Globall War of Terror - WItness
May. 7th, 2018 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGloball War of Terror - Witness
We needed to stop, if only to reconfigure and warn the drivers about the stretch ahead.
But I didn't want contact with whoever was occupying the town of Gerlach.
The original residents - hostile to outsiders before the Firecracker, likely heavily armed and even more hostile now. They would have little to sell and nothing we would want to buy.
Survivors from the San Francisco Bay Area - counterculture types who could think of nothing better to do than flee to nearly uninhabitable hard desert. They would be starving at best.
Bandits or gangs - presumably chased into this area from the outskirts of more civilized territory. We would certainly outnumber them and likely outgun them. But we would have to expend ammo and risk lives to defeat them.
But what I didn't expect was none of the above.
Our first sign that we had hard trouble here was the T-intersection at Soldier Mountain. About thirty shot-up cars had been bulldozed off the road to leave the intersection clear. No one had removed the bodies, but birds and insects had mostly completed their work of deskeletonization. Mostly.
I called a convoy halt. "No one dismount!" I ordered. Then gathered Buddy and half the guards by voice.
Brooke took up watch in the shade of the truck, watching Gerlach closely with binoculars.
The rest of us started the backbreaking work, in the hot sun, of unloading the barracks van. We would have to haul the ambulance, for a number of reasons.
But I wanted recon, and now was the time.
I couldn't risk myself or Brooke or Buddy away from the convoy, for different but critical reasons. But I could risk one guard and one van.
"Brooke, whatcha got?"
"Town's been thrashed, boss. Several burned buildings. No movement, no activity."
Gerlach had been what amounted to a local hub. A gas station, grocery store, post office, Sheriff's substation, the kind of garage that could set its own prices as the only garage in a one hundred fifty mile radius ...
Buddy wandered back over from the wreckage, which he'd carefully inspected.
"Not bulldozer, boss. Armored fighting vehicle. Wheeled."
Not tracked ... tracks would have left very obvious damage on the asphalt road.
For myself I noticed that no one had gotten out of the cars, some of which had burned. That meant no one had cared about either sorting them out, or loot.
"Matt, go check out the town. Be hard careful. No chances at all."
Matt nodded. He'd been driving the shuttle bus. I could afford to lose him, which is why I was sending him.
He rolled down the van windows, turned off the AC and rolled forward at a measly 15 miles per hour. He was going to take his time.
Brooke watched. The van took no fire. It drove into the town, circled around once and came back.
Matt reported.
"Deserted. Some dead. Lot of damage. Heavy machine guns and explosives. Gas station burned."
He hadn't paused to take photos.
But we had a trick for burned gas stations.
The question was whether it was worth the risk to the convoy. I personally checked each gas tank. The barracks van and nursery van were still full. The bus was 2/3rds tank, diesel. The shuttle bus was half tank - gasoline. The truck was 3/4 tank, diesel.
"Let's do it. We're going to take the gas station. Herringbone formation, tight perimeter. NO WANDERING OFF."
WIth that we proceeded into the ruined town of Gerlach.
I don't know what other people saw. But what I saw had all the hallmarks of a military operation.
Send a block force, probably one or more APCs, around the perimeter to the north side of town. Attack in overwhelming force from the south. Kill everyone. Try to leave buildings intact, but hey, accidents happen. The survivors would try to flee north, where they would be harvested in neat rows by machine gun fire from behind armor. Now bleached bones.
Type of military operation - atrocity.
We pulled up beside the gas station. The truck was fully stocked with all the tools we felt we might need. No longer needed to drive the ambulance, the firefighter helped Buddy pry the charred remains of the surface fuel pumps clear.
The actual gas station tanks are underground. Damaging the pumps means that you can't use the gas. But it doesn't get rid of the gas. It's still there. And only four months since the Firecracker War, the gasoline would still be good.
One of the refugees, who should have known better, snatched at my arm.
"I've got no cell signal."
I looked at him. Then I _looked_ at him. He had the offending phone in his hand.
"Hand that to me," I said very calmly. When he did, I saw that the device was in 4G mode with no service. I set it to "Airplane Mode" and handed it back.
"The next time you take that out of Airplane Mode, I am going to break every finger on both your hands with my baton. You just endangered all of our lives."
