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He stood there for a few moments, frowning, his arms crossed high on his chest and the aerosol held to one cheek. “I’ve got it!” he announced, and began to spray. When he was finished, he extracted a cell phone from his pocket and snapped a few images, including one of himself with his new creation, taken with the phone held at arm’s length.

  “There,” he said. “Pretty good, eh?”

  David had to lean right out of the firing port to see what Johnny had painted on the wall. “Nice one, Johnny!” he jeered. “That’s the ace of clubs—but the ace of spades is the cool ace. Even I know that.”

  Johnny whirled to face the tower, his ravaged chin jutting angrily upward. “This isn’t an ace of clubs, you idiot! It’s one of those Irish things—a shamrock. I saw it on that documentary the other night about prisons in Texas—all the really cool-looking prisoners had these things tattooed all over them, with lots of sick runes and stuff.” He snorted in contempt. “And since when do you know what’s cool, seminary boy?”

  But David had already withdrawn into the watchtower. “I’ll tell you what I do know, graffiti boy,” came his muffled voice from within. “Captain Smith’s jeep is on its way over here. You’d better get back in here before he sees what you did to the wall!”

  “Oh, shit! Is that Daddy Jesus guy with him?”

  “I can’t see—they’re still too far.”

  Johnny sprinted back to the tower, slammed the door shut, and bolted it behind him. Along the wall the gunfire was dying away. The jet pilots had shot their bolts and gone home again, but innumerable drones now haunted the sky. Shells were falling on the ruined apartment blocks still visible through the smoke to the south, inside the Embargoed Zone. Another terrorist rocket sighed up into the sky.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was not the bombardment that woke Flora that morning—the shells were dropping well over a mile away, into someone else’s life—but the measured argument of rifle fire, single shots in the middle distance, dulled by the gusty wind and by streets of crumbling concrete. Turning onto her back, she stretched her arms out from under the blankets, seeing them almost brown against the bare white walls of her bedroom. The cold air pinched her skin.

  The pattern of shots told her as clearly as writing that army sniper teams had infiltrated in the night, seizing family homes to make nests on their rooftops, gouging loopholes in their walls. Down below, families were being held at gunpoint while soldiers stole or smashed their valuables and pissed on beds and floors. And where the snipers and their support teams came, the tanks and armored infantry would shortly follow.

  I should probably take in the laundry, Flora thought.

  She reached for the clothes she had left folded on a stool beside her bed. Several squirms later, she emerged from the blankets wearing jeans and a blue cotton hoodie.

  Passing down the apartment’s dark, ill-plastered corridor, she saw that Gabriel’s door stood open and that her brother was gone. She hoped he would not be drawn toward the shooting again, he and his giddy little friends.

  He was not in the kitchen, either. Taking a plastic basket, Flora unlocked the back door and picked her way across the muddy yard to the clothesline. The apartment building glowered cracked and ugly above her, its concrete eaten by grime.

  The laundry shuddered in the wind, still wet, but she began slowly to gather it, ear cocked to the sounds from the streets. There was another sniper shot off to the east, and resistance rifles began to answer, barking blindly from corner to corner like dogs in the night. Farther east again, the bass thud of a heavy machine gun betrayed the arrival of the first tank of the day.

  Flora hugged her hoodie tightly around her, turned east, and closed her eyes to concentrate. The wind hissed cold in her ears, stinging the back of her neck with fine grit. She pulled the hood over her long black hair and stood there motionless, eyes shut and head bowed like a young pagan novice praying to the dawn.

  Prayers answered, she opened her eyes again: the tank fire, she decided, was coming from beyond the low ridge that ran to the east of her neighborhood, parallel with the coast. It was not, therefore, her neighborhood’s turn to be raided today. She began pegging the laundry back on the line.

  Her father appeared in the black rectangle of the kitchen door, smiling uncertainly. His eyes flickered between Flora and the washing line as he tugged at his mustache. She pretended not to notice him, pegging up more laundry. He cleared his throat.

