High over the Tigris River, a shuttle hovers in place. Its passengers are too valuable to risk a possible shoot-down. Palantir has been screaming for months that the Iranians are shipping serious firepower over the border to the Ikhwan. Anti-air missiles, mainly.

  The altitude provides a good view of the work of the bombers, all Nebula Aerospace aircraft. The pilots roll their planes in victory, showboating as much as celebrating. It’s a miracle they don’t crash into each other, Ryan thinks.

  He sweeps long blonde hair out from in front of his face. His dad says he needs a haircut but Sophia tells him that she looks like Thor, but tanned. He takes it as a compliment.

  Brown clouds below stretch into the sky like volcanic debris, lingering for minutes after the strikes. There are no secondary explosions. There would’ve been if those buildings had been harbouring ammunition or explosives. Another miss.

  To Ryan’s left, a massive man scratches his beard, and speaks with a voice that could shake a mountain.

  “Well, we sure got ‘em.”

  Ryan looks across at Brian Flynn – who prefers the mononymous ‘Flynn.’ It works as a first and last name, anyways.

  “Hopefully that’s an understatement,” Ryan replies.

  “You think they’ll learn?”

  Ryan barks a short, humorless laugh.

  “They haven’t learned in a hundred years. Why would they learn now?”

  Something clatters to the ground behind him. Ryan turns to see a metal water bottle scrambling around the fuselage, the third of the four chasing it around. Whereas Ryan desperately needs a haircut – or not – and Flynn wears his hair in a bushy, spec-ops beard and a fauxhawk, this one is olive-skinned and about as clean shaven as he gets. He gets a five o’clock shadow at noon. His brown hair is permanently ruffled. Shabby is a good word to describe him. Sophia once told Ryan that Paulie Rinaldi looked like Columbo, some television detective during the 20th century. He snags the bottle and rises like nothing happened.

  “Then it ain’t a matter of learning,” Paulie says. His quick breathing betrays his ‘too-cool-for-this’ attitude.

  Paulie joins Ryan in looking out the side of the shuttle. Its doors are closed but this one is made for high-level VIP transport and accordingly has windows. Ryan sights a cloud of billowing violet smoke from behind the condemned Dafnat al-Nahr.

  “I don’t care whether they learn or not. We just need to get them to stop shooting fuckin’ rockets at us,” Ryan replies.

  Paulie is quiet.

  “If they don’t, they’ll hit the refinery, or they’ll hit cold storage, and then we’re all fucked.” Ryan points behind him, through the other window, to the shattered fortress. Paulie looks through the glass.

  “Fuck me, man,” he whispers to himself.

  “Exactly! That’s just from a missile. Now, imagine that hits our refinery. Whole city’s fucking gone.” Ryan snaps his fingers.

  Paulie looks on.

  “Think anything’s getting through that for another week?”

  The fortress being destroyed is one thing. The bridge mechanisms meeting the same fate is another. Now nothing can get across. No cars or trucks or emergency vehicles, and definitely no ships. The other bridges are going to have to pull triple their usual load.

  “No,” is Ryan’s response.

  The shuttle swings around the old hotel to sight their pick-ups. He prayed prior that it wasn’t going to be her, that she’d be literally anywhere else. Only she could fuck up the fortress part of the operation so magnificently. His hopes were high.

  By the purple flare, four people loiter. From the distance Ryan can only make out silhouettes. The shuttle turns to face the station and zooms towards it, blocking out his view until it turns ninety degrees again and comes to a halt maybe half-a-foot off of the building, hovering over the middle of the street. The exhaust of the engines is enough to slide around the dead bodies below.

  Ryan finally gets a good look at the four. Two are completely unfamiliar. One is midnight dark, skin and hair equally as obsidian and dressed in all-brown. And one…

  “Oh, fuck me.”

  Next to him, he hears Paulie break into a hysterical hyena laugh. He can’t see it because his brain refuses to process what his optical nerves are sending. Of course it’s her!

  “Thought it’d be someone else?” Flynn asks, gently patting him on the back.

  “Thought it’d be Sophia,” he mutters back.

  The shuttle inches closer to the roof and Ryan forces himself not to move to the cockpit. He’s a professional, he’s better than her. He bounces on the balls of his feet like he’s preparing for a fight. He is preparing for a fight. Flynn pulls one of the shuttle doors open and the shrieking of the jet engine almost deafens Ryan. Paulie hands him a pair of zip ties.