I called a meeting. Using Mic Check, I briefly and forcefully explained that we were far, far out of cell coverage and would stay that way. However, a phone could be _detected_ at three times the range it could send a signal. I made everyone show their phone to a friend to make sure Airplane Mode was set.
Buddy gave me the thumbs up. "We've got gas." Then he advanced about 60' of one of the two 100' spools of fuel hose we had with us, hooked up a pump, and pulled up a sample for quality test. Pour out a little, catch a little in a plastic bottle and shake it, finally sniff a little. "It's good. Filling up."
We were going to be here for a bit. So the next challenge was water. I sent the guards in pairs to recon, keeping only the medics and Brooke.
After we were full up on gas, including our portable cans, Buddy checked the Diesel too. Also good.
The community water system was destroyed, deliberately, by people who knew what they were doing. But some houses had private wells and not all had burned.
My radio crackled. Orders were only to go up on radio for life and death.
"Contact! One in custody, coming in."
When three return instead of two, the temptation is to hose them down and drive off. That was a proper use of the radio.
Matt and his partner had a prisoner - but not a very combative one. The figure was covered in dusty rags and walked with a staff. The guards hadn't taken it away from him, so he hadn't resisted.
I walked out to him and introduced myself, "[Echo 18], convoy captain. Who are you?"
"I don't have a name," the man replied. From the voice, ill and elderly. He was a big framed man, not obviously malnourished, but wrapped in rags. Perhaps to protect his clothes underneath, perhaps merely to keep warm in the cold nights. Or perhaps he was that ill.
"Medic," I called, and one came over to us.
This was bound to be interesting.
"What happened here?" I asked him.
His voice took on a lecturing tone. Perhaps he had been a teacher, or a preacher. Scientist? Park ranger?
"Witness. You have come here to witness. This is not the place. Go to the playa. You will find your answer on the playa."
"We have food and fuel. WIll you show us to water?"
The medic looked at his face carefully when he pulled back his hood to gnaw on a paper packet of the beef jerky we then gave him. So did I. His eyes were bright but clear. He had not yet coughed despite the dust.
He nodded.
The medic and I conferred briefly. Not sick with something contagious. Certainly mentally ill. But functionally so.
Two pairs of guards - half our force - went with him carrying rifles, a bundle of jerky and a freshly filled five gallon gas can.
Two came back for the barracks van and all our empty water containers.
"He hasn't salvaged the town. He's got several caches, both in town and in the desert. He expects them to come back. He's been hiding here since it happened."
"It? Them?"
"He won't say. He says he has been waiting for the witnesses. He says we are the witnesses. He had this for us."
A packet of papers. Local maps. A treasure beyond price if I didn't have most of it electronically already. A bunch of papers underneath I didn't have time to look through.
"Brooke, take one of the bicycles and recon the south perimeter. Be very careful. Take your M-16. If we are separated, rally point is overlooking the Y at Soldier Mountain. Radio only if we have company or you get hurt."
"Sir."
After a sweep we moved the buses to the house with the working well pump. The monitors were posted in a loose circle around the buses and the house. The truck was parked in the shade of a billboard, ready to pull out on the road at a second's notice - nursery van and ambulance still on the flatbed.
I took the barracks van and two guards to check the Sheriff's substation.
Whoever had attacked had started with a stealth approach and gone dynamic. The front doors and windows were unmarked. The front desk and office area had been shredded by fully automatic gunfire. Totally uncontrolled, wild bursts. People not accustomed to controlling such weapons. No one had pulled the drives from the shattered computers or tried to go through the paper records.
The armory -- a closet -- had been broken into. The fuel tank outside had been blown up, likely with a thermite charge. The parking lot was empty. Not destroyed vehicles - empty. The key storage was also empty.
The attack had been by people the deputies recognized. No expended shell casings behind the desk -- all in the hallways.
The jail was the worst. The cell grills were still locked. The attackers had shot through the bars. Two prisoners had died immediately. The third had died later, based on the skeletal arm reaching through the locked bars. Injuries or thirst or both.
There was nothing of value here. We returned to the convoy.
