Free Chopper Ops by Mack Maloney Page B

and took the first two seats in the first row. Right in front of Smitz's podium.
    "Candy-assers," Delaney said under his breath.
    Only one person in the room laughed at Delaney's remark. It was the guy in the Angel cap. He was sitting three rows in front of them, yet somehow he had heard the whispered comment.
    Smitz tapped the podium again, and now everyone else sat down. There were twenty-six individuals in the room, and all of them found seats as far away from the men with the needles as possible.
    "Well, this is what you've all been waiting for," Smitz began nervously. "All of the human assets needed for this program have arrived. This being the case, we've finally been authorized to tell you a bit about where you'll be going and why."
    A groan went through the room. Smitz nodded to one of his flunkies and the lights became dim.
    Slowly the huge TV wall screen came to life. The room went absolutely silent. Smitz pushed a button and a video began rolling.
    The title boasted that the video was prepared by the CIA's Foreign Intelligence Evaluation Section. Everyone in the room groaned again.
    The tape began shaky and washed out. When it finally cleared, it showed an enormous hole in the ground shot by a camera from high above. The gash was about three hundred feet across, the length of a football field, and maybe a couple feet deep. It was blackened and stood out like a sore thumb in the relatively undisturbed field of long golden hay surrounding it. The hole itself was filled with burnt stuff. Tree limbs, brush, scarred pieces of metal, and what appeared to be hundreds of chalky sooty sticks.
    In reality, they were human bones.
    "This video was shot in Bosnia almost one year ago," Smitz said. "During a new flare-up in the fighting there, someone herded three hundred and fifty-two civilians into a field. This is what was left of them."
    Those assembled stared at the video. This was not a bomb crater they were looking at. It was too shallow and the shape was all wrong. This thing looked like a perfect circle.
    The tape continued. Now they were looking at a hilltop village somewhere in the Middle East. There was nothing left of the place either, except the foundations of some houses and the remains of a fountain, which was leaking rusty water out into the street, like a bleeding wound.
    "This was once the village of El Quas-ri," Smitz went on. "It's in central Iraq. It was more than four thousand years old. We've determined it took about thirty seconds to wipe it off the map."
    For the next ten minutes, the tape presented a ghoulish montage of burnt holes, charred bones, leveled villages, and other instances of selective destruction. The two-dozen perfectly square carbon smudges along a flat desert highway were the remains of twenty-four food-supply trucks heading for a Kurdish refugee camp, Smitz explained. The tiny seaport that no longer had a dock standing or a boat afloat had been a stopping-off point for people fleeing oppression in Iran, he went on. The small airfield flying a Red Cross flag that no longer had any runways or buildings or airplanes had been a UN-sponsored airmobile field hospital.
    Everywhere, at every location, there were bodies. Twisted, skeletal, all shapes and sizes, from adults to children. Some still had skin clinging to their bones, others had been picked clean. They all looked as if they'd been cooked alive, which was not far from the truth. Most of the ghastly images were identified as being from the Middle East; others had been shot in parts of Asia and Africa.
    But what had caused all this? Smitz wasn't telling—not yet.
    The tape finally ended, only to be replaced by another. This began with a black screen emblazoned with three red letters: NSA. Everyone in the room sat up again and took notice.
    "This is footage from an NSA airborne asset," Smitz explained solemnly. "It was taken two months ago somewhere over the Persian Gulf."
    What appeared was a grainy, static-filled NightVision video of