He had been thus many times. He imagined the scurry and twist of the Americans. The helmets were turtle-shaped, sand-colored, flanged to protect the back of the neck. They wore so much gear, it was a miracle they could even move. They looked like Crusaders, lacking only the flapping white tunics emblazoned with the Templar cross. In their armor, and with rucksacks and an abundance of weapons, they seemed to be a new crusade, and, in the way his mind worked, it wasn’t hard to go from there to cities in flame, men burned at the stake, mosques desecrated, women raped, towns pillaged, despair everywhere in the land of Muhammad. All that had happened ten centuries ago meant nothing. Time was meaningless; there was no “then,” as there was no “now.”

The rifle was marvelous to his practiced touch. No tremble afflicted the chevron that dominated the center of the broad encirclement of his scope image. He put the point of the chevron where it had to be, gauging distance, adjusting the hold up a bit, down a bit, perhaps a bit to the right or left if heavy winds blew sand across the lens. Then the squeeze, almost automatic at this point, as the trigger resisted him slightly as he pressed it back, toward himself. No torque, no twist, the regularity of a robot’s press, and the gun issued death in the form of Bulgarian heavy ball, which to Juba felt like a bit of smash to the shoulder and looked like a blur. Followed by the recovery of the system as it fell back to steadiness after its adventure in recoil.

Each one reacted differently when hit. You could never tell what was going to happen. Some went instantly still, some fought against the penetration of the bullet—that is, the penetration of death itself. Some manifested fury, some resignation, some even relief, as they went down into eternal sleep.

In this dream, the world was rich with targets, even if in the real world it was seldom so. Marines crouched everywhere, rigid with fear, trying to find cover, twisting their bodies into cracks and fissures in the rubble, trying to insert themselves into doorways or vehicles, anything to get away from the anger of the sniper. But the world was a kill box. His finger spoke for God. It nursed a bolt of heavy ball from the Dragunov without upset to the reticle image in which the infidel was pinned atop the chevron. He had lost track of how many times he’d sent infidels on their voyage to wherever Allah sent them.