I heard a low droning sound from the sky and shouted "Enemy aircraft! Everybody freeze! MIC CHECK! ENEMY AIRCRAFT! EVERYBODY FREEZE!"
Then I made sure all our vehicles were not moving and engines off.
Around me the cry went up, "Enemy aircraft! Everybody freeze! Mic check!"
It is surprisingly difficult to spot much from the air, especially from a fixed wing aircraft. But movement draws the eye. Our best bet was not to be noticed, but movement in a dead town _would_ be noticed.
"Fixed wing," Buddy muttered. "Cessna. If we were in California, sounds like CHP."
Almost certainly a reconnaissance aircraft. And if it were equipped like a CHP bird, it would have excellent optics, and night vision, and thermographics. The latter would be less useful in daytime sun. But it would also have ELINT equipment. A stingray - a device that tracks and logs cell phones. Even if they are out of range.
In the movies I'd shoot it down. That's technically possible. But I could think of nothing more likely to provoke an aggressive, heavy response than a "Mayday" call from a crashing aircraft.
Also, what had possessed me to call it an "enemy" aircraft? That was the kind of momentary mistake in wording that could get one shot in the back of the head.
The aircraft took one lazy circle around the town. Not two. Then flew off west.
"Everyone load up! We gotta go! Give me a count!"
As we finished the count, Brooke came back. Her face was ashen.
"Boss, we need to go _now_. Not south."
"Contact?"
"No contact. Impassible. I'll tell you in a moment. Gotta go gotta go."
She of course had also heard the aircraft and frozen.
This left the man in rags.
He had seen us, and the thing to do was to either bring him with us, or kill him and hide his body.
But as we geared up he had already disappeared among the houses, among turf he knew and we did not. Winkling him out would take time - time that Brooke felt we did not have -- and likely cause more damage to the town, possibly a fire visible for miles, it went downhill from there including the possibility of us taking casualties. He'd survived one massive attack. And based on what little he'd told us, he'd probably be equally unhelpful to the next visitor - if he chose to reveal himself to them.
I had no interest in witnessing anything. But the route I had chosen needed to cross the playa -- the dry lake bed on which the Burning Man celebration was held - for numerous reasons.
We changed convoy order as prearranged. Barracks van on point, Matt driving solo. Recovery tow truck towing flatbed with nursery van and ambulance next. Interstate bus next. Shuttle bus last, but with roof hatch open and a guard standing on an A frame ladder looking out the back.
Now Brooke could tell me what she had seen.
"Outside town a half mile, barricades across the road." She showed me a digital camera photo. "Keep Out, Homeland, Deadly Force Authorized" Standard signage, I'd seen photos before, of the perimeter of Homeland offices and detention camps. I dimly recalled seeing two as I'd passed Manzanar on my last Reno run.
"At the town limits, skull and crossbones. A single skull, two femur bones." She showed me the photo. The bones were scorched. A deliberate message.
"The school." The auditorium - the largest room available in town - had burned to the ground. The rubble was full of burnt bone.
That meant someone had gathered all the people willing to obey orders, herded them into a room, and set the room on fire.
"A few people tried to put up a fight with rifles," she showed me a .30-30 casing. "That's the destroyed houses. Otherwise they did a sweep."
We'd found other evidence in the houses. I didn't feel a need to share with Brooke the nature of it. But if I were the report writing sort I'd be writing reports of torture, rape and murder.
"Tire marks," she showed me more photos. Huge donut tires. The barrel of her rifle for measurement reference. Recognizably MRAPs.
One more photo. Spray painted on a billboard where it would be visible only from the north. The word "WITNESS" in a shaky hand and a sketch of two curved lines with a head in the center. )O(
The Burning Man logo.
Well, we were committed.
The entrances to the playa - the dry lake bed - are numbered by miles. 3 mile, 6 mile, 9 mile etc. We bypassed 3 and 6, headed for 9.
We passed the occasional wrecked car, pushed off the narrow road, but did not check them out.
A spray of wrecked vehicles surrounded each of the entrances. It appeared that a number had been parked across 3 mile as an attempt at a barricade, easily defeated.
We approached 9 mile and I signaled convoy stop.
I would be joining Matt in the lead van for this one.
I walked forward. Before getting in the van, I held my fist high in the air and clenched it, pulling downward twice.
