Busted Flush

Dirge in a Major Key:

Part II

S. L. Farrell

THE CHINOOK WAS LOUD, crowded, and uncomfortable. Underneath them, lit only by starlight, sandy, low hills crawled toward the horizon and more hills emerged to replace them, until finally the sun rose to color the world red and then yellow. Rusty was in the chopper with him, along with four dozen UN troops and their officers, Lieutenant Bedeau among them. They wore flak jackets and helmets and carried live ammunition in their weapons, but there had still been no real resistance—not at Kuwait International, not at any of the places that Michael had been to in the endless parade of days and nights.

Michael had lost count of time. All the places in the Ar-Rumaylah field in southern Iraq were starting to look the same, blurring in his memory. The employees of each facility had packed up and left, leaving papers and half-eaten snacks on their desks. In each place, the wind wailed mournfully as it blew dun-colored sand between the buildings. The army of the Caliphate was an eternal no-show.

The other teams—Kate with Lohengrin in the Al-Burqan field in Kuwait; Tinker on the Az-Zuluf platforms out in the Gulf—reported the same: no resistance. The wellheads, the pumping stations, the pipelines, the refineries: they’d all been abandoned. Michael, Rusty, and their blue helmets would stay a day or two or three until UN contractors and support troops were sent in from HQ at Kuwait International, and then they’d be on to the next place.

The ease of the operation was a relief to everyone, Michael no less than the others. He’d not been looking forward to another battle in some godforsaken locale, especially when the enemy carried a special hatred for him.

He glanced out the window nearest him. The radio headset squawked with terse updates. DB kept tapping on the flak jacket that covered his chest, but the dull sound it returned gave him no comfort. Easy or not, the whole operation still felt wrong. Everything was too easy. Michael was sweating, and it wasn’t the heat. He slipped one of his hands under his flak jacket and rubbed at the bruise on his chest, the fading remnant of the sniper attack at Kuwait International.

They hate you for what you did in Egypt. . . . The people of the Caliphate, they don’t like you very much. . . .

“Wellheads, one minute.” The warning came from his headset. Around him, soldiers checked gear and readied themselves: their group was French, as were the bulk of the UN ground forces, armed with stubby FAMAS G2 assault rifles. The Chinook tilted, then dipped with nauseating suddenness as the rotors wailed. Michael caught a glimpse of the towers of derricks, several buildings, and a trio of huge storage tanks for the crude oil, but then dust and sand rose in a dense, choking cloud, blocking sight of the landscape, and he felt the shudder as the wheels touched ground.

The rear door yawned; a squad of blue helmets jumped out, ducking their heads against the rotor wash and running across the sand with weapons ready. Alongside him, Rusty coughed in the gritty air. “Cripes,” he muttered. More troops tumbled out. Michael checked the two M-16s he carried—still leaving his upper set of hands free—and lurched to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said to Rusty.

“Why don’cha stay behind me, fella?” Rusty suggested. “Just in case.” Michael thought that an excellent idea.

They lumbered down the ramp and onto the sand at a jog.

Their Chinook had landed alongside the administration building for the facility—Lieutenant Bedeau was leading the first set of blue helmets, and had already kicked open the doors of the building and gone in. As with all the wellheads they’d taken, there didn’t seem to be anyone around: no cars in the parking lots, no one near the storage tanks or near the oil derricks set in a mile-long arc just to the east, no one moving in the village five hundred or so yards away to the west near the main road. The pipeline-linked refinery a half mile to the south looked equally deserted. The Tigre choppers hovered overhead menacingly, loud in the sunlight, but their guns were silent.

Maybe, he thought, maybe Jayewardene and Fortune were going to get what they’d hoped. He rubbed the bruise under his Kevlar again and crouched behind Rusty, scanning the rooftops and half expecting to feel the kick of a slug against his jacket.

“We’re secure here,” he heard Bedeau say in his headset in French-accented English. “Aucun problème.” The relief in the man’s voice was palpable. Someone laughed nearby; he saw the closest soldiers let the tips of their weapons drop slightly.

