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A war zone.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had taken high-resolution satellite images of the territory formerly known as India and Pakistan.
A mass of craters. Their circumferences in direct proportion to the size of the warheads used to create them. The effects of the nuclear war had been as far reaching as they had been unsubtle. It was as though the earth had bubbled up and boiled over. Over the years, purling mountain rivers had poured into craters where warheads had dented the ground, gradually filling them up to form giant concentric reservoirs. The craters themselves were desolate places, reddish-brown pits devoid of all life; the radiation had seen to that. But venturing away from the circumference, the ground gradually started to turn greener until finally the stench of death had all but disappeared and you were back into the territory of India’s verdant forests.
The picture zoomed in. The numerous NGA lenses in orbit shifted in their trajectory, enlarging the image of the land far below. The heat radiation present in over ten kilometers of atmosphere, combined with minuscule imperfections in the lenses themselves, caused the new image to momentarily blur until the adaptive optic software embedded in each of the lenses kicked in to correct the final image so that it was crystal clear again.
The cameras employed twenty-four bits per RGB channel, which meant that it was possible to identify green pixels on the mountain roads and distinguish them from the deep greens of the forest all around them. This paler green color was the green of war, the green of the army. Antiaircraft guns, armored vehicles, personnel carriers, tanks. When the generals who had pressed the nuclear button had fled from justice, the courtroom, and their inevitable death sentences, they were welcomed with open arms by the paramilitary organizations—provided they brought along with them a handful of toys.
The cameras zoomed farther in, five centimeters to a pixel, the maximum resolution. We could now distinctly see faces of the dead villagers scattered across the center of the paramilitary’s latest stronghold. There must have been at least fifty corpses, burnt and twisted into various fetal positions. The satellite video was still focusing, showing an ever-clearer image of the agglomeration of dead bodies.
People had been killed there. An entire village. At the hands of other people.
There was an acronym that we in the Special Forces had come to hate. CEEP: Child Enemy Encounter Probability.
It meant exactly what it sounded like. The possibility that we’d end up in a shootout with prepubescent girls.
The possibility that we’d end up having to blast their little skulls open and riddle their developing bodies with bullets.
Probability. Traceability. Countability. Searchability. Viability. Everything was “-bility” this and “-bility” that. It was enough to drive the world mad.
In reality, when the word probability was used, we were looking at a hundred percent chance. The suffix -bility lost all meaning. It was a weasel phrase, a phrase used only by fraudsters and fools.
Words don’t have any smell.
Neither do images or satellite recordings.
For some reason, this fact annoyed me.
The smell of fat frying and muscle shrinking. The stink of proteins in human hairs turning into ash. The distinctive odor of people burning. I knew it all too well. I wouldn’t quite say that I had become used to it, but I had encountered it enough times over the years in the line of duty that I was at least familiar with it.
The smell of gunpowder. The smell of old rubber tires aflame, lit as beacons by the soldiers.
The smell of the battlefield.
There was something inherently vile about watching these satellite images, and it was making me feel uneasy. Not because of the horrific nature of the images—though they were horrific enough, all right—but because they were so sanitized. Sitting here, it made no difference to us whether we were looking at people burned whole, with guts spilling out, or with blood seeping out onto the ground. It was all so clean and deodorized. That was the most disgusting thing of all. The lenses that coldly looked down at the corpses from on high in the freezing void of space were like an omniscient yet supremely indifferent god.
The only smell associated with these images right now was the smell of the conference room at HQ in Fort Bragg. A brand-new smell, the smell of concrete and plastic and resins and monomers and adhesives and chemical wizardry.
“These images were taken by the air force’s space recon satellites four days ago,” the man from the National Counterterrorism Center explained. “At the New India government’s behest, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court at The Hague has issued arrest warrants for eight leaders of a Hindu fundamentalist faction currently active in rural areas. The charges include crimes against humanity, use of child soldiers, and genocide.”
He sounded like every other civilian state official. There was a complete, bizarre mismatch between the bland tone of voice he affected and the gravity of the actual words. It was as though he was taking half-digested pieces of jargon and spinning them ever further away from their true meaning, taking them to the point where they became almost completely nonsensical, before presenting them in a nice and orderly fashion. I would have called it superficial, except that the word didn’t really do justice to that weird sense of detachment he was projecting. When he talked of crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide, you had no sense that he actually understood or felt what these words meant. At that moment I felt a lot of sympathy for the soldiers who listened to Robert McNamara’s account of the Vietnam War and simply couldn’t relate to it in a meaningful way.
Still, this man from the NCTC was here, now, in this meeting room in Fort Bragg, giving a skillful, efficient, and entirely superficial briefing to the assembled soldiers.
“Eugene and Krupps are on the ground as the Japanese government’s proxy, carrying out the UNOIND remit for postwar reconstruction and stabilization. As the US Armed Forces maintain only a token presence in this area, it’s fair to say that Eugene and Krupps are effectively the dominant military power on the ground.”
The next image was brought up on the screens of the notepads of the assembled meeting. A picture of children mingled with skinny adults, smiling at the camera without a care in the world as they brandished AK rifles that seemed comically oversized in their tiny hands.
“This group that now calls itself the Hindu India Provisionals was founded by the same faction that started the nuclear war. The official postwar Indian government that had formed following international intervention established a secular state. Hindu India smoldered away in the rural hinterlands for a number of years without causing any real damage, but recently their activities have escalated. They have started attacking remote Muslim villages, massacring their inhabitants, raping their women, and abducting and indoctrinating their children and assimilating them into their own ranks.”
I watched as the screen in front of me started graphically enumerating a list of the atrocities. Rows of corpses lined up and bleached white with caustic lime. The lime looked like flour and the bodies almost like pieces of chicken ready to be breaded and fried. Then there were the charred black houses and the alleyways between them littered with the naked bodies of women. Just images. No smell, no sound. Just pixels trapped inside our notebooks on our desks.
“The postwar New India government has, for the most part, exceeded international expectations. The Hindu India Provisionals were until recently a mere fringe cult group with limited influence. The population of India is still poor, but the government managed to hold a successful round of democratic elections. Infant mortality was dropping rapidly. And then, as of last year, things started going downhill.”
“Who are these Hindu India when they’re at home?” blurted out a voice from behind me. Williams.