the living Christ. He wore a pair of night-vision goggles and was using them to spy on a trio of Christian militiamen as they planted an IED in a culvert beneath the roadbed.

He could not help but admire the militiamen’s bravery. They were dressed in the reflective jackets of a legitimate road crew and had a Dominion Water & Power truck parked on the median, but while that might fool passing civilian drivers (or at least give them an excuse to play dumb), it would be no protection at all against a military patrol. In the early days of the insurgency, when Army snipers sat on D.C. rooftops with orders to shoot anyone carrying a shovel or a toolbox after dark, Washington utilities employees had suffered a horrible death toll. After years of entreaties from the citizenry, the capital’s defenders were a little less trigger-happy now, but out here in the Virginia suburbs it was still open season on potential saboteurs—and rather than a quick clean bullet through the head, you were likely to get a shower of explosive shells from a helicopter gunship, leaving you torn up and dying in slow agony beside your burning vehicle.

As the militiamen ran a wire from the bomb to an antenna on the back of a mile-marker post, a clatter of rotor blades echoed from the east. The militiamen didn’t stop working or even look up. More bravery, or maybe it was just fatalism: If the chopper pilot had spotted them, they were as good as martyred already. But minutes passed with no deadly hail of shells, and the sound of the rotor blades gradually faded away. Not long after that, the job was finished; the militiamen got back into the truck and drove off.

“All right.” Timothy stood up and peeled off his goggles. “Let’s do it.”

The other disciple made no move to rise. “I don’t know about this, Tim,” he said.

“There’s nothing to know. You heard the director’s orders.”

“What if that chopper comes back?”

“It won’t. You heard the director. We’re protected from on high.”

“Yeah? If the director’s so sure about that, how come he’s not here?”

A crunch of leaves as Timothy half turned towards him: “We’re doing this, Terry. You’re doing it.”

After so much time in the dark, Terry didn’t need night-vision goggles to see the expression on his companion’s face. He shuddered, trying in vain to summon up the nerve to tell Tim to go fuck himself. But there was a reason Timothy was a leader while he was only a sidekick.

“OK,” he said, ducking his head in submission. “OK.” Then: “Fuck it.”

Mustafa opened his eyes around 4 a.m., disturbed by silence. Samir had been tossing and turning most of the night, but now the other bed was empty. Mustafa got up and went to use the restroom. Samir wasn’t there either, but the toilet stall smelled strongly of vomit.

He found Samir in the deluge room, seated on the “mountaintop” beside the velociraptor skeleton. The ’raptor remained poised to leap at Noah’s ark, but Samir looked like he’d already tried that and failed: His face and neck were damp, and his hair was plastered to his skull.

“Samir?” Mustafa said. “Are you ill?”

“I suppose I am,” Samir replied, his voice thick like a sleepwalker’s. “Many would say so.”

“Do you want me to get a doctor?”

“No. It’s not that kind of sickness.” Then: “Is it time to go already?”

“Not just yet. But listen, Samir, if you’re unwell, perhaps you shouldn’t go at all. Amal and I can—”

“No!” Samir came suddenly alert, looking alarmed and then angry. “I’m not a coward!”

“All right,” said Mustafa. “I’m going to go find Colonel Yunus, to pray. Would you like to join us?”

Samir’s face had gone slack again, and he took so long answering that Mustafa became convinced that he really was still asleep. Finally Samir said: “No. If God has no time for me, I have no time for Him . . . Come get me when you’re finished.”

A covered foxhole had been dug into the hillside by some previous group of partisans, abandoned and forgotten, then rediscovered by Bar Abbas as he scouted the highway for ambush sites. He crawled inside just before dawn. Twenty other militiamen were dispersed along the top of the ridge, lying belly down in the dirt with their weapons beside them.

The foxhole’s observation slit gave a view of the Davis Pike, hazy now in the dawn mist. On the ledge of packed earth that formed the base of the slit, Bar Abbas laid out a pair of binoculars, a pack of cigarettes, a coffee thermos, and last but not least, a remote-control box.

