Laird noticed something in the tree beside him, then the tree. An ironwood, which he knew from its gray-green and broken bark; the ironwood has long and serried leaves like a weeding tool but not this one, anymore, after the blast, and he felt a little remorse and anger maybe. Even the ugliest tree is a thing of beauty. It didn't ask to be born here. From its lower limbs he pulled a long scrap of fabric, a checker pattern in orange and white. Knots of grease on it, and he took off a glove to give it a feel. So it was half a keffiyeh soaked in brains. He went to his armtrac and tied it to the radio mast.

There was a boy's sneakered leg nearby, and he threw it back into the fire: he liked to keep a clean mission: this was not chaos. And as always he had half a company of complainers policing the grounds. They would run to him with found items, identity cards, bits of AK, like rookies at a crime scene; he'd accumulate, wait, feed the fire.

They always fled to find a mosque. Why. To bring Allah into the mix (who can't be troubled to say you're only making it worse). Or maybe if you know you're going to die. Facilitates the related rituals. Anyway it's not my job to give them advice. A better question was why it burned with such enthusiasm. Houses hereabouts were made of brick, concrete, mud mashed with straw. So perhaps a mix of pews, carpets, stacks of sacred texts. Every once in a while a satisfying pop, as with a roast, which could be rounds cooking off. The smell was just the smell of everyday life, yet some of his people wore respirators or durags dipped in gunslick, which he found ludicrous. I'm not afraid of you, mooj. I am sure as shit not afraid of you dead.

The fire gave out, and in came the hazard team with a last look for rads, and now the D-10s, the big bullies, to render the site unfit for use. He would wait to watch them when he could, his favorites. Unpopular with the mooj. They'd bumble up and kill you by the bludgeon of your own home. One time he'd been in one and seen that if you use the blade right you can lift ten meters of mines and drop them into their own trenches, perfect; also driven one, where he had a flame-thrower appended, whose main effect was for morale, theirs and ours. He'd've used them more often but they broke down a lot here, here in the Khorasan where nothing worked well except of course me.

Approaching a town, AT-0235, hoping to receive fire. A fireman wants to fight fire. But no, a crowd comes forward conceding the town, led by a wise and bearded elder. In early days non-combatants would be held at a distance, by way of hose or sound cannon, and herded into holding lots. They're not all bombers, went the credo: they're all bombs. And war is about adapting, and if you can be clever all the better: Tritregonex-30 was brought to life by a particular spark, and science had conjured a beam, something like a magnetic pulse, that swept all before it with just that right sensitivity. Prowlers in wing formation and the occasional EC-130 had flown all over the badlands and washed it with the beam and been rewarded with red and golden plumes all along. Then from science comes a cathode device, the size of a box and fits on a tank, by which you could bathe a captive crowd. If any of them were among the anointed, well, up went the lot, burkas flying like illegal kites.

So T-30 was no longer the drug of choice, and it was back to dynamite vest and plunger. To address that they were now using wahdah, a special unit, sixty locals pressed into service and happy to live to do it. He kept them in the general baggage train in old half-tracks, hand-cuffed and eating the same as everyone, including the ham-and-limas. Haha. They were brought out as needed to clear the non-combatants, women mainly with their children and others (so-called military-age males were not dumb enough to come forward, which is to say that those of them who did come forward were in fact dumb enough). Wahdah would strip them to their underwear but not more than that, and the young and the old could keep their swaddling clothes: we are not barbarians, we are not the Goth or the Hun, we are not you. Dashiki, niqab, hijab, scarves and baggy pants, into a pile and burned. Then he had them sit for a while under the sun to render them down; their own small sun, heaved up on its meridian, hovering there and killing all it could. He called up the trucks and off they went to someone else's purview.

Laird had no real feeling about any of this because this is just what I do for a living. They moved forward. There's a process to reducing a town. First, for safety, knock it off the grid. There'll be a substation or something, fragile as a flower: send in a spec with a whiff of C4 and the whole thing comes apart, a bright and belabored death. Then selected structures, by Laird and his laser, take a beehive round through the window. Wake up in there. If gunners miss the window he makes them do it again, not a bad rebuke. Eventually you pave the paths: napalm or narrow fuel-air strips to set off traps or mines. Mines -- he'd made a wordplay: kill one of mines, cost ten of yours.

Now urban warfare, and for this Laird had in his caravan a tractor-trailer full of the latest expedients. Cartons of kamikaze robots, bloody and insane; spy filaments thinner than a whisker, and drones the size of a bee; army-grade silly string -- shoot it down a dusty hallway and it shows the tripwires; gamma guns for cooking a mooj behind a wall. He used none of it. When he felt friction he took the building down. Couple of methods for that. If he had air -- when they weren't called away or gassed out -- he'd announce a duck-and-cover and use a guided glide bomb or maybe a baby cruise; he also had vehicle-mounted home-wreckers like the Klopfen-2, the Lancet. For taller buildings a team puts thermobaric charges (Laird: thermobarbaric) at the corners. He'd seen a ten-story tower fall like water, like a slip dropped down a body of air. They called the dust pancake makeup. Bullies would come later and grade the remains. Nice work. The Roman ideal was: not one stone upon another. Not practical now or actually then but a lovely thought.

A break for water and power bars; buildings are assigned. The process would continue by the book: wahdah run through to find sneaks or tricks; haz guys sent in to sweep for nukes and nuke parts. Paperwork goes to the spooks, pale and bespectacled, lisping into their devices. Then in go the carrion crows for a quick loot for restitution, defrayment and reprisal; mark the building for demolition. They could do a town in a day.

