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 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.