Killing Two Birds
By: dharmamonkey
Rated: M
Disclaimer: Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those delicious little moments that Hart and friends leave out. In this case, AU do-overs for that gap between Seasons 5 and 6 that wrought so much havoc for our heroes. That's why you read fanfic.
A/N:
1) Military acronyms/terminology: A reviewer noted that I'm using some acronyms/lingo the meaning of which may not be immediately evident. Here are some you'll want to take note of because they show up in this chapter:
ACU: Army Combat Uniform (fatigues, people).
DFAC: Dining facility
GSA: Government Services Administration, US government agency that helps manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies, supplying products and communications for U.S. government offices.
1LT: First Lieutenant
SSG: Staff Sergeant
SFC: Sergeant First Class
BDU: Battle Dress Uniform (older style of fatigues worn in 80s, 90s and early 2000s)
NCO: Non-commissioned officer
2) Shout-out to my HHB (hugely helpful beta): My secret weapon and high-speed, low-drag LEO pal Jasper777 beta'd the first half of this chapter and gave hella useful feedback, and also helped me with a bit of technical research that helped immensely with the second scene below. I owe her a piping hot Venti Pikes Place Roast.
3) Shameless plug for one of my other fanfics: Some of you won't be into this, but if you like the tingly, smutty bits I write, and you like snarky or amusing B&B banter, go to my profile and check out "A Very Bad Idea," which is an anthology of sorts I've been doing with my erstwhile coauthor Lesera128. We just posted the first two chapters/parts of a four-part scenario called "Pulling the Goalie," which is our AU take on what naughty stuff might have happened after Brennan took Booth to the hospital for a broken hand at the beginning of episode 4x13, "Fire in the Ice." It's very funny, very snarky, very steamy and will get very, very M before it's done. You've been warned.
So, anyways—alright, without further ado, let's go back to Bagram.
Chapter 21: Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Booth sat down at Brennan's desk, flipped open his laptop computer and waited for it to boot up. He glanced at his watch and saw it was twenty-five past nine. Feeling restless, he stood up and unzipped his ACU jacket, shrugging it off one arm and then the other before tossing it on the bed which Brennan had swiftly made, with Booth's one-handed help, before they set out for the DFAC that morning.
"Since when did you care about making the bed, Booth?" she'd asked him with a laugh. "It's not like Gordon Gordon doesn't already assume that we're now engaged in a sexual relationship." She smiled at him, that sexy half-grin that he loved so much. "Do you think he would be embarrassed at seeing the sheets and pillows in disarray like that, leading him to deduce that we had sex in that bed recently?"
Booth blushed. "For fuck's sake, Bones," he'd told her, unable to suppress a smirk because he knew, once again, she was right. "Just make the bed already."
The laptop finally finished booting up as Booth scowled at the glacially slow speed of the Army-issued computer. He sat back down at the desk and double-clicked on the Skype icon, then initiated the video call with "AmuseBouche58." He smiled at Gordon Gordon's username, and remembered how Brennan had teased him for picking such a boring one (BroadStreetBully24) for himself. "Boring?" he asked her. "Do you even know who the Broad Street Bullies are?" Her blank stare supplied the answer. "Never mind," he said with a roll of his eyes. "Forget it."
"Can you hear me?" Booth asked.
"Quite well," Gordon Gordon said, unscrewing the cap off of a bottle of Mountain Dew, which made Booth scrunch his nose. "Good morning, Booth."
"You drink that crap, Gordon Gordon?" Booth snorted. "Seems a bit inconsistent with your sophisticated palate there, doc. Unless you're really wrecked tonight and need a massive infusion of caffeine-fueled energy."
"I have no shame," Gordon Gordon admitted. "I bought it at the local bodega because it seemed, at the time at least, to offer the best opportunity to consume a tremendous quantity of caffeine at this time of night. I simply cannot bring myself to patronize Starbucks, no matter how good the coffee smells. If I do, I would be the final nail in the coffin of my personal pride."