These assignments were already becoming routine. They were beginning to expect it to be easy. That worried Michael more than anything.

“Nobody home again,” Rusty said. In the midst of the pipes and derricks, he looked like a piece of old equipment that had decided to become ambulatory. “Good deal.”

They swept the facility closely and made certain that the employees had indeed abandoned the place, that there were no soldiers of the Caliphate or snipers hidden about, and that the facility hadn’t been either sabotaged or booby-trapped. Rusty had been given the task of using the metal detector on the grounds, with two demolition experts a careful dozen steps behind him, checking any hits he found. He grinned at Michael with the earphones stretching dangerously around his orange-red head. “I found lots of pieces of old pipe, and a whole buncha coins.” He held out a large palm, and Michael saw several silver and bronze-colored coins there, adorned with Arabic lettering. “Souvenir, fella?”

Michael took one. He brushed the sand from it and stuck it in his pocket.

A few hours later, Michael, Lieutenant Bedeau, and a six-member squad of blue helmets trudged out to a small village along the narrow paved road passing the complex, while Rusty and the others continued to sweep for mines and booby traps. The village was a collection of small houses huddled together in the sand with a few stores and a petrol station. All the houses looked the same: prefab, cheap company housing. The veiled faces of women watched them from behind shuttered windows as they approached.

There were children—a dozen or more, their ages seeming to range from maybe seven to perhaps fourteen—playing soccer between the houses. Usually, no matter where he went, the strangeness of Michael’s spidery figure would bring them running and chattering toward him, but these only stopped their game and stared as they approached before melting away into the bright shadows between the buildings. “. . . Djinn . . .” He heard the word in the midst of the stream of whispered Arabic, and it gave him a chill. He began to watch the windows of the houses carefully, half expecting the muzzle of a rifle to appear. The children vanished, the soccer ball abandoned on the sand. The village seemed preternaturally quiet; it made the small hairs stand up on Michael’s arms. His lowest set of hands clutched the single M-16 he was holding tighter, his finger sliding close to the trigger.

It’s all kids, women, and old men here, he reminded himself, but that gave him little comfort. Any of them could just as easily press a trigger.

Lieutenant Bedeau, in addition to English, also spoke Arabic. He called out a greeting, his voice sounding terribly small. For several seconds there was no response at all, and Bedeau shrugged at Michael. “We’ll go building to building looking for weapons,” Michael began, but then a door creaked on rusty hinges and an elderly man stepped out from one of the houses. His thobe—the standard white robelike garment of the region—swayed as he moved, revealing a stick-thin body underneath. They tensed, all of them: had the man made a wrong gesture, he would not have lived to take another breath. But the grizzled elder kept his hands carefully in sight as he spoke to Bedeau in a burst of rapid-fire, gap-toothed Arabic. Bedeau nodded; they exchanged a few brief sentences.

“This one’s name is Dabir,” the lieutenant said. “He says that all the men—the workers—are gone. His son was one of them. Big trucks from Baghdad came here three days ago and took them away. The wives, a few old men like him, the children; they were told more trucks would come for them, but none have. There’s no one here right now but the elderly, the women, and the children.” Dabir said something else, pointing at Michael. Bedeau grimaced and hesitated before translating. “He said that you and the other one are abominations in the face of Allah, that you must leave so the men can come back.”

“Well, that’s nice,” Michael said. “Rusty will be happy to hear that. Tell our friend Dabir that we don’t think the men will be coming back at all, that tomorrow or the next day more of our people will be coming to work here. Tell him that we’ll talk to Prince Siraj and try to make sure that the trucks show up to pick them up to take them to wherever their men went.”

As Michael spoke, he saw movement behind the old man; a boy, probably no more than ten or eleven. The child crept out to stand next to the old man, who put an arm protectively around him as he listened to Bedeau’s translation, scowling. The boy said something in response—again, Michael thought he heard the word “Djinn” in the torrent—and Bedeau’s face colored.