The green lamp on the remote control lit as soon as Bar Abbas switched it on, and when he pressed the test button the lamp flashed, indicating that the detonator circuit on the IED was live. A red lamp would let Bar Abbas know if and when Samir pressed the SEND button on his cell phone. After that, he wouldn’t have to do anything; the bomb would use the cell’s GPS to decide when to detonate. But the remote control also had a second button, under a safety catch, that would allow Bar Abbas to detonate the bomb manually if the red lamp failed to light.

Bar Abbas’s own cell phone vibrated silently in his jacket. It was a text message from a confederate in the Green Zone: SARACENS WILL DEPART 0700. Assuming normal traffic, drive time from the Green Zone to this kill zone should be about thirty minutes, so he had roughly two hours to wait.

There was room in the foxhole for at least three men, but Bar Abbas had insisted on privacy. While his subordinates shivered in the open air, he poured himself coffee and took a book from a satchel at his feet. In the gray dawn half-light he studied the title and author on the book’s cover: The Osama bin Laden I Know, by Peter Bergen.

A truck rumbled by on the highway below. Bar Abbas lit a cigarette and began to read.

The four Humvees were lined up in front of the Watergate Hotel. Three of them were what the Marines called “luxury models,” with bolted-on side and rear armor plating, bulletproof windows, and an armored turret surrounding the roof-mounted .50-caliber machine gun.

Mustafa, Samir, and Amal were each assigned to one of the armored Humvees. Mustafa would ride in the lead vehicle with Lieutenant Fahd. Humvee number two was the unarmored model.

Amal was assigned to Humvee number three with Salim, Zinat, Umm Husam, and a Sergeant Faris. Zinat offered to drive, but Sergeant Faris insisted on taking the wheel himself, and since Lionesses were not allowed to operate heavy weapons except in emergencies, that put Salim on the .50-caliber. “Ah well,” Zinat said, after Umm Husam claimed the other front seat, “at least we’ll have a nice view.” She tried to show Amal how the gunner’s sling would dangle Salim’s buttocks directly before their eyes, but Amal’s attention was focused on the turret armor, which struck her as inadequate. Salim’s head and upper torso would still be exposed, especially to a shooter firing from an elevated position.

Samir was assigned to the fourth Humvee, which had a sign mounted between its taillights reading AMERICA, TAILGATE AND WE WILL KILL YOU.

They had been issued helmets and flak jackets. Samir found the body armor constricting and pointless, so he stripped it off while he had a last smoke and then, when the order came to get into the vehicles, tried to leave it behind. The Marines were looking out for him, though, and one of his Humvee-mates, Private Dimashqi, patted him on the shoulder and handed the flak jacket back to him. “I know it’s a pain in the ass,” the private said, “but we really do want to keep you safe, sir.”

“Thanks,” Samir said glumly.

Colonel Yunus came out to see them off. He made eye contact with Mustafa and pressed his palms together in front of his chest. Mustafa smiled and returned the gesture, and the colonel nodded to Lieutenant Fahd.

“OK, let’s roll,” the lieutenant said.

Their air escort, a Shaitan missile-equipped helicopter gunship, was hovering over the Kennedy Arts Center. As the Humvee convoy rounded the Arabian embassy and entered the on-ramp for the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, the pilot dipped the chopper’s nose in acknowledgment and flew out over the Potomac ahead of them.

Lieutenant Fahd, playing tour guide, explained that the bridge was named for the first American president to pay a state visit to the UAS. Teddy Roosevelt had spent little time in Arabia itself; instead he and Ibn Saud had gone down the East African coast for six weeks of big-game hunting in Kenya.

The bridge passed over an island in the middle of the river. The island too was named for Roosevelt and prior to the invasion it had been a nature preserve. Unfortunately the forest cover had attracted insurgents, and after a pair of former Minutemen had been caught laying dynamite under the bridge piers, Army engineers had been dispatched to the island. They’d chopped down every tree and shrub within two hundred meters of the bridge and used flamethrowers on the rest. Looking ahead, Mustafa could see that similar measures had been employed on the Virginia shoreline—and not just on the foliage. Many of the high-rises in downtown Arlington were blackened husks, and those that hadn’t burned were heavily damaged by artillery and rocket fire. “Is that from the 2004 assault?”

“Some of it,” Lieutenant Fahd said. “Some of it dates back to the initial invasion, and some is more recent—Arlington has always been a trouble spot. Despite how it looks, we do try our best to minimize collateral damage, but there are limits to how surgical you can be with high-explosive munitions in a built-up area like this.”

