The sergeant stomped over to him before he was out of the cab, looking pissed. Here we go, Dylan thought.

“I got another complaint about you being late,” she said. “The airfield is right across the damn base. You stopping for a beer on the way?”

Yeah. A beer, in Kuwait. That’d be the day. Out loud, however, all Dylan said was, “I’m going as fast as I can.”

She looked at him for a moment, apparently trying to decide if he was lying or just stupid. “Get your shit together,” she said, and turned away neatly on the heel of one of her combat boots.

“Yes, ma’am.” Bitch, Dylan thought. Put a chick in uniform and she thinks she’s a frigging general or something. She had no idea who she was screwing with. But she’d get a big surprise soon enough.

He started to load the truck.

As he struggled to hoist the transfer cases holding dead U.S. soldiers into the back, he reflected again on how unlucky he was. He never should have been put in this position. It was all going to change, but still, he never should have had to go through any of this shit in the first place.

Dylan was one of hundreds of civilian contractors working at the base in Kuwait. A year before, he was driving a vending machine route, delivering candy and snacks to office parks.

He saw both jobs as beneath him. In fact, he saw most jobs as beneath him. If his father weren’t such a prick . . .

Dylan was supposed to be rich. His father had been a successful singer/songwriter, with a series of minor hits in the ’80s. He was never famous himself, but he wrote and produced for people who were. He made a shitload of money. It kept coming, in the form of residual checks from car commercials and greatest hits compilations.

Dylan’s parents had moved from L.A. to Orange County when he was born, in search of a more wholesome family environment.

They found it. Dylan grew up marinating in wealth and privilege with kids just like him. Vacations in Cabo, private schools, and a Porsche at sixteen.

It was something of a shock when Dylan’s dad sat him down at twenty-three and said it was time to get a life.

This was just after Dylan had been kicked out of the third and last college he would attend. He majored mostly in beer-drinking and hangover recovery. While the first two schools simply flunked him, his academic career ended for good with an unsuccessful date-rape and a faceful of pepper spray.

Criminal charges were avoided with a generous settlement. That’s when Dad decided it was time to talk man-to-man with his son. They sat on the patio of the house in Newport Coast as the sun set into the Pacific. It was beautiful. Father and son cracked open several beers to get over their mutual discomfort, then got down to business.

Dylan’s father admitted he hadn’t been around much. His marriage to Dylan’s mom ended, and a series of increasingly blond, pert and young stepmothers followed. While they talked, Dylan’s dad kept touching his new hair plugs, like a gardener tenderly checking new sprouts.

He asked Dylan what he wanted to do for a living.

Dylan said he’d like to go into the music business, like his father. Start a band. Maybe go on tour. It would take about fifty grand in operating capital.

Dylan’s father offered the opinion that it might be a good idea to learn an instrument, and perhaps how to read music, first.

Dylan countered with the observation that his father’s music sucked, and he didn’t need to read music to do better than that “dentist’s-office crap.”

Things deteriorated from there. Dylan’s father finally threw up his hands and walked into his home office, where he smoked a joint and wondered how he’d managed to raise such a thoroughly unpleasant little shit. Twenty years of voting Republican, and for what? He blamed the schools.

Dylan found his credit cards canceled, his trust fund locked up tight until he turned forty. His mother convinced her current husband to allow him to live in the guesthouse on their property. After six months of his moping, she insisted he take a job, and her husband called in a favor from a friend, getting Dylan a truck on a vending-machine route.

It was about that time when Khaled got in touch with him again. Dylan was playing Grand Theft Auto: Vatican City online at three a.m., after another unsuccessful band practice, taking out his frustration by slaughtering his opponents with an Uzi. The instant-message window on his computer popped up.

It was Khaled, a guy he’d known back at school. Khaled had been a Saudi student living in the dorm on the same floor.

Ordinarily, Dylan would have been the first to mock and abuse a foreigner living within such close range. But Khaled was awesome. He spoke English better than Dylan, wore jeans and T-shirts, and listened to hip-hop and rap. It also didn’t hurt that he had more money than God, and always scored good drugs.

They started IM’ing regularly over the next couple of months. Between rounds of virtual carnage, Khaled sympathized with Dylan’s troubles. He recalled the unfortunate incident with the girl and the pepper spray. Men—men like Khaled and Dylan—were cut off from their natural role, which was to command. To be respected. That woman who maced Dylan, for instance. She should have known her place. “Whores,” Khaled typed. “The world has turned all women into whores.”

