The world clock caught up with his fear-quickened senses, and a rush of visions flowed over him. Dirty orange blooms of fire consuming the heavy earthmoving equipment on the muddy, torn-up grass outside the fort. An explosion above him, off to the right, as something detonated on the old roofline, sending dark, wicked fangs of black roofing slate scything away through the air. A deep rumbling in the earth as the volcanic eruption of fire and thunder built to a crescendo. A woman, a reporter, running full tilt, right into a blossoming explosion that roughly quartered her body, flinging the remains to all points of the compass.

Then more men, all clad in black body armor, all over him, slamming his shoulder into something hard and unyielding. A wall? A door frame? It was dark, and he couldn't see anything beyond the spots of light blooming in front of his eyes. Jed felt himself thrown to the floor, a polished wooden floor he noted just before his cheekbone cracked into the boards. The thunder rolled on outside but became distant, muffled. Black spots spread over his vision, and he fell into them.

New York Yusuf Mohammed was unimpressed by his fellow fighters. Although many of them were older than he, some by many years, they behaved like foolish children. He did not imagine that most would survive an encounter with the Americans when they came. Looking out across the river, craning to catch a glimpse of the great broken spires of Manhattan, Yusuf knew the Americans could not be far away now. He crouched in his fighting pit, chosen for him by one of the emir's very own lieutenants, and wondered where the other men of his saif might be.

To judge from the yipping cries and gales of laughter that reached him between the volleys of rocket fire, they were still dancing and capering around the launchers. Yusuf shook his head in dismay. He was no more than fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. Nobody knew for sure. But he had been a soldier for nearly ten of those years, and he had seen unknowable numbers of men and women and of course children, such as he had once been, who had died because they did not take the business of war seriously.

Another string of missiles shrieked away into the sky, describing a great soaring arc over the river, traced by dirty gray trails of smoke. From his makeshift bunker, where he clutched an AK-47 to his chest and leaned against a canvas bag full of loaded magazines, he could not see the launch of the rockets or where they fell on the far side of the water. But he could hear them as they crashed down on the heads of the infidel, the thunder rolling back across the river like the sound of God's judgment.

Laughter and the words of an obscene Somali drinking song also reached him.

Drinking!

He sighed heavily. Allah's judgment would fall heavily on both sides of the river today.

Yusuf risked a peek over the barricade of broken concrete blocks and bricks and loose black soil behind which he was hidden. Amid the roaring rush of the missile barrage he thought he heard the distant buzzing of attack helicopters, a terrible sound he knew only too well. From his vantage point overlooking a large rectangular field covered in thick, tall swards of grass and a small forest of gray stunted trees, he could not see the southern end of Manhattan, but he had a clear view of another large island directly across from the mouth of the large dock that all but cut Ellis Island in half. A small swarm of black metal insects appeared to be rising from somewhere within the middle of that island. They had been told by the emir's officers that it was a base for one of the American militias and that they could expect the response to their attack to come from there.

Yusuf tightened his grip on his weapon and marveled just a little at how nervous he was. He had fought in many battles in his short life, but most of them of course had been in Africa against other primitive forces. As the vague dark shapes resolved themselves into the outlines of the helicopters he knew as Apaches, the young fighter allowed himself a small measure of pride in how far he had come. There was a time when he thought of his first allies, the small band of Ugandan child fighters by whom he had been abducted and with whom he fought for five years, as the finest, the toughest, the most ferocious warriors in the world. Now, hunkered down thousands of miles from home, or at least from the continent he called home, he thought of his first band of comrades and their fabulously cruel commander Captain Kono as nothing more than stupid savages. They fought for the same reason he had fought. Because Captain Kono and his men had taken them from their homes, murdered their families, and threatened to kill them if they did not fight for him. Yusuf checked his weapon one last time, looked around in vain for the other mujahideen who were supposed to be manning a strongpoint with him, and mouthed a quiet prayer of thanks for the opportunity the emir had given him not just to escape Kono and the ridiculous Lord's Resistance Army but to lift himself up into the light and the forgiveness of the one true God.

"Allahu akbar," he said quietly to himself. Not fiercely, not boastfully, but quietly and piously and most of all with great love in his heart for the infinite forgiveness that Allah had bestowed upon a former infidel such as he.

He crouched down below the lip of his fighting pit. The emir's men had trained him well. He knew all about the wondrous technology with which the Americans still fought in spite of the great blow God had smashed down upon them. He knew that merely popping his head up for just a second or two might be the last thing he ever did. It made the stupid, animalistic laughter and shouting of the other fighters, who were still apparently dancing around the rocket trucks somewhere behind him, all the more galling. Had they learned nothing?

The answer came in the form of a sudden high-pitched screeching sound as the Americans finally reached out with their own rockets and missiles. Yusuf burrowed as deeply into his little pit as he could and breathed out to protect himself from the waves of overpressure that surely would follow the impact of the aptly named Hellfire missiles. Huddled into a tight ball, pressing himself into the earth, he had only the vaguest impression of the sky above the island suddenly turning lethal. Whereas their rockets, launched from the back of trucks driven in darkness over the long causeway from the mainland to this former migrant-processing center, had lanced through the air like the spears of Zulu warriors, the American attack seemed to fill the entire space a few feet above his head with roaring death. There was no whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of volleying rocket fire. There was only a huge and instantly terrifying eruption of noise and fire and smoke as the very earth seemed to shake beneath his cowering form. Shock and horror rolled over the boy soldier as he thought it possible the Americans might just demolish the entire island, pouring fire onto the rubble until it subsided beneath the waters of the river.

He did not know how long he lay there, quaking in fear. His abject terror was so great, so overwhelming, that a few times he felt himself subject to a whole-body hallucination, the feeling that he was being squeezed out of his mortal remains in the bottom of his bunker. His mind seemed to float free of the hell in which his body was trapped, but it did not escape, falling instead down a long dark tunnel at the end of which a smaller, younger version of himself lay quivering in fear many, many years ago. As in a dream, he had no grasp of the hard edges of this vision. It was more a sensation and a few half-remembered images he had long ago tried to forget. His mother screaming in pain after Captain Kono's men had cut the lips from her face. His tiny, spindly little boy arms shaking and useless, all but paralyzed with mortal dread as he held a makeshift club and stood over his uncle Bongani while Kono screamed in his face to kill the old man if Yusuf wanted to live.