A metallic snickering could be heard over the idling engines. Lock and load.
I walked briefly down the apron to the playa lake bed, tested it with a foot. Very solid. I walked back to the van and got in. Checked my GPS - technically GLONASS - again. We would be driving on GPS between here and our next waypoint.
The dry lake bed is all road. Hundreds of square miles of all road. One can get very easily lost. This is not necessarily a disadvantage. It would have the effect of burning anyone following us.
We drove onto the playa. Immediately we were all covered in a layer of playa dust. This was annoying but survivable.
About a mile away from the entrance, I could start seeing along the right side, between us and the horizon, a series of black dots I hadn't noticed before.
I signaled convoy halt and used my binoculars.
My mouth went from dry to gummy dry, my arms went pale. I lowered the binoculars, took a long deliberate sip of water, and raised them again.
Range and bearing. Distance estimation.
Burning Man had come early this year.
I walked back to Brooke, who was also using her binoculars. We both climbed up on the flatbed for a better view.
We stood there together for a moment, looking.
"They set up on the playa," she said.
"They were running from something," I replied. Litany and response.
"Not near water. Not up in the rocks."
"Something keeping them from that side of the road. Pushing them off. Ground troops."
"They thought they could just run further if anyone approached. They posted lookouts."
"They were spotted from the air. Localized."
"Some scattered."
"They were gunned down. From the air."
"The rest - the ones who couldn't run any more - banded together. Thousands."
"They tried to surrender."
"Their surrender was not accepted."
Binoculars told the story. Eyeballs did not.
The thing to do was to keep going.
Buddy climbed up, held out his hand for a pair of binoculars.
"You don't want to see this," I said. And handed them over.
He took one long, long look. Then he handed them back.
I climbed down and went back to the lead van.
Matt was pale as a sheet, a neat trick given his complexion. He had been using his binoculars too.
"Let's go," I ordered, moving the convoy out.
We drove away from the massacre site using GPS to navigate across the playa.
Documenting this would be a major operation for a fully equipped war crimes investigation team.
If I lived to return, I would have to do my best.
"Where men are silent, the very stones cry out."
WItness indeed.
We needed to stop, if only to reconfigure and warn the drivers about the stretch ahead.
But I didn't want contact with whoever was occupying the town of Gerlach.
The original residents - hostile to outsiders before the Firecracker, likely heavily armed and even more hostile now. They would have little to sell and nothing we would want to buy.
Survivors from the San Francisco Bay Area - counterculture types who could think of nothing better to do than flee to nearly uninhabitable hard desert. They would be starving at best.
Bandits or gangs - presumably chased into this area from the outskirts of more civilized territory. We would certainly outnumber them and likely outgun them. But we would have to expend ammo and risk lives to defeat them.
But what I didn't expect was none of the above.
Our first sign that we had hard trouble here was the T-intersection at Soldier Mountain. About thirty shot-up cars had been bulldozed off the road to leave the intersection clear. No one had removed the bodies, but birds and insects had mostly completed their work of deskeletonization. Mostly.
I called a convoy halt. "No one dismount!" I ordered. Then gathered Buddy and half the guards by voice.
Brooke took up watch in the shade of the truck, watching Gerlach closely with binoculars.
The rest of us started the backbreaking work, in the hot sun, of unloading the barracks van. We would have to haul the ambulance, for a number of reasons.
But I wanted recon, and now was the time.
I couldn't risk myself or Brooke or Buddy away from the convoy, for different but critical reasons. But I could risk one guard and one van.
"Brooke, whatcha got?"
"Town's been thrashed, boss. Several burned buildings. No movement, no activity."
Gerlach had been what amounted to a local hub. A gas station, grocery store, post office, Sheriff's substation, the kind of garage that could set its own prices as the only garage in a one hundred fifty mile radius ...
Buddy wandered back over from the wreckage, which he'd carefully inspected.
"Not bulldozer, boss. Armored fighting vehicle. Wheeled."
Not tracked ... tracks would have left very obvious damage on the asphalt road.
For myself I noticed that no one had gotten out of the cars, some of which had burned. That meant no one had cared about either sorting them out, or loot.
"Matt, go check out the town. Be hard careful. No chances at all."
