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him.
    “A day, if it comes to a desert crossing. You’ve got a day. Your body can take no more.” They told him stories of Mexican illegals who’d been led into the desert by unscrupulous smugglers and abandoned and how they’d died in horrible agony in just hours at the hottest time of the day.
    He pushed ahead, feeling the blood pulsing in his temples. The shirt off and wrapped about his head in the fashion of a turban gave some relief from the heat; he wore only an undershirt over his body. But at each rise he prayed the mountains had moved closer and at each rise he was disappointed.
    Kurdistan ya naman
.
    The pack had become hugely heavy, yet he clung to it.
    He pushed ahead.
    In the early afternoon, there was a helicopter, low off the horizon.
    Always helicopters, he thought, always helicopters.
    He ducked quickly into a ravine, opening his wrist on the knifelike leaves of some grotesque plant. The blood spurted. He listened to the roar of the machine, an almost liquid sloshing, the rising pulse.
    He crouched into the side of the ravine as the noise grew. He reached inside the pack and touched the Skorpion.
    But the noise died.
    He climbed and faced the same bright frozen sea of sand and spiny vegetation. His head now ached and the wrist would not stop stinging. In all directions it was the same—the crests of sand, the cacti, the cruel scrub under a broad sky and a fierce sun. In the distance, the mountains. Ulu Beg rose and headed on, facing death.
    By midafternoon he began to get groggy. He fell once and didn’t remember falling, only finding himself on his knees at the bottom of a slope. He stood, his knees buckled, he went down again. He got up slowly, breathing hard, stopping to rest with his hands on his knees. He thought he saw that bus, that crazy bus pulling toward him, full of blond Americans, rich and well-fed, their children riding before them on bicycles.
    He blinked and it was all gone.
    Or was it? Caught in his mind was a memory of the vehicle, the awkwardness of a thing so huge. In its tentativeness, its absurdity—but also its determination—there’d been a memory.
    He called it up before him.
    They had marched for days down through the mountains to the foothills near Rawāndūz, and set the ambush well, with great patience and cunning. Jardi was with them. No, Jardi was one of them.
    There had been thirty of them altogether, with Ulu Beg’s own son Apo along because he’d begged to go. They had the new AKs that Jardi had brought and the RPG rockets that he’d shown them how to use, and a light machine gun; and Jardi had his dynamite, which he’d planted in the road.
    They caught the Iraqi convoy in a narrow enfilade in the foothills, men of the 11th Mechanized Brigade who had not a week before razed a Kurdish village, killing everybody. Jardi exploded his dynamite on the lead truckand they’d all fired and thirty seconds later the road was jammed with broken, burning vehicles, mostly trucks.
    “Keep firing,” Jardi yelled, for the shooting had trailed off after the initial frenzy.
    “But—”
    “Keep firing!”
    Jardi was a fierce man, crazy in action, a driven man. The Kurds had a phrase: a fool for war. He stood behind them, his eyes dark and angry, gesturing madly, screaming, exhorting them in a language only Ulu Beg could understand, communicating nevertheless out of sheer intensity. Standing now, striding up and down the line, howling like a dog, his turban pushed off so that his short American hair showed, oblivious totally to the bullets that had begun to fly up from the dying convoy at them.
    He was in some ways more Kurdish than any of them, a Saladin himself, who could inspire them to heroic deeds by nothing greater than his own ruthless passion. He loved to destroy his enemies.
    “Pour it on. Keep pouring it on,” he yelled.
    Ulu Beg, firing clip after clip of his AK-47 into the burning trucks and the huddled or fleeing figures, watched as the Kurdish fire devastated