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 denitrifying 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 documented 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.'
'Fucking rain,' the eyeglasses 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 associated 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 AT&T 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.
'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
