BoneMan's Daughters Read Online Free PDF

similarities to the hundreds
     of cases he’d been exposed to during his career, felt profoundly different, beginning with the choice of Kahlid’s language.
    He looked at his interrogator, who was now smiling. “You don’t have enough footage of American soldiers condemning the war?”
    “We do, yes. And we won’t need any more from you.”
    Then what?
    An unnerving quiet settled over them as the soldier with the camera carefully set up the tripod, mounted the Panasonic, inserted
     a tape, and plugged the unit into an extension cord.
    “We have enough gasoline to run the generator for three days. If it takes longer, we will refill the tanks. But it’s not gasoline
     that I’m concerned with running out of.” He glanced at the cameraman, who was looking through the lens. “Are we set?”
    The man nodded.
    “Turn it on.”
    A red light was the only indicator that the camera was live.
    Kahlid crossed to the table, scooped up a stack of papers and a handful of tacks, and then stepped over to the corkboard.
     He began to pin 8 1/2 × 11 inch sheets of photocopied images up on the board in a neat row.
    Pictures of collapsed buildings, chunks of concrete immediately recognizable as the handiwork of explosives. The photographs
     had been taken on the ground, some slightly blurred, as if the photographer had taken them in haste.
    He’d seen volumes of war images, enough to deaden his mind to all but the worst. But there was something about the presentation
     of these pictures that he found disturbing.
    Then he saw it: hardly distinguishable from the chunks of rubble, broken and twisted limbs. The evidence of bodies that had
     been trapped and crushed under the weight of the crumbling building.
    Kahlid went calmly about the business of pinning more photographs on the wall, one at a time, until he had twelve of them
     in two rows of six each. The last eight were close-ups, showing a dusty arm thrust out from the space between several large
     blocks. A very thin, small hand that was attached to a boy or girl younger than ten, hidden under tons of stone. Three different
     pictures of this arm, broken above the child’s elbow, hanging limp, dusty but not bloody.
    Ryan now saw limbs between the cracks in the rubble. All children, noticed only upon a second look, then noticed singularly,
     as if the mounds of broken building didn’t even exist. His stomach turned.
    Kahlid turned around and stepped aside. “Do you recognize these, Kent?”
    Did he? No, he didn’t think so.
    “Mr. Kent?”
    “Umm… no. No, I don’t.”
    “Of course you don’t. Your pictures come from high in the sky, where your collateral damage is safely hidden from the public
     eye.”
    Kahlid took a deep breath. His lip quivered.
    “I, on the other hand, do recognize these photographs because I took them. If you look carefully you will see my daughter’s
     arm in the third photograph from the left at the bottom. The next two are also Sophie. And the next one is of my son’s leg.”
    The man’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly, then he stepped to his right. “They were seven and nine when your bombs fell
     from the sky and crushed the apartment next to the one I’d sent my wife and four children to for safekeeping. They all died
     that day. Their bones were broken and crushed. It is hard for me to imagine the pain they must have felt.”
    Ryan didn’t know how to respond to this man’s obvious heartache.
    “I’m going to leave you with these pictures for a while, Kent. I want you to stare at my children. At God’s children, lying
     broken on the ground, and I want you to feel their pain… the way God feels pain. And when you have done that, I will
     return and we can go to the next step. Fair enough?”
    For the first time since waking, Ryan felt completely out of his element.
    Kahlid dipped his head and left the room, followed by the others. Ryan sat alone under the steady gaze of the camera’s red
     blinking light and the handiwork of