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. no, wait.”
    He stuck his head down into the interior of the dull steel tank. The skin was marked by dents and dings; if it had ever been polished the finish had long worn away. The top was mated to a ZIL 130 chassis. What seemed to be military markings had been painted over with inelegant swathes of gray paint, completing the early junkyard look.
    “Water?” A-Bomb asked.
    Coors pulled it up with a laugh. “I think it’s milk. Still fresh, too. Or at least it don’t stink.”
    “Now all we need’s a truck full of cookies,” said A-Bomb, pulling himself up the ladder onto the back.
    He leaned over and took a whiff. It smelled like milk, though on the watery side and with a metallic aftertaste .
    “Milk,” he declared. “But you aren’t going to want to drink it. Be okay for dunking . Yeah.” He straightened, considering the scent. Milk wasn’t his beverage of choice. Would ruin good coffee with it. No. Dunking would be okay. But not just any dunking; would have to be hard cookies, like Italian biscotti or Russian rusks. Donuts are out,” he added as he jumped down to look over the rest of the truck. “Because they’re going to soak in too much moisture and that’s going to bring the aftertaste with it. What you need something with granules and surface area. So we’re talking biscotti. Hard cookies. Evaporation and crumbs, that’s what I’m talking about.”
    Coors pretended not to be intere sted. “What do you think they’re doing way out here with milk?”
    A-Bomb shrugged, looking into the cab to make sure it wasn’t booby-trapped before opening it. “Maybe they couldn’t get beer.”
    Outside of a screwdriver and a map, the cab was empty. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with the truck that a half-hour in a carwash wouldn’t fix. Still, ZILs weren’t known for their reliability and it wasn’t until he had monkeyed with the carburetor for a few minutes that A-Bomb realized the driver had simply run out of gas.
    “You think we can siphon some out of the FAV?” he asked the sergeant. The old Soviet-era transports used petrol rather than diesel.
    “Won’t have to. Got a spare gas tank lashed on the top. You wait here and I’ll be back.”
    “Wait a second,” said A-Bomb. “You owe me one, remember?”
    “Yeah?”
    “So I’m collecting.”
    “You’re collecting by walking back to the FAV?”
    “And driving it here. I’ll be back before you have the body buried in the rocks over there.”
    Coors laughed. “You’re a piece of work, Captain.”
    “Nah. Just a Hog driver,” answered A-Bomb, returning his one-fingered salute.
     

CHAPTER 9
    O N THE GROUND IN IRAQ
    26 JANUARY 1991
    1420
     
    Di xon’s mouth, throat and stomach had seared together, parched and burned by hunger, thirst, and heat. The only part of him that felt good was his fingers. They were curled around the stock of the Kalashnikov.
    If there had been other Iraqis near the quarry or bunker they hadn’t followed him. Alone and seemingly unnoticed, he trudged eastward, paralleling the highway by about a hundred yards. At first he crouched low to the ground, huddling as close to the scrubby vegetation as possible. Soon, however, he realized there was no one nearby to see him, and the open area would give him plenty of warning if a vehicle approached. He gradually came out of his crouch, walking slightly stooped over and then finally upright, continuing to turn back and forth, checking his six like the trained fighter pilot he was.
    Dixon kicked at the dirt. It seemed thicker stuff than the sandy grit and fine dust near the quarry. It was the kind of stuff that might almost be farmable , or at least hold enough promise to ruin a man once the summer came. There were irrigation ditches on the other side of the road. A few had water at the bottom, though most were dry. In the distance, Dixon could see a small hovel which he took to be a farmhouse. Beyond that on his side of the highway was a low set of hills,