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  Moon shrugged. “Sure, why not? So what makes you think that extending your service will help you to become a real pilot?”

  “If I pass the course,” said Gerald, using his joystick to redirect a drone manually, “the air force will help me gain a private pilot’s license through the flying club. It’s a new offer—they put it up on the notice boards last week. They’re trying to promote voluntary reenlistment among technical cadres such as ourselves.”

  Moon found it difficult to imagine Gerald at the controls of a real aircraft; unlike himself, Gerald had not failed flight school but had been assigned directly to the Slob as soon as he enlisted. “But why would you want to take up private flying? You can’t go anywhere in a light aircraft anymore, thanks to the terrorists. There’s hardly any airspace left that isn’t heavily controlled or outright forbidden.”

  “I’d like to be a crop duster.”

  “A crop duster? Your folks told me you were going to be a physicist when you get out of this. All crop dusters do is fly back and forth all day in geometric patterns.”

  Their drone had moved into position, and a muddy wasteland appeared on the video screen, strewn with twisted cars and moldering rubbish.

  “I’d like to fly in geometric patterns,” said Gerald, adjusting the image. “I’ve been doing it for two years now, albeit vicariously. Geometric patterns help me think.”

  “Wow,” mused Moon. He opened a locker underneath the console and took out his customized joystick. “So, you’ll save crops while solving equations?”

  “You’re mocking me,” said Gerald, adjusting the controls. “I don’t think that my plan is unfeasible. You, to my knowledge, have no plan at all.”

  Moon laughed. “You’ve got me there, Gerald,” he said. He plugged in his joystick and put his feet on the console, crossing the ankles. He was just getting comfortable when the door from the corridor opened behind them. After a few seconds, sensing a brooding note in the silence, Moon turned his head and looked. Standing in the doorway, in the uniform of a full air force colonel, was a man Moon vaguely recognized as the Slob’s new commander. The colonel was of medium height and build but trim and wiry, with one of those chiseled, tanned, instantly detestable faces that they use to sell Swiss watches. He was glaring at Moon with an expression of cold loathing. Behind him in the doorway, peering over his shoulder, was a skull-faced giant in a helmet and flak jacket.

  Moon goggled back at them for a few seconds, searching for the right form. “Attention?” he managed finally, pushing his chair back and lurching to his feet. Gerald remained seated, his eyes fixed on the screen as he reached up to adjust his spectacles.

  “Fuck off, Trollhunter,” he declared. “I’m not falling for that one again.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  People called it “the park” because there had been trees there once, even some flower beds, before the blockade. But the municipal wells had long since run dry, and the grass, already sickened by the poisoned water, had turned brown and died. The flower beds dried up and blew away, and the last trees were chopped up for firewood. Now the park consisted mainly of piles of hand-strewn rubbish, some burning, scattered around a patch of dirt that still served sometimes as a playing field. Near the northwest corner, by the road that led to the sewage lake, stood a little bank of sand and dirt, the remains of an obstacle that militants had bulldozed across the road a long time ago, in the days when there was still diesel for bulldozers. The next day an invading tank had driven right through it without changing gears, but what was left still served as a fortress for children, worn smooth by their tumbling games.

  It was here that Flora found her little brother. He was hunkered down at the foot of the bank with half a dozen boys from the neighborhood, his straw-colored head bobbing eagerly at the edge of their huddle, a little below and a little apart. One of the older boys was pouring fluid from a metal tin into a row of plastic bottles. The others were tearing foil into strips.

  “What are you doing, Gabriel?” Flora demanded.

  “We’re working on something,” said Gabriel, turning to glower at her. “Leave us alone.” He flapped his hand dismissively. She recognized the gesture: it had once belonged to their big brother, Jake.

  The boy with the bottles noticed Flora. He was a few years older than Gabriel and already much broader and taller, with dark fuzz on his lip and his jaw.

  “Hello, Flora,” he said, and smiled at her.

  “Adam,” said Flora, not smiling back.

  Gabriel looked from Adam to Flora, aghast. “Go home, Flora!” he shouted. “This isn’t for girls!” He turned huffily away.