"Really?" Booth raised an eyebrow.
"Of course," the Englishman replied. "America is the world's greatest incubator of chain restaurants—which, though I can't claim to have any scientifically-validated statistics to back this up, seems to be at this point her #1 export. There are Starbucks in fifty-five countries, including over 700 such stores in the UK. I would far rather drink hideously nasty swill like this…" He held up his Mountain Dew with a grin. "Than feed the ravenous beast of caffeine imperialism that is Starbucks."
Booth laughed. "Bones loves Starbucks," he said. "That's what they have in the breakroom at the lab—at the Jeffersonian. She's always griping to me about the crap coffee at the Hoover."
"It is crap coffee," Gordon Gordon chuckled. "Colossally bad, to be absolutely honest."
"I know," Booth replied. "That's why I always tried to tank up at the lab so I didn't have to rely quite as heavily on the FBI's crap. Or else I just held off until we could grab a cup at the diner."
Smiling at the reference to the diner and, slightly more obliquely, to the endless hours Booth spent at the establishment with his partner, Gordon Gordon narrowed his eyes a little, sure that all of those moments, aggregated together, formed a bond between the two that had now, after five-odd years, finally blossomed into something bigger.
"Army coffee sucks, too," Booth observed. "There's even a song—a marching cadence—about how crappy the coffee is." He cleared his throat and began to sing: "They say that in the Army the coffee's mighty fine. It looks like muddy water and tastes like turpentine…"
"And does it?" Gordon Gordon took a long draw on his bright, unnaturally-green soda and winced at the sweet taste of it.
"Well," Booth grinned. "It does look like muddy water, but I can't speak to the taste of turpentine, because I haven't done a side-by-side taste test. Army coffee is a caffeine delivery device, plain and simple, just like the crap at the Hoover. I bet they even use the same GSA-approved supplier."
"Probably so," Gordon Gordon agreed, sliding his soda out of the view of the camera. "So—"
Booth took a deep breath in anticipation of what he knew would eventually come. "Yeah," he said opaquely. "I guess I—"
"Bones, can't you stay with me?" he'd asked her that morning as they walked together down to the car. Wendell was already there waiting for them, standing in front of the tailgate, his navy blue backpack slung over his shoulder. "I mean, when I talk to Gordon Gordon."
She looked at him with soft, sympathetic eyes but shook her head. "No, Booth," she said. "You need to do this—without me."
"But—" He stopped and stood there, his hand on his hip as he stared at his feet. "I don't know if he'd understand, you know."
Brennan cocked her head gently, placed her hand on his forearm and looked at him. "Has he been in the specific circumstances that you are, Booth?" she asked. "No, he hasn't. But—listen to me, Booth—has he been a foot soldier in a hostile environment, patrolling the streets while insurgent eyes watched him from places of concealment? Yes. Has he lost comrades to insurgent violence? Yes." She paused, frowning a little as she worried then that perhaps she'd stepped over the line in being too tough on Booth. "He understands more than you think he does." She pursed her lips and sighed. "Give him a chance, Booth. Give this a chance. Please."
Booth shrugged and shoved his hand in his pocket, digging for his keys as he acknowledged Wendell with a slight upward jerk of his chin.
"Okay," he whispered. "Alright. I can do this. Right?"
"Yes," she replied, rubbing her hand in slow circles over his back. "You can do this."
Gordon Gordon smiled. "So, where would you like to begin?"
"I don't know," Booth replied, frowning and chewing the inside of his lip.
Watching the gesture and seeing—between the nibbling of his lip, his wrinkled brow and the tell-tale signs of his bouncing leg—how anxious Booth was, Gordon Gordon tapped his fingers on the arm of his desk chair, reflecting on what he knew, then raised his head and spoke. "I think it best if we start with what happened yesterday, and work backward from there," he said. "Is that alright?"
Booth jutted his lower jaw forward as he let loose a long sigh. "Yes," he whispered.