The road circled north and west around the urban core. The Humvee gunners kept their weapons trained on the broken skyline and watched for snipers. Zinat, ogling Salim’s butt, gave Amal a nudge as his hips swiveled along with the turret. Amal ignored her. Like the gunners she was focused on the tall buildings, appalled not by the destruction but by the number of viable sniping perches that remained among the wreckage. Minimizing civilian casualties was all well and good, but if you were going to raze a city anyway, why not do a more thorough job?

For the first kilometer no one attacked them. Then they drove past a housing subdivision that had been blasted flat during an encounter between the Virginia Sons of Liberty and the Seventh Marine Regiment. A gang of little kids were playing Patriots and Muslims in the rubble-strewn field, darting from cover to cover and shooting one another with rifles made from sticks.

Lieutenant Fahd keyed his radio. “Hold fire, hold fire,” he said. “These are noncombatants.”

The Humvee gunners held their fire. The kids, being kids, showed less restraint. When Salim snapped a mock salute at one mini-patriot in a newspaper tricorne, the boy threw a rock at him. The kid had a good arm; the rock struck the lip of the turret armor and bounced up, nearly catching Salim in the face. “You little shit!” Salim said—a sentiment echoed by Amal inside the Humvee. But Salim was laughing, and he kept the .50-caliber aimed safely skyward, even as the other kids started throwing rocks too.

“What’s that phrase they’re chanting?” Mustafa asked.

“ ‘Sand nigger,’ ” said Lieutenant Fahd. He added drily: “It’s a term of endearment. They are comparing us to the noble slaves who built this country.”

Mustafa got the joke, but he didn’t laugh. He didn’t wish to be a spoilsport, and he really did believe that the military had done the best it could here with the tools available. Nevertheless, as the convoy continued on its way, passing more and more scenes of devastation, the thought was inescapable: On the Day of Judgment, whatever other achievements might be credited to the Coalition, nation-building wouldn’t be one of them.

The rising sun had burned off the fog and there was enough light inside the foxhole now that Bar Abbas could read without squinting. He’d paused to light a fresh cigarette and pour the last of his coffee when his cell phone vibrated again.

He had two incoming text messages. One was from the secondary ambush team, confirming that they were in place, ready to finish off any Marines who managed to escape this kill zone.

The other message was from a watcher along the route: SARACENS ON PIKE @ FALLS CHURCH. EXECUTING DIVERSION.

“Excellent,” Bar Abbas said, and sent a text of his own: SARACENS INBOUND. ALL MAKE READY.

Samir was trying to hypnotize himself.

He’d recalled all that he had ever heard about how suicide bombers prepared themselves mentally—the ritual prayers and recitations of faith, the visions of heavenly reward waiting beyond the pearly gates—but none of it was any use to him. He didn’t know the words of the Nicene Creed and didn’t believe in Saint Peter. Maybe if he’d had a ball of hashish to eat, like one of Hassan Sabbah’s assassins—or better yet, a good stiff drink.

He concentrated on the drone of the Humvee’s motor, hoping that combined with his exhaustion it would put him in a headspace where he could push two buttons without thinking. It worked too well: His head drooped until his chin touched his chest, and then the sound of an unmufflered motorcycle passing on the other side of the road made him jolt upright again, saying, “Where are we? Where are we? Did I miss it?”

“Easy,” Private Dimashqi said, chuckling along with the other Marines. “We aren’t there yet.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“A minute or two at most. You didn’t miss anything, I promise you.”

They were passing through another burned-out urban pocket. Samir pressed his face against his door window and tried to look back, to see if there were any billboards on the road shoulder behind them, but it was no use. Fretting, he dropped a hand to his thigh and felt for the cell phone in his pocket. As he touched it, an explosion thundered in the distance.

“What was that?” Samir looked out the window again and saw black smoke rising to the north. “What the hell was that?”

In the lead Humvee, Lieutenant Fahd was asking the same question in more measured tones. “Looks like a truck bomb,” the helicopter pilot radioed down. “Somewhere in McLean . . . Yeah, citizen’s band is reporting an insurgent attack on the main fire station.”

