Anaconda, the father of Afghanistan operations, was their first meeting. To one and all, the poetry of code names was not bard-made, but to Mary, spy in the barracks of men, the song of it always amazed. How could it be that military males made such descriptors? They punched them out fast, Mary knew that much. They most likely never unpacked a word’s ancestry, but Mary opened the suitcases and pulled out all the scarves. Anaconda was originally a Sri Lankan snake, an unexplained alteration of Latin anacandaia, for “python,” yet still from Sinhalese henakandaya, for “whipsnake,” itself being from hena, for “lightning,” and kanda, for “stem.”

So Mary and Frank had first met in a lightning stem, situated in the Shahi-Kot Valley of Afghanistan, back in the late winter of 2002. Anaconda was also (geographically speaking) eight by eight square miles of (militarily speaking) sloppy intelligence—i.e., “slop intel”—but the blame went to CAS, close air support, or, as Frank called it, Aunt Cassie, which consisted of Frank and Mary and all their fellow airmen. Frank faulted the rules of engagement and the worst confliction stew Mary had ever seen. A small air-support command at Bagram thought they were in charge; a larger command, in Doha, thought they were. Frank complained and was completely right, that both—Bagram and Doha—had to have Tampa’s okay to drop a thumbtack.

She and Frank always said it made no sense that Florida controlled their wings in Afghanistan. Yet she and Frank, like all the militaries of all the worlds, had been taught to do, not think. This was the thesis. It was absolutely the job. Most important, they had, after all, chosen to do these things, these flyings and smokings. It all came back to her first solo flight—feeling in bones the cudgeling roar she commanded, craving the angle she could have, and then the loft, up to up, up to up, hovering like frozen smoke, flightless for that one instant before blading through air. Ground, the death trap, falling off, and none of it comparing to the vault of crying sky, the flume of speed. She had been so long small, so often overpowered, she would never forget getting her steel at last. She felt it every flight.

Until Anaconda. And the worst of Anaconda was Neil Roberts, a Navy SEAL. He had carrot hair and a pink face. Three days into the operation, she was hovering in her Viper, one of many birds trying to bomb the right target. Neil was below, on a Chinook’s ramp, when three Taliban RPGs hit his chopper, shredded its hydraulics, spilling liquids. He slipped off, into the Qaeda enemy. He had a pistol and two grenades. She watched him run out of ammunition. She watched three men drag him behind rocks. She couldn’t see what came next. Later, a team recovered the body. He’d been shot in the back of the neck.