“This is Dabir’s grandson Raaqim. He’s . . . not exactly happy with the news,” Bedeau told Michael. “The rest, it’s not worth translating.”

“Yeah, I kinda gathered that.” Raaqim was staring at Michael, scowling like Dabir with his arms crossed defiantly in front of him. “Tell the old man we’re sorry, but that is the way of things. It is the will of the Caliph and Prince Siraj.”

Bedeau shrugged. He translated, and Dabir’s scowl deepened. With a middle hand, Michael dug in his pocket for the old coin Rusty had given him. He crouched down in front of Raaqim, the muzzle of his weapon pointed down at the sand, and held out the coin. “Here,” he said. “You can have this.”

The boy stared; the old man watched without saying anything. “Go on,” Michael said when the kid didn’t move or respond. “It’s yours.”

Raaqim unfolded his arms. He stared at Michael, his gaze roaming up and down his long, muscular body, staring at the several arms, at the snarl of tattoos decorating his skin, at the sextuplet of tympanic rings covering his chest and abdomen. His eyes widened. He looked at the coin.

With a violent lurch of his head, he spat in Michael’s face.

Michael recoiled, dropping the coin and standing abruptly. Raaqim flinched, stepping quickly backward; the old man snarled something in angry Arabic, his hands coming up as if to ward off a blow. The soldiers’ weapons snapped up, all of them.

“Stand down!” Michael shouted. He wiped the spittle from his face with an upper hand; he forced himself to smile. He spread all his hands wide. “Shit. Everyone take it easy . . . Lieutenant, tell the old man I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I’m sorry the men were made to leave and I hope they’re all together again soon, but we have the wellheads now and there are more people coming to take the oil. That’s the way things are. We need to check their houses for weapons, but once we’ve done that, we won’t trouble them again. We can give them food or water if they need it. There won’t be any trouble for them as long as they let us do our job.” He waited until Bedeau had finished translating, watching Dabir’s leathery face, watching the doorways and windows around them.

He’d dropped the coin when Raaqim spit at him. He could see it glinting on the sand. He shouldered his weapon with a flourish of many arms, and nodded in the direction of the houses. “Let’s get this done,” he said. “And be fucking careful.”

The connection over the satellites was static-ridden and erratic, and Michael had to strain to hear Kate’s voice. “Everything’s still going easy here,” she said. “Clockwork. Last place, there were villagers wandering around and scavenging stuff from the facility, but they scattered when we landed. We had some shouting and cursing, but no real resistance.” The line squealed; he could barely make out the last words.

“Yeah. Same here,” DB told her, half yelling into the cell phone. Across the lobby of the Administration Building that had become their base, Rusty glanced over at him. “No problems. Makes me happy; I wasn’t looking forward to another dustup with the Caliphate, especially not over oil.”

“What we’re doing is about people,” Kate said. “That’s what matters. Half the world is suffering because of the embargo. That’s the reason we’re here.” Then, a laugh that made him grin. “That sounded like John, didn’t it?”

“All you need is a scarab beetle in your forehead.”

There was silence, and he worried for a moment that she’d taken offense. “Sorry,” her faint voice responded at last. A squawk of static cut off most of what she said afterward. “. . . watch yourself, especially. And see you soon back home, okay?”

“Right,” he told her. “Soon.”

“How’s Curveball and the others?” Rusty asked.

“It’s good,” Michael told him. “Everything’s good.”

The rest of the day was uneventful. Michael and Rusty toured the wellheads that their team had secured; all seemed well. The evening subsided into semi-boring routine as the workers arrived from Baghdad International: derrick workers whose job it was to get the oil flowing again. The feeds they received from the news channels were full of praise for the work of the teams. Fortune sent word through Barbara that the aces would be brought out within the week—there was more need of the Committee elsewhere with this operation going so smoothly.

The next day, Michael and Rusty, along with two blue helmets—Lieutenant Bedeau and Marlon, another French soldier—decided to sweep through the refinery area to the south of the Administration Building, where crews were scheduled to begin work. Tomorrow, Michael and the others would be heading somewhere else, landing in some other desert wellhead.

