The Descent Page 7

“What if the remains are being disturbed? But only during certain hours.”

  “Delete.”

  “Middle-of-the-night hours.”

  “Delete.”

  “When they logically think we can’t see them.”

  As if to confirm him, the pile moved again. “What the fuck!”

  “Impossible.”

  Branch let go of Barry’s earnest eyes and took a look.

  “Give us some close-up,” a voice called from the end of the line.

  The telephoto jacked closer in peristaltic increments. “That’s as tight as it gets,” the captain said. “That’s a ten-meter square.”

  You could see the jumbled bones in negative. Hundreds of human skeletons floated in a giant tangled embrace.

  “Wait …” McDaniels murmured. “Watch.”

  Branch focused on the screen.

  “There.”

  From beneath, it appeared, the pile of dead stirred.

  Branch blinked.

  As if getting comfortable, the bones rustled again.

  “Fucking Serbs,” McDaniels cursed.

  No one disputed the indictment.

  Of late, the Serbs had a way of making themselves the theory of choice.

  Those tales of children being forced to eat their fathers’ livers, of women being raped for months on end, of every perversion … they were true. Every side had committed atrocities in the name of God or history or boundaries or revenge.

  But of all the factions, the Serbs were the best known for trying to erase their sins. Until the First Cav put a stop to it, the Serbs had raced about excavating mass graves and dumping the remains down mine shafts or grating them to fertilizer with heavy machinery.

  Strangely, their terrible industry gave Branch hope. In destroying evidence of their crime, the Serbs were trying to escape punishment or blame. But on top of that—or within it—what if evil could not exist without guilt? What if this was their punishment? What if this was penance?

  “So what’s it going to be, Bob?”

  Branch looked up, less at the voice than at its liberty in front of subordinates.

  For Bob was the colonel. Which meant his inquisitor could only be Maria-Christina Chambers, queen of the ghouls, formidable in her own right. Branch had not seen her when he came into the room.

  A pathology prof on sabbatical from OU, Chambers had the gray hair and pedigree to mix with whomever she wanted. As a nurse, she’d seen more combat in Vietnam than most Green Beanies. Legend had it, she’d even taken up a rifle during Tet. She despised microbrew, swore by Coors, and was forever kicking dirt clods or talking crops like a Kansas farmboy. Soldiers liked her, including Branch. As well, the Colonel—Bob—and Christie had grown to be friends. But not over this particular issue.

  “We going to dodge the bastards again?”

  The room fell to such quiet, Branch could hear the captain pressing keys on her keyboard.

  “Dr. Chambers …” A corporal tried heading her off.

  Chambers cut him short. “Piss off, I’m talking to your boss.”

  “Christie,” the colonel pleaded.

  Chambers was having none of it this morning, though. To her credit, she was unarmed this time, not a flask in sight. She glared.

  The colonel said, “Dodge?”

  “Yes.”

  “What more do you want us to do, Christie?”

  Every bulletin board in camp dutifully carried NATO’s Wanted poster. Fifty-four men charged with the worst war crimes graced the poster. IFOR, the Implementation Forces, was tasked with apprehending every man it found. Miraculously, despite nine months in country and an extensive intelligence setup, IFOR had found not one of them. On several notorious occasions, IFOR had literally turned its head in order to not see what was right in front of them.

  The lesson had been learned in Somalia. While hunting a tyrant, twenty-four Rangers had been trapped, slaughtered, and dragged by their heels behind the armed trucks called Technicals. Branch himself had missed dying in that alley by a matter of minutes.

  Here the idea was to return every troop home—alive and well—by Christmas. Self-preservation was a very popular idea. Even over testimony. Even over justice.

  “You know what they’re up to,” Chambers said.

  The mass of bones danced within the shimmering nitrogen bloom.

  “Actually I don’t.”

  Chambers was undaunted. She was downright grand. “ ‘I will allow no atrocity to occur in my presence,’ ” she quoted to the colonel.