  “Dad wants you.”

  The boys were tearing the strips again, crosswise, to make flakes of confettilike aluminum. Adam finished filling the bottles and balanced their caps on their necks loosely, the threads not engaged. He peeked at Flora again.

  “Tell Dad I’ll be home in a few minutes,” Gabriel said crossly.

  “He needs you now.”

  But Gabriel had his eyes fixed stubbornly on the other boys. They pooled their aluminum flakes on a plastic sheet, then divided the heap into small equal piles. Flora spoke again.

  “He needs you, Gabriel. He needs us both to help him move a machine.”

  “I said I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Okay,” Flora said slowly. “I suppose I’d better get back then. I suppose I can help him lift the dryer without you. I offered to already, but Dad said it was man’s work.”

  Gabriel pivoted on his heels. “Please, Flora,” he pleaded. “Can’t you just wait a minute? I really want to see this.”

  “See what?”

  “I’ll show you, Flora,” put in Adam. He smiled at her again, then scooped up a bottle and a fistful of foil, scrambling up onto the mound. “Just stand well back and promise you won’t go all girly and freak out on us.”

  “I’m older than you, Adam. If I’m girly, that makes you a child.”

  The other boys guffawed. Adam flushed and then, collecting himself, stuffed the foil into the bottle, quickly screwed its cap shut, and gave it a few hearty shakes. Picking up a metal pipe that lay on the mound, he went down on one knee, balanced the pipe on his right shoulder, and with his left hand pushed the bottle inside it. Then he froze, one eye closed and the other squinting along the pipe. Nothing happened for another second, and then there was a thud and a whoosh and two jets of white smoke burst from either end of the pipe. The shredded remains of the bottle went whizzing back twenty yards, narrowly missing Gabriel.

  “Oh, God!” Flora yelped.

  The boys jumped up and down, cheering, then swarmed up the hill to crowd around Adam, who was beaming proudly down at them, the smoking pipe still balanced on his shoulder.

  “Oh, that’s really smart, Adam!” Flora shouted. “What if that thing went off in your hand? Don’t you know you could kill someone?”

  Adam ignored her. “Didn’t I tell you it was sweet?” he told his admirers. “Just like a real RPG, eh? I’ll bet if you were fifty yards off you wouldn’t know the difference!”

  The other boys were trying to wrest the pipe from him.

  “Here,” clamored Gabriel, offering Adam a bottle and some tinfoil. “Do another one!”

  Still flushed with success, the older boy surrendered the pipe to his suppliants. He stuffed the foil into the bottle and skipped clear of the huddle. “And the other thing,” he shouted, “is that you can also do hand grenades this way—you don’t have to use the pipe!” He turned and hurled the bottle away from him. It spun end over end out into the empty road.

  Except that the road was no longer empty. Flora clapped her hands to her mouth and bent, cringing, as the bottle tumbled toward the jeep that had appeared—it seemed from thin air—on the road beyond the barrier. The jeep braked and swerved, tires screeching, but in vain. The bottle bounced off the hood and exploded on the windshield in a splash of smoke and light.

  Flora felt her heart stop. The jeep careered off the
road, bounced over a dirt verge, and lurched to a halt in the park, its nose buried in a mound of rubbish. Smoke gusted from the windshield. There was a moment’s silence.

  “Oh, shit,” said Adam, and he turned and fled.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  David pulled his face back from the rubber eyepiece of his periscope, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and then leaned in for another look. As he did so, the top of his helmet snagged the underside of the commander’s hatch, dislodging his glasses. He fumbled to catch them, but they bounced off his lap and fell into the void beneath his feet, disappearing in the jumble of pipes, wires, and valves on the floor of the tank turret.

  He put his eye to the periscope again, adjusting the diopter to compensate for the loss of his glasses, but the image was now more blurred than before. Someone tapped his knee. Lenny peered up from the gunner’s position in the base of the turret, a hand extended, proffering the missing glasses.

  “Thanks,” muttered David. “My other pair has a string on it, but I lost it.”

