Page 7

CHAPTER 3

Before Ken...before Wisconsin or Stan…he and his brother came on the carcass of a small lizard seething with fire ants. How or why the lizard had died was unimportant. At seven years old, all he was interested in was the ants foaming and churning and laboriously tugging the body toward their hill.

This was a little like that.

The road into the airport at this point was not a straight line but jogged to the right at a forty-five-degree angle at the corner just before the Baron Hotel where the British were holed up clearing those eligible for evacuation to the U.K. From where he stood, John saw thousands of people teeming and jostling and surging in various directions, pinging off one another like pinballs in a crazed arcade. Many more were trying to move in the opposite direction and get away from the checkpoint but couldn’t move because of the sheer volume of people .

Later, he’d find out that the bomber—and it had been a he , which would’ve probably pleased his DCC instructors—had loaded his vest with ball bearings in order to inflict the maximum amount of carnage.

From the looks of things, the bomber had succeeded.

My God. A chill shivered up his spine. Oh, my Lord.

The dead were everywhere: not only on the narrow shelves lining the canal but choking the sewage canal itself. Hundreds were down, and most were still. Among them were men in uniform, Marines either wounded or worse. Many more civilians writhed and screeched. The place was awash in blood and bits of people. Some bits were large: heads blown from spines; headless corpses, with only bloody, meaty ladders of vertebrae protruding from between the shoulders; legs, some minus their knees, others with them. Shattered chests. Gaping abdominal wounds from which ropes of intestines slopped. People whose faces had been pancaked by the force of flying debris. Some clutched at eyeless sockets, one or both eyeballs obliterated by a ball-bearing whizzing along at two thousand feet per second. (Later, a Marine would pull up a leg of his camo pants and show John an enormous bruise: Felt like a bowling ball, sir, but it was a guy’s head. )

The smell was staggering, a combination of human waste, burnt blood, heat-blasted dirt, singed flesh, scorched hair. The sheer volume of noise was deafening as all those voices coalesced into a single ear-piecing note of despair and disbelief and loss.

What am I going to do? That was his only coherent thought. The sergeant was rapping into his shoulder mike, calling for help and medical teams, but that single thought kept spinning around and around like some crazed gerbil running a wheel as fast as it could to nowhere at all.

Because, in that instant, he wasn’t a man. He wasn’t even John Worthy yet. What he was, in that moment, was a terrified boy listening to the muted shrieks and screams of the other kids punctuated by the far-away wail of sirens—and knowing that the adults would get there too late?—

“Worthy!”

The sound of his name yanked him back from that nightmare of the past and into a present no less nightmarish. Dazed, he blinked, looked around...

Someone in the crowd. He skipped his gaze over the crowd, hoping to snag on someone familiar, someone in that sea of faces who knew him?—

“There, sir!” The sergeant pointed to the right. “Near the Baron!”

He followed the line of the sergeant’s finger: down the road where the canal angled at the Baron Hotel—and then his breath stoppered in his throat.

A group, all in uniform, gathered in a protective huddle. A single person down, judging by the boots, though whether that person was male or female, he couldn’t tell. He recognized Musa’s broad shoulders and bluff torso, though, as the Afghan bent and helped first the woman John remembered from the tarmac to stand and then, a young boy. A huge gout of blood darkened the woman’s clothing. More coated Musa’s hands and arms up to his elbows.

Then, as Musa and the woman and the boy moved back from the huddle, John caught a glimpse of a familiar profile, a flash of chestnut hair?—

And a gush of something liquid and bright and crimson.

Oh, no. His heart tried to fail. He couldn’t move. His chest grew tight as his heart thundered. No, please, God, no...

“Sir!” The sergeant, again. “Sir, that guy over to the right, the one who’s shouting! You know him?”

“What?” Dazed, he looked away from all that blood—and spotted a man, his outstretched arms moving in a frantic semaphore.

“ Worthy!” Daniel Driver bellowed. “Worthy, over here! Quick, quick !”