  It was a clever bit of insubordination, her way of declaring that she and her scientists were not alone in their disgust. The quote came from the colonel’s very own Rangers. During their first month in Bosnia, a patrol had stumbled upon a rape in progress, only to be ordered to stand back and not intervene. Word had spread of the incident. Outraged, mere privates in this and other camps had taken it upon themselves to author their own code of conduct. A hundred years ago, any army in the world would have taken a whip to such impudence. Twenty years ago, JAG would have fried some ass. But in the modern volunteer Army, it was allowed to be called a bottom-up initiative. Rule Six, they called it.

  “I see no atrocity,” the colonel said. “I see no Serbs at work. No human actor at all. It could be animals.”

  “Goddammit, Bob.” They’d been through it a dozen times, though never in public this way.

  “In the name of decency,” Chambers said, “if we can’t raise our sword against evil …” She heard the cliché coming together out of her own mouth and abandoned it.

  “Look.” She started over. “My people located Zulu Four, opened it, spent five valuable days excavating the top layer of bodies. That was before this goddam rain shut us down. This is by far the largest massacre site. There’s at least another eight hundred bodies in there. So far, our documentation has been impeccable. The evidence that comes out of Zulu Four is going to convict the worst of the bad guys, if we can just finish the job. I’m not willing to see it all destroyed by goddam human wolverines. It’s bad enough they engineered a massacre, but then to despoil the dead? It’s your job to guard that site.”

  “It is not our job,” said the colonel. “Guarding graves is not our job.”

  “Human rights depends—”

  “Human rights is not our job.”

  A burst of radio static eddied, became words, became silence.

  “I see a grave settling beneath ten days of rain,” the colonel said. “I see nature at work. Nothing more.”

  “For once, let’s be certain,” Chambers said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “No.”

  “One helicopter. One hour.”

  “In this weather? At night? And look at the area, flooded with nitrogen.”

  In a line, the six screens pulsed with electric coloration. Rest in peace, thought Branch. But the bones shifted again.

  “Right in front of our eyes …” muttered Christie.

  Branch felt suddenly overwhelmed. It struck him as obscene that these dead men and boys should be cheated of their only concealment. Because of the awful way they had died, these dead were destined to be hauled back into the light by one party or another—if not by the Serbs, then by Chambers and her pack of hounds, perhaps over and over again. In this gruesome condition they would be seen by their mothers and wives and sons and daughters and the sight would haunt their loved ones forever.

  “I’ll go,” he heard himself say.

  When the colonel saw it was Branch who had spoken, his face collapsed. “Major?” he said. Et tu?

  In that instant, the universe revealed depths Branch had failed to estimate or even dream. For the first time he realized that he was a favorite son and that the colonel had hoped in his heart to hand on the division to him someday. Too late, Branch comprehended the magnitude of his betrayal.

  Branch wondered what had made him do it. Like the colonel, he was a soldier’s soldier. He knew the meaning of duty, cared for his men, understood war as a trade
rather than a calling, shirked no hardship, and was as brave as wisdom and rank allowed. He had measured his shadow under foreign suns, had buried friends, taken wounds, caused grief among his enemies.

  For all that, Branch did not see himself as a champion. He didn’t believe in champions. The age was too complicated.

  And yet he found himself, Elias Branch, advocating the proposition. “Someone’s got to start it,” he stated with awful self-consciousness.

  “It,” monotoned the colonel.

  Not quite sure even what he meant after all, Branch did not try to define himself. “Sir,” he said, “yes, sir.”

  “You find this so necessary?”

  “It’s just that we have come so far.”

  “I like to believe that, too. What is it you hope to accomplish, though?”

  “Maybe,” said Branch, “maybe this time we can look into their eyes.”

  “And then?”

  Branch felt naked and foolish and alone. “Make them answer.”

  “But their answer will be false,” said the colonel. “It always is.

  What then?”

  Branch was confused.

  “Make them quit, sir.” He swallowed.

  Unbidden, Ramada came to Branch’s rescue. “With permission, sir,” he said. “I’ll volunteer to go with the major, sir.”

