NEW ORLEANS, SEPTEMBER 2005

"I feel like I'm in a third-world country," Parker said, breaking a silence that had endured the entire distance from the Iwo Jima, moored at the Riverwalk in downtown New Orleans.

" Haiti," Helms said. She looked around with the same expression of bewilderment she'd worn all day. "Where is everyone? There should be ambulances and helicopters and-and police cars." She looked back at the two officers, almost pleading. "It can't be only us. It can't be."

Everything in St. Bernard Parish was backwards, if not upside down. The cars were in the water. The boats were on the land. Enormous barges, stripped of their containers, were beached hundreds of feet from the nearest canal. Trailers had been forcibly separated from their tractors and were scattered haphazardly across drenched and flattened fields like so many giant Tonka toys. Electrical transmission towers lay on their sides, half-submerged in bayous much deeper and wider than they had been not twenty-four hours before. The houses, those that remained standing, were minus doors, windows, roofs.

The landscape was not improved by the almost total absence of life. Once they saw a woman peer out at them from behind a tree. It didn't make any of them feel better when she screamed, a high, thin, terrified sound, and went crashing headlong through the underbrush, getting as far away from them as fast as she could. Once they saw a dog, a pit bull, emaciated and hostile, who growled menacingly at them before it, too, ran off. Cal would have shot it if he'd thought to bring a gun.