Matt nodded. He'd been driving the shuttle bus. I could afford to lose him, which is why I was sending him.
He rolled down the van windows, turned off the AC and rolled forward at a measly 15 miles per hour. He was going to take his time.
Brooke watched. The van took no fire. It drove into the town, circled around once and came back.
Matt reported.
"Deserted. Some dead. Lot of damage. Heavy machine guns and explosives. Gas station burned."
He hadn't paused to take photos.
But we had a trick for burned gas stations.
The question was whether it was worth the risk to the convoy. I personally checked each gas tank. The barracks van and nursery van were still full. The bus was 2/3rds tank, diesel. The shuttle bus was half tank - gasoline. The truck was 3/4 tank, diesel.
"Let's do it. We're going to take the gas station. Herringbone formation, tight perimeter. NO WANDERING OFF."
WIth that we proceeded into the ruined town of Gerlach.
I don't know what other people saw. But what I saw had all the hallmarks of a military operation.
Send a block force, probably one or more APCs, around the perimeter to the north side of town. Attack in overwhelming force from the south. Kill everyone. Try to leave buildings intact, but hey, accidents happen. The survivors would try to flee north, where they would be harvested in neat rows by machine gun fire from behind armor. Now bleached bones.
Type of military operation - atrocity.
We pulled up beside the gas station. The truck was fully stocked with all the tools we felt we might need. No longer needed to drive the ambulance, the firefighter helped Buddy pry the charred remains of the surface fuel pumps clear.
The actual gas station tanks are underground. Damaging the pumps means that you can't use the gas. But it doesn't get rid of the gas. It's still there. And only four months since the Firecracker War, the gasoline would still be good.
One of the refugees, who should have known better, snatched at my arm.
"I've got no cell signal."
I looked at him. Then I _looked_ at him. He had the offending phone in his hand.
"Hand that to me," I said very calmly. When he did, I saw that the device was in 4G mode with no service. I set it to "Airplane Mode" and handed it back.
"The next time you take that out of Airplane Mode, I am going to break every finger on both your hands with my baton. You just endangered all of our lives."
I called a meeting. Using Mic Check, I briefly and forcefully explained that we were far, far out of cell coverage and would stay that way. However, a phone could be _detected_ at three times the range it could send a signal. I made everyone show their phone to a friend to make sure Airplane Mode was set.
Buddy gave me the thumbs up. "We've got gas." Then he advanced about 60' of one of the two 100' spools of fuel hose we had with us, hooked up a pump, and pulled up a sample for quality test. Pour out a little, catch a little in a plastic bottle and shake it, finally sniff a little. "It's good. Filling up."
We were going to be here for a bit. So the next challenge was water. I sent the guards in pairs to recon, keeping only the medics and Brooke.
After we were full up on gas, including our portable cans, Buddy checked the Diesel too. Also good.
The community water system was destroyed, deliberately, by people who knew what they were doing. But some houses had private wells and not all had burned.
My radio crackled. Orders were only to go up on radio for life and death.
"Contact! One in custody, coming in."
When three return instead of two, the temptation is to hose them down and drive off. That was a proper use of the radio.
Matt and his partner had a prisoner - but not a very combative one. The figure was covered in dusty rags and walked with a staff. The guards hadn't taken it away from him, so he hadn't resisted.
I walked out to him and introduced myself, "[Echo 18], convoy captain. Who are you?"
"I don't have a name," the man replied. From the voice, ill and elderly. He was a big framed man, not obviously malnourished, but wrapped in rags. Perhaps to protect his clothes underneath, perhaps merely to keep warm in the cold nights. Or perhaps he was that ill.
"Medic," I called, and one came over to us.
This was bound to be interesting.
"What happened here?" I asked him.
His voice took on a lecturing tone. Perhaps he had been a teacher, or a preacher. Scientist? Park ranger?
"Witness. You have come here to witness. This is not the place. Go to the playa. You will find your answer on the playa."
"We have food and fuel. WIll you show us to water?"
The medic looked at his face carefully when he pulled back his hood to gnaw on a paper packet of the beef jerky we then gave him. So did I. His eyes were bright but clear. He had not yet coughed despite the dust.
He nodded.
