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her training had taught her to do when under stress.  But the more she tried to distract herself, the more she zeroed in on what the camp overseer said was about to happen to her. 
    Her insertion into the barracks was supposed to be the easiest part of her mission.  Now, instead of sleeping with the other prisoners, itself a harrowing undertaking, she would be taken to Shaheed Abad’s office where she would be presented to him the way he liked for women to be presented to him.  No doubt this son of Satan saw her as a spoil of war to be spoiled.
    Shaheed took his whip and motioned towards the door and nodded.  “Go now,” he said. “And do not let me find you where you are not supposed to be.  Hut, hut, hut!  Like it was yesterday!”
    Mrs. Parker grabbed Tracy’s arm, swung her around, and pushed her out through the door.  Tracy lost her footing and stumbled down the steps, landing on the dusty, bare ground.  She picked herself up, unhurt, and gave Mrs. Parker a strong, hard eye as she came down the steps.  Shaheed, still standing near the threshold, looked down at Tracy and laughed.
    Tracy managed to hold herself together, physically and emotionally, as Mrs. Parker pushed her along, slapping the back of her head with an open palm.  She saw three shacks at the far end of The Yard, all of them exact replicas of the poorly-designed, shoddily-built prisoners’ barracks.  Lights, probably from incandescent bulbs powered by gasoline-powered generators, lit the porches and glowed behind glass windows.  A few Muslims, all wearing matching fatigues and holding their weapons, sat on the porches.  They laughed and ate while a couple of women served them.
    Mrs. Parker headed towards the shack in the center.  At her signal, the men on the porch stopped eating, jumped up, and hurried down the steps, disappearing into the shadows.  The others, still seated on the porches to the right and left, just stared and pointed.
    “Seems like they’re afraid of you,” Tracy said.  She started up the steps and hesitated when she felt the first step flexing beneath her foot like the floor of an inflatable bounce house.  Typical Muslim construction, she thought: shoddy, cheap, and inferior.
    Tracy felt another blow on the back of her head, harder than the ones she’d already received, and she lost her balance, falling forward on the steps, breaking her fall with her hands.  She turned around to get up, and Mrs. Parker, as well-trained as any prize fighter, drove her fist into Tracy’s face as if aiming for the back of her skull.  She felt her head fly backwards and hit the steps.
    Mrs. Parker put her face close to Tracy’s and whispered through her clenched teeth, “Get up, b----, before I smash your head into a million pieces.”
    Nobody not within a few inches of Shaheed’s rickety, poorly-built steps could’ve heard the things she had just been told by Mrs. Parker.  Tracy’s being pushed down the steps a few minutes earlier, and the blows to the back of her head, were all part of an act, things her old Bible School teacher did to keep up the illusion of her conversion to Islam and her support for her boss.  Tracy believed that a minute earlier.  Now, she wasn’t quite sure.
    Mrs. Parker pulled Tracy to her feet using the neck of her tee shirt as a handle.  She told her to get moving. 
    Tracy could see Mrs. Parker’s eyes through the opening in her burka, eyes cold and angry, dark and obsessed with the job assigned to her.  In a fit of brazen defiance, Tracy let out a bit of nervous laughter, a cackling sound of independence and defiance, and she walked up the rickety wooden steps holding onto an equally rickety handrail. 
    She thought about Mrs. Parker.  Islam had dismantled her, had broken the woman she once knew, a woman who had once been a significant person in her own life and in the lives of so many others, most of whom had probably come to rather untimely and inhumane deaths.
    Mrs. Parker opened the