  “Are those clothes still wet?” he asked hopefully. Her back was turned to him, but she had to close her eyes before she could answer.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” he said, pleased. He took a few steps into the yard and then stopped, frowning, as his slipper slid on the wet dirt. His gray trousers had once been part of a suit; their cuffs, frayed despite all Flora’s efforts at mending, dragged in the mud. He stood there puzzled, running a hand through his stiff gray hair, contemplating the ground beneath his feet, and then the wind, gusting through his cardigan, brought him back. He turned to Flora and smiled at her again.

  “If you had something wet for me, I could put it in that dryer I’ve been working on to give it a test run. I’ve just finished fixing it.”

  Flora shook her head, still not looking at him. “There’s no electricity.”

  “No electricity?” His lips moved, and then his brow smoothed out again. “Of course, of course,” he said, and turned to the door again.

  Flora found herself calling after him. “I can let you have something from this wash if you like. You can put it by for when the power comes on again. They might give us some power later today or maybe tomorrow.”

  She took from the line one of her father’s shirts, transparent now from overwashing, and followed him inside.

  Her father’s workshop was a bare concrete room at the front of their ground-floor apartment, with a floor-length metal shutter fronting the street. Light seeped in from two windows above the shutter, which had been rolled up a little to let in the air. The room smelled of solder and oil and was filled with household appliances scavenged from dumps and waste ground: washing machines, dryers, fridges, and ovens. The appliances were arranged in rows on the floor and stacked two or three deep around the walls.

  Her father sat at the far end of the room, beneath shelves stacked with bins of spare parts, cans of nuts and screws, and coils of hose and wire. He sat, fingers spread on his temples, gazing at a clothes dryer set on the workbench in front of him. The bench was lit by a Luxo lamp wired to a car battery, its illumination now faded to a dull orange. Her father must have been up all night again, running down the battery.

  “I’d better put this machine up with the others,” he said, his fingers still pressed to his temples. “I need to make room on the bench for the next one.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  He lowered his hands to smile at her. “Don’t be silly. It’s much too heavy for a girl. Go find your brother. He’s a big strong boy.”

  “I’m much stronger than he is,” Flora protested. “He’s only twelve.”

  “Twelve?” her father pondered, his eyes sliding away from her again. She realized where his thoughts would take him and quickly put in: “I’ll look for him outside. He’s gone out already: probably playing with his friends.”

  Taking a scarf and a raincoat from behind the front door, Flora passed through the building’s dark vestibule and emerged in the street outside her home.

  A damp wind blowing off the sea rustled the grass that grew from the gutters. Rows of rusting cars lined both sides of the street, immobilized by the blockade and then crushed by playful tanks. Flora found a gap between two of the wrecked vehicles and stepped out into a dilapidated gray canyon that ran east and west between bullet-scarred cliffs of cancerous cinder block. Tank tracks had torn away scabs of tarmac, exposing the soil beneath, and broken pipes and crushed bricks crunched beneath her sneakers. Raw sewage trickled down the gutters, sprouting grass and reeds in the pools where the curbs had collapsed. The weeds were
suppressed in the roadway itself by the UN trucks that still sometimes passed this way. Here and there, glaciers of rubble from bombed-out buildings nosed down to the edge of the street.

  The working day would soon begin for those—UN employees, mostly, and aid agency workers—who still had jobs. Their bustling progress infected the street with a twice-daily sense of purpose, sweeping along, if only for a few minutes, all the others for whom clocks were now checked and rechecked merely to space out thin meals. Caught in the tramping rhythm, hunched figures in thrift shop overcoats went about whatever business they had—mothers clutching their families’ UN ration books, students meandering to bookless schools, children zigzagging their own secret errands—all with their faces to the ground. On corners and in doorways, men—married and single, old and young—passed hand-rolled cigarettes, talking and smoking in short, angry snatches.