  First onboard are the two strangers, a man and a woman. La Montagne. Then is her boyfriend, the astonishingly pretty man who, if Sophia hadn’t told him that his name was Jacob Gillman, Ryan wouldn’t kept on assuming that he was a girl.

  And then, her.

  Her eyes, heterochromatic, blue on the left and green on the right, lock on to his. If eyes could turn hostile, hers could – her caterpillar eyebrows furrow and her lips pull down into a scowl. Ryan stays stone-faced because he’s a professional. His left hand holds zip ties, his right holds a handgun, a SIG Sauer P330, aiming from his hip.

  Dawn looks down and notices both. Her scowl pulls back into a vicious sneer.

  “Fuck’s your problem?” she asks. Problem?

  “They’re members of an internationally recognized terrorist organization–”

   The short man suddenly gets all up in his face. Ryan stands almost half-a-foot taller than him but he’s built like a bulldog.

  “Terrorists?” the man asks, some British accent strong. He’s almost spitting the word out at Ryan. “You just bombed a fucking apartment block and pharmaceutical factory and you’re calling me a terrorist?”

  Ryan doesn’t even blink.

  “I didn’t bomb anything, partner,” he replies. Partner. Whoops. Too much Texas. “Stand down.”

  Desmond does not stand down, in fact, he stands up, on his tiptoes to try and match Ryan eye-to-eye. It’s silent for a moment, drowning out the screaming of the engines, until Gillman pulls the man away from Ryan.

  Ryan exhales ever so slightly until Jacob takes up his place. He’s less hostile, less accusatory. But he’s a Janissary, no, one of C-SPEAR’s Janissaries. The scorpion badge on his shoulder gives it away, black and gold against purple. His silver eyes are like arrowheads, a thin ring of gold surrounding his pupils. Prolonged aether exposure, allegedly.

  “They’re under C-SPEAR protection,” he says, voice even keeled. Fuck does that mean? They’re terrorists!

  “You say it like it’s good for anything,” Ryan replies. This is his operation. He didn’t pick the targets but it’s his responsibility that everything goes smoothly and a pair of terrorists just walking away is most definitely not smoothly. “What happened to the bridge? Was that under C-SPEAR protection?”

  Jake looks back at him, confused. His head tilts ever so slightly to his right and his long hair shifts with gravity. There’s perhaps an inch separating the two’s heights. His silver eyes are piercing but Ryan can’t let him get away with anything because it means letting her get away with it.

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  But his silence is enough for Ryan.

  “Exactly. Get out of my way.”

  Gillman doesn’t get out of his way. Instead, the wall between Ryan and the two terrorists doubles in size because Dawn Howard joins it. Something red flows through his arteries and veins. Her stupid fucking hair is obnoxious, dark brown with thin streaks of pale silver-gold that seem to increase in number every time he sees her. Her fucking eyes are obnoxious, the blue like a sapphire, the green carved from emerald, a thin ring of gold surrounding her pupils that make them almost haunting. Her uniform is obnoxious, all-black in today’s heat, with douchebag Air Force 1s and that stupid fucking scarf that she always wears, some memory of the Palestinian cause, the C-SPEAR scorpion an epaulette on her shoulder. She’s six-three, she has a blisteringly sharp jawline that makes her face look vaguely square-shaped, her skin is fawn-brown, the colour of a beach somewhere in Micronesia, she has these dark bags under her eyes that indicated either poor nutrition or poor sleep or both –

  What the fuck is your problem?

  He clenches his teeth to get her out of his head. He’s gotta say something.

  “If you don’t move, I’m going to write you up for insubordination. Do you know what they do to insubordinate Janissaries?”

  Dawn laughs at him, mean and humorless.

  “Are you gonna go to the principal? Are you gonna cry about it, you fucking pussy? You’re such a bitch, dude.”

  “I’m just trying to do my job because, I’m a fucking professional, and you’re standing in my way.”

  “If I’m keeping you from doing your job it’s because you suck at your job.”

  “Look at the bridge! That was your job! You can’t say a fucking thing!”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Fuck off!”

  The two glare at each other. If people could shoot beams from their eyeballs Superman-style then they would’ve augered holes in each other’s faces by now. His heart races. His brain feels like its drowning in oxygen. He feels alive and its because of this fucking bitch.