Laird had two adjutants, Lieutenants Mirou and Nidha; he told Mirou to dress the part, and he put on his house kit, which was mostly just Uncle Walther and a head-lamp. They walked off on their own down a block, and found a building with a hand-painted sign, Ezhar Al-Raisi, a feed and seed store. They listened. Distant sounds of the mission. He broke a window and peeked in.

This is what Laird did for a living, and this was the living part: he blew up the door with a cone charge. That tone in the ear, and he felt a bit concussed. Seems he'd also blown up a service counter and some burlap sacks of brown rice perhaps. Curtains, thin and stiff with rigor, hung like a woman's dress at a hanging. They moved forward and to a back area. There were signs of a quick exit, a money-box, a cup and an open ledger.

He had Mirou turn on her sniffer -- an OA-22, the latest, better than a dog because it never got bored -- which led them to a hatch under a rug. She moved the dial and announced two heartbeats heard. Laird pulled the cover over and said come out, drew his .425 and dropped down a grenade, following after.

A mooj, bound up in the rubble, his right eye gone and that general area. Otherwise unmarked. Wounds could be so oddly particular. He had a little mooj beside him, a fighter, a scrapper, eyes wet with hate, clawing at his father's hand.

The war was over here but the big mooj rallied his broken parts for a last attack. Mirou: "He says you are not a godly man ... you prey upon the weak ... your name will become a curse."

Laird banged together a line from an old Sufi story -- "Al-shattaim al-khassa al-thanaa," your insults are praise -- and shot him in the other eye. Now from the boy a medley of siren sounds, an alarm, help me, his face a little like a clown's, covered in brick dust; he grappled with that strong hand now infinitely soft. Laird: "It must be a comfort for you. To have had a father worth grieving. Ask him how old he is."

Mirou, after an interval: "Nine."

"Tell him I'll come back and kill him when he's old enough. Tell him."

Mirou: "[Wait until he's gone. You'll find water outside.]"

Up the ladder and into the hard air. Mirou: "Have you no children?"

"Not really."

"You are a piece of shit."

He always listened to his people, however briefly; in this case he had to say no, more like an atom of shit. There was trac nearby and she tried to pull down a jerry-can. Laird: "Nope. Your water." He hung there as she peeled off her camelbak and placed it by the door, her face screwed into a weak and conflicted hate, nowhere near as pure as a child's.

Laird was Lieutenant Colonel George Campbell Laird, commanding officer of 1st Battalion, 3rd Armored Division, which meant nothing. 1st of the 3rd, the Thundering Third, with all its entourage of tradition, which can help men fight, and was used for that purpose up to the point of the military imperative, which is success. For that you adjust as needed, the true art of war and of course life. For example, a battalion holds a thousand guys; Laird's carried over five thousand now, or maybe six this week, they kept throwing men at him. In code they called it Deployment Unit 7: something like fifty big guns, in layered and redundant batteries. Platoons for recon, for mortars and missiles, for military police, platoons for psyops, hazard, HQ, medic, an army of platoons. Detachments, that wonderful word without meaning, of marines, engineers, a special forces team with the mooj beards, never-bathed as a constant reminder of I don't care, fuck you. Ten dozen tanks, carriers, other tracked vehicles only vaguely defined; hundreds of trucks, and the men to repair them, then their own trucks; choppers and VSTOL, and various other air. A rampaging supply train, changing the skyline, rolling hills of it for miles behind, ammo fuel and fan mail, and food of course, crud but so much of it, a manna's horn of it, the victuallers are making us fat and lazy on crud. Even a riverine unit, with its rubber bateaux and nothing to do.

He was gravid with war; he was in effect some kind of general officer -- a rank considered too vital to be put at risk, which decree crashing against his own imperative, so here he was at lower pay by his own hand. Managing all this was mainly just a matter of ordering up more majors, and leaving them alone and having them do same.

Now city AT-3106; he was told it was a university town, which baffled him. Grind up the ring road, skirt a saline lake; an overflight of green teal, loud and heading out. Smart. Arty had been carping about underuse, and Laird stopped the process to call up a couple of light howitzers. Move aside, make way. He put out a map, and had them aim at the power plant; his words were like pheromones for an ant farm; and then they laid on him that gape of expectancy, hungry dogs who could not look away. Okay: two fingers like a victory and the guns opened up, barking like loons. War as dumb as we can make it, can't even see what you're killing. A blind man taking photographs. Nidha's commentary was buried under the big talkers, but he knew it was about manhood. He waited until they got that glow and cut it off, calling a lunch: crud cakes, flavor chews and a piss if you must. Moving on.

He was summoned to the front, call code pdq Alpha: seems the van guys had found an anomaly, a specimen not in the catalog, calling for adjustment, someone with that knack. He roared up in a sidecar, klaxon parting the way. There in the middle of the main road, just off a plaza, a ring of protestors, a score perhaps, prone and locked together by what appeared to be concrete casts, elbow-to-elbow. A sergeant: "The same over there and that block, and we've confirmed that they're handcuffed too, which I don't know how they did that." Good trick. Outwait? The buildings beside gave daunting shade. They were canting, something ordinary, and he heard a Dane in the mix; blond, well-shod; and a voice from regional America, a Michigander, will I show her more mercy or less. An odd mob was forming, from doorwells and other side spaces, cautious and amenable. Some held signs, which he told his aides not to translate if possible; and everywhere the phones aloft, and other devices, making history. You stupid fucks. You'll be the first taken up; hope you enjoy your trench-latrines, film that won't you. They wouldn't of course, their devices going to bomb-disposal.