  Three gunmen from one of the resistance groups came trotting up the hill, breathless in black cotton masks, burdened by rifles and homemade rocket-propelled grenades. A drone aircraft whined overhead, its tone sharpening suddenly as it entered, invisible, the patch of sky above the street. The gunmen flattened themselves against a wall, exchanging theatrical hand signals, until the drone moved on. Then they continued on their way, trailed by the curious children who were following them to war.

  Flora frowned as the gunmen dwindled in the direction of Mercyville; she recognized some of the following children, but Gabriel was not among them. Turning her back, she headed west, toward the sea. A few women and girls greeted her as she picked her way down the hill, past shuttered stores and burned-out workshops. Men and boys pretended to ignore her. She had just reached the former gas station when a tank shell exploded behind her, somewhere back beyond the crest dividing Hilltown from Mercyville, close enough to make heads turn sharply all along the street. But when Flora looked around, she saw no smoke and no fire and no still or running figures, just the blank sky stretched between the buildings, their upper stories turned to lace by years of flying metal. The children paid no heed, playing their games again. She would look for Gabriel in the park.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Flint Driscoll was having problems with his armor. He had been very pleased with his new flak jacket—a pixellated dispersal-pattern vest with outsized bullet-proof plates, purchased especially for this assignment—but when he folded himself into the front seat of Captain Smith’s jeep, he found that his posture forced the plates to ride up. The front plate was now jammed between his thighs and chin, while the one in the back grated the base of his skull, which was freshly shorn for the occasion. The jeep bounded and twisted along the track that ran vertiginously just inside the Embargoed Zone, skirting the base of the wall; each jolt was exquisitely painful.

  Driscoll’s helmet was also a worry. He had decided he would sit on it to protect his vitals from improvised explosive devices. But should the helmet be placed rimside up or rimside down? It had been so long since he’d seen those movies. Either way, the helmet jarred harshly whenever the jeep hit a pothole. It also lifted his bottom eight inches clear of the passenger seat so that, being a very tall man, he was forced to sit with his head tilted sideways against the metal roof. He couldn’t avoid catching Captain Smith’s eye whenever the captain looked at him; the captain’s own helmet was discarded on the backseat between the two young soldiers they had brought along as escorts. The escorts wore their helmets on their heads.

  Captain Smith glanced at Driscoll again. “First time in the Easy, Doctor?” he inquired. A round little man, rather old for his rank, he kept his poise as the jeep bucked and heaved around him, feet dancing on the pedals, hands stroking the wheel and the gear lever.

  “Not at all,” snapped Driscoll. “I’ve been here many, many times before, Captain. I was embedded with your armored infantry when this place was abandoned to the terrorists. And I’ve also reported on many of the other embargoed zones set up since then—Cabinda, Bexhill, Peshawar, Lurgan, you name it. But for me this is still the oldest and the best: I’m proud to call myself an old hand in the Easy.”

  “Me too,” said the captain, and smiled.

  The jeep hurtled along the pitted gravel track, yellow dust billowing behind it. A few feet to the left rose the sheer concrete slabs of the wall; off to the right, across the free-fire zone, lay a wasteland of splintered fruit trees and overgrown fields dotted with heaps of twisted steel and ruined concrete, the remains of bulldozed homes and farmsteads. To the south, two miles away on a line of hillocks, scarred towers marked the edge of a quarter that, Driscoll remembered, the terrorists called Hilltown. Several buildings had been set alight, not for the first time, by the morning barrage. Beyond the towers, dark flecks floated in a cold sky. Driscoll turned to the captain again.

  “Are those drones engaging terrorists right now, Captain Smith?”

  The captain glanced past Driscoll and then consulted a computer that was clamped to the jeep’s dashboard. The screen showed a jumble of gridlines and topographical features and red and blue contact icons.

  “Those aren’t drones. Those are kites.”

  “Kites?” Driscoll took out his notebook and pen. “What on earth are the terrorists doing with kites, Captain? Signaling?”

  Smith glanced at him again, then shifted down the gears to race the jeep across a gully where a dry streambed ran under the wall. The watercourse was blocked with a metal grille, and signs warned of mines and automated machine gun turrets and lethal electrical currents. The jeep bounced up the far bank and skidded to a halt near the base of a watchtower. A cloud of flies rose to reveal a donkey’s severed head, tongue protruding, eyes wide with its last sudden grievance.

