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CHAPTER 1

The instructors at the Army’s DCC said spotting a suicide bomber was easy. The guy would be twitchy, sweaty, shifty-eyed, maybe mumbling prayers: all small but significant tells an astute observer should grasp. Because the guy was nervous, right? By definition, a suicide bomber was doing this for the first time. If he messed up, not like he was getting any re-dos.

The way their instructors ticked off those tells sounded a lot like a quadratic equation: A + B + C = KA-BOOM. Like, pay attention, Captain Worthy, and you, too, might be a hero.

Another thing the instructors said was that suicide bombers were, like, 99.999 percent guys. Women, they claimed, were rarer than hen’s teeth.

John and Roni never quite saw the logic in that. Because rare doesn’t mean never. Rare only means a lot less often. For example, Boko Haram routinely kidnaps girls and women and gives them a choice: become a fighter’s wife or find yourself made into a ticking time bomb.

So, rare did not equal zero. Although how anyone figured out gender after the fact, his instructors never did say. John and Roni figured this probably depended on whether you ended up with chunks or only red mist.

Something no one, not even Roni, ever asked was if any DCC instructor had actually applied these same datapoints and spotted a bomber before the ka - boom . John figured the number to be just about zero. Honestly, those close enough to succeed at the last minute weren’t around to give an opinion one way or another.

So, perhaps there was some truth in all these calculations.

Or the other possibility: that was why it was called fiction.