"Waddah all that rabble up. Tell them use batons. Off they go. One hour. And I want two dozers up here right now." Nidha passing it along. The arrestees in the crowd were processed, the rest evaporating, to upper windows by his eye or other overlooks. He ordered some counter-sniper. For the bully-boys he called up a map. "Open space here." A cemetery two streets over. "I want a pit, six feet deep or so by twenty meters." He indicated the ring of disobedients. "I'm a free speech guy. But they can do it just as well over there. Drag it over and drop it in. And this is important, keep them well watered. Treat them better than they would." He stood around during the process and listened; their protests were not at all curtailed. Everybody wins.

A lot of standing around today; Laird grabbed a flash and this time a shot-shell pistol, and dialed up a whoop of door-kickers; he pointed to the main tower on the square, red-brick and looking down with a reek of conspiracy; he proposed a brief campaign. Through the main entry and he was exactly right: another dozen obstructionists, handcuffed along the hall to a gas or possibly steam pipe. Cuffs again for fuck's sake. All handcuffs have a key in common, a universal. Of course they do. Think. He probably had one in his desk; one of this lot here had it hidden in a cheek; probably that one there, pinched and seeming a bit important. He sent the marines ahead and had Nidha ask for an engineer, bring his torch. More standing around. Laird might put on the conqueror's posture at times like this and screw in a smile; or, like now, he might go with simple disappointment, which has so much more depth: oh look at what you've done; why am I here; really, why are we here exactly. Not one of them met his gaze. Or actually that one, a winsome look, child-like, I'm thirsty. Laird: "Don't ask for pity if you want it." Good line, must learn it in the local tongue.

To the engineer he said tuck a dollop of solder into each keyhole. He went up the front stairs, skipping a couple flights for peace and quiet. The hall was carpeted and clean, dark of course but lit by open doorways. A classroom, whiteboard covered in methodical script. Microbiology. Lots of file boxes for others to explore. Another classroom, chemistry tools in close order, beakers and burners; if they'd meant to leave in a panic they'd not done it well. A small closet for schoolbooks, holding strong but not long for this world.

He smelled smoke; a door just open, which he leaned on with his gun hand. Small room exposed to the west, blinds up and getting good light; a woman at her desk. It was her desk: her familiar way against it, her items arranged around, jar of pens, a caddy for her device and heavy watch; perhaps five pages in a fan in front of her for correction, and other pages in a low pile beside; in a little dish an improbable cigarette, from which she drew. "Why are you here?"

An area accent educated in England. Laird: "You killed my people."

"And you gave smallpox blankets to your people."

Good one. Did I now. "So kept them warm all the while."

Nidha took a seat across from her in a canvas chair, staring. The woman: "I suppose you know you are going to hell."

Laird: "Nice to think about. But probably not."

She was beautiful in the local manner, with the deep black arches; hair a humble black and gray beneath a head scarf. Hijab. He imagined slaves who, freed from their chains, wore them anyway for tradition. She said, "I was dead before, I will be again. This is my in-between time. I spend that time as best I can." She made a show of organizing her papers but didn't actually do anything. "Will you let me tell you my story first?"

"No thanks I know the ending." One shell to the chest, another to change her expression. I spend my time as best I can. From amongst her papers he plucked her cigarette, disgusting thing, might've burned us all down.

That night he moved his team and the rest of headquarters company ten miles south into the desert to get away from the smoke. His trac was set up with an armored cap that would fold away to help you get shot at, like now. Above him he could account for Corvus and Crater, Berenice's Hair. "An Egyptian queen who gave up her hair for the cause." He pointed at her with his utility spoon. "Just like you."

Nidha: "Why are you how you are?"

"No one knows that sort of thing. It's not science."

"You are how you are because of events in your past."

"No one knows that. Nidha. It's not science. Sorry you're upset but not very much. You don't know, I don't know, difference is I don't care."

"The great faiths abjure cruelty, without exception. The most base of the sins. So I guess you are without faith. Nothing undergirds you."

Nidha and Mirou. Foist on him at first, now kept with a measure of affection. Not quite paternal affection, since he endangered them every day, unless it was. Between the two, seven languages; in his own they'd twice his vocabulary. Listening to them, in their lithe and deliberate eastern altos, was like listening to spoken song, and they had no idea.

But of course they didn't: given all that, they were still children, knowing nothing in seven languages. "We can talk about cruelty and sins if you like. Old conversations; if we run out of time you can find them online in the old Greeks. But here's one way to think of it. As long as we are better than them as we reduce them, we are all lifted up, bit by bit. Even they win."

"Better than."

"So you're keeping score. Well, we're not cannibals. No ritual human sacrifice. We don't torture. Not in a gratuitous way. There's no rape in my command."

"I did notice the absence. Perhaps not one of your skills."

Dark in here except for comms lights, to the benefit of the night sky, and he could not much make her out. She did sound quite upset; he aimed a flash at her and yes she was. Laird: "Something you probably never saw in your reading about the Puritans is the case, and this is middle 1600s, of the boy, he was fifteen, who was convicted of criminal fornication, of which there were many types in those days. He was hanged and his head put on a gate-pole, as a take-notice. You didn't read about this? No? Okay. The important part of the anecdote is his romantic interest: a domestic fowl." He almost made a pun. "As an aside, the sad part: the turkey had been made profane, ruined, and was hacked up and thrown on a fire, downwind. Anyway this was their thinking, their message, and mine too: that you would stick your dick in that. The very thought. Brings us all low. And as you know, the weakest link controls the chain; cut it off if you can. If I run into that sort of thing here I guess I wouldn't cut his head off, but I might beat him to death. I do have some skills, after all."