The medic and I conferred briefly. Not sick with something contagious. Certainly mentally ill. But functionally so.
Two pairs of guards - half our force - went with him carrying rifles, a bundle of jerky and a freshly filled five gallon gas can.
Two came back for the barracks van and all our empty water containers.
"He hasn't salvaged the town. He's got several caches, both in town and in the desert. He expects them to come back. He's been hiding here since it happened."
"It? Them?"
"He won't say. He says he has been waiting for the witnesses. He says we are the witnesses. He had this for us."
A packet of papers. Local maps. A treasure beyond price if I didn't have most of it electronically already. A bunch of papers underneath I didn't have time to look through.
"Brooke, take one of the bicycles and recon the south perimeter. Be very careful. Take your M-16. If we are separated, rally point is overlooking the Y at Soldier Mountain. Radio only if we have company or you get hurt."
"Sir."
After a sweep we moved the buses to the house with the working well pump. The monitors were posted in a loose circle around the buses and the house. The truck was parked in the shade of a billboard, ready to pull out on the road at a second's notice - nursery van and ambulance still on the flatbed.
I took the barracks van and two guards to check the Sheriff's substation.
Whoever had attacked had started with a stealth approach and gone dynamic. The front doors and windows were unmarked. The front desk and office area had been shredded by fully automatic gunfire. Totally uncontrolled, wild bursts. People not accustomed to controlling such weapons. No one had pulled the drives from the shattered computers or tried to go through the paper records.
The armory -- a closet -- had been broken into. The fuel tank outside had been blown up, likely with a thermite charge. The parking lot was empty. Not destroyed vehicles - empty. The key storage was also empty.
The attack had been by people the deputies recognized. No expended shell casings behind the desk -- all in the hallways.
The jail was the worst. The cell grills were still locked. The attackers had shot through the bars. Two prisoners had died immediately. The third had died later, based on the skeletal arm reaching through the locked bars. Injuries or thirst or both.
There was nothing of value here. We returned to the convoy.
I heard a low droning sound from the sky and shouted "Enemy aircraft! Everybody freeze! MIC CHECK! ENEMY AIRCRAFT! EVERYBODY FREEZE!"
Then I made sure all our vehicles were not moving and engines off.
Around me the cry went up, "Enemy aircraft! Everybody freeze! Mic check!"
It is surprisingly difficult to spot much from the air, especially from a fixed wing aircraft. But movement draws the eye. Our best bet was not to be noticed, but movement in a dead town _would_ be noticed.
"Fixed wing," Buddy muttered. "Cessna. If we were in California, sounds like CHP."
Almost certainly a reconnaissance aircraft. And if it were equipped like a CHP bird, it would have excellent optics, and night vision, and thermographics. The latter would be less useful in daytime sun. But it would also have ELINT equipment. A stingray - a device that tracks and logs cell phones. Even if they are out of range.
In the movies I'd shoot it down. That's technically possible. But I could think of nothing more likely to provoke an aggressive, heavy response than a "Mayday" call from a crashing aircraft.
Also, what had possessed me to call it an "enemy" aircraft? That was the kind of momentary mistake in wording that could get one shot in the back of the head.
The aircraft took one lazy circle around the town. Not two. Then flew off west.
"Everyone load up! We gotta go! Give me a count!"
As we finished the count, Brooke came back. Her face was ashen.
"Boss, we need to go _now_. Not south."
"Contact?"
"No contact. Impassible. I'll tell you in a moment. Gotta go gotta go."
She of course had also heard the aircraft and frozen.
This left the man in rags.
He had seen us, and the thing to do was to either bring him with us, or kill him and hide his body.
But as we geared up he had already disappeared among the houses, among turf he knew and we did not. Winkling him out would take time - time that Brooke felt we did not have -- and likely cause more damage to the town, possibly a fire visible for miles, it went downhill from there including the possibility of us taking casualties. He'd survived one massive attack. And based on what little he'd told us, he'd probably be equally unhelpful to the next visitor - if he chose to reveal himself to them.
I had no interest in witnessing anything. But the route I had chosen needed to cross the playa -- the dry lake bed on which the Burning Man celebration was held - for numerous reasons.
