that seemed to envelope him.
So Key started walking. He thought the mist would soon dissipate, but it didn’t. So he just kept moving. He didn’t know for how long or in what direction. As long as he was covered in fog he kept moving.
Come on, come on, he thought. Heaven or hell, make a decision.
He only paused for a second when he realized that maybe they already had. Maybe this was purgatory. Maybe he was doomed to walk in this for God-knows-how-long.
Key chuckled at the truth of that. Yeah, only God knew how long. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken Your name in vain so often….
As if in response, the mist finally began to clear. Key stopped dead in his tracks as the smoke retreated—like he was a circular fan. All around him a devastated village began to appear. The whole place looked like a giant lawn mover had been dropped on it. The dwellings didn’t look so much detonated as shredded. The foliage didn’t look so much cracked or broken as frayed.
Then something else started coming into view. At first Key didn’t even recognize them as corpses. The pungent smell—it could’ve been anything dead. He’d smelled carcasses before, in the mountains of Southern California where he grew up. It wasn’t until he realized that the hair, fingernails, and toenails were human in origin that he acknowledged them as more than elaborately slaughtered animals.
The hands and feet of the corpses weren’t just sliced open, they seemed inflated until they burst. In fact, all the limbs of the corpses were like that—even the heads. Popped balloons. Balloons popped from the inside, by shattering nails. What sort of weapon did this? What sort of weapon could do this?
Key walked slowly around, forcing himself to stare at the devastated bodies—trying to recognize something, anything, about them. Their hair was colored the same dark black by their staggeringly violent deaths, so that was little help. Only the length gave hint of male or female—but not in any convincingly effective manner.
But their remaining, tattered, blood-and-gut-stained clothing held the only real clues. Key could distinguish villager from soldier, but just barely. He dreaded seeing insignia or ID patches, but he looked intently for them just the same.
A young woman’s face flashed in his mind’s eye. He wasn’t proud that he put his hope that Terri Nichols was alive above the rest, but he had felt protective from the moment she joined their squad. She was also from Michigan, like him, and was the youngest, the nicest, and, yes, the prettiest member of the unit. Also the toughest, strongest, smartest girl he had ever met. He was proud to work alongside her, and he wasn’t going to blame himself for feeling that way, or for feeling glad that he could find no evidence of her among the corpses.
Then he heard it. And felt it. A foot fall.
Josiah Key looked up, straining to see into the remaining mist, which encircled the ruined village like a net. As he stared, a silhouette began to outline itself in the steamy shroud. He suddenly felt his M249 SAW tight in his hands, but he did not shift his stare a centimeter. He waited until a figure began to emerge from the cloud like a drowning victim surfacing from the sea.
He was not a US soldier. He wore a darkly dyed thawb, the traditional long-sleeved, ankle-length garment, only with fatigue pants and army boots. He also wore a turban, but with a gauzy scarf that rippled in the breeze like a flag. But it was not a flag of surrender. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Key would have recognized him even if he was wrapped like a mummy. He had seen his face enough, on screen, on paper, on walls, on desks, and even on flesh in the form of a tattoo. It was Usa Awar, one of the enemy’s most wanted terrorists and killers.
He stood twenty feet away from Key, staring back at him with indifference. No, it was more than that. He stared at Key the way a serial killer stares at a victim: not as an animal, but the way a human stares at an animal it is about to kill. As something only worthy of slaughtering.
And he held in his right hand, blood pouring out its neck to spread on the village ground, the decapitated head of Private Terri Nichols.
Key screamed in regret and rage, his forefinger clamping on the trigger of the M249 until its thirty forty-five caliber shells obliterated Awar from his sight. Even then he didn’t stop. He instantly replaced the empty weapon with his M9 Beretta sidearm, emptying its fifteen nine millimeter rounds into the same smug face.
It wasn’t until a distant beeping distracted him that he finally stopped. He looked down to see a red light flashing inside his pants pocket. The beeping was coming from there.
Like an automaton, Key reached into his pocket to find his personal smartphone flashing and beeping—something he never equipped it to do. He raised it to his numb face to see a small box on the device’s screen. The box read: “Military Override. Urgent Incoming Message.”
Like so many in the cellphone age, Key’s thumb automatically, seemingly involuntarily, responded.
The message appeared, and repeated, again and again. “C5, C5, C5, C5, C5…”
The cleaning had been upgraded. It was now “With Extreme Prejudice.”
Josiah Key looked up to see that Awar was gone. There was no sign of Nichols’s skull, or any other part of her.
Chapter 2
“You should have seen him,” Usa Awar said quietly, even gently, to Private Terri Nichols.
They were in a cave, illuminated by oil lamps and candles, so a glimmering yellow sheen dappled over everything, making her flesh seem to glow. Awar was kneeling before the chair Nichols was tied to. The chair was obviously homemade, from coarse but demonically strong, heavy wood. The rope was also strong and coarse, as well as coiled and thin.
“Obviously in shock, his eyes vacant and unreasoning….”
Her ankles were bent back on either side of her, and lashed to the back slats of the chair seat. The chair did not have arms, but did not require them. Her arms were bent back and slung there by her wrists, which were also noosed around her neck, so if she let them hang naturally, she would strangle herself.
“I was carrying your helmet,” Awar said. “You know, the one with your name on it? ‘Nichols, T.’”
“He acted as if I was carrying your severed head,” Awar continued mildly. “He stared, eyes huge, then started firing wildly.” The captor shrugged smugly. “The shooting was easy to evade, as all your attacks are. Apparently I had hit a nerve….”
With that, he diffidently swiped her left breast with the back of his fore and middle fingers. Her nipples were covered by squares of duct tape that he had scraped in the dirt before affixing. Otherwise she was naked, her uniform in a puddle beside her. Nichols cringed, her expression souring.
“Apparently I have hit a nerve of yours as well.” Awar smiled. “Please understand that will not be the first or only one I will hit if you do not talk.”
Nichols would have loved saying all sorts of things at that moment—how many others have you captured, how many others have you tortured, how many others have you killed—but he had taken that choice from her as well. Her lower face was sealed with swath after swath of duct tape. Behind it, inside her mouth, was a small light bulb. If she bit down, or they slapped her, it would shatter, leaving shards behind. If her tongue or jaw moved, they would cut, filling her mouth with blood until she drowned. If she swallowed, even