They walked along a large open area set in the middle of the cluttered refinery: weapons shouldered, their Kevlar vests unbuttoned against the day’s broiling heat—Michael, against orders and his own nagging paranoia, was entirely bare-chested in the fierce sunlight. Marlon was snapping pictures with a digital camera; Bedeau was speaking into a satellite phone, reporting in to Colonel Saurrat’s adjunct. “The refinery looks to be operable,” Michael could hear Bedeau saying in French-accented English. “There’s no—”

The voice cut off with a grunt. Michael glanced back. Bedeau had dropped the phone and was clutching his stomach with both hands, a look of surprise and shock on his face as blood poured through his fingers and bloomed on his uniform shirt. A strangled, wet cry came from his open mouth as his knees gave way and he crumpled. At the same moment, there was a familiar, chilling metallic chatter: small-arms fire. Something pinged from Rusty’s body and whined away past Michael’s left ear, leaving behind a burning line from his ear to his forehead. He could feel blood sliding hot down his cheek.

“Shit! Take cover!” Michael screamed. A four-foot-tall set of thick pipe sections was stacked a dozen feet away. Michael took two running steps and flung himself behind them. Marlon was trying to get his FAMAS up when a round took him in the biceps and spun him around; he managed to crawl behind the pipes with Michael, puffs of sand kicking up around him from bullets.

Rusty hadn’t moved. He stood in the open, pointing to the north and a tangle of steel pipes laced between two buildings a hundred feet away.

“The fellas are over there,” he said calmly. “I see six or seven of them.”

“Great,” Michael told him. “Now get the fuck down.”

A trio of bullets struck Rusty’s body and caromed away, leaving shiny scratches on his chest. He grunted. “I’m fine,” Rusty said. “Let me try—”

A stream of orange fire and black smoke raced past well above them and slammed into the side of the main refinery building fifty feet behind. The concussion of the explosion was like a fist, the sound was deafening. Michael could feel the heat of the fire as debris rained down around them. A brick slammed into the sand a hand’s breadth from Michael’s right side, burying itself several inches deep. “RPG,” Michael shouted to Rusty, wondering if any of them could hear anything over the lingering roar. He was trying to wrestle his own M-16 from his back. “That’s why you have to get down, Rusty! Marlon? You okay?”

The man was cursing loudly in French, and blood stained the sleeve of his uniform. “Fuck,” he said in English. “I think so, but the lieutenant, I think, is dead.”

Rusty had stooped to grab Bedeau’s body, then came lumbering behind the piping with the others. “How is he?” Michael asked, glancing at Bedeau’s open-eyed stare and already knowing the answer. Rusty shook his head.

Michael felt his stomach turn over. He gulped acid.

They huddled behind the pipes. It was the only cover—they had been caught in a large swath of open ground, the nearest building the one now burning behind them: a good twenty running strides away and already a conflagration, vomiting black smoke and fire from the hole the RPG had punched in it. Rifle fire rang from the pipes like a Midwestern hailstorm. To their left and right there was nothing: just sandy ground for a hundred yards or more—a killing field if they tried to retreat.

Michael could hear more small-arms chatter to the north and to the east—separate firefights on the compound. Someone with a high, thin voice was shouting in Arabic near where Rusty had said their attackers were hidden. Through the din, Michael heard the dull k-WHUMP of another explosion somewhere in the distance, followed by the thrup-thrup-thrup of a chopper’s rotors starting up. He hoped it was one of their people at the controls. Christ, it wouldn’t take many of them to get us all.

Marlon was moaning as he ripped open his medical pack. Michael helped him apply the pressure bandage to his arm. “Can you still use that?” Michael asked him, gesturing at the soldier’s weapon. Marlon nodded grimly. “Good. Look, it sounds like the others are dealing with their own problems right now. We can’t just sit here and wait for someone to rescue us—and if our friends have another RPG and send it our way, we’re dead. Rusty, you willing to take a few more hits? If we can see the muzzle flashes, Marlon and I can return fire and hopefully take a few of them out, and maybe then we can figure out a way to get the fuck out of here.”