  Jake clears his throat. Ryan flicks his eyes towards him. He’s completely unreadable. He could want to go to sleep. He could want to murder Ryan in cold blood. Maybe he wants a cheeseburger

  “This is C-SPEAR business,” Jake says. His voice is still flat, vaguely bored. It’s calming. “We have a mandate to operate without your interference and the right to use force if you prevent us from doing our jobs. Like you’re doing right now.”

  His hand slowly moves to the tomahawk on his hip. Ryan notices it. So he’s threatening me. Yeah, no shit buddy.

  “I don’t care, I’ll call up your boss. Hell, I’ll call up your boss. Then you’re really fucked.”

  Those silver eyes don’t even blink. The TACPAD buzzes on Ryan’s wrist buzzes. The caller is listed as ‘Dad.’ Meaning Colonel Royce Witherspoon. His TACPAD is older, doesn’t display pictures. Ryan grins at Jake who remains completely dispassionate about all of this.

  “Go ahead,” he tells Ryan.

  Ryan answers it and calms himself. He’s got to be the professional here.

  “Sir?”

  “Kid, you’re being redirected.” His dad speaks firmly. His accent has hints of Texas, just like Ryan’s. “I’ve already sent orders to the pilots. You’re meeting up with a pair of medical shuttles at the Mosul Docks. Pier nine, if Commander Davison was right.”

  Ryan pauses.

  “Can I ask why, sir?”

  “He said human trafficking.”

  Ryan looks across at his teammates. The two awake, Flynn and Paulie, are listening intently. The third, a tall, beanpole ginger with curly hair, is passed out, taking up almost half of a bench. Real heavy sleeper.

  “Sorry, did you say human trafficking?”

  “I did. Did you pick up the informants?”

  Ryan sighs, deeply.

  “Yes, sir. C-SPEAR’s Janissaries are being uncooperative.”

  “Don’t provoke them. C-SPEAR has a charter to operate in the area without our interference. Part of the deal.”

  “But the two informants are Montagne!”

  “It was expressed in detail to us earlier. Not our problem. Not yours earlier.”

  Ryan’s quiet for a moment. He doesn’t bring himself to look at Dawn. She’s probably making some loathsomely smug face. She has this catlike smile that Ryan’s only seen when something bad happens to someone she hates.

  “Don’t be petulant, son. It’s beneath you.”

  Ryan exhales. It’s really not, but his dad thinks so. And it becomes beneath him.

  “Yes sir. I’ll oversee, whatever’s going on at the pier.”

  “Good.”

  His father ends the call, just like that. Ryan sighs and turns to Flynn, but Dawn re-positions herself to be juuuuuuuuust inside his field of vision. Ryan turns away and she repositions herself again. Apparently, it’s not beneath her. She’s wearing that fucking smile, like she just got away with eating his lunch. Again.

  She then decides to speak, in a dramatic, flowery, debutante accent, like an antebellum housewife.

  “Oh, yes sir. No sir, oh, yes sir, I’ll stop being a huge baby, yes sir, I’ll stuck your dick and no sir, I won’t forget the balls, yes sir, I am a huge pussy–”

  “Shut up.”

  It doesn’t work because the two hostages are cracking up behind the two Janissaries. As is Paulie. He’s going to have to talk with him later on about this. Flynn, thankfully, is not. The big man just shrugs.

  “You’re not allowed to act like you didn’t bring this upon yourself.”

  Ryan’s response is grumbled, to the point of incoherence.

  “What would you have done?”

  Flynn can cohere it just fine, though.

  “Not tried to out-alpha someone with a four-figure body count.”

  Ryan pinches the bridge of his nose. Maybe so. Or maybe it was that he was too professional. He needs something real biting to say. He glances at Dawn but she’s apparently moved on, taking a seat on one of the benches, her eyes closed and her posture leaning back. He got beat after a long day. Never again.

  One of the Montagne looks out the window, and Ryan joins them. The girl, with the short, sideswept auburn hair. Big forehead. He tries to find what she’s looking at; a mass of swirling shuttles and helicopters all circling around what used to be a soccer stadium. There’s a great mass of something down there. A great pool of yellow and red and brown.

  “What is that?”

  The woman to his left turns her head and scowls. But she abides him. Tells him a story.

  “You probably missed it, because American news is Nazi propaganda, but this happened in Algeria a few years ago.”

  Ryan doesn’t respond. Her accent is French, but harsh. Maybe Quebecois. Who knows. But her voice is dead-serious, no matter where it originates from.

