The Descent Part 5

'What?' she said.

'An uprising. Some kaffir sect thing. They hit your neighbor last night, and the next farm over, too. We came from them. All dead.'

'This your bag?' another soldier asked. 'Get in. We're in great danger out here.'

In shock, Ali let them push and steer her into the sweltering armored bed of the vehicle. Soldiers crowded in and made their rifles safe and the doors closed shut. Their body odor was different from that of her lepers. Fear, that was the chemical. They were afraid in a way the lepers were not. Afraid like hunted animals.

The carrier rumbled off and Ali rocked hard against a big shoulder.

'Souvenir?' someone asked. He was pointing at her bead necklace.

'It was a gift,' said Ali. She had forgotten it until now.

'Gift!' barked another soldier. 'That's sweet.'

Ali touched the necklace defensively. She ran her fingertips across the tiny beads framing the piece of dark leather. The small animal hairs in the leather p.r.i.c.kled her touch.

'You don't know, do you?' said a man.

'What?'

'That skin.'

'Yes.'

'Male, don't you think, Roy?'

Roy answered, 'It would be.'

'Ouch,' said a man.

'Ouch,' another repeated, but in a falsetto.

Ali lost patience. 'Quit smirking.'

That drew more laughs. Their humor was rough and violent, no surprise.

A face reached in from the shadows. A bar of light from the gunport showed his eyes. Maybe he was a good Catholic boy. One way or another, he was not amused.

'That's privates, Sister. Human.'

Ali's fingertips stopped moving across the hairs.

Then it was her turn to shock them.

They expected her to scream and rip the charm away. Instead, she sat back. Ali laid her head against the steel, closed her eyes, and let the charm against evil rock back and forth above her heart.

3 - BRANCH.

There were giants in the earth in those days... mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

-GENESIS 6:4.

Camp Molly: Oskova, Bosnia-Herzegovina NATO Implementation Forces (IFOR)/ 1st Air Cavalry/US Army 0210 hours 1996.

Rain.

Roads and bridges had washed away, rivers lay choked. Operations maps had to be reinvented. Convoys sat paralyzed. Landslides were carrying dormant mines onto lanes laboriously cleared. Land travel was at a standstill.

Like Noah beached upon his mountaintop, Camp Molly perched high above a confederacy of mud, its sinners stilled, the world at bay. Bosnia, cursed Branch. Poor Bosnia.

The major hurried through the stricken camp on a boardwalk laid frontier-style to keep boots above the mire. We guard against eternal darkness, guided by our righteousness. It was the great mystery in Branch's life, how twenty-two years after escaping from St. John's to fly helicopters, he could still believe in salvation.

Spotlights sluiced through messy concertina wire, past tank traps and claymores and more razor wire. The company's brute armor parked chin-out with cannon and machine guns leveled at distant hilltops. Shadows turned multiple-rocket-launcher tubes into baroque cathedral organ pipes. Branch's helicopters glittered like precious dragonflies stilled by early winter.

Branch could feel the camp around him, its borders, its guardians. He knew the sentinels were suffering the foul night in body armor that was proof against bullets but not against rain. He wondered if Crusaders pa.s.sing on their way to Jerusalem had hated chain mail as much as these Rangers hated Kevlar. Every fortress a monastery, their vigilance affirmed to him. Every monastery a fortress.

Surrounded by enemies, there were officially no enemies for them. With civilization at large trickling down s.h.i.+tholes like Mogadishu and Kigali and Port-au-Prince, the 'new' Army was under strict orders: Thou shalt have no enemy. No casualties. No turf. You occupied high ground only long enough to let the politicos rattle sabers and get reelected, and then you moved on to the next bad place. The landscape changed; the hatreds did not.

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 guns.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+t. 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-s.h.i.+rts 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 p.o.r.no flicks had been a refres.h.i.+ng 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 c.o.kes.

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 ma.s.sacre 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 Ch.e.l.ly 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 ma.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 ba.s.s voice. She could have been singing gospel. 'Spectro, here. Gamma.'

'Stop! See it?'

A pool of bright light was spilling amorphously from Zulu Four.

'So what am I seeing here, please?' one of the Wizards bawled at the screen next to Branch. 'What's the signature here? Radiation, chemical, what?'

'Mostly nitrogen,' said his fat companion. 'Same as last night. And the night before that. The oxygen comes and goes. It's a hydrocarbon soup down there.'

Branch listened.

Another of the kids whistled. 'Look at this concentration. Normal atmosphere's what, eighty percent nitrogen?'

'Seventy-eight-point-two.'

'This has to be near ninety.'

'It fluctuates. Last two nights, it went almost ninety-six. But then it just tapers off. By sunrise, back to a trace above norm.'

Branch noticed he wasn't the only one eavesdropping. His pilots were dropping in, too. Like him, their eyes were fixed on their own screens.

'I don't get it,' a boy with acne scars said. 'What gives this kind of surge? Where's all the nitrogen coming from?'

Branch waited through their collective pause. Maybe the Wizards had answers.

'I keep telling you, guys.'

'Stop. Spare us, Barry.'

'You don't want to hear it. But I'm telling you...'

'Tell me,' said Branch. Three pairs of eyegla.s.ses turned toward him.

The kid named Barry looked uncomfortable. 'I know it sounds crazy. But it's the dead. There's no big mystery here. Animal matter decays. Dead tissue ammonifies. That's nitrogen, in case you forgot.'

'And then Nitrosomonas oxidizes the ammonia to nitrate. And Nitrobacter oxidizes the nitrate to other nitrates.' The fat man was using a broken-record tone. 'The nitrates get taken up by green plants. In other words, the nitrogen never appears aboveground. This ain't that.'

'You're talking about nitrifying bacteria. There's de nitrifying bacteria, too, you know. And that does leak above ground.'

'Let's just say the nitrogen does come from decay.' Branch addressed the one called Barry. 'That still doesn't account for this concentration, does it?'

Barry was circuitous. 'There were survivors,' he explained. 'There always are. That's how we knew where to dig. Three of them testified that this was a major terminus. It was in use over a period of eleven months.'

'I'm listening,' Branch said, not sure where this was going.

'We've doc.u.mented three hundred bodies, but there's more. Maybe a thousand. Maybe a whole lot more. Five to seven thousand are still unaccounted for from Srebrenica alone. Who knows what we'll find underneath this primary layer? We were just opening Zulu Four when the rain shut us down.'

'f.u.c.king rain,' the eyegla.s.ses to his left muttered.

'A lot of bodies,' Branch coaxed.

'Right. A lot of bodies. A lot of decay. A lot of nitrogen release.'

'Delete.' The fat man was playing to Branch now, shaking his head with pity. 'Barry's playing with his food again. The human body only contains three percent nitrogen. Let's call it three kilograms per body, times five thousand bodies. Fifteen thousand kgs. Convert it to liters, then meters. That's only enough nitrogen to fill a thirty-meter cube. Once. But this is a lot more nitrogen, and it disperses every day, then returns every night. It's not the bodies, but something a.s.sociated with them.'

Branch didn't smile. For months he'd been watching the forensics guys bait one another with monkey play, from planting a skull in the ATT telephone tent to verbal wit like this cannibalism jive. His disapproval had less to do with their mental health than with his own troops' sense of right and wrong. Death was never a joke.

He locked eyes with Barry. The kid wasn't stupid. He'd been thinking about this. 'What about the fluctuations?' Branch asked him. 'How does decay explain the nitrogen coming and going?'

'What if the cause is periodic?'

Branch was patient.

'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.