The lieutenant hissed in disgust. “You see?” he said, looking over his shoulder at Mustafa. “This is what these fucking people are like. They kill their own first responders, and then they blame us when their neighborhoods go up in smoke.”

The radio crackled. It was the helicopter again: “Insurgents are hitting the McLean police headquarters now. The attackers have a mortar and the cops are asking for help taking it out.”

“Yeah, yeah, go,” Lieutenant Fahd said. “We’ll call if we need you.”

Samir watched the helicopter fly away and understood. He hadn’t missed anything. The sign he’d been commanded to watch for was still ahead, but now that their escort had been lured off, he wouldn’t have long to wait. He abandoned his attempts at mesmerism and fell back on fatherhood, taking the snapshot from his other pocket and cupping it in his hands. Malik, he thought, Jibril, I’m sorry I couldn’t be the dad you deserved. But now I’ll do this thing, for you, and pray Idris keeps his part of the bargain.

“Are those your sons?” Private Dimashqi said.

Samir gritted his teeth. “Yes,” he said.

“Handsome boys.” The private held out a snapshot of his own. “These are my daughters. That’s Faiza and Basilah, and the baby is Aisha.”

“Adorable.” Shut up. Please shut up.

“Yeah . . . I haven’t actually met Aisha yet. But my tour’s up in a month, so I’ll finally get to hold her . . .”

OK, God, Samir thought. I get it. I’m a sinner and I’m going to hell. Well, to hell with you too. Pressing the photo of Malik and Jibril to his chest, he stared at the roadside in grim silence while Private Dimashqi prattled on about his daughters.

This seemed to be the last of the devastated zones. They drove under a crumbling highway overpass, passed a sign that read LEAVING TYSONS CORNER, and entered a green suburb of mostly intact housing developments. There was still plenty of evidence that battles had been fought here—a roadside church missing its steeple; a pair of American tanks, sans turrets, sitting in a field overgrown with brambles—but no more scorched earth.

“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—”

Thunk! The lieutenant’s own head jerked sideways and his eyes rolled up. Mustafa caught him as he fell. The lead Humvee gunner zeroed in on the sniper a half second later and vaporized him. The driver, having restarted the motor, shouted at Mustafa: “Get in! Get in!”

Having run out of targets on the ridge, the gunner in the rear Humvee rotated his turret to check on the road behind them. A few cars were coming up the pike on the far side of the junction, but when their drivers caught sight of the firefight, they all made hasty U-turns.

Then a truck rig rumbled into view along the crossroad. The driver had his radio cranked, so he didn’t hear the shooting, and distracted by the U-turning cars on his left, he didn’t see the Humvees until he’d already begun his own right turn onto the pike. By then, the Humvee gunner’s attention had been drawn to the long silver tank that trailed behind the rig like a bomb.

“Fuck that,” the gunner said, taking aim. “No tailgating!”

Just up the road and out of sight around the bend, the members of the secondary ambush team listened to the explosions and the gunfire and watched the rising fireballs and smoke. Because they knew God was on their side, they concluded the initial ambush had been a great success and the Marines were being slaughtered.

Their feelings about this were mixed. They wanted to see God’s enemies destroyed, of course. But that was just it: They wanted to see God’s enemies destroyed, and take part in the destruction. What was the point of being a soldier of Christ if you didn’t get to do battle?

So instead of thanking God for granting them victory, they asked Him for another favor: Please Lord, they prayed, lips moving silently as they watched the road. Please, don’t let them all die. Save some Muslims for us.

God, they soon discovered, was in a generous mood.

Mustafa had loaded Lieutenant Fahd into the back of the Humvee so that the corpsman who occupied the other rear seat could tend to him. The sniper bullet had put a deep dimple in the lieutenant’s helmet, and while the slug had failed to penetrate the Kevlar, the impact had concussed him. A dark bruise was forming beside his temple, and when the corpsman tried to get his attention, his eyelids barely fluttered.

Mustafa sat up front and listened to the radio chatter. A Marine in one of the other Humvees was trying to call back their air support. But the gunship was having its own problems: After taking out the mortar, it had been fired on by a surface-to-air missile. It wasn’t clear, from the frantic transmission, whether the helicopter had actually been hit or was just maneuvering to get a shot at the missile launcher.

