To the north, in the far distance, rose rugged mountain peaks. Closer to the village, the surrounding area was as flat, and as hot, as a frying pan.

“You can move here after we’re done,” Luke said.

Luke and Ed walked through the village, catching the stares of the locals. They were accompanied by an Arabic translator, a cheerful young guy from the suburbs of Chicago named Greg Welch. Greg worked for the “State Department.”

He made the little crow’s feet with his fingers when he said the words State Department. He thought that was funny.

In Luke’s experience, CIA office people who rarely or never saw combat seemed to think a lot of things were funny, especially their own status and their cover stories. Undercover CIA agents and special operatives, and the people who staffed black site prisons, tended to think nothing was funny.

“How’s your Arabic, Greg?” Luke said.

Greg smiled. “It’s awesome. I’m fluent in the Mesopotamian dialect, as though I grew up here. I can speak Levantine, but some of the slang phrases are a little dicey. I’ve got some Middle Eastern blood myself, and I tan really well. There’s been talk of sending me undercover at some point.”

Luke thought of his own time undercover as a Western jihadi in Iraq. The bloodstained images passed through his mind in a flash. He glanced at Greg again.

“I don’t know if I’d recommend that.”

The three men wore casual TV reporter war zone clothes as they entered the village—utility vests, heavy boots, cargo pants, and T-shirts. Greg Welch wore a floppy sunhat. They all carried sidearms, even Greg Welch, although he was just an “embassy staffer.”

The chopper had dropped them off on a flat sandy plain a quarter mile outside town. What they didn’t want to do was drop in suddenly, fully armored, and possibly retrigger the trauma of the original raid. They wanted this to go as smoothly as possible.

They were in Syria now, and Syria was not part of the war. They walked in, moving slowly and deliberately, not trying to hide or defend themselves. They were not invading or infiltrating a sovereign nation.

They were just visitors, policemen actually, here to ask a few questions.

Everyone knew already.

People stood in front of their small homes, as still as statues, watching them pass. In the best of situations, Ed Newsam’s sheer size would bring stares, but this was more than that. It was as though the people of the village had been waiting for someone to come.

It was as though they were ghosts, the ghosts of their former selves, the people they were before the raid. Those people were gone and these ghosts were here, and the ghosts knew what the young man from their village had done, and they were waiting for the hammer to drop again.