“Sure thing,” Rusty said. He lumbered to his feet behind the pipes as Marlon and Michael moved to either end of the pipes. Gunfire popped and hissed; Michael could see the glint of fire from the muzzles—their attackers were settled in a snarled nest of piping and flow valves between two buildings; judging by the flashes, there seemed to be five or so separate people with guns. Twenty feet over their attackers, a heavy pipeline bridged the structures. Michael heard the chatter of Marlon’s gun and he pressed the trigger on his own weapon, the recoil slamming into his upper shoulders, his lower set of hands bracing himself on the pipes. The Arabic shouting returned, more alarmed this time, but Michael doubted they’d hit anyone. Michael saw a bloom of fire and smoke—“Rusty! Down!”—and another RPG arrowed toward them. Rusty stood there gaping as the round passed a bare few feet over his head before slamming into the burning building behind them with a new eruption of fire.

Rusty hit the ground belatedly with a grunt. He stared at Michael wide-eyed, his steam-shovel mouth open. “Yeah,” Michael said. “I know. Cripes. We’re lucky that bastard’s a lousy shot, but we can’t sit here waiting for him to get more practice.”

Another bullet ricocheted from the pipes, the sound like a drumstick on the bell of a cymbal. The heat from the fire behind them was searing; Michael began to wonder what was going to kill them first.

“They be amateurs, these ones,” Marlon spat in his broken English. “Professionals would now spread to come from different angles; but these—they stay all together.” He made a quick sign of the cross. “This is good, yes? If they are well trained, we would be already like poor Bedeau.”

“Yeah, there’s some comfort,” Michael told him. The gunfire had slowed to erratic single shots. Michael hoped that wasn’t because they were taking Marlon’s advice. The wind was whipping the choking smoke away from them, but flames were gushing from the ruined building and the heat was nearly unbearable—Michael was almost afraid to touch the pipes in front of him. The fire hissed loud and throatily and suddenly leapt thirty feet into the air as a gas line in the building ruptured. They all felt the fiery embrace of the inferno. “We really can’t stay here. We gotta make our move. Rusty, you willing to take a chance on being a target again?”

The ace’s shoulder lifted and fell. He didn’t look thrilled at the prospect, but he didn’t say no.

“Okay, then. Marlon, I want you to start firing from your side of the pipes—keep them down as much as you can. Rusty, I’m hoping they’re even worse at hitting a moving target. Head toward them, but zigzag it—maybe about ten steps’ worth, then go down just in case Mr. RPG is waiting. I’m hoping that they’ll be a lot more interested in a fucking big steam shovel coming their way than me.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to give them a free performance that’ll bring down the house. I hope.”

Rusty’s eyes widened. “Oh,” he said, somewhere between question and statement.

“Yeah.” He touched the wound on his forehead, looking at the blood that stained his fingertips. “Sorry, I don’t have a better idea. Do either of you two?”

Rusty slowly shook his head. Marlon just stared and clutched his weapon. “Then wish us luck,” Michael said.

Rusty, his knees creaking, got to his feet; Marlon, lying on the ground, began to rake the space between the buildings on full automatic as Rusty came around the pipes and started toward them, shouting and waving his massive arms.

Michael, on the other side of the improvised cover, stood up. He started drumming with all six hands, the multiple throats in his neck pulsing as he shaped and focused the sound as he surveyed the target area. At first it was merely noise (as Marlon continued to fire, as Rusty weaved and roared while bullets pinged from his body). Michael could hear the stacked pipes in front of him rattling in their racks with sympathetic vibrations, and he forced his throat openings to narrow, to toss the sound farther out and focus it—as he had when he killed the Righteous Djinn. He aimed the torrent of percussion between the two buildings, hitting himself harder and harder, his arms flailing. There was a new sound now: a metallic wail as the piping set between the buildings started to respond.