  The morning was tranquil now apart from the rumble and thud of artillery firing in support of a routine tank raid to the south. The sun had burned the last of the fog away. They got out of the jeep and stared at the slick of stinking offal smeared near the tower’s base.

  “Jesus,” said Driscoll, breathing though his mouth. “Those sick bastards.”

  He took a video recorder from his belt and shot some footage of the scene. Finished, he looked up at the captain.

  “Captain, do you mind if I get you on camera now for my video blog, talking us through what just happened here?”

  Smith had been staring at a scorched fragment of carrot that lay in the dirt. His face assumed an expression of regret.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Doctor. Briefings by intelligence officers must be unrecorded and nonattributable. If you want, though, I can talk to you off the record. But we need to be quick: I have a job to do inside the Easy this morning—servicing a ground agent.”

  “I understand completely.” A notebook replaced the camera in Driscoll’s hands.

  “Well,” the captain began, “basically, the terrorists dispatched a donkey loaded with explosives in an attempt to penetrate our defenses and kill as many innocent people as possible. They were foiled by the courage and vigilance of the young men and women who guard the wall. Miraculously, no one was harmed.”

  “No one but the poor donkey, you mean,” Driscoll muttered, scribbling. “But Captain, could you tell us a bit more about the type of explosives employed, the delivery system, detonators, terrorist command structures—that sort of thing? My blog has a big following in the national security community, so don’t be afraid to get technical.”

  “Well,” Smith said slowly, “from the smell I’d say the bomb was made from fertilizer and diesel oil. It was delivered by a donkey.” His eyes narrowed as he noticed something lying in the free-fire zone. “And to judge from that electric cable over there, I’d say the terrorists used a command wire. They probably hid in that tree line over there while the attack was going on.” He was frowning now.

  “A command wire, eh? So that’s what the terrorists used to control the donkey’s movements?”

  Smith raised his eyebrows. “No, Doctor. That’s how they set the bomb off.”

  “Really? I thought they always used
cell phones to set off bombs these days. So if they didn’t use the wire to control the donkey’s movements, how did they steer it to its target?”

  Captain Smith lifted his arms a couple of inches clear of his sides, blew out his cheeks, and let his arms fall again. “I suppose they must have trained it somehow.”

  “Tell me, Captain, did your forensics team find any of the mechanism?”

  The captain’s eyes fell upon the carrot, and he frowned again as he shook his head. “This only just happened, Doctor—we’re the first to arrive on the scene. Just think: if we’d set out on this inspection only a few minutes earlier, we could have been killed ourselves!”

  Driscoll lowered his pen, eyes narrowed. “You think this attack was aimed at me?”

  “No, no, no!” said the captain. “I only meant that we could have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. As it is, we’re in the right place at the right time—from the point of view of your story, that is.”

  Driscoll looked disappointed. “I guess so.” His eyes narrowed again, and he pointed to the wall. “Tell me, Captain, what does this symbol mean?”

  Driscoll’s finger hovered a couple of inches from what looked like a large three-leafed clover rendered on the wall in black paint. A capital A was printed underneath the symbol, and there was a number 6 inside each leaf. The captain considered it for a moment, his face betraying no curiosity.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, Doctor. It’s probably just some old graffiti.”

  Driscoll ran his finger along the stalk of the clover and then turned, a black digit held aloft. “Look here, Captain! The paint is still wet! Yet you said that we were the first on the scene!”

  One of the escorts coughed. “Uh, sir, that’s an Aryan symbol. Me and Lenny here and the rest of the guys from our tank crew were watching this documentary about prisons on Discovery the other night, and we saw—”

  “That’s enough,” Captain Smith put in, smiling at the soldier. The youngster blanched and moved to the back of the jeep, aiming his rifle at the Embargoed Zone. His comrade sank keenly down on one knee.