Gordon Gordon continued watching him for several seconds before again breaking the silence between them.
"Perhaps it's best," he began, "if you just tell me what happened yesterday."
"What do you mean?" Booth asked. "You mean, like everything that happened yesterday?"
Booth rolled his lips together firmly and glanced out the window, puzzled by how much had happened in the previous thirty-six hours. It seemed, in a way, a lifetime ago, even more so than the crash itself, or his deployment to Afghanistan, or the night at the Founding Fathers, standing out in front of the bar trying to talk Brennan into just holding off before making any big decisions as she contemplated taking some time away from the Jeffersonian—and, by extension, from him. He flipped mentally through the events of the day before, one by one, tracing his steps backwards until he landed where it all seemed to really begin to fall apart.
"I had a dream," he said quietly, his voice tight as the words fell from his lips.
Gordon Gordon noted the tension in his voice and the fact that Booth's eyes were averted. "What did you dream about?" he asked gently.
"Kosovo," Booth croaked, rolling his jaw in a grinding motion as he tried to summon the will to continue despite the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and the bile that was rising in his throat.
"I see…" Gordon Gordon rubbed his thumb under his chin. "Care to share the details?"
Booth swallowed, hesitating, then nodded. He proceeded to explain how his dream—his memory, really—began with him lining up for the shot on his target, squeezing the trigger as his spotter watched as his bullet traveled a half-mile downrange to meet its destiny, smashing through the forehead of the Serb militia leader and blowing out the back of his head. By the time his rifle's recoil settled, all Booth saw was a bloody spray splattered on a concrete block wall behind where the militia colonel had stood. He recalled how he had hardly begun to fold his rifle's bipod before he heard the sound of small arms fire crackling in the ravine below their position.
"Oh my God," Booth hissed as he slid down the wooded embankment to where the four other members of his Ranger team were. One of them, his platoon leader, 1LT Hank Luttrell, lay on the ground as one of the other Rangers held his legs a few inches off the ground. Luttrell's helmet lay next to him on the ground and another Ranger held his head between his hands as Luttrell shivered and howled in agony, his half-fisted hands quivering as he saw Booth approach.
"He's hit, Booth," SSG Barrett said, looking up as Booth and his spotter ran up to them. "Bad, man." Booth crouched down next to Luttrell and saw that he had been shot, the apparent entrance wound piercing his side but, reaching below and sliding his fingers along the small of the lieutenant's back to feel for an exit wound, Booth felt none. Barrett fell back on his haunches as he raised Luttrell's legs up higher, letting his boots fall on either side of his hips. "He says he can't feel his legs," he whispered.
Booth fell silent, his jaw working up and down as he narrowed his eyes, turning his head away from the camera as he once more stared out the window at the bright light of the Afghan morning, trying to fill his eyes with the vision of something other than the memories that flooded back to him. He felt a tingle in his nostrils as he swore he could smell the blood dripping on the ground. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a smell that would never really leave him.
"Jesus Christ," Booth said quietly, glancing around and seeing the bodies of six Serb fighters laying bloodied and still in the brush a few feet away. "There will be more," he said grimly. "We've gotta get him the fuck outta here, now." His heart was thundering in his ears and he glanced at the four other Rangers that crouched in the dirt. "Here—you take this," he said to his spotter, handing him his sniper rifle. "I'll take him," he murmured.
Gordon Gordon took a long swig of his nearly-flat Mountain Dew and carefully screwed the cap back on the bottle before setting it down next to his laptop. He watched Booth's facial expressions cycle as he recounted his story.
"What?" SFC Cranston said as he watched Booth hand off his weapon.
"You take this," Booth said, shrugging off his rucksack and shoving it in Cranston's direction. "Don't give me that look, you ass." His dark eyes burned hard as he looked down at the young officer who writhed on the ground which was now dotted with quarter-sized pools of his blood. "We leave no man behind. We're Rangers."