(Rusty took a few more steps, a lumbering, bearlike dance. Marlon’s weapon went silent for a moment as he changed clips. Through the fury of Michael’s drumming, there was a percussive cough, and a smoky lance arrowed in Rusty’s direction, hitting the ground six feet to his left and erupting; Michael saw Rusty lifted and tossed.)

He drummed, grimacing at the effort of finding the right notes, the right timing, and the right frequency. The pipes shuddered and danced angrily in response. He could see figures there, pointing toward him, and muzzle flashes. Bullets whined past him and he forced himself not to respond. The huge pipe above their attackers groaned loudly enough to be audible over the racket and Michael concentrated on it, forcing all the sound toward it; he saw dust and bricks falling as it shook itself loose from the walls, shaking like a wet dog. Dark, thick fluid gushed out in a wide stream.

The man-high steel tube fell, much of the walls of the two structures going with it. He could hear screams as it slammed into the ground, taking out the nest of smaller piping underneath. A dust cloud rose; within, something sparked violently and then there was fire and more screams—high-pitched and desperate.

Michael stopped drumming. Marlon was staring. Rusty had pushed himself back up to a sitting position on the sand, shaking his head as if dazed. Michael snatched his weapon from the ground and ran toward the buildings.

He saw one of their attackers, on his back with his arms outstretched as if he had been trying to escape the fate he had seen falling on him, the bottom half of his body crushed under a section of brick wall. The thick tube of the RPG launcher lay near him.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathed. He stopped. His weapon drooped in his lower hands. “Fuck.”

He stared at the body—at the beardless, smooth face of a child, a face he recognized: Raaqim, the boy who had spat at him yesterday.

None of them were soldiers. None of them looked to be older than their midteens, while the youngest couldn’t have been more than ten. The weapons they’d brandished were a strange collection of ancient single-shot rifles to modern automatic weapons, probably scavenged from a dozen different sources. The RPG launcher had been the most sophisticated and dangerous piece, but it had no more rounds left.

Twenty kids, all told, and not all of them boys. Their surprise attack had cost the lives of three UN soldiers, but twelve of the twenty kids were dead; of the survivors, all had serious injuries. The unit’s medic had done what triage she could; the four worst they’d choppered out to Baghdad after frantic communications to Colonel Saurrat and Barbara Baden; the medic didn’t seem to have much hope any of them were going to make it. They’d laid out the dead children in the lobby of the main building, covering the bodies with whatever sheets they could find, and they’d permitted the villagers to come in to identify the bodies and take them away for burial.

The wails and screams, the accusing glares, the accusations, were something that Michael knew he could never forget. Dabir, his ancient body shaking with rage, had screamed curses over the body of Raaqim. A woman in a black abaya and head scarf had charged at Michael after seeing her granddaughter’s body. She’d reached him before anyone could stop her, beating at him with her fists as she screamed in Arabic, her fists making the tympanic rings boom and crash in a mockery of his playing. Michael endured the beating, his arms at his side like a stunned spider while two soldiers grabbed the woman’s arms and pulled her away, still screaming and wailing, tearing at her clothes, gesturing with hoarse, sobbing cries.

He was weeping with her suddenly, the tears coming unbidden and unstoppable, hot and harsh, his throat clogged with emotion. Michael had left then, going outside into the heat and glaring sun. He slumped against the side of the Administration Building, his back on the rough stone wall, staring outward toward the oil derricks.

He touched his chest where the woman had struck him, so softly that he made no noise at all. His throat openings pulsed and yawned, silent. Under the bandage the medic had wrapped around his head, the scabbed track of the bullet throbbed and burned. Part of him wished it had killed him instead.

Afterward, he’d tried to call Kate and hadn’t gotten her; he sent her a text message: FUBAR. That said it all.

“Hey.” A shadow drifted over him. Michael glanced up.

“Hey, Rusty.”

“Bad deal, huh?”

“Yeah. The fucking worst.”

With creaks and groans, Rusty sat down next to Michael. “Kids. I don’t want to fight kids.”

