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still have my dick, all of you have to buy me a drink.”
    ‘Of course, the crowd agrees, so he drops his pants, puts his pecker in the ’gator’s mouth, and the room goes silent. At the end of one minute, he picks up a beer bottle and smacks the ’gator over the head with it. The ’gator opens its mouth and out comes the guy’s wang, unharmed. The crowd goes nuts and the free drinks flow. After a while, the guy stands on the bar and says, “I’ll make y’all another offer. I’ll pay a hundred bucks to anyone else willing to give it a try.”
    ‘A hush falls over the crowd.
    ‘“C’mon,” says the guy. “Aren’t there no damn volunteers out there?”
    ‘A lone hand slowly rises over everyone’s heads. It’s a young blond woman.
    ‘“I’ll do it,” she says, “but only if you don’t hit me on the head with no beer bottle.”’
    Fallon’s attention wandered off.
    Detmond grunted.
    ‘My mother’s blond,’ said Stefanovic flatly.
    I cleared my throat and told them to keep up the good work, then moved away to check the cousin’s front door.
    No one was coming out. I was getting impatient. Loitering on the streets of Kabul with a Stars and Stripes patch on your shoulder was only slightly less moronic than sticking a fork in a wall socket. Besides, his five minutes were definitely up.
    ‘Meyers . . .’ I said into the mike.
    ‘He’s telling me he wants another five minutes,’ came the reply.
    ‘He can’t have them,’ I said, but I knew this guy would take them whether I agreed or not.
    I turned in time to see a girl of no more than fourteen years old, dressed in black and wearing a pink scarf over her head, run into the building adjoining the cousin’s. She was bent over with her arms wrapped around her belly as if she were pregnant, and left the front door open behind her.
    I was about to say something about this into the mike when a deafening explosion turned the world into a giant dust ball. It punched me backward through the air and I slammed into the house ten feet behind. Dust clogged my nose and eyes and my lungs were clenched, closed tight.
    Could.
    Not.
    Breathe.
    I pawed the dirt from my face and saw a massive white, black, and gray cloud boiling into the sky. Below it, two of our Landcruisers were tipped on their sides. My men were down. Something released in my chest, and I sucked down a lungful of powdered building, which brought on a coughing fit. When I pulled out of it, I could see through watering eyes that al-Eqbal’s cousin’s house was gone, along with the neighbor’s, heading skyward in the expanding gray and black mushroom cloud. Jesus . . . Meyers would be in that cloud somewhere. I wanted to move, stand up at least, but everything was in slo-mo. Rog-erson’s Landcruiser was parked outside the spot where the neighbor’s house used to be. I could see her profile. Something about it was wrong. Oh, shit . . . her face . . . she didn’t have one.
    My body didn’t want to work. I managed somehow to pull myself up on one knee, and thanked the K-pot on my head and the ceramic plate in the back of my body armor for taking most of the wall’s impact. I could see that Stefanovic, Fallon, and Detmond were flat on the ground, with only sluggish movement from all three. They were closer to the blast than I had been, and harder hit. Detmond was wounded, a red stain advancing down the gray-green pixels of his Army battle uniform toward his elbow. He managed to sit up but was almost immediately hit square in the chest by an invisible force that knocked him down onto his back. Shit, we were being fired on! Fallon and Stefanovic struggled to their feet and dragged Detmond behind the second of the scuttled Landcruisers – my Landcruiser, the one Bellows was driving. Where was Bellows? I couldn’t see him; Mattock either. All three drivers – dead?
    The situation would head from fucked up to fucking fucked up if someone didn’t do something fucking quick. Static burst into my