There was something else bothering him. The beheading movies he’d seen—they were particularly valuable because the participants were unmasked. The producers of these scenes sent the masked versions to television and Web outlets. What soldiers found and intelligence sent back were the outtakes.

This time the leading men were masked from the start. Could be they removed the ski wear at the end for a war dance. He sat back a little. He watched in order, from the beginning. It was a wait. For one minute, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, the camera stayed on the standing figures. They neither spoke nor moved. Maybe one scratched his head. Will kept checking the audio, but there was nothing to pick up. It got so long he wanted to fast-forward. He felt his composure clouding. He shut off the feeling. All the funerals he’d gone to over the last month for the fallen, each one brought back to him his odd luck. He’d never collected so much as a knife knick. He, who was a dumbass, the one who last weekend tripped on a soft trail with his son, got dirt grimed into his palms, his weak ankle made worse, mud on his knees. He missed—no, he walked right past, even though he was looking carefully for it—the home of a neighbor who needed a hand moving a table. He got lost at least a few times if he deviated from home to work and work to home. He was a beach ball, a milk shake, a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey blind man, and one, it seemed so far, who survived. So why Hoseyn? How come the careful one?

Still more four guys standing in a row staring straight ahead. One was taller than the other three. The guy seemed not so good at freezing, now that Will looked. There—the tall one shifted his center of gravity from one foot to the other. Two of the men were standing close. They were checked out. Inhuman, in a way that spelled drugs to Will. It was one of the ways to bankroll an insurgency. These two didn’t know about not using. Then again, in most uprisings, the discipline was rarely there. Or maybe it was all wishes. He liked to think they needed numbing to do this.

He leaned forward on his elbows. Waiting.

There was an adjustment in them he couldn’t pinpoint but recognized. It was beginning. If this was Prophet, if this was the easier battle-space, their intended victim would shape-shift into their own father, son, or uncle, and they would back off, wondering: How could we slaughter our loved one? Who put him here and stole away the kafir? Are we mad? Are we lost?