"I met him once," he told Booth, his eyebrows raised as he anticipated Booth's response. "Your lieutenant."
"What do you mean?" Booth asked, turning back to the laptop screen. "You know Hank Luttrell? How?"
Gordon Gordon shrugged. "I wouldn't say I know him well," he said. "But I made his acquaintance a couple of years back, right before I gave up my psychiatry practice, when I served as an expert witness for the prosecution in a case involving a particularly violent serial rapist in Columbia Heights, and—"
"I remember that case," Booth said. "Back in 2008, right?"
"Precisely," the Englishman said with a nod. "Terrible, extremely disturbing case, that one." Shaking his head, he turned back to the matter at hand. "So, that's when I made the acquaintance of your friend Judge Luttrell."
Luttrell opened his eyes and reached up, grabbing Booth by the strap of his Tactical Load-Bearing Vest. Booth looked down and saw his lieutenant's hand, covered with his own blood, the stain of which made the yellow gold of wedding band seem almost copper-colored under the summer sun.
"Tell Jenny I—"
Booth shook his head and squeezed Luttrell's hand. "You'll tell her yourself, okay?" he whispered to him. "We're getting you outta here, alright? You're gonna be fine."
Luttrell blinked a couple of times, then smiled faintly through the pain. "Okay, Booth," he whispered, sucking in a breath as Kimmich tied the bandage tightly against his hip.
"Help me," Booth grunted to the other Rangers as he knelt down to pick up Luttrell who moaned and mumbled incoherently as he was lifted up. Booth winced as he stood, sliding the lieutenant's torso over his shoulders as he lifted himself up to his full height.
Gordon Gordon tilted his head and frowned sympathetically as he continued to inventory Booth's vocal patterns and facial expressions. He felt hamstrung by the distance, the medium and the setting for their discussion, wishing in that moment that they were rather together, two men in a bar, so he could reach out and clap him on the back in a gesture of support or camaraderie. But that reassuring contact, the language of touch, would have to be delivered to Booth by others—by Brennan, of course, or by the young Wendell Bray.
"Go," he whispered to the other men with a jerk of his head as he tucked his arm underneath Luttrell's knee and fisted the sleeve of his BDU shirt. "Now. Don't wait for me, Kimmich. Go ahead. I'll follow you. Just go."
Gordon Gordon pursed his lips as he listened to Booth tell his story, sucking in his breath as he tried to imagine the broken-hearted man on the other side of the video conference carrying another, gravely-wounded man on his shoulders behind enemy lines in the middle of someone else's civil war.
"God, it hurts, Booth," Luttrell moaned.
"I know it does," Booth said. "I know it does. Just hang in there. You're doin' real good there, Lieutenant. Just hang in there, okay?"
"Alright," Luttrell replied, sucking his breath in through his teeth as Booth began to walk, his first few steps punctuated with quiet grunts as he tried to comfortably balance the dead weight on his shoulders.
"You saved his life, Booth," Gordon Gordon told him as he watched a tear fall onto Booth's right cheek as he blinked. Booth raised his right arm to wipe it away, then stopped, staring for a moment at his casted hand before letting it fall with a heavy sigh to rest again on his thigh. Gordon Gordon took a breath as he watched the gesture, made a mental note of it but said nothing. Booth wiped the tears from his eyes with the heel of his left hand as the Englishman continued. "You saved that man's life. Without you, he would surely have died, or been taken prisoner by the Serb militias, and then Lord only knows what would have happened to him."
Booth sniffed, his mouth hanging open as he tried to pull himself together. "That's what Bones said, but—"
"But—?"
He sighed heavily. "I don't feel like a hero here, doc," he said. "I let him down—I let my guys down. Those Serb militia should never have gotten the drop on my Rangers—but they did, which means I must not have trained them right. Their skills weren't sharp enough, or maybe they were overtired from the last mission and I'd missed it. Or, I don't know—"
"You can't do this to yourself, Booth," Gordon Gordon said. "You of all people know how these things can't be perfectly executed every time. War is the perfect example of chaos theory and the butterfly effect. One little thing changes and everything can change in a matter of seconds, and sometimes, it's just not possible to get your arms around all of it in time."