  He put them back on, readjusted the diopter, and hunched forward, taking care this time not to disturb his glasses.

  “I still can’t see it,” he said after a few moments. His voice echoed back at him through his headphones. “What can you see, Johnny?”

  On the left-hand side of the turret, beyond the breech of the main gun, Johnny was squinting into his own periscope. “I’m still pretty sure I saw a muzzle flash,” he said doubtfully over the intercom. “What have you got on the video cameras?”

  David looked again at the monitor mounted under the commander’s hatch. The view from the rear camera showed the debris of the house through which they had just passed. The front cameras showed the dirty ghost of the next row of buildings, glimpsed through a clutter of crumbling walls. Beyond those buildings, the open stretch of rubbish and mud was still a featureless blur. “I’m not seeing anything on the screens either,” said David. “There’s too much dirt and stuff on the camera lenses.”

  “I told you not to take us through all those goddamn walls and houses,” said Johnny.

  “Hey! I was following the manual! Go through, not around—the way around could be mined, remember?”

  “Let me pop my head out of the hatch and I’ll take a look for you.”

  “No way, Johnny! Rule one in the armored manual: you stay buttoned down in the tank if you’re in a built-up area and you don’t have infantry to protect you. Otherwise people can throw grenades or Molotovs in. There could be terrorists lurking out there right now, just waiting for a hatch to open!”

  “What about the computer?” demanded Lenny’s voice on the intercom. “Maybe someone else has already registered this thing as a target. If they have, then we’re allowed to shoot at it, right? Even if we can’t actually see it.”

  David said nothing.

  “Oh, dearie me!” keened Johnny sarcastically. “You’d better tell them, David: our computer isn’t actually working today, is it? You used it to access a porn site last night, and now you can’t get it back onto the tactical network, can you, David?”

  “What?” shouted Lenny, incredulous.

  “Hey! Johnny’s lying! It wasn’t a porn site!”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Johnny. “So then what are those hippy chicks doing with those goats in that scene that the screen froze on?”

  “They’re milking them! And they aren’t hippies! That’s a scene from the life of Abraham! It’s a religious website! And how the heck was I to know we’d be using the tank today? We haven’t been in it since we finished basic training! How was I to know we were going to be taken off checkpoint duty and assigned to these intelligence guys?”

  Johnny tutted. “Listen, David; I already told you: if we get caught, you have to say you were looking at hardcore barnyard porn. We’ll never live it down if the rest of the guys find out what you were really looking at.”

  “I’m having trouble believing this,” Lenny said slowly. “You’re saying that we’re lost inside the Embargoed Zone and we can’t see anything and we don’t even have our computer online?”

  “Yeah. What the fuck?” broke in a fourth voice. It was their driver, Harry, cocooned alone in his cockpit in the hull. Their bickering had awoken him.

  Silence returned, broken by the beat of the big diesel and the hiss of the air-conditioning. Then Lenny tugged at David’s knee again.

  “So what shall we do? We can’t just sit here all day. The terrorists might stalk us.”

  David grabbed at one of the poor options that flapped around him in the confined, confusing turret. “I’m going to radio that Captain Smith and tell him about our computer problem and ask him what we should do about this contact.”

  “For the love of God,” begged Lenny, “please don’t do that. If an officer finds out that we came into the Easy without a computer, we’ll be cleaning toilets for the rest of our enlistment. Let’s just reverse slowly out of here, following our own tracks: they shouldn’t exactly be hard to see.”

  “He’s right, David,” said Johnny. “Me and Lenny will sneak out to the tank park tonight and reboot the computer. You’ve already radioed in the contact. Whoever’s in charge can deal with it now.”

  “I don’t know,” said David slowly, leaning forward to check his periscope again. “The field manuals say—ow!” The eyepiece slammed into his forehead, dislodging his glasses again. Harry, unbidden, had thrown the tank into reverse.

  Captain Smith’s armored personnel carrier reversed ponderously, tracks churning the damp sand, until its rear access ramp was directly opposite the workshop’s doors. Hydraulics whirred as the armored ramp groaned open, and Smith strolled out into the Embargoed Zone. The engine cut out, and Daddy Jesus followed him, a pump-action shotgun held loosely in one hand.

