Beirut. Iraq. Somalia. Haiti. His file read like some malediction. Now this. The Dayton Accords had designated this geographical artifice the ZOS – the zone of separation – between Muslims and Serbs and Croats. If this rain kept them separated, then he wished it would never stop.
Back in January, when the First Cav entered across the Drina on a pontoon bridge, they had found a land reminiscent of the great standoffs of World War I. Trenches laced the fields, which held scarecrows dressed like soldiers. Black ravens punctuated the white snow. Skeletons broke beneath their Humvee tires. People emerged from ruins bearing flintlocks, even crossbows and spears. Urban fighters had dug up their own plumbing pipes to make weapons. Branch did not want to save them, for they were savage and did not want to be saved.
He reached the command and communications bunker. For a moment in the dark rain, the earthen mound loomed like some half-made ziggurat, more primitive than the first Egyptian pyramid. He went up a few steps, then descended steeply between piled sandbags.
Inside, banks of electronics lined the back wall. Men and women in uniform sat at tables, their faces illuminated by laptop computers. The overhead lights were dim for screen reading.
There was an audience of maybe three dozen. It was early and cold for such waiting. Rain beat without pause against the rubber door flaps above and behind him.
'Hey, Major. Welcome back. Here, I knew this was for someone.'
Branch saw the cup of hot chocolate coming, and crossed two fingers at it. 'Back, fiend,' he said, not altogether joking. Temptation lay in the minutiae. It was entirely possible to go soft in a combat zone, especially one as well fed as Bosnia. In the spirit of the Spartans, he declined the Doritos, too. 'Anything started?' he asked.
'Not a peep.' With a greedy sip, McDaniels made Branch's chocolate his own.
Branch checked his watch. 'Maybe it's over and done with. Maybe it never happened.'
'O ye of little faith,' the skinny gunship pilot said. 'I saw it with my own eyes. We all did.'
All except Branch and his copilot, Ramada. Their last three days had been spent overflying the south in search of a missing Red Crescent convoy. They'd returned dog-tired to this midnight excitement. Ramada was here already, eagerly scanning his E-mail from home at a spare duty station.
'Wait'll you review the tapes,' McDaniels said. 'Strange shit. Three nights running. Same time. Same place. It's turning into a very popular draw. We ought to sell tickets.' It was standing-room only. Some were soldiers sitting behind laptop duty station computers hardwired into Eagle base down at Tuzla. But tonight the majority were civilians in ponytails or bad goatees or PX T-shirts that read I SURVIVED OPERATION JOINT ENDEAVOR or BEAT ALL THAT YOU CAN BEAT, with the mandatory 'Meat' scrawled underneath in Magic Marker. Some of the civilians were old, but most were as young as the soldiers.
Branch scanned the crowd. He knew many of them. Few came with less than a PhD or an MD stapled to their names. Not one did not smell like the grave. In keeping with Bosnia's general surreality, they had dubbed themselves Wizards, as in Oz. The UN War Crimes Tribunal had commissioned forensics digs at execution sites throughout Bosnia. The Wizards were their diggers. Day in, day out, their job was to make the
dead speak.
Because the Serbs had hosted most of the genocide in the American-held sector and would have killed these professional snoops, Colonel Frederickson had decided to house the Wizards on base. The bodies themselves were stored at a former ball-bearing factory on the outskirts of Kalejsia.
It had proved a stretch, the First Cav accommodating this science tribe. For the first month or so, the Wizards' irreverence and antics and porno flicks had been a refreshing departure. But over the year, they'd degenerated into a tired Animal House schtick, sort of like M*A*S*H of the dead. They ate inedible Meals Ready to Eat with great relish and drank all the free Diet Cokes.
In keeping with the weather, when it rained, it poured. The scientists' numbers had tripled in the last two weeks. Now that the Bosnian elections were over, IFOR was scaling down its presence. Troops were going home, bases were closing. The Wizards were losing their shotguns. Without protection, they knew they could not stay. A large number of massacre sites were going to go untouched.
Out of desperation, Christie Chambers, MD, had issued an eleventh-hour call to arms over the Web. From Israel to Spain to Australia to Canyon de Chelly and Seattle, archaeologists had dropped their shovels, lab techs had taken leave without pay, physicians had sacrificed tennis holidays, and professors had donated grad students so that the exhumation might go on. Their hastily issued ID badges read like a Who's Who of the necro sciences. All in all, Branch had to admit they weren't such bad company if you were going to be stranded on an island like Molly.
'Contact,' Sergeant Jefferson announced at one screen.
The entire room seemed to draw a breath. The throng massed behind her to see what KH-12, the polar-orbiting Keyhole satellite, was seeing. Right and left, six screens showed the identical image. McDaniels and Ramada and three other pilots hogged a screen for themselves. 'Branch,' one said, and they made room for him.
The screen was gorgeous with lime-green geography. A computer overlaid the satellite image and radar data with a ghostly map.
'Zulu Four,' Ramada helpfully pinpointed with his Bic. Right beneath his pen, it happened again.
The satellite image flowered with a pink heat burst.
The sergeant tagged the image and keyed a different remote sensor on her computer, this one fed from a Predator drone circling at five thousand feet. The view shifted from thermal to other radiations. Same coordinates, different colors. She methodically worked more variations on the theme. Along one border of the screen, images stacked in a neat row. These were PowerPoint slides, visual situation reports from previous nights. Center-screen was real time. 'SLR. Now UV,' she enunciated. She had a rich bass voice. She could have been singing gospel. 'Spectro, here. Gamma.'
'Stop! See it?'
A pool of bright light was spilling amorphously from Zulu Four.