He stopped two meters away, keeping the barrel of his new rifle trained on his enemy’s unlined face. He was bleeding badly from a wound in his leg and the ground beneath him had gone dark with it. He wouldn’t live much longer.

“Why don’t you fight?”

He didn’t answer, instead focusing on Zahid’s face with eyes that contained no hatred or fear. Only emptiness.

“Why don’t you fight?” Zahid repeated, glancing behind him as the rate of fire slowed and the screams went silent. The Americans hadn’t come. The village of Sarabat was gone from God’s vision. After more years than anyone knew, honor had been restored. But how? Why?

“God is great,” Zahid said, tightening his finger on the trigger as he turned back to his enemy.

The injured man’s brow furrowed and his chin rose until he was staring directly into the intense glare of the Afghan sun. “There is no God.”

* * *

CLAUDE GÉROUX SWEPT the massive lens north, focusing on one of the last living inhabitants of Sarabat: an old woman trying uselessly to escape a horseman raining blows down on her with a primitive club. Blood spattered across the animal’s fur and she fell, covering her head as she was pulled beneath its hooves.

He zoomed out, taking in the entire battlefield—if it could be called that. He’d fought in Congo, Iraq, and Bosnia, to name only a few, and thought he’d witnessed every way a human being could die at the hands of another. But never anything like this.

He turned his lens on one of the attacking force crouching next to the body of yet another armed male villager. They hadn’t used those weapons, though. Some had fled, but most had just stood there and allowed themselves and their families to be butchered.

The gunfire went silent and Géroux kept filming for a few seconds more, documenting not the customary pumping fists and elated shouts, but silent confusion as the victorious warriors wandered among the bodies of their fallen enemies.

He finally pulled away from the camera and shut it down, but the recorded images stayed trapped in his mind. They would be added to the others, he knew. The ones he couldn’t escape.

2

Las Vegas, Nevada
USA

JON SMITH MADE HIS WAY through the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center toward a dense knot of people at its heart. The air-conditioning was already drying the sweat that had soaked through the back of his shirt while he was stuck standing in the desert sun. It had never occurred to him that security for the function would be so tight—metal detectors, multiple ID checks, bomb-sniffing dogs. By comparison, the TSA and Secret Service were downright easygoing.

When he reached the crowd, the reason for the over-the-top scrutiny became apparent. It seemed to consist of a Who’s Who of the tech industry. He spotted familiar faces from Amazon and Facebook right away. The new CEO of Apple was also there, embroiled in a heated discussion with two gangly young men he didn’t recognize but whose presence and spectacular basketball shoes suggested they were probably worth a billion dollars each.