Booth's brow knit heavy and low over his eyes. "But it shouldn't have happened that way had we been—" He grunted. "We were Rangers—we were supposed to be ready for anything. And we weren't. They weren't. And Hank Luttrell hasn't walked in ten years on account of it. He'll never walk again, and it's my fault."
"It's not," Gordon Gordon told him. "It's simply not." His jaw hardened as he leveled a hard stare at Booth's glistening brown eyes. "What could you have done differently? What? Tell me what you could have done differently that would have changed the outcome that afternoon…"
Booth blinked then turned away. He watched a box truck pull up behind the building across the street and two airmen climb out. They raised the gate at the back of the truck and pulled the ramp down over the tailgate. "Nothing," he whispered.
"Come again?" Gordon Gordon asked, biting the inside of his lip to avoid even the faintest smile as he watched Booth's eyes and cheeks twitch while his mind chewed on the question.
"Nothing," he said, turning back to the screen.
"That's right," Gordon Gordon agreed. "Nothing."
"But, still," Booth pressed on, his voice thick and choked. "It was my job as the senior NCO in the unit to—"
"Booth," Gordon Gordon interrupted him, his voice firm as he held his hand up. "Stop," he said. "Listen. Have you ever missed a shot?"
Booth's brow dropped low over his eyes again. "What?" he hissed.
"What I mean is, have you ever taken a shot—out there chasing some suspect on the streets or in a combat scenario—and missed?" Gordon Gordon asked.
Booth frowned. "Yes, of course," he replied, his voice dark with suspicion. "What's your point?"
The Englishman cocked his head and shrugged. "When you're on the practice range, Booth, excepting that one period shortly after your brain surgery, of course, you are an exquisitely talented marksman," he said. "You almost never miss."
Booth looked out the window and took a deep breath as he watched the young airmen unload their cargo with hand-trucks. "I never miss on the range," he said quietly, rolling his jaw as he turned back to the screen to see the shrink-turned-chef watching him.
"Why, then," Gordon Gordon asked, speaking each word carefully as he knew he was treading on thin ice, "on those rare occasions when you miss in the field, do your shots sometimes land astray?"
Booth's eyes fell and he stared into his lap for several long moments before looking up again. When he raised his glance, Gordon Gordon saw his brown eyes were narrow but somewhat brighter than they had been in the seconds before. "Because conditions in the range are controlled, and in the field, they are not," Booth admitted. "Out in the field…" He fell silent for a moment, looking out the window once more before looking straight into the laptop's camera. "In the field, additional factors come into play that complicate the execution of the shot. There's always a constellation of circumstances that can't always be predicted."
Gordon Gordon's mouth quivered slightly at hearing Booth's words spoken as if he were an instructor in a tactics course and the chef one of his students. It seemed almost, well, practiced. He spoke with a distinct detachment that reminded Gordon Gordon of Brennan's speech patterns when she used her expertise and intellect as a way of holding people and feelings at arms' length. While Booth's words uttered the right message, the one the Englishman wanted to hear him speak, he was unhappy with the emotional distance. But, he admitted to himself, it was a start.
"You see my point?" he asked, his eyebrows raised expectantly.
Booth nodded. "Yeah," he whispered. "Shit happens."
Brennan looked at the shattered skeleton laid out on the table in front of her and glanced over at the two on the two adjacent tables. All of them showed massive body trauma, some of the worst she had seen over the years. While several of the other sets of remains, including Michael Swann's, had been relatively intact, albeit severely burned and in some cases partially disarticulated, there were several sets—ten in all—that were more severely damaged than the rest. The three she had examined that morning were among the worst, retrieved from the very first body bag she had begun sifting through the afternoon she arrived at Bagram. The bodies had been almost completely disarticulated—torn apart, essentially—and even the more robust bones had been badly damaged. The skulls were wrecked—crania broken apart into pieces somehow, mandibles torn away and broken, many of the teeth torn from their sockets—and the bones were scarred and pitted by perimortem trauma with no sign of remodeling or antemortem bleeding.