"I know your philosophy tells you crime expiates crime. But in the end there is always the detritus: the criminal, which is you."

"First, what might be a crime to us is not to them. This is how they live. And you have to speak to people in a language they understand. Second, it's not even a crime to us. Not anymore. They even put it in writing; what we're doing is too important. It's all allowed."

"And there are children crying right now because of you." He knew she wouldn't let her composure fail, not here, and he heard her put up barriers against in a brave voice. "Who are not aware of this nicety. They only know that they are suffering and that life is not supposed to be like this."

"Right, you wanted to talk about sin. I bet you have a whole lecture ready." Now one for her. And at times like this he would take on the role, the didact with the don's cap. "The sin is in why you do it. I get no pleasure from this. I don't hate these people. Did Lister hate bacillus? Hate is for idiots. Here, more history." More history, of which he had a complete supply. "Japan conquered Manila and ruled it for four years. Uneasy at times but otherwise an ordinary occupation. In 1945 the Allies landed and the order came down from Tokyo: kill all. Subete korusu. There were recommendations for disposal -- dump them in the bay; hide them in stacks in burning buildings -- but a lot of open-mindedness as to means. Officer's choice. Have at it. Efficiency was the watchword in the Imperial Army, so start with orphanages, hospitals, I believe a monastery, a school for boys. By the way, bayonet when you can, please don't waste ammo in days of privation. As they made their rounds they found recalcitrants, tens of thousands, in cellars and garrets, desperate or not getting it. Kill the men of course; the women too but it's the details that tell the story. Rape, or actually gang-rape, which is different. Then, when they're ready, cut off their tits; not even for prizes, like scalps, but just because, for dog toys or to toss around; put gas in her hair and get it going. With gas running low. All of this for morale. Maybe they knew they were going to die soon: get your joy while you can, here in the Pearl of the Orient, actually a modern western city, that kind of thing for days, no way to count the dead, how would you do that, a slurry of bones. Are you still mad at me? Yeah? Okay.

"The men who did this were not outliers or the mentally ill, they were ordinary products of a time and place. A culture. Whose destruction, then, was necessarily a good thing. Burn their cities, one by one. Imagine a baby in its layette, on the end of a long knife, as a matter of procedure. And for the joy of course, as we just spoke about. So kill all. Might could've done, but I guess we don't do that, so instead we killed their culture, ground it down, exposed it to the elements. Stub it out and start again.

"That's all we're doing here. This is a land of the old books. They'll get it." Will they ever. "I think of my tools as a gardener's tools. I water the soil. I turn the soil. I turn the earth."

"Dig hole with shovel, fill hole with body."

"Seattle: 50,000 dead in a day, and how many of them got a burial. And did you know of course that the Japanese are helping us with this project now, supplies. Children cry for all sorts of reasons, Lieutenant. Inoculation. Broccoli." At this point the orange moon was lighting up her expression. Laird: "Please don't try to shame me. It's beneath you. All right, I'm a bad person. I don't care. That's what bad people do. Not care. I didn't say you could leave."

"You didn't say a lot of things."

She left, surely unappeased and newly wounded. Laird laid his head back and spied on satellites. Job well done. If you ask me for an apology you might be sorry.

Another night. He was rated for helicopters and the V-series and the like, and various small air; not fast movers or the big bummers, anyway too impersonal: now Laird driving his V-26, the single-stick tilt-rotor; spotter, utility, good for spying like now. In the jump-seat beside him he'd put a map guy; they were being sneaks on city 6050, seemed more like a town to his eye. Hanging around the southern hills, getting a feel for the place; optics were really good, could see the rover on the moon if you gave a shit; and too good, he kept having to back out to find his place. Flat and fairly dark outer core of homes and estates; cement plant, houses of worship of course with their minarets and other markers, tenements tailing out like spiral arms.

Some kind of bad light was bollixing his night vision, and he said Eddins put out a drone, which was done. After a minute he dialed in and could look down on town center, government buildings, street market and public garden; now an open acre with maybe two hundred mooj in a grid, packed like a head-count in a camp, before a flickering color screen and the speaker aggrandized on it, ruddy and waving his arms. Laird had the drone tuck in just above, a quiet late-comer: our heldentenor wears a turban, exhorting or maybe excoriating, anyway a classic battle speech; out comes a scimitar made to circle overhead, death to heathens; now comes a slave girl ... and ...

"What am I looking at?"

Eddins: "Bollywood, sir."

Get your joy while you can. "Call up a Kingfisher." A black bird with a bright tail, put out miles above by a circling Spooky. "On my dot," his laser setting the marker; he brought the tilty up to 300 feet for a better look. I suppose I'm paid to understand these people, so now let's learn a thing or two. Set the recordings for high-speed, send a note to satellite command. The bird would slow to a stall over the spot, then drop straight down. There, he saw it coming; they wouldn't, their peepers full of song and dance. At times like this he might count the kilometers -- Klick. Klick. -- then gird for a little science study, an engineering science, crepitology, and he did that now.