  “When the French were ‘re-establishing the rule of law’ over their former colonies in the region, they dropped a cruise missile right on top of a warehouse that they said was being used to store weapons.”

  “What’s the point of this?” Ryan answers. But he can already imagine people with Hazmat suits wading through a knee-deep soup, bodies and bones floating to the top.

  “When rescue workers went inside to look for survivors, they found themselves knee-deep in some sort of hot, thick liquid.”

  Ryan knows exactly where this story is going. The story made his stomach churn, but it wasn’t the Americans who did it so all he was left with was a half-finished lunch at the time. Hell, he was in Afghanistan when the French struck Algiers.

  “You’re going to tell me it was people, right? No other reason you’d bring it up.”

  Ryan looks from the woman to the strange mass as the former football stadium. Mosul has two teams in the Twin Rivers Premier League. Ryan wondered if the Twin Rivers Titans would lend them their stadium to use now that theirs is gone.

  “Is that people too?” he asks.

  “That’s about twenty-three hundred people. That’s also Malik ibn Hassan. He was the target, right?”

  “One of ‘em.”

  “Do you think it was worth it? One for twenty-three hundred?”

  “I don’t do cost/benefit analyses.”

  “Of course you don’t!” the woman explodes. “You fucking Americans, you call yourself Christians and invade countries under the guise of democratic crusades and the rest of the world knows you’re lying and follows you anyways. You’re Satanists, creating human sacrifices for your wretched, Molochian god.”

  Ryan hesitates. ‘Satanist’ is a new one.

  “Well, it’s not for me to decide.”

  He gets up and walks away. He doesn’t want to look at a puddle of humanity, even from a few kilometers away. He just wants this conversation to end. At least he’ll see Sophia after this.

  “What do you mean, not for you to decide?”

  Fuck me.

  The British guy apparently isn’t ready for the conclusion.

  “You’re fucking Ryan Witherspoon, you prick. Even I know who you are! Your dad’s in charge of this country’s entire fucking military!”

  “What the fuck would you do then?” Ryan rounds on the bastard. He’s sick of this shit. He’ll throw this prick out the fucking helicopter Pinochet-style if he has to.

  “Not destroy half of the goddamn city to prove some sort of absurd fucking point! That’s pretty easy!”

  “It’s never that easy! Those people are launching rockets at us and if not for the Iron Dome we’d all be dead!”

  “Launching rockets at you is the most morally just thing they can do!”

  A hand affixes itself on the Montagne’s shoulder, and one does the same to Ryan’s and the two are separated. Gillman and Flynn, respectively. The air feels thicker in the shuttle now. Jake steps between the two and Flynn opens a door. The howling of the wind and whine of the jet engines drown out any conversation and allow everyone a breath of fresh air. As fresh as the air can be.

  Below them is Mosul. The old city of Nineveh lays somewhere behind where Ryan is looking. Smoke billows from fires below and dust clouds linger in the afternoon atmosphere. There’s a particularly big one engulfing the remains of a building a few hundred meters from the dockyard, the flames thick and black like a tire fire. Ryan figures that they’ll still be floating around until tomorrow. Nineveh will have to deal with the haze.

  The M/V Brighton sits below, blue and red and rusted. All the glass on the ship’s bridge is shattered. Must’ve been a secondary explosion, right? No way a thousand kilo bomb could do that.

  Two red and white shuttles with red crosses sit outside the dockyards, empty aside from the Brighton, its crew, and its cargo. There’s a few local ambulances there too, and a wide collection of doctors, field medics, and nurses from both sides of the river alongside with a few dozen mercenaries. Ryan can’t figure out which company they’re with. There’s an 8x5x5 field of stacked shipping crates next to the boat, and a mobile crane perpendicular. A half-dozen of the crates have their doors open and some of the mercenaries are taking what’s within. A small attack helicopter sits in the empty pier next door, pier three, with a dozen and change people being attended to, overseen by a trio of figures that look like they’re wearing some sort of power armour. There’s a ten-meter-diameter circle which’s circumference is comprised of wooden barricades. Three people sit within.

  As the shuttle lowers, Ryan sights the slightest glimpse of pink, the end of someone’s hair. His heart rises in his chest and the red in his veins fades to pink. The tension in his neck fades. If the price to see Sophia is the insane woman who hates his guts, so be it.