The Second
Voice

“When they come,” Wasim said, “we should kill all of them. Both aircraft. Everyone.”

“No.”

“Sir—”

“The helicopter is not the target.”

Wasim lowered the binoculars. In the moonlight his face was all angles, a young man’s face, eager to be useful. “Then what is?”

Jadid did not answer right away. Below them, the wind moved through the orchard and the leaves turned their pale undersides up to the sky, a long silver wave rolling west to east.

“The Americans have one religion,” he said finally. “It is not the one they swear on. It is this: they do not leave their people. Not the wounded. Not the dead. When one of their aircraft falls, they will send everything they have to the place where it fell. Every time. Without exception.” He turned the cracked watch face toward the moon. “A man who will not leave his dead can be told where to go.”

He had measured that, too. A convoy struck on Route Mercury in the spring: twenty-three minutes until the first American vehicles arrived. An outpost probed in early summer: nineteen. A patrol pinned in the canals near al-Hadid: twenty-one, and they had come by the same road all three times, and they had dismounted at the same bend all three times, because the bend was where the road stopped being a road.

From the bend, there was only one fast way into the orchard. It ran along the main canal, where the bank was high enough to give cover from the ridge and narrow enough to keep men in a line.

Jadid had men on the canal, too.

From The Second Voice by Jaxon Reade, Prologue.

“He had a son,” he said.

He should not have said it. He knew it while he was saying it, and he did not afterward understand why he had, except that nobody had asked him in eleven years.

It had been at the outpost, at night, in the plywood room where the interpreters slept, which had a space heater that blew the breaker every time somebody next door used the microwave. The sergeant had come in to ask about an elder’s name for the morning and found Mirwais reading Dickens. He picked the book up off the cot and said, My wife would like you. Then he sat down on the empty cot and took a photograph out of the same pocket as the notebook, the way a man does when he has been waiting for someone to show it to.

It was small and square and folded once across a corner. A boy on the wooden steps of a house, snow on the ground and on the porch rail, elbows on his knees, a red baseball cap with a white letter on it pulled down too far. Seven or eight. Thin. Squinting at the camera as though he had been asked to smile and was considering it.

“Danny,” the sergeant said. “He’s going to be bigger than me.”

Mirwais said that would be very big.

The sergeant laughed, the big laugh, the one that made the soldiers next door yell at him through the plywood to shut up. Then he said something Mirwais had thought about many times since, at odd hours. He doesn’t talk much. He watches everything and then he does what needs doing and doesn’t tell anybody. His mother says he gets that from me. He doesn’t. I never shut up.

From Same Valley by Jaxon Reade, Prologue.