Click: it came in nicely center of mass. He watched it live of course but more carefully in its replay. The science had four parts, the first three occurring so quickly in series as to be a slurry of distinct events. The first effect, the primary, was essentially a bubble of cessation of time, which is to say human time, i.e. time so brief as cannot contain sensation; or thought, in fact the dot of acetylcholine cannot even begin its way across the gap. Within this bubble the players do not move, tableau vivant -- this one sleeping through it, this one picking out a bit of khat -- as they are made subject to a blend of static pressures coming just behind the wall of the blast wave: smash them first from the inside, the eyes and ears, the lungs and gassy viscera. Secondary effects are the air itself, normally so innocuous but which when motivated can cut you to scraps: the air and everything in it, the nuts and bolts -- good graphics here -- and indeed the buttons and bones, as those who are destroyed outright are weaponized in turn. Tertiary effects are for those not destroyed outright, who are lifted and carried along to no good end: maybe into a pile of scrap metal; or up hard against the screen, which it seems is a white-washed wall, much pocked now and beflecked, the girl still plying her wares, nothing much coming of it.

The quaternary effect was almost not worth noting, burns and blood loss et cetera. Watch it all again, the little drone doing good work before its end, here take a medal; with simple filters he could warm the reds and yellows.

Laird noticed he felt pleasure.

His hate full of heart. What can I do. I am a man of a certain time and place. Alright I concede, and yes I am capable of concession, a sign of strength -- the most important virtue is strength, all the others virtues rest on it, call it the strongest virtue -- I concede that if this is what I need then I will use it. I don't care. Civilization requires uncivilized men.

Two documents.

Laird full of shit before an artificial fire, made of oil bricks and whatever they could find, out in the desert like a caravansary, telling tales and building morale. Comes a subaltern, DeRoss, with a message, a must-see, which almost never really is.

"This came outta Camp Barbiya." POW camp; he held a single rag of paper like it was radium. "One of the mooj wears a pair of five-hundred dollar kicks, Red Balls. Look brand new. Keels over so one of our guys goes thanks I'll take it. Tries them on and finds this inside."

Laird: "Not touching that."

Someone found a plastic sleeve. Hand-written note; he didn't recognize the runes and gave it to Mirou, who put on her readers and set up proper light. "'All praise to God and his messengers. I don't know what today is. I have asked them every day, and independently they say the same day, which cannot be right. Commander of the camp is ... ' probably saying Col. Cavender." Laird knew him, had no opinion. Go on. "'He told us food is coming. They needed a count, and promised us water, so we did file past. 33,771, which I know is wrong because some of us died during the count. With the water they gave us shovels.' Here there is a gap expressed by a slashed line. 'Not far from here they killed and cooked a wild boar. The smell made many of us ill. We have eaten all the grass in the enclosures. Some of us have eaten scraps of clothing, cuffs or pockets, buttons. My friend Tariq al-Sabbah bit his tongue to drink the blood. I think there are two hundred of us left. We can no longer bury the dead. I don't know why I was brought here, perhaps to bear witness, Farisi Avesta, seventeen, I pray my testimony is heard.'"

To the young louie Laird made a face saying prove my indifference wrong.

DeRoss: "Well they're obviously passing notes. So I say dig them up and check their shoes."

"Good, put together a detail and run it yourself. Reports every morning." Off went that one. To Mirou: "Cavender. Scratch his name out." She pulled the message from the sleeve and did so. "Now put mine in. Can you translate like that?"

"I'll just do it in English."

"Do that and take it to Zarley and tell him we have a new psy-op drop." The leaflets that preceded engagements, surrender-or-die etc. "I want a big print run. Tens of thousands, as much as he can. Our new calling card. Sow the fucking ground with it." To that incomprehending look: "What. Just answering a boy's prayers."

Next day or so a couple of spooks came in, with their belly knives and otherwise acting tough, which was more effeminate than simply not being tough. "At the college, that woman, she actually was an author, in fact I recognized her name. This is what she was working on."

A rude pile of pages put on his map-reading. Typed in English, with some pencil corrections. Once again, this country makes no sense.

In a long-ago age very much like our own, and in a land of rolling hills we all would recognize, a traveling artisan, alone except for the blue dog beside that carried his tools and different effects, was surprised on the road by a djinn, who put him in a bottle.

The djinn, in a voice resounding, said, "Rejoice, O traveler, and be of good feeling, for I give you the privilege of aiding me. I have three wishes I am fain you fulfill. Fail me and you will stay shut up therein, stopped over with lead. Succeed and your freedom obtains, as you like it."

The traveler was minded to escape the bottle, but found its mouth made fast with a leaden cap. He looked upon the semblance of the djinn, and marveled with an exceeding marvel. Huge of height, like as to touch the welkin, and burly withal. Hair black of blee, as deepest night-tide; eyes like two coal lamps, smile wide as a cove. What great bother hast betided me, he wondered. "Could you put my dog in? There's room."

"Dog abscondeth," said the djinn, cozeningly, for of very sooth he had taken the dog and hid it. "Now attend my first wish. Give the name of the bird who has a song but does not sing."

The traveler wotted not the meaning of the wish-riddle, but said to himself I am a man to whom providence hath given a passably cunning wit. And he said anon, "The bird who has a song but does not sing is a nervous swallow."

The djinn made an agreeable nod, and smiled with a surpassing smile. "Keenly clever, pilgrim. But now address the second wish I'll have you grant: name the drink that cannot wet the thirst."

"To hear is to obey," quoth the traveler, though again he wotted not the curiosity. But he fell to pondering, until he felt he did haply know. And he said anon, "The drink that cannot wet the thirst is a draught of air."

Now came a sound resounding, of low tremoring, which was the djinn and his laughter in his belly. "Meseemeth thou art well chosen, young boy, young wanderer, but now list: describe the book of fables which has no words. That is my third wish."