The world was screwed up. Anyone could see that. But Khaled actually seemed to know why. He explained to Dylan how all of his problems were a result of the forces aligned against men like them. The war in Iraq was a ploy by international bankers. Just like 9/11, the government rigged the whole thing.

Which was also why Dylan couldn’t get a recording contract—the music business was completely controlled by the same people. And of course his father was hoarding his trust fund. The bankers wanted to keep it, to suck it dry.

It all fell into place. It really wasn’t Dylan’s fault. He wasn’t quite sure how it all added up, but he liked the bottom line: he deserved better, and someone had conspired to take it from him. There had to be some reason a guy like him was stocking candy and Coke machines for a living.

Some people were meant for better things than menial labor, Khaled said. He had a plan, and Dylan could be part of it.

Khaled’s father had multiple businesses contracting with the U.S. Army. In Kuwait, Khaled promised, Dylan could be making as much as a hundred grand a year, just for driving a truck like he did now. Everyone else was profiting from the war, Khaled said. Why shouldn’t Dylan get a little of the action?

Dylan knew it was time for a life change. His once toned gym muscles were going soft, and his hair was getting thin. His band had broken up. His boss had knocked his hours back, and he tried to buy a girl a drink in a bar in Newport Beach a week ago, only to find he didn’t have enough in his wallet for her fourteen-dollar appletini.

What the hell, he thought. There was nothing tying him down. The closest thing he had to a relationship was a favorite stripper at Spearmint Rhino. Khaled sent him a plane ticket and an advance on the first month’s paycheck.

His great adventure in Kuwait didn’t start at all like he planned.

He wandered around the Kuwait City airport, jet-lagged and clueless, surrounded by men and women wearing long robes. One of the locals spotted him, broke away from a pack of his friends, and approached.

Dylan was nervous. This was just after those contractors in Baghdad were kidnapped, and he had a frightening vision of his own head rolling on the floor in some Jihadi terrorist’s garage.

Then he recognized the guy behind the beard.

Khaled was wrapped in traditional robes, covered in hair. If he hadn’t smiled and said Dylan’s name, Dylan never would have put it together.

He embraced Dylan warmly, even though his friends all scowled. He escorted Dylan to a new apartment, which came with the job. Khaled couldn’t stay and talk—he was running his father’s shipping concerns in Kuwait—but he promised they’d catch up later.

After a month, Dylan was considering chucking the whole thing and heading home.

First off, he was getting a lot less than a hundred grand a year. The big money was for the people willing to work in Baghdad and risk getting blown into stew meat. His paycheck worked out to about what he was making back in the States.

But instead of loading up candy machines, he had the worst job on the base—mortuary support. Which was a fancy name for undertaker. Dead bodies would show up all day and all night at Camp Wolf. He was responsible for taking the coffins—sorry, “transfer cases,” the army called them—and stacking them, then driving them over to the airfield, where they’d be shipped back home.

Dylan realized he was in Hell. Roasting in the heat, then freezing in cold storage, surrounded by corpses every day.

When Khaled finally got back in touch, Dylan was pissed off and ready to go back to the States.

Khaled tried to soothe him. Dylan didn’t want to listen. He invited Dylan to his apartment. Dylan was hesitant, until Khaled mentioned beer.

Khaled sent his Bentley for Dylan. At his massive, luxury apartment, they opened a case of contraband Coors Light and drank while Khaled explained what was happening.

Obviously, he said, things had changed since college.

Dylan, who’d slammed two beers and was working on his third, said, “No shit. What’s with the outfit?”

Khaled explained: his father had found out how he was spending his time in America, and pulled him out of college. He was sent to a strict madrassa in Saudi Arabia.

“Sucks, man,” Dylan said.

Anger flashed in Khaled’s eyes, but it passed. “At first, I thought so,” he said. “But then I learned the truth.”

All of the things they’d talked about, all of the problems in the world, all of that had to change. And Khaled and his friends had the answer. They were going to make things right.

They were part of a group called Zulfiqar. They were a sword of righteousness to cut the evil out of the world.

But they needed Dylan. They needed him to step up and be a hero.

And, of course, they were willing to pay for one. Being a hero shouldn’t come without rewards, Khaled said. He offered an even million dollars.

Dylan passed. A million? That was less than he had in his trust fund. He could survive until forty. Not worth it.

There was some haggling. Khaled pointed out the benefits of tax-free cash. He eventually offered $3.5 million.

Dylan said, “Cool.”

