The camp wasn’t much to look at—a cluster of tents, a couple of low stone houses, and some corrugated aluminum buildings in a barren desert north and west of the Sunni Triangle. There looked to be a firing range. There was a helipad and an old airstrip—the airstrip was narrow, short, and in a state of disrepair that suggested only very small and light planes could get in there, flown by people who weren’t too picky about whether they lived or died.

“The place looks abandoned,” Luke said. “I don’t see a single car or truck. I don’t see any movement. I don’t see an active roadway. I don’t see evidence of garbage burns, or recent activity on that firing range. I don’t think there’s anybody there.”

Luke didn’t like to look at the photos. He didn’t like them because he had carried out the mission he had been assigned, and he had done it quickly. He had killed two men this morning, and he didn’t enjoy killing. They had been here a little over twenty-four hours, and he wanted to go home. His wife was pregnant with their first child. He wanted to get back to her, hug her, and reassure her that he loved her and wanted to be with her always.

He also didn’t like to look at them because he knew what was going to happen next. He and Ed Newsam were going to helicopter out to the desert, probably this very afternoon, and they were going to arrive at that camp before sundown.

What were they going to find there? If Luke had to guess, he’d say they were going to find dead bodies in those tents, decomposing in the baking heat of the desert, swarming with flies.

This was the gift the grateful imam had given him—the opportunity to find a pile of corpses of militants who had become expendable, and whatever mystery that solved or made more complicated for people like Big Daddy Cronin.

“What do you think, boys?” Big Daddy said. “You could go out there, check the place out, grab anything interesting, and be home for supper. Tomorrow morning you can be on your way home to the States. Monty’s right. It’s on you. The man offered it to you as gift.”

“I’ve gotten better gifts,” Newsam said.

* * *

The phone was ringing half a world away.

Luke sat at a makeshift desk carrel—like everything around here, it had been built with raw plywood. There was a bank of a dozen such carrels in a row, lined up in an echoing marble hallway. A person sat at every single one of them.