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.