We changed convoy order as prearranged. Barracks van on point, Matt driving solo. Recovery tow truck towing flatbed with nursery van and ambulance next. Interstate bus next. Shuttle bus last, but with roof hatch open and a guard standing on an A frame ladder looking out the back.
Now Brooke could tell me what she had seen.
"Outside town a half mile, barricades across the road." She showed me a digital camera photo. "Keep Out, Homeland, Deadly Force Authorized" Standard signage, I'd seen photos before, of the perimeter of Homeland offices and detention camps. I dimly recalled seeing two as I'd passed Manzanar on my last Reno run.
"At the town limits, skull and crossbones. A single skull, two femur bones." She showed me the photo. The bones were scorched. A deliberate message.
"The school." The auditorium - the largest room available in town - had burned to the ground. The rubble was full of burnt bone.
That meant someone had gathered all the people willing to obey orders, herded them into a room, and set the room on fire.
"A few people tried to put up a fight with rifles," she showed me a .30-30 casing. "That's the destroyed houses. Otherwise they did a sweep."
We'd found other evidence in the houses. I didn't feel a need to share with Brooke the nature of it. But if I were the report writing sort I'd be writing reports of torture, rape and murder.
"Tire marks," she showed me more photos. Huge donut tires. The barrel of her rifle for measurement reference. Recognizably MRAPs.
One more photo. Spray painted on a billboard where it would be visible only from the north. The word "WITNESS" in a shaky hand and a sketch of two curved lines with a head in the center. )O(
The Burning Man logo.
Well, we were committed.
The entrances to the playa - the dry lake bed - are numbered by miles. 3 mile, 6 mile, 9 mile etc. We bypassed 3 and 6, headed for 9.
We passed the occasional wrecked car, pushed off the narrow road, but did not check them out.
A spray of wrecked vehicles surrounded each of the entrances. It appeared that a number had been parked across 3 mile as an attempt at a barricade, easily defeated.
We approached 9 mile and I signaled convoy stop.
I would be joining Matt in the lead van for this one.
I walked forward. Before getting in the van, I held my fist high in the air and clenched it, pulling downward twice.
A metallic snickering could be heard over the idling engines. Lock and load.
I walked briefly down the apron to the playa lake bed, tested it with a foot. Very solid. I walked back to the van and got in. Checked my GPS - technically GLONASS - again. We would be driving on GPS between here and our next waypoint.
The dry lake bed is all road. Hundreds of square miles of all road. One can get very easily lost. This is not necessarily a disadvantage. It would have the effect of burning anyone following us.
We drove onto the playa. Immediately we were all covered in a layer of playa dust. This was annoying but survivable.
About a mile away from the entrance, I could start seeing along the right side, between us and the horizon, a series of black dots I hadn't noticed before.
I signaled convoy halt and used my binoculars.
My mouth went from dry to gummy dry, my arms went pale. I lowered the binoculars, took a long deliberate sip of water, and raised them again.
Range and bearing. Distance estimation.
Burning Man had come early this year.
I walked back to Brooke, who was also using her binoculars. We both climbed up on the flatbed for a better view.
We stood there together for a moment, looking.
"They set up on the playa," she said.
"They were running from something," I replied. Litany and response.
"Not near water. Not up in the rocks."
"Something keeping them from that side of the road. Pushing them off. Ground troops."
"They thought they could just run further if anyone approached. They posted lookouts."
"They were spotted from the air. Localized."
"Some scattered."
"They were gunned down. From the air."
"The rest - the ones who couldn't run any more - banded together. Thousands."
"They tried to surrender."
"Their surrender was not accepted."
Binoculars told the story. Eyeballs did not.
The thing to do was to keep going.
Buddy climbed up, held out his hand for a pair of binoculars.
"You don't want to see this," I said. And handed them over.
He took one long, long look. Then he handed them back.
I climbed down and went back to the lead van.
Matt was pale as a sheet, a neat trick given his complexion. He had been using his binoculars too.
"Let's go," I ordered, moving the convoy out.
We drove away from the massacre site using GPS to navigate across the playa.
Documenting this would be a major operation for a fully equipped war crimes investigation team.
If I lived to return, I would have to do my best.
"Where men are silent, the very stones cry out."
WItness indeed.
