Plough was worried that the pictures showed places and people the insurgents planned to strike. He had already been on the radio a couple times, back to base, talking with CI about it in a strained, excited voice. He was especially upset about Steven Seagal. Everyone in Plough’s unit had been made to watch Above the Law at least once, and Plough claimed to have seen it more than a hundred times. After they brought the prisoner out, Plough stood over the Fedayeen, yelling at him and sometimes swatting him upside the head with Seagal’s rolled-up picture. The Fedayeen said, “More fuck you.”

Mal leaned against the driver’s-side door of her truck for a while, wondering when Plough would quit hollering and swatting the prisoner. She had a Vivarin hangover, and her head hurt. Eventually she decided he wouldn’t be done yelling until it was time to load up and go, and that might not be for another hour.

She left Plough yelling, walked over the flattened gate and up to the house. She let herself into the cool of the kitchen. Red tile floor, high ceilings, lots of windows so the place was filled with sunlight. Fresh bananas in a glass bowl. Where did they get fresh bananas? She helped herself to one and ate it on the toilet, the cleanest toilet she had sat on in a year.

She came back out of the house and started down to the road again. On the way there, she put her fingers in her mouth and sucked on them. She hadn’t brushed her teeth in a week, and her breath had a human stink on it.

When she returned to the street, Plough had stopped swatting the prisoner long enough to catch his breath. The Ba’athist looked up at him from under his heavy-lidded eyes. He snorted and said, “Is talk. Is boring. You are no one. I say fuck you still no one.”

Mal sank to one knee in front of him, put her fingers under his nose, and said in Arabic, “Smell that? That is the cunt of your wife. I fucked her myself like a lesbian, and she said it was better than your cock.”

The Ba’athist tried to lunge at her from his knees, making a sound down in his chest, a strangled growl of rage, but Plough caught him across the chin with the stock of his M4. The sound of the Ba’athist’s jaw snapping was as loud as a gunshot.

He lay on his side, twisted into a fetal ball. Mal remained crouched beside him.

“Your jaw is broken,” Mal said. “Tell me about the photographs of the U.S. soldiers and I will bring a no-more-hurt pill.”

It was half an hour before she went to get him the painkillers, and by then he’d told her when the pictures had been taken, coughed up the name of the photographer.