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exposed to the caustic mist.
    â€œThe bandits poisoned us the way one kills rats,” the woman said. “We feared to leave our home, but we could not stay in our poisoned village.”
    She went on to tell how she tore her veil in half. One half she tied tightly over her child’s nose and mouth; the other she tied across her own face.
    â€œSome of us began to leave,” she said. “Allah forgive us, we did not stop to help the dying. We wanted only to get our children out of the poison. We walked through the night to get here.”
    â€œYou saved your boy’s life,” Gold said.
    â€œHe is all that I have left. His father died in the civil war.”
    The attack on civilians did not surprise Gold. Militant factions ran riot all over North Africa under banners such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and the Signers With Blood Brigade. Some of the raids seemed to serve no purpose but to mark territory, and the tactic wasn’t new. As far back as the 1990s, the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria carried out indiscriminate massacres. Fighters, some with henna-dyed beards to signify they’d completed a pilgrimage to Mecca, swept into Algerian towns and mowed down anything that moved. The men with orange beards deemed the villages insufficiently pious, and determined that everyone in those villages had to die.
    But now the killing knew no borders. And the killers used new weapons.
    Lambrechts treated other patients with blisters like those of the mother and child. Gold remained by the doctor’s side, translating as best she could. One old man took every breath in agony. He coughed bloody foam, and Lambrechts said he’d inhaled enough chemical to sear the inside of his lungs. Gold tried to speak with him, but he couldn’t talk.
    â€œHe needs oxygen,” Lambrechts said. She gave an order in French, and a nurse wheeled over a green metal bottle. A clear hose led from a valve on the bottle to a plastic mask. The nurse placed the mask over the man’s nose and mouth, and she secured the mask with an elastic band that fit around the patient’s head.
    The old man lay back on his cot, eyes darting from Gold to Lambrechts and the nurse. He kept one hand on the mask as if that could force more oxygen into his lungs. At first the oxygen seemed to give him relief, but as the day wore on he began to wheeze. His face tookon a gray pallor, and his eyes squeezed shut when he inhaled, as if respiration itself caused pain. He died in the med tent, each breath a struggle right down to the last one.
    Gold and the medical team worked long into the night, changing dressings, applying ointments, comforting patients. Before going to bed, Gold went to the admin tent to use the satellite phone. She dialed her good friend Michael Parson, an Air Force officer recently promoted to colonel. Parson worked air mobility issues and mission planning for AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, headquartered not in Africa but in Stuttgart, Germany.
    â€œI’m sorry to call you so late,” Gold said.
    â€œSophia,” Parson said, “you can call me anytime you want. It’s good to hear your voice. Is everything all right?”
    Parson sounded like himself, in command and straight to the point. She told him about the chemical attack near Ghat.
    â€œOh, shit,” Parson said. “We knew they’d hit that area, but intel said the reports about chem weapons were unconfirmed. Sounds pretty confirmed now.”
    â€œFirst Sigonella and now this.”
    â€œYeah, that was sarin, but you’re saying you saw blister agents?”
    â€œYes.”
    Parson let out a long breath. Over the sat phone, Gold could hear the worry in his voice even as it bounced back down from space. She knew what concerned him. This showed that bad guys had gotten their hands on weapons of mass destruction, in variety and in quantity. The U.S. had once invaded Iraq over a WMD threat. Nobody in the military wanted