The caskets were in the truck. Dylan started the engine and drove around the corner from the mortuary building.

He made sure the bitch sergeant wasn’t watching him as he left.

About halfway to the airfield, Dylan pulled into a parking lot and slid his truck between two personnel carriers. He shut down the engine.

He took the small toolbox Khaled had given him and hopped out of the cab. He didn’t look around as he got into the back of the truck. He’d learned one thing about the army: look like you knew what you were doing all the time. Do that, and nobody would question you; they had their own problems.

He’d made sure the casket he wanted was on top of the stacks. PFC MANUEL CASTILLO, THOUSAND PALMS, CALIF. He unstrapped it, quickly pulled the flag off like he was unwrapping a gift and snipped the fastener seal with wire cutters.

The remains inside were covered in plastic garbage bags full of ice. It didn’t matter much—PFC Castillo was headed to a closed-casket funeral. He’d been thrown from his Humvee by an explosion that tore through the bottom of his seat; they probably shoveled him into the body bag.

That’s why Dylan had picked him.

Dylan tossed the ice packs to the floor of the truck and unzipped the bag. Half the poor bastard’s head was sheared off, all the way to the collarbone; he’d been shot straight up, like an ejector seat, into the frame of the vehicle.

But his right leg was still intact, from the hip down.

Dylan checked his list, just to be sure. RIGHT LEG—followed by five boxes. Four of them had check marks. He took out a pen, crossed off the last empty spot.

Then he opened the toolbox and got to work.

The circular saw was remarkably compact. It was almost smaller than a cordless drill, and when it revved up, it cut through skin and bone like tofu. Dylan was glad, once again, these guys weren’t shipped home in their uniforms. That was all done at the other end, at Dover Air Force Base, after they’d been embalmed. He didn’t think he could handle stripping a corpse down to its underpants.

He checked the joint where the hip met the leg. He didn’t have to be precise, but Khaled bitched at him when he shaved off too much.

He leaned back as he pressed the power button on the saw. The first time he did this, he’d gotten a faceful of gore by hunching too close to the cadaver. He only had to learn that lesson once.

The blade sliced through the dead flesh and bone. A couple strands of skin snapped like rubber bands when he lifted the leg out of the body bag.

This was the way Khaled explained it to him. Nobody would ever miss a few body parts. The army morticians in the States certainly wouldn’t question it, because it wasn’t like they got an invoice of all the arms and legs a corpse was supposed to have upon delivery. The families back home were told their soldiers had been blown to pieces. They were expecting an incomplete package, if they even bothered to look. With all the car bombs and shrapnel and IEDs in Iraq, there were plenty of guys going home short a few limbs.

The only downside: Khaled wanted the heads of the soldiers, but Dylan’s best picks were all guys who didn’t have much left above the neck. It was a sore spot. Khaled had finally told Dylan to forget it, he’d make other arrangements.

Dylan turned off the saw and unfurled his own special plastic sack from the toolbox. There was some kind of chemical coating inside that kept the leg cold; it activated as soon as the sack was peeled open. Cold vapor curled in the air around him.

He crammed the leg inside, struggling with it like a side of beef.

Sweating, Dylan zipped up the body bag and repacked the corpse with ice, stuffing the bags around the casket. He latched it shut and used a tiny, battery-powered soldering iron to reseal the fasteners. Then he slung the sack with PFC Castillo’s leg over his shoulder.

He tossed the leg on the floor of the passenger seat and started the truck. It only took him a short while to clear the gate at the airport. He unloaded the coffins into a hangar, where they waited for the next flight out.

Nobody wanted to look at the flag-draped boxes. Nobody wanted to think about what was inside. Dylan was grateful for that.

He took the truck back out the gate. He slowed near the fence line, as he hefted the sack with the leg off the floor of the cab. With one smooth motion, he opened his door and dropped it onto the side of the road.

One of Khaled’s guys was waiting, as usual. He saw the dark figure scurry out of a ditch and pick up the bag.

Dylan smiled. He wasn’t sure if he believed everything Khaled was selling. Most of the time, he didn’t care one way or the other. But he definitely liked the idea of getting some payback from the world that had mistreated him. And getting paid at the same time.

Dylan could handle this shit job for a little while longer. He was undercover. Like James Bond.

Pretty soon, everyone who underestimated him and disrespected him would get a big lesson. Dylan would be rich, living the good life on a beach somewhere.

That would show his dad. And everyone else. They could all just blow him.