"With goodly gree I will," said the traveler, although it be a bemusing question. So he girt the loins of resolution; and he said anon, "The book of fables which has no words: can't make heads or tales of it."

In little time came from the djinn a mighty cachinnation, that shook the raindrops from the rainclouds. And he stamped a stamp of his foot that nearly clave the ground; and the traveler was loose on the road, the djinn saying, "Whereby I free you and keep my word."

Quoth the traveling artisan, "Could you put me back in the bottle? I've never been this good at anything before."

The djinn said, "Yes, and I have more wishes." With a clap like a thunderclap he --

"Any copies of this?"

"No. I don't know. You shot up all the drives in the room. And then we blew it up."

Laird took the pages outside. A drizzle of gas; he got them going and gave them a stir. You barely existed before; now you never existed at all.

Regardless the day, when you asked them the day they'd say 425, bomb day; who might be digging the rubble, or giving out the shovels, doing bombs of their own. 425, much-tattooed, and tagged on battered walls both home and abroad; the impetus behind the Walther .425, favored side-arm for officers now and others; four-two-five, four-two-five, oft-repeated, a tagline for the matter, or actually more its mantra, meant to soothe, inspire and spiritualize the mass murder, despoliation and other correctives that must needs follow April 25.

Another: fifty thousand dead in a day -- actually more like forty-five (prior to a terror attack you want the toll as low as possible; after, as high as) -- or actually the tiniest part of a day, a trice; a glimmer. And of course the early ledgers were of no account since by the time any daily sum was done it was outdated. All the bad burns, which are so often just a delay; and so many who were caught in collapses, to suffocate or worse; first-responders would add themselves to the tally (and second, and third), as they probed the pit, an abattoir of atomic parts: by week's end the number, whatever it was, was treble. And then there was the matter of the heavy black plume, the counterpane lifted over and onto the bedroom towns just east, Duvall and pretty Carnation and parts beyond. No escaping it, the roads and bridges fouled with abandoned RVs. And no hunkering down, since to a dustfall of strontium-90 your stucco safe-house might as well not be there at all. Beautiful homes full of families, the homes destroyed without a mark.

We are transfixed by the newly dead, for surely life-lessons will derive and make sense of it. 425 was unusually generous and new in that regard: a nuclear ground-burst mid-city, a first, its remedies never considered. How to count those atomized; or to salvage precious orts and iotas from a complication of materials; how to handle remains which are themselves soaked in radioactive ash. And as far as counting as dead those who never showed up where they should've: how do you count them when that place is gone.

Explorers found the soil to be rich in surprising isotopes. Important improvements in safety apparel were asked for. Eventually robot tractors were told to press it all into the pit, which then got a ponderous concrete cap. New sacred ground, not soon to receive flowers.

The communique from Makh, the apologia, came in the form of a translation into idiosyncratic English, perhaps by way of German. "A bold and clear defiance ... genocide against us in both form and fact ... we will not practice a sentimental manner of warfare." About the blast: its focus, Microsoft, had been chosen because its applications were central to the banking sanctions and thus the crimes of Hammerfall, crimes analogized to those against the American Indians, which is to say displacement, hunger and death against an innocent people; timed for a board meeting "for maximum revenge." To the list of demands -- basically quit Israel -- was added the end of Hammerfall, including a pecuniary show of atonement.

The message closed with a light note referencing more devices in-country.

April 25, a date not to be forgotten; to live in infamy, though without the consequent war in this case really. Very little actual warcraft being practiced, so perhaps war in name only, but not even that, since it wasn't named that. (The writer who proposed Reprisal War I later claimed to be a humorist. Note: if you're not funny you're not a humorist.) In time the preferred term was simply operations.

President Bishop's consultations also had been bold and clear. From his secure location -- from whatever secret warship, airship, spacecraft, or actually Appalachian bunker -- he and his team had by emergency decree gathered up all of America's military might and dumped it like from a haversack onto the old dry land in question, then to turn away and say have at it, any army's dream.

Phase One -- destroy the enemy -- had been a bit of a bust, hunter-killer teams everywhere confronted with a couple of bombs, tough talk, no wish to engage. Militias simply disappeared, in a residue of abandoned berets and sand-colored tunics, piles of crappy small arms; Makh shaved their beards and hid in lady's habiliments maybe, disappearing forevermore; neighbor states ceded border areas; even the allies knew better than to get underfoot. Kind of embarrassing war stats given all the effort, and best to just go to Phase Two.

Phase Two: search structures for nuclear material; inspect for signs of its recent presence or manufacture; render said structures unfit for these purposes. Important: interpret this order as broadly as possible.

That codicil was key, and made for a more satisfying campaign. Structures: start with towers and office-blocks, government complexes including utilities and schools; shopping centers; barns and silos and so on, not complicated. And homes of course, and their attendant structures. And wait: if you can live in it, it's a home, so off to the crusher went railcars and buses and the like, caravans and trucks. And someone said you can tuck a nuke almost anywhere, so wells and cisterns, and storm-cellars, ossuaries, latrine pits, pools and reservoirs were inspected and filled with concrete. A dammed lake was blown, and all its little pleasure boats. Phase Two kindled creative thinking.

All of this was contrary to the rules. But the rules were American. We made them and could remake them. Knock out a wall, add a room, decorate according to taste; or simply do without. And at this time America decided we might be better served by something else.

As for those who believed that this makes us no better than them: all that lot died in a fire.

So to summarize: unpleasantness; a lack of body counts, or other good measures, and in fact a lack of clear accomplishments or even goals; a corps of embeds somehow left back home this time, fiddling with dispatches: all good reasons not to give the thing a name; the best reason of all was the better war just beside.

