Her home was gone; everything was gone. Her father had said there would be trouble as soon as the bad men from Mosul had arrived. But even he could not have foreseen this. She sat and hugged her knees tight, her face wet and the skin on her neck peeling and raw.

Her father had told her to run and hide as the bad men maimed and killed, and then finally rounded up hundreds of men, women, and families, and bundled them all into trucks, along with her father, still in his favorite blue shirt. No one fought back – they just let themselves be taken and driven away. Leyla had followed, staying on the mountain slopes. She had cursed their ill fortune. But that changed in a heartbeat. Now, she realized she had been one of the lucky ones.

Soran was now ash and smoke. God had reached down a finger and touched the city, and taken it from them. The back of Leyla’s neck still stung from the heat flash and she wrapped her shawl there to dry its sticky rawness. Her eyes were sore, but it was pure chance that she’d been looking away from the blast and hadn’t lost her sight.

Leyla rocked back and forth, wondering how she would tell people of this moment. What would she say of Soran? Of all the poor souls who stayed; of her friends, neighbors, and when it came to it one day, what would she tell her children?

Leyla knew immediately how she would remember this moment. She would say to them:

I was ten when my world vanished in the flames. When the bad men came and beat us, we didn’t fight back. When they raped and killed us, we stood silent. And when they finally smashed God’s house and took us as slaves, we still did nothing. We were weak and maybe that’s why we were punished. God turned our world to ash.

She rocked faster, feeling tears on her cheeks. Father always said that when things were darkest, when evil was everywhere, then the angels would come – and they would strike like the hammer of God.

She lowered her head. I pray they come soon.

CHAPTER 1

United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) – Nebraska

Major Jack Hammerson stared at his computer screen with a clinical, military interest. It showed an aerial shot of the small Iraqi city – former city.

Data windows beside the images displayed wind direction, rad-count, and drew colored lines suggesting wind dispersal patterns. Body count and survivor numbers were also displayed – the first number was over 130,000, and the second number, showing the survivors, was expected to be only in the hundreds – a maximum kill rate, Hammerson thought.

Already, the VELA satellites had tasted the composition of the blast and supplied their findings: High-grade fission blast delivered by a single twenty-kiloton nuclear device. The bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima was only around fifteen kilotons.