“Mountain have a name?” Mary asked. She wished she could press through the seat, whisk out under the chassis. She’d left base to avoid Seri, to miss Purdue’s coming in the hut with the release, and here were Jeff and Rex with updates. She concentrated on keeping her chin level, her line of sight unbroken. Frank tried to catch her eye once and then gave up. She sensed Jeff checking the mirror, looking to see how she took it.

She could feel defensiveness, its brittle coil, threading and breaking through her.

You could kill civilians, as in carpet-bombing Japan, as long as it looked as if you were just on the brink of losing to Japan. But if you were kinda winning but not entirely, you better not touch a hair on any civilian head. When an enemy got that equation entirely figured out, which took, oh, maybe ten minutes, enemy would simply mix up soldiers with civilians. Best example of this was military honchos storing weapons under cradles. So, when she bombed the weapons cache, enemy lost his firepower, sure enough, but, more effective than that firepower ever would have been, he could say, Lookie here, I lost my wife and kidlets.

She was still fuming, but now at herself. Kiddiewinks, munchkins, babes in warland. Serpent, thy name is Mary.

They drove to the arrow. In the air, that’s what Mary saw when she flew here. It pointed north and east, to the Hindu Kush. Four thousand years, land here had been contested. She was just the latest to visit. The snow under the Land Cruiser was packed, some of it slippery. She waited for the spin-out, a jackknife. The cold this January was killing Afghans. She’d heard hundreds had perished. She thought she saw one of them a distance from the shoulder.

“See that,” Rex said.

“See what?” Frank said.

“Back that way, four o’clock,” Mary said.

“Shit,” Frank said.

“Is he dead?” Rex asked.

“We should stop,” Frank said.

“And do what?” Jeff said, his speed steady.

“Earth too hard to bury him,” Rex said.

“Maybe he’s not dead,” Mary said.

“We try to help, we get to be targets,” Jeff said.

“PRTs up this way haven’t had trouble,” Frank said.

Provincial Reconstruction Teams. One of them had built a paved road from Kabul to the Panjshir Valley. It used to take five hours to reach the valley from Kabul. From the cockpit, the Panjshir Valley was the space between the index finger and the thumb on the hand reaching for the arrow. It seemed to come from China, as if grabbing for a spear.