America on a war footing, number one and united in fear and rage. Those who could leave left for towns not important enough for terror, Rupert or Elko for examples, and a thousand others, swallowed whole by camper-vans, run dry and ruined, but there are always more towns. Or they broke into Canada, or other places considered safe from the possible warpaths of the plumes, the greasy black clouds coming any day now. Oregon was overrun.

Washington (the other one) locked down and held very still, probably by way of a plan in place, dug up from old bunkers. But certain other cities or regions or parts of them were bled low: Manhattan, Austin and its satellites, Bay Area and Back Bay, Space Coast, all abandoned and sadly also the good homes so assiduously made. The men and women left behind, no less afraid, feasted on these leavings with end-of-days dissipation.

Those who wandered the roads discovered a mystifying cash-only economy, in which the value of any given dollar might turn on the dyspesia of a sales-clerk; this until the banks ran out, rolling to a stop. Now laws are being flouted, including the laws of economics. A krugerrand gets you a gallon of gas. Eventually the Glocks come out.

Bank failures are common enough in history and well-understood; a general failure across an entire polity is not, or not very; a good analogy is a plague. It kills directly but also by killing those who keep us fed and warm, safe from wild dogs. To wit: utilities failed as critical personnel fled their posts. Power is needed to run the pumps, so petrol, so central to modern life (and of course its exodus), ran to a trickle: failed. And of course the gas at the pump gets there by gas, but what doesn't. So marketplaces failed, not having a lot of options, there are no more dray horses. There might've been manpower to help with this but they were busy with their gamma-meters, stopping traffic, kicking in doors. Amazing how one bomb brings the whole building down.

We hate being reminded that we know how to bang out a killer spread-sheet but not how to hunt, fish or forage; that we can't run our cars on wits alone; that we know how to burn trash in the house for heat but not why we shouldn't. Who do we kill for all of this?

Makh of course, for starters, which network was rolled up in the entire, and then some, thanks in part to the new expedient at hand, actually a reissue of an old favorite, torture. (Note: there are those who think torture doesn't work, but of course it does, why else would you do it, it's time-consuming, and taxing if not unpleasant.) I'll have you know I was not a witness to it per se but I was privy to the principles as they were laid out. It started with the idea of America being best at everything, a point of pride; and let's dispense with the old niceties, like leaving a person presentable, or fully functioning. Anyway, success.

Eventually they are husks, exhausted of use, and -- and this would've been August of that year, I remember because of the pun -- the summary executions begin. I was there for the debate, and the winning side was for an emphasis on ease: mess, noise and cost kept to a minimum. In the end they settled on a pulley and a simple length of cable. Then to crematoria, where they provided their own fuel. Even the ash was used to leaven parkland.

Again, to those who say we don't do such things, the riposte is yes we do.

There was also a more organically American violence going on, grass-roots, can-do, rugged individual, not entirely illogical but mostly: Muslims were attacked, in ones and twos at first, and as opportunity allowed; then more comprehensively as the panic hardened and became clear. Windows smashed of course, that old morale-builder; then beatings, houndings. Actual murders were more impersonal, fire-bombs or regular bombs, the car that interrupts the cortege. Domestic Islam advised self-restraint, which was done, of course it was; but then there were those who were only possibly Muslim, like Sikhs and in particular the local Nepalese Gorkhali, who were bloodied and having none of it: and having at it. These redresses were apolitical and closely targeted, based on things like online boasts and other postings, and were quite personal.

For the government's part, all this was only lightly officiated, in the sense of good luck to both sides, let's hope it's wins all around.

Woven into this violence was another, built around American Jewry, standing in for Israel and tied to 425 only in the abstract; and whose consequent dead were not abstract. Their enemies were carriers of the ancient animus, the permanent condition, that sometimes slept but would stir at the lightest touch; who began with broken glass of course, cost-effective and bold. The sons of Irgun had seen this number and did not respond in kind but rather more like by a factor of ten: simple nitrate devices to take out sources, especially in their gatherings, plus print shops and the like. Bloody escalations would involve a helicopter full of tourists, celebrities and famously an entire awards show. All this in the first week.

By all accounts and according to those who claimed to know, the government's part in this was in providing arms to the one side and intel to the other; and/or vice versa. Situation normal then, nothing to see here, now let's find those nukes.

All this while the real war was nowhere near and just beside.

The ice cracking south not far from Iskut and 40 Mile Flats. On its plateau and by its bluff above Telegraph Creek, suddenly a group appears, camera crew in hand, picketing the towers because of the possible harm to ice-worms, that odd and only nominally-edible annelid which might've been found in these glaciations but in fact had not been found very much. Noble cause but turns out it was a ruse, a bit of ironicality put on by a late show; didn't matter, the lot were ensconced in ice brigs and forced to subsist on pemmican for the next few months, how funny is that. I mention this disturbance only because of its anomalous nature now: anomalies had begun to give to way to the humdrum of success.

The events of 425 and after had rallied the workers in the canyons of the Canadian Rockies in two ways. First, of course, a respite or at best an end to the unnatural violence that had stunned and confused the project. As well, 425 had helped animate the wartime analogy. Privations, low pay and no way to spend it; battle-lines and changing fronts; a renewed understanding of logistics as the most important of the war sciences; clarity of purpose. Kill or die.