The convoy rounded the bend in the road. Just past the turn, the woods to their right gave way to a strip mall, the string of shops extending to a gas station at the corner of another crossroads up ahead. On the left side of the road, still slightly elevated on the back end of the ridge, was a single long box-structure building, its windows painted over and covered with OUT OF BUSINESS signs; individual letters running along the concrete lip of its roof spelled the words PIGGLY WIGGLY next to a smiling hog face.

A roadblock had been set up at the crossroads. A pair of Dominion Water & Power trucks were parked nose to nose on the pike’s eastbound side. And on their side of the median, just pulling into place across both lanes, was a big yellow school bus.

The lead Humvee driver eased up on the throttle. Knowing how insurgents thought, he was inclined to be highly suspicious of vehicles, like those used to transport children, that a Marine might be reluctant to shoot at. “Talk to me, Abu Azzam,” he called up to his gunner.

The gunner was already looking through a pair of field glasses. This was no ordinary school bus. Sheet steel had been welded onto its side, in a poor man’s imitation of the Humvee’s armor kit. As he scanned the windows, he saw no little kids’ heads inside, only big heads in tri-cornered hats, and gun muzzles, and—

“RPG!” the gunner shouted. The driver swerved to the right, as did the driver of the second Humvee. The third Humvee was just a little too slow, and the grenade struck it on the left side above the rear wheel well. The explosion was deafening and the tire instantly went flat, but the armor plating prevented any shrapnel from entering the passenger compartment. Amal, ears ringing, looked up at Salim, but he seemed to be OK too—he was standing firm in the turret, already returning fire at the school bus.

All of the Humvee gunners were firing at the school bus, whose improvised armor proved far less effective than the Humvee’s. The bus became a sieve.

More militia appeared atop the Piggly Wiggly. They had rifles, another RPG, and a machine gun that set up directly above the pig’s head. Most of them began shooting at the convoy, but one Minuteman whose rifle was loaded with incendiary rounds took aim at the gas station.

“Don’t stop, don’t stop,” the lead Humvee driver chanted to himself, machine gun fire rattling against his door as he raced along the strip mall parking lot. Mustafa looked ahead, and had just noticed that the blacktop around the gas station pumps was soaking wet when the air itself seemed to ignite and the station disappeared beneath a massive bloom of flame. The driver slammed on the brakes; they jerked forward in their seats and then back as the second Humvee rear-ended them.

The third Humvee, which had fallen slightly behind, tried to brake more gently, but the friction shredded the damaged tire. The Humvee fishtailed, caught a pothole, and began to tip sideways. Its right wheels left the ground and it tilted to a forty-degree angle and hung there for an instant as if considering the matter, before the added weight of the turret armor and an inadvertent nudge from the fourth Humvee carried it all the way over. “Salim!” Amal cried. She tried to grab him, but his legs abruptly vanished as if God had yanked him up on a string.

The Humvee came to rest on its side. Amal, who had fallen against Zinat, immediately pushed herself up, grabbed Zinat’s rifle, and started crawling through the turret opening. “Wait,” Umm Husam called to her, but Amal didn’t wait.

Salim had landed on his back a few meters from the Humvee. He wasn’t seriously injured but the tumble had left him punch-drunk again. Rifle rounds were ricocheting off the parking lot surface all around him but instead of seeking cover he sat up slowly. A bullet grazed the shoulder of his flak jacket and he frowned, swatting at the spot as if it were a mosquito. Then he shrugged and started to get up, and a bullet whined off the asphalt directly behind him and ricocheted upwards and a red cloud puffed out of the top of his right thigh. He fell back, hard, onto his tailbone, and stared at the bleeding hole in his leg and said, sounding exactly like a little boy: “Ow.”

Amal, in a crouch, raised the rifle to her shoulder and sighted on a bobbing tricorne. She killed the Minuteman who’d shot Salim, and another man next to him. This got the attention of the Minuteman with the machine gun, who began swinging his weapon around, meaning to ventilate Amal and the Humvee behind her. “Target right,” Umm Husam said, appearing at Amal’s side. She fired, and the machine gunner’s head disappeared in a red sunburst.

