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onto the white side panels of the four-wheel-drive trucks in big bold, black letters).
    What happened next happened fast. The soldiers poured all over the Land Rover and motorcycle like ants on sugar. They aimed their rifles at her and the short man, forced them to lay down flat on their stomachs, hands locked behind their heads. It was while she was on the ground, all those black shiny jackboots shooting past her line of sight, that she first noticed the short man’s sobs. He whispered to her through the tears, “They will kill us all. You and me. We are all dead.”
    She laid there on the ground, the cool sand touching her lips. What happened to the tough guy, she thought. Where’s the hard son of a bitch who ran his filthy fingers down my chest?
    It would please her to see him die. Even if she had to die along with him.
    That is the last thing she remembered before being picked up off the ground, carted over to one of the flatbed trucks, thrown down on her back—on a mattress, of all things, as if they had been planning this all along. Two soldiers aimed their M-16s at her while another man ordered her to unzip her jumper. “Do it now,” he said, in English. On her back, she swallowed something hard, began to unzip the jumper, slowly. All the time she was watching the eyes of her captors, watching their Adam’s apples bob up and down with every inch of bare skin revealed. But then, just as she was about to remove the jumper, another man appeared from out of the twilight.
    He was not a soldier. At least, he was not dressed like one. He was wearing a suit. A black suit in the desert, with alligator shoes. He was a dark-haired, mustached man with a tiny diamond earring in his left earlobe. He carried a black pistol. A six-shot .45 maybe, or a .9 millimeter. Whatever it was, he pressed the barrel of the pistol up against the temple of the soldier to her immediate left.
    “That’s enough,” the suit said in broken English. “We’re taking them to the pit.”
    Several bumpy miles later, she found herself standing on the very edge of a wide-open pit. A mass grave really, dug out of the desert. Maybe twenty feet wide by thirty feet long. There must have been a hundred bodies stacked inside, like cord wood. Bloated bodies covered with some kind of white, sulfurous powder. The smell was revolting. Rotting meat and skin.
    She stood there, shivering in the early morning coolness, but it was not the air that made her tremble. She was reminded of the old films she once saw of the Holocaust. Black-uniformed Nazis surrounding entire groups of Jews who had been stripped naked to the waist. Women, children, and men shot pointblank in the back of the head, their bodies slumping lifelessly, one by one, into the grave.
    And then it happened. Two soldiers dragged the short dealer to the very edge of the pit, he kicking, screaming, clawing the entire way. He didn’t want to die. Not now. Not like this. Then a third soldier coming up on him, pressing the barrel of an M-16 up against the back of his skull, triggering off a round that sent his forehead into the grave just a couple of seconds before the rest of his body followed.
    She stood at the edge of the pit, watching the short man’s body rolling end over end, like a rag doll falling down the stairs, until it joined the others. So this is what it’s like to die, she thought. This is what it’s like to just disappear off the face of the devil’s earth.
    She waited for her turn. But then she discovered that they had something else in mind for her. The suit approached her once again. He was carrying something in his right hand. A piece of black cloth. When he opened up the black cloth, she could see that it was really a hood. When he pulled the hood over her head, everything went black. He dragged her across the sandy floor, until he told her to stop. She heard the sound of a truck door opening. “Watch your step,” she heard the man say as he helped her up into the