  “And me,” said McDaniels.

  From around the room, three other crews volunteered also. Without asking, Branch had himself an entire expeditionary force of gunships. It was a terrible deed, a show of support very close to patricide. Branch bowed his head.

  In the great sigh that followed, Branch felt himself released forever from the old man’s heart. It was a lonely freedom and he did not want it, but now it was his.

  “Go, then,” spoke the colonel.

  0410

  Branch led low, lights doused, blades cleaving the foul ceiling.

  The other two Apaches prowled his wings, lupine, ferocious.

  He gave the bird its head of steam: 145 kph. Get this thing over with. By dawn, flapjacks with bacon for his gang of paladins, some rack time for himself, then start it all over. Keeping the peace. Staying alive.

  Branch guided them through the darkness by instruments he hated. As far as he was concerned, night-vision technology was an act of faith that did not deserve him. But tonight, with the sky empty of all but his platoon, and because the strange peril—this cloud of nitrogen—was invisible to the human eye, Branch chose to rely on what his flight helmet’s target-acquisition monocle and the optics pod were displaying.

  The seat screen and their monocles were showing a virtual Bosnia transmitted from base. There a software program called PowerScene was translating all the current images of their area from satellites, maps, a Boeing 707 Night Stalker at high altitude, and daytime photos. The result was a 3-D simulation of almost real time. Ahead lay the Drina as it had been just moments before.

  On their virtual map, Branch and Ramada would not arrive at Zulu Four until after they had actually arrived there. It took some getting to used to. The 3-D visuals were so good, you wanted to believe in them. But the maps were never true maps of where you were going. They were only true to where you’d been, like a memory of your future.

  Zulu Four lay ten klicks southeast of Kalejsia in the direction of Srebrenica and other killing fields bordering the Drina River. Much of the worst destruction was clustered along this river on the border of Serbia.

  From the backseat of the gunship, Ramada murmured, “Glory,” as it came into view.

  Branch flicked his attention from PowerScene to their real-time night scan. Up ahead, he saw what Ramada meant.

  Zulu Four’s dome of gases was crimson and forbidding. It was like biblical evidence of a crack in the cosmos. Closer still, the nitrogen had the appearance of a huge flower, petals curling beneath the nimbostratus canopy as gases hit the cold air and sheared down again. Even as they caught up with it, the deadly flower appeared on their PowerScene with a bank of unfolding information in LCD overprint. The scene shifted. Branch saw the satellite view of his Apaches just now arriving at where they had already passed. Good morning, Branch greeted his tardy image.

  “You guys smell it? Over.” That would be McDaniels, the eight-o’clock shotgun.

  “Smells like a bucket of Mr. Clean.” Branch knew the voice: Teague, back in the rear pocket.

  Someone began humming the TV tune.

  “Smells like piss.” Ramada. Blunt as iron. Quit horsing around, he meant.

  Branch caught the front edge of the odor. Immediately he exhaled.

  Ammonia. The nitrogen spinoff from Zulu Four. It did smell like piss, rotten morning piss, ten days old. Sewage.

  “Masks,” he said, and seated his own tight against the bones of his face. Why take chances? The oxygen surged cool and clean in his sinuses.

  The plume crouched, squat, wide, a quarter-mile high.

  Branch tried to assess the dangers with his instruments and artificial light filters. Screw this stuff. They said little to him. He opted for caution.

  “Listen up,” he said. “Lovey, Mac, Teague, Schulbe, all of you. I want you to take position one klick out from the edge. Hold there while Ram and I take a wide circle around the beast, clockwise.” He made it up as he went along. Why not counterclockwise? Why not up and over?

  “I’ll keep the spiral loose and high and return to your grouping. Let’s not mess with the bastard until it makes more sense.”

  “Music to my ear, jefe,” Ramada approved, navigator to pilot. “No adventures. No heroes.”

