They had even picked the target. He knew before they told him it would be American. By now he could repeat the Imam’s Friday harangue to do jihad on the invaders word for word.

All he had wanted was to go home. Pakistan was a hungry place for a young Afghani man with no family or friends. His father had been killed when the Americans invaded in 2003, and his mother had taken the children and fled over the border, joining the hundreds of thousands of other refugees in the camps. When she died, he found his way back to his own country, where he had not been so much recruited by the Taliban as kidnapped.

At least they fed him.

The camp three hundred yards up the narrow valley was small, an outpost dug into a small saddle between two hills, consisting of forty American soldiers. The top of the hill in front had been leveled to provide a landing place for a helicopter. He had been waiting for it for three days, broiling by day and freezing by night beneath the camouflage netting that had been stolen, they told him, from the enemy in another firefight in another valley.

The weapon was beautiful and deadly, brand new, light of weight, black in color, made of heavy plastic married to a dense, dark metal with a dull shine. A zippered sheath kept it free of the dirt and sand that filtered through the netting to layer his clothing and coat the inside of his nostrils so that he could barely breathe.

In the distance, a few tumbledown buildings marked a primitive landholding. A boy herded goats toward a patch of earth that showed the barest hint of green and hosted a few wormword bushes twisted into nightmare shapes from lack of water. Those fields he could see lay fallow, the only cash crop this area had ever known rooted up by the invaders.

A faint sound of wings disturbed the air. He looked up. A steppe eagle had been hunting this valley every morning and evening, soaring overhead on brown wings spread six feet from wingtip to wingtip, black tail spread wide.

This sound wasn’t the eagle, though. It was the helicopter, coming at last.

It hurtled up the valley, barely time enough for him to get the rifle out of its protective sheath. He settled his eye to the scope, as he had been taught, and sighted in. The magnification of the scope threw the aircraft into startlingly immediate relief. The windshield was scratched and sandy and the sun rendered the Plexiglas nearly opaque, so that the figures at the controls on the other side were barely visible to him. He caught the merest glimpse of a smooth cheek, nearly hidden beneath helmet and sunglasses. Too young yet to shave. His age.

One shot was all it would take, they had told him, so long as he hit the target. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes as his finger pulled the trigger, slowly, firmly, even gently, again as they had taught him. The stock recoiled against his shoulder as the high explosive round left the barrel. The sound of the shot rendered him temporarily deaf.

Before he could raise his eye from the scope, the helicopter touched down on the pad and on landing seemed simply to shatter into a thousand pieces. The three-man crew died instantly, shredded by fragments from their own splintering aircraft, as did the one soldier on the ground standing fifteen feet from the landing pad, skewered by a flying piece of one of the rotors. All six of the soldiers waiting for their ride home fifty feet from the landing pad were injured as well, two of them mortally.

The watcher upslope granted him just enough time to be amazed at the destruction he had wrought before putting a bullet into the back of his head precisely where his skull ended and his spinal column began.

Two

THURSDAY, JANUARY 14

Niniltna

Each of the 103 Pyrex baking dishes was scraped clean. The mountain of gifts was reduced to a floor-covering rubble of plastic clamshells, price tags, and instruction books. The last person with a story to tell about Old Sam had finally and reluctantly abandoned the microphone. The heavy wooden double doors slammed shut behind the last guest with a finality that echoed off the hard sufaces of the gym.

“A good potlatch,” Auntie Vi said.

“Lots of the people come to say good-bye,” Auntie Balasha said, nodding.

“Too many,” Auntie Edna said. “Look at this mess. Pigs.”

Auntie Joy said nothing.

“Vern Truax he come, too, see you?” Auntie Vi said. “And he don’t stay too long, just pay his respects. Good manners. Good business.”

“You see Peter Kasheverof’s daughter canoodle in the corner with Lizzie Collier’s son?” Auntie Balasha said. “A marriage there soon, I think.”

“There better be,” Auntie Edna said.

Auntie Joy said, “I get the bags and the dust pans.”

Auntie Balasha and Auntie Joy moved from one end of the room to the other with mathematical precision, a garbage bag in one hand and a dustpan in the other, scooping up debris. Auntie Edna and Auntie Vi followed with push brooms. When Auntie Balasha and Auntie Joy reached the far end, they exchanged the bags and pans for buckets and mops, followed in their turn by Aunties Edna and Vi with dry mops and polish. In both efficiency and productivity, it was an operation that would have made Henry Ford proud to be an American.

In the kitchen, in bright yellow rubber gloves, Annie Mike presided over a double aluminum sink almost as deep as she was tall, filled with steaming, soapy water. Kate ferried in the dirty dishes, and when she set down the last load she said, “That was a good story Demetri told, the one about Old Sam and the sheep hunt. I hadn’t heard it before.”

“Me, either,” Annie said. “For all that he lived right next door to us for the last thirty years, there’s a lot we don’t know about that old man.”

Kate turned to look at the other woman.

“Like the icon, I meant,” Annie said. She had seen Kate’s shoulders tense at her words, and wondered. “I’m ashamed to say I’d never even heard of it before now.”

“Me, either,” Kate said. She was silent for a moment, thinking of the Sainted Mary, an ancient Russian icon triptych depiciting Mary and Jesus as mother and baby, mother and corpse, and mother and ascending son of God, that had only recently returned to the tribe due to the one-person scavenger hunt—that one person being Kate—orchestrated by Old Sam from beyond the grave. A century before, tribal members had credited the icon with everything from healing the sick to granting wishes to finding loved ones lost at sea. After a sufficient amount of spiritual groveling first, Kate was sure. “You think Emaa knew about it?”

“She was of his generation. Be strange if she didn’t.”

Kate looked through the pass-through at the four aunties in the gym. “By that definition, most of them would have known about it, too. I wonder why they never said anything.”

Annie ran more hot water into the dish encrusted with the remains of the Olga Kvasnikof special, macaroni and cheese with Spam. “Put yourself there, in that time. A third of them were dead from the Spanish flu. They were fifty-plus years into American sovreignty. There were ongoing repercussions from the Klondike Gold Rush and the Kanuyaq Copper Mine. White encroachment on Native lands. What amounted to a foreign government taking over. The introduction of the notion of private property when before, the whole state and western Canada, too, had been their oyster, without border or boundary.” She rinsed out the Pyrex dish and set it on the drainboard. “Their parents’ generation was being pushed, hard, by Western civilization. Could be their pride couldn’t take the extra hit, that they just couldn’t face up to losing an artifact the tribe regarded as holy. Be easier just to pretend it never existed in the first place.”

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