  Sniper teams had been inserted the night before to provide cover for Smith’s operation, taking families hostage, nesting on rooftops. Their lieutenant, with two of his men, was waiting by a Judas gate set into the metal doors of the workshop. All three infantrymen were draped in armor and equipment, faces smeared with camouflage makeup. The two enlisted men knelt back to back on either side of the Judas gate, squinting left and right along their carbines. Captain Smith nodded to the lieutenant, and he and his men moved away a couple of paces as Daddy Jesus swung up his shotgun and blew out the lock. Then one of the soldiers kicked the Judas gate open, and the other threw in a stun grenade. There was a flash and a crash, and all three infantrymen plunged into the building.

  Captain Smith and Daddy Jesus, waiting outside, looked at each other. Daddy Jesus raised his eyebrows, and the captain shrugged and sighed. They listened as boots scuffled around inside the building, and then the three infantrymen reemerged from the doorway. The lieutenant nodded. “All clear, Captain,” he said, and led his men back to their nest.

  The captain sighed again and stepped in through the shattered door. Daddy Jesus followed him, crossing his arms in front of his body to fit his shoulders through the gap. Inside was a dim loading bay scattered with scrap and dismantled machinery. A pair of blackened lathes had been installed along one wall, and a welded steel frame hung by chains from a tripod. In one corner lay a pile of plastic shopping bags, their tops tightly knotted. Some of the bags had split open, releasing the stinging smell of chemical fertilizer.

  Captain Smith strolled over to a door in the opposite wall, opened it, and passed into a bare concrete stairwell lit by a window on a landing above. A plank partition shut off the space beneath the stairs. He looked at Daddy Jesus, who raised his eyebrows again, and then the captain rapped on the partition with his knuckles.

  “It’s only me,” he cooed. “You can come out now, Cobra.”

  A section of partition creaked open on concealed hinges. A gray-bearded face peered anxiously around it.

  “God Almighty,” the beard muttered peevishly. “Did you have to shoot the door off? You know I always leave it open for you.”

  “Sorry, Cobra. But you know how it is—we have
to keep up appearances. Speaking of which, can’t you find a better hiding place than this? Your people are bound to get suspicious when they hear that we raided this place again but still didn’t find you.”

  Cobra crawled out of his cubbyhole and joined them in the stairwell. He was a short and rather fat man of early middle age, and he wore gray slip-on faux-leather shoes, olive combat pants, and a camouflage jacket too tight for him to fasten. “You needn’t worry about my people,” he muttered, brushing dust from his knees. “You killed all the smart ones a long time ago.”

  “All except you,” said Smith. Daddy Jesus guffawed. Cobra gave him a pained look before turning back to the captain.

  “So did you bring my money?” he demanded.

  Smith cocked his head winningly. “All in good time,” he said. “First, why don’t you tell me what happened this morning.”

  “What do you mean, what happened? You know what happened—I saw you there myself. We put a bomb on a donkey and blew it up by the wall at the place and time specified. Same as usual.”

  “Yes, but this time you used a command wire, didn’t you?” Smith tutted. “Very sloppy. What if a drone had spotted the wire and followed it back to you? That’s why we gave you those cell phones and those special detonators, remember? So you wouldn’t get yourself killed.”

  Cobra stared at him. “You mean your people don’t have standing orders to hold their fire when I’m working for you?”

  “The sentries I’ve posted myself have orders not to shoot you—I’m able to hack into the computer terminals of soldiers assigned to me. But I can’t control what anyone else might do—the drone people, for instance. This sort of operation has to be kept on a strictly need-to-know basis. So do you mind telling me why you didn’t use a phone detonator?”

  Cobra looked shifty. “I had to sell the phones,” he confessed. “Well, what else could I do? You haven’t been paying me, and I’ve got my men to feed. And donkeys don’t grow on trees, you know—that one this morning cost me two hundred and fifty euros!”