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already turned and started running. By the time the squad can make an opening in the wire enough for McGraw to give chase, she is gone.

Chapter 2
    Beginning to wonder if we actually did leave Iraq
    The night is alive with police sirens and car horns and shouting and gunfire. The warm, muggy air smells like smoke. The streetlights dim and occasionally flare up as the city juggles its power problems. Down First Avenue, past the roadblock, the traffic lights are all blinking red and the traffic is snarled and honking with fury as thousands continue their flight from Manhattan in anything that can get a little gasoline in it.
    Everybody thinks things are better somewhere else.
    The boys of Second Platoon’s Third Squad pace the wire nervously, wired on black coffee. A police helicopter roars overhead, its powerful spotlight exploring the area briefly and ruining their night vision before moving on.
    “I can’t believe this,” Corporal Hicks mutters to himself, squinting down First Avenue and listening to the deep thuds of heavy machine-gun fire. “Are those tracers?”
    “No, I’m just happy to see you,” McLeod says, strolling up with his SAW. “Sounds like a fiddy-cal. So what?”
    “Because this is New York, not Baghdad, shit-for-brains. What is somebody down there doing firing an MG in the middle of New York?” Then, as an afterthought: “Beat your face, McLeod. Give me twenty.”
    “Are you serious? We’re in the middle of a war zone here.”
    “You want thirty?”
    While McLeod counts off his pushups, Hicks raises his carbine’s telescopic close combat optic to his eye. A red dot is centered in the optic for easy targeting. The tracers form a stream of light over the hoods of cars crawling in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the heads of people running through the cars.
    Hicks can’t see through buildings, though, so he can’t tell who is laying down this steel rain and who is getting rained on. Just a few hundred meters away, and yet even this close he feels isolated and can barely tell what is going on. He wonders where all those big bullets are ending up. A fifty-cal round can travel four miles. It can blow through vehicles and, at close range, concrete walls.
    Now imagine what it can do to a human being.
    “Six. . . . Seven. . . .”
    The firing stops. It lasted only a few seconds. Somebody screwed up big time, probably some green recruit in a Humvee who got spooked. Hopefully, nobody got killed.
    Rather you than me, he thinks.
    Hicks is about to lower his weapon when he notices two people at the periphery of his scope image and focuses on them. One is a middle-aged man wearing boxers. The other is a teenaged girl dressed in a long T-shirt that comes down to her knees. They’re staring vacantly and doing that strange, jittery neck roll that people with the Mad Dog strain of Lyssa often do and that always gives Hicks the creeps. Their hands are clenched into fists in front of their chests. They look in his direction, open their mouths, and bolt away in the direction of where the MG fire had come from.
    He mutters, “And what are all these Mad Dogs doing running around without a leash?”
    The last thing we need, he tells himself, is another bunch throwing themselves at our perimeter and getting themselves shot. Getting caught in that kind of fire incident will follow you around for life.
    The MG starts thudding again.
    “I’m beginning to wonder if we actually did leave Iraq,” McLeod says, then resumes counting.

Things will be just fine, sir, if we keep right on moving
    The armored Humvees, butterbar Todd Bowman commanding, race up Haifa Street through dense smells of burning trash and gasoline fumes. The boys in the lead vehicle bob their heads in time to Dope’s “Die Motherfucker Die” played loud enough to be heard in the mosques. A year ago, the government of Iraq tottered on the edge of collapse and the U.S. Army reentered the cities in force to prop it up, unleashing a new generation of