“None of us should have had to.” Michael glared outward. Against the sky, the derricks were ink lines drawn on a blue canvas, and he’d killed children for their sake. He imagined the blood flowing dark like oil. “This shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have been able to happen.”

Rusty said nothing more. He and Michael sat there for a long time, each lost in his own thoughts, until the sun slid away and abandoned them in the cool shadow of the building.

The old man Dabir stared with slitted, dark eyes at the nervous squad with Michael. He barked something in Arabic and spat on the sand between him and Michael. The squad’s translator spoke to Michael without taking his eyes from the old man or his finger from the trigger of his FAMAS. “He says you are the afterbirth of a syphilitic camel and that you are not welcome here.”

Michael might have laughed at that, before. Now it only made him feel ill. “Tell him . . . tell him that I want him to know that I had no choice. He needs to know that.”

That earned a bark of dry, hollow laughter from Dabir. “Allah always gives us choices,” the old man said through the translator. “What choice did Raaqim have? You come here, you take away his father’s job, you ruin our family, you take the land that belongs to us and our people, you steal our oil. Why shouldn’t my grandson defend what was his? Why shouldn’t he fight to take back what you’ve stolen?” Dabir glared at Michael. “I am proud of my grandson. His was a good death. Are you proud, you abomination in the eyes of Allah?”

Michael clenched his jaw at the torrent of vitriol from the man. “You don’t know,” he told him. “You don’t know the suffering the Caliphate has caused with its oil policies. You don’t know—”

“Suffering?” Dabir interrupted as the translation was given to him. “Look around you, Abomination. Do you see people here with automobiles and televisions? Do you see mansions? Do you see stores full of things to buy? I have seen pictures of your West. I have seen the way you live. Suffering? You know nothing of suffering.”

“People have lost jobs from the lack of oil,” Michael persisted. “Some are going hungry as a result, or can’t pay for care that they need, or have lost their houses. And some have even died.” It was what Fortune might have said. The words tasted as dry and dead as sand.

“So you come to steal the job from my son, who has been taken away?” Dabir waved a hand toward the buildings of the wellhead and spat again. “You come to steal the food from our table? You come to kill my grandson?”

“Your grandson tried to kill me. I was only defending myself.” It should have sounded angry; it sounded apologetic.

“Raaqim was defending the land that is his from you. You come here saying you want to ease the suffering of all people, but it is only your people you care about, and you bring the suffering and the pain and the death here instead. You want to leave it here when you go.” The old man spat again. “You wonder why we hate you, Abomination? Because you do not see us. We will fight you with an army of children if we must. We will fight you with an army of old people, because there is only one way to make any of you see. Only one way.”

The translator was still speaking the last few words when Dabir reached under his white thobe. Michael saw the gleam of metal, but before he could react, the others already had. Two of the FAMAS opened up, and the old man danced spasmodically backward to the barrage of sound, an ancient handgun flying from his grasp and splotches of arterial red spraying over the bone-colored clothing. Dabir thumped loudly to the floor of the house as the FAMAS went silent. Someone screamed inside the house and a figure hurled itself from the darkness of the interior toward Michael. He struck at it with all his hands, using his full strength with his adrenaline and fright; the figure slammed hard against the door frame of the house. He could hear the crack of bones and glimpse the deep lines and liver spots on her half-covered face even as he realized the ancient frailty of her body. She was unconscious by the time she slumped, half over the body of Dabir. “Pull them all out!” someone ordered behind him. “Anyone moves or resists, shoot.”

“No!” Michael yelled. “No!” He grabbed at one of the soldiers who tried to move past him toward the house and shoved him away. “Damn it, back the fuck off!” He glared at them all, waving all six hands. “We’re going back. You hear me? We’re done here. We’re done.”

The old woman moaned on the floor. He could see other people inside the house, watching and too afraid to come forward. “I’m sorry,” he told them. “I’m sorry . . .”

They didn’t understand. They only stared at him with hatred diluted by fear. At him.

The Abomination.