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.