The lead Humvee, having recovered from its fender bender, backed up to give them some cover, while the unarmored Humvee ranged back out onto the pike to offer itself as a moving target. Hunks of concrete began flying off the lip of the Piggly Wiggly’s roof as the Humvee gunners went to work.

In the back of the rear Humvee, Samir sat through all of this in numb detachment, feeling as though he were encased in a bubble. He’d thought for sure he’d died in the roadside bombing, and even now a part of him wondered whether that might not be so, and the chaos around him just the normal process of entering into hell. The prospect didn’t frighten him. The gunfire, the explosions, even the flames, all left him unmoved.

What did finally move him, and begin dragging him back to the world of the living, was the sight of the wounded Marine, Salim. Samir had missed seeing Lieutenant Fahd get shot, so Salim was his first glimpse of the human cost of his betrayal—something he had not counted on surviving to witness. He got a good close look, as the Humvee he was riding in tucked in behind the lead Humvee to form an armored screen for the exposed Marines.

Salim was not the worst of it. The worst was Amal, the expression on her face as she tied her headscarf around Salim’s leg to try to stanch the bleeding. From her fear and her rage, one might think the Marine were family, rather than just some guy she happened to be riding with. Watching her, Samir felt a horrified pang in his heart. I’m sorry, he thought. I’m so sorry, Amal, but my sons, I had no choice . . .

Mustafa and the corpsman both got out of the lead Humvee to help Amal. An RPG round flew by too close for comfort, punching through the plate glass of a minimart in the strip mall and making everybody duck. Samir, suddenly sure he was about to see his friends get killed, looked away. Looked up. His gaze lit on the sign above the minimart, which to his tear-blurred vision appeared to read 9/11. He turned his head to the right, towards the roof of the Chinese restaurant next door.

There was another Minuteman up there. He had crept in a crouch to the corner of the roof, unnoticed by the Marines. He was holding a bottle filled with amber fluid and trying to use a balky lighter to ignite the rag stuffed in the bottle’s neck.

“No,” Samir said. And once more he was in freefall, but this time the fear was galvanizing rather than paralyzing. Like an acrobat in midair, he twisted and reached, drawing the .45 automatic from the leg holster of Private Dimashqi beside him, turned again, shoved his door open, stepped out, and aimed up. Samir’s first three shots missed, but the fourth hit the bottle even as the Minuteman got the rag alight. The Minuteman became a burning man with a blazing three-cornered crown.

Samir fired the pistol until it was empty. Then he ducked down beside Mustafa and Amal and Salim and the startled corpsman. “I’m sorry,” he said, weeping. “I’m sor—”

The ground shook. All the windows in the Piggly Wiggly blew out, and the roof, suddenly fluid, bulged upwards, flinging Minutemen into the air. “Shaitan!” one of the Marines cried, thinking that the helicopter gunship had returned. But this was no missile strike; it was another bomb, detonating inside the store—or rather, in the parking level below it.

The roof fell back in and with a long rumble the outer walls collapsed, spilling a last few screaming Christians into the rubble. After that a stillness fell, a stretch of calm during which even the roar of the gas station blaze seemed muted. When half a minute had passed with no more shots being fired, the Marines began to relax.

A voice called out: “Mustafa al Baghdadi!”

Heads—and guns—turned towards the sound. Forty meters back along the parking lot from where the Humvees were stopped, a pale man had appeared, standing out front of a greeting-card store with his arms in the air. His hands were open and empty, and he’d unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a scrawny chest to which no bombs or weapon holsters were strapped.

The unarmored Humvee drove up beside him. Marines jumped out and shoved the pale man to his knees.

Mustafa stood up. “Hey!” Umm Husam said. “Your helmet!” Mustafa nodded and got his helmet and then walked down the parking lot to the unarmored Humvee. When he got there, one of the Marines was staring through the open door of the greeting-card store; just inside, another Minuteman lay dead with a loaded RPG launcher beside him.

Mustafa turned his attention to the pale man. “I am Mustafa al Baghdadi,” he said. “Who are you and what do you want with me?”

“My name is Timothy McVeigh,” the pale man replied. “I’m an agent of the Texas CIA and I was sent here to find you—to protect you.” His eyes flicked briefly to the dead man, and then to the pile of rubble across the pike, before returning to Mustafa. “The director would like to see you, sir.”