  Except for a snapshot he had shown Branch, Ramada had yet to lay eyes upon his brand-new baby boy, back in Norman, Oklahoma. He should not have come on this ride, but would not stay back. His vote of confidence only made Branch feel worse. At times like this, Branch detested his own charisma. More than one soldier had died following him into the path of evil.

  “Questions?” Branch waited. None.

  He broke left, banking hard away from the platoon.

  Branch wound clockwise. He started the spiral wide and teased closer. The plume was roughly two kilometers in circumference.

  Bristling with minigun and rockets, he made the full revolution at high speed, just in case some harebrain might be lurking on the forest floor with a SAM on one shoulder and slivovitz for blood. He wasn’t here to provoke a war, just to configure the strangeness. Something was going on out here. But what?

  At the end of his circle, Branch flared to a halt and spied his gunships waiting in a dark cluster in the distance, their red lights twinkling. “It doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” he said. “Anybody see anything?”

  “Nada,” spoke Lovey.

  “Negative here,” McDaniels said.

  Back at Molly, the assemblage was sharing Branch’s electronically enhanced view. “Your visibility sucks, Elias.” Maria-Christina Chambers herself.

  “Dr. Chambers?” he said. What was she doing on the net?

  “It’s the old chestnut, Elias. Can’t see the forest for the trees. We’re way too saturated with the fancy optics. The cameras are cued to the nitrogen, so all we’re getting is nitrogen. Any chance you might snug in and give it the old eyeball?”

  Much as Branch liked her, much as he wanted to go in and do precisely that—eyeball the hell out of it—the old woman had no business in his chain of command. “That needs to come from the colonel, over,” he said.

  “The colonel has stepped out. My distinct impression was that you were being given, ah, total discretion.”

  The fact that Christie Chambers was putting the request directly over military airwaves could only mean that the colonel had indeed departed the command center. The message was clear: Since Branch was so all-fired independent, he had been cut loose to fend for himself. In archaic terms, it was something close to banishment. Branch had fragged himself.

  “Roger that,” Branch said, idling. Now what? Go? Stay? Search on for the golden apples of the sun …
>
  “Am assessing conditions,” he radioed. “Will inform of my decision. Out.”

  He hovered just beyond reach of the dense opaque mass and panned with the nose-mounted camera and sensors. It was like standing face-to-face before the first atomic mushroom.

  If only he could see. Impatient with the technology, Branch abruptly killed the infrared night vision and pushed the eyepiece away. He flipped on the undercarriage headlights.

  Instantly the specter of a giant purple cloud vanished.

  Spread before them, Branch saw a forest—with trees. Stark shadows cast long and bleak. Near the center, the trees were leafless. The nitrogen release on previous nights had blighted them.

  “Good God!” Chambers’s voice hurt his ears.

  Pandemonium erupted over the airwaves. “What the hell was that?” someone yelled.

  Branch didn’t know the voice, but from the background it sounded like a small riot breaking out at Molly.

  Branch tensed. “Say again. Over,” he said.

  Chambers came back on. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see that. When you turned your lights on …”

  The comm room noised like a flock of tropical birds in panic. Someone was yelling, “Get the colonel, get him now!” Another voice boomed, “Give me replay, give me replay!”

  “What the fuck?” McDaniels wondered from the floating huddle. “Over.”

  Branch waited with his pilots, listening to the chaos at base.

  A military voice came on. It was Master Sergeant Jefferson at her console. “Echo Tango, do you read? Over.” Her radio discipline was a miracle to hear.

  “This is Echo Tango, Base,” Branch replied. “You are loud and clear. Is there a situation in development? Over.”

  “Big motion on the KH-12 feed, Echo Tango. Something’s going on in there. Infrared just showed multiple bogeys. You say you see nothing? Over.”

  Branch squinted through the canopy. The rain lay plasticized on his Plexiglas, smearing his vision. He angled down to give Ramada an unobstructed view. From this distance, the site looked toxic but peaceful.

  “Ram?” he said quietly, at a loss.

  “Beats me,” Ramada said.

  “Any better?” he spoke into his mouthpiece.

  “Better,” breathed Chambers. “Hard to see, though.”