It was working. Every day or every 500 meters you start again and save the Western world. Ironwrights and tractor-men, and those whose roles enjoined them to keep that lot alive all the while; who would hack out a firebase from the permafrost and Doug firs, the rocky riverbeds and plains; put up a pylon a hundred feet high, heavy on the north side with radiating wires. String it up or down the line as needed, then break camp for another. Every day or whenever you're told: listen to orders, make your complaints innocuous and become a valued part of a machine. Not difficult if you try: machines come from our loins, after all. They embody our ideals. Build or die.

Working: down a bank on the ravine just by PK 3309, the ice crept up with all the guile of a patch of ground cover -- embarrassing how dumb it was. Within yards it begins to falter and disappear, steaming. It spills its guts; the drool becomes a drizzle and eventually an effluence, which finds its way down-valley to a generator, turning a turbine. Cheers, half-astonished, and champagne is pulled from the snow. The press was there, for pictures and reports, which crowded their way into internet heds that week. In America the celebration was by all accounts sincere.

There were live feeds: we watched in glory for several days. The ice has nowhere to go now -- man is once again master of nature -- except up and down. Some of us noticed it was rising, white back heaving, slowly, as if unfolding from a lounge chair. And as it became a tower of its own its weight doubled and redoubled, until it had also become a digging tool, a spade. The term undermining comes to mind. As it tore the earth (and surely here we must note the odd rhythm of water -- freeze, expand, destroy -- which is one of the original rebukes of nature) it slid beneath the concrete dais of 3309 in a classic subduction move.

Eventually we noticed the ice had overtopped its barrier. Now two things happened more or less within a day. The tower, under assault from below, begins to recoil, setting off an emergency; at the upper end the glacier lets go a frozen mass, a great ziggurat, and the tower is crushed along with a work detail. For another day the ice is an angry mother, dropping calves like bombs. Then once again careening more carefully down, drunk with power and as meticulous as a mad surgeon.

Cassiar is abandoned, and all the towers and bases along the length of the line, which the ice would destroy in the softest way. A soft hammer. If you were to simply lay your hand on its face it begins to falter. But it has more time than your hand.

A study was funded. Seems the whole thing should've been built on the ridgelines (where you can't breathe and tractors fail), because glaciers make their way on melt-water and don't climb well. Oh well. At least the project had given us time. Time for what. The president was curious about ways to stimulate volcanic activity in that area; a study was funded. Science argued about when it began and where, and by whose greed or neglect.

Where nothing lives. Where nothing can be built, and where nothing has a home. Where nothing grows. And grows. The ice came down like a theme.

Operations continued in the high basin. Heavy smothering sky; an old drought from before the invention of water; where the sun had begun her day with a vomitus of heat, Laird swimming in it. 140 degrees. How could anyone live here; no one should live here; no ones live here.

Captain Sayre speaking, charged with securing an old mud town evacuated for some hundred years; mud-straw structures are not bound up like regular structures, and might not as readily give up their ground, "So a couple of daisy-cutters, maybe six or eight." When things would not die quite as needed Laird always said yes to air requests but did insist on being asked first.

Sayre: "And we found a cave complex. We have drones going. Setting up for demo but it's taking a while. Thought you might want to come take a look."

"Yeah okay."

So there you have it. Sayre took a congenial turn: "Volunteer?"

Indicating the kaffiyeh tied to Laird's trac. "Didn't have a chance to ask."

"Okay. Yes sir." Unbuttoned a little of his battledress to show a sports tee with the same checker pattern. "Serious, what's the story?"

Middle Tennessee accent. Okay. Never be afraid to learn something new. Laird undid the rag, rotten with road dust, and threw it over. "Brains on it, might do you some good." That's the fucking story.

The cave complex had been badly described: rows of rough sandstone blocks, stacked and weathered together; a stone ramp leading down, made smooth by old footfalls. Lights had been strung into it, but not by his people, who had tied them to a generator. Signage, not too shot up, told the story: this was an archaeological dig.

Operations continued, a body of engineers; Laird standing around. The air was a murderous air. Boiling out of the ground. The wind picked at his tunic like beggars and he headed down. A complex of halls and passages, shaded recesses where the heat could hide. Suddenly to the side a huge placard, a foam-core board, with a citation in four translations, including German and Mandarin.

"As well as his talent as a military leader, Cyrus King of the Four Corners of the World was an engineer. During the design of this citadel, he advised the builders to use new techniques, including cantilever construction, examples of which you will see elsewhere. As well as the vaulted arch, the first in mankind, which you can see above you. "

He looked up. Sure enough. So they'd been making this whole thing ready for the tourist trade. Either fight a war or don't. Around the vaulted arch, det-cord and bits of plastique. Ruins soon to be ruins again. I wonder if a thousand years from now tourists will come stamping through. Spell my name right.

Now a gallery, standing at one end of which a tall piece of graven sandstone, demarcated by a velvet rope and lit like a scene. Unknown glyphs in the stone. The placard read:

"This is a paean to the Zoroastrian god Ohrmazd. It is the earliest known example of script using both spacing techniques and diacriticals. These writing improvements led to advances in trade, jurisprudence and history-keeping."

He picked a figure and drew his finger along its legs and spine, leaving sweat in the furrows. He imagined an old forebear with a chisel and hammering tool, breaking the rock with single purpose.

Mirou was behind him. "We are ready as soon as you like. I have the detonator and will carry it outside."

No you won't: last man carries the detonator. Over his shoulder: "Just put it down. I'll walk it out." He could hear his voice smashing against the walls; then the scrape of her shoes up the tunnel.

What happened next exactly is not recorded. There would've been a great noise of course, and its cessation. Then darkness, immaterial and protracted: nothing undergirding him.