She reached into her pocket and increased the volume on her iPod a couple of notches before turning her attention to the Petri dish on the edge of the table. Inside of it lay five slivers of brown metal, each less than a quarter of an inch wide and ranging in length from one-half to three-quarters of an inch. She picked up the Petri dish and walked over to the microscope. Using a pair of tweezers, she picked up one of the slivers and placed it on a slide, then turned on the microscope and adjusted the focus. She took a deep breath and narrowed her eyes at what she saw, pulled her head away from the eyepiece, shook her head and then took another look.
"That's strange," she muttered. She scribbled a quick note in her notebook, turned off the microscope and went over to her laptop.
"Dr. Brennan?" Wendell asked, looking up to see his mentor's fingers flying across the keyboard, her brow furrowed in concentration as she stared at the computer screen. "Did you find something?" She looked up and shot him an annoyed glare. "Right," he whispered, popping his earbud back into his ear with a shrug and returning to his examination of a skull.
Brennan drummed her fingers on the edge of the steel table as she read the screen. She walked back over to the microscope, flipped it on and took another look at the metal sliver under increased magnification.
"Booth was right," she said, sighing as she stepped back from the microscope.
Wendell pulled both earbuds out of his ears and arched an eyebrow. "What?" He walked over and accepted her invitation to view the slide under magnification.
"Booth was right," she said again. "The Army's official explanation of what happened to these two helicopters is not correct," she said, her voice dropping to barely above a whisper.
"Are you saying that—?"
"Yes," she said, a lilt in her voice as her eyes widened. "These helicopters did not crash due to pilot error."
Wendell's eyes widened and then narrowed again. "But—" He put a hand on his aproned hip and wiped his brow with the back of his wrist, both of his hands still being gloved. "Can you prove it? I mean, to the point we'd—he'd—be believed?"
"Yes," Brennan said confidently. "Look again at the fragment under the microscope." Wendell complied, narrowing his eyes as he waited for her to explain. "Do you see the white paint on that material?"
"Yes," he replied. "What is it?" Brennan deftly removed that slide and, placing another of the metal slivers on a slide, slid that one under the lens. "Ohh," he whispered. "What is that? Arabic?"
Brennan rolled her eyes. "No, Mr. Bray," she replied, her brow kinked in irritation. "It's a Persian script."
He pulled away from the eyepiece and looked at her. "But Persian and Arabic are basically the same script," he said.
"Except that Persian includes four additional letters," she said.
"Okay," he replied, hesitating. "But aren't most of the languages in this region written in a Persian script? Pashto, Farsi, Kurdish, Azerbaijani—"
Brennan nodded. "Yes," she said, "but the partial letter you can see between these two fragments is a character, the do chashmī he, that is unique to Urdu. Urdu is the official language of Pakistan."
"Of course," Wendell whispered under his breath. Because everyone knows that, he grumbled silently. "I'm sorry, Dr. Brennan, but I'm not sure I understand how seeing a tiny fragment of Pakistani script on a sliver of steel will tell us what happened to those two—" He cut himself off. "Ohhh," he murmured.
She smiled. "Well," she said. "Strictly speaking, this alone doesn't tell us what happened to those two aircraft," she admitted. "But it made me think."
"Okay…" Wendell stepped away from the microscope and looked at the eight skeletons arrayed on various tables around their makeshift lab.
Brennan walked around to one of the tables on which a relatively intact skeleton was assembled. "Booth is always telling me to step back and look at the big picture," she said. "He calls it 'seeing the forest in the trees.'" Wendell smiled. "I knew there was something here, but I wasn't sure what it was. I must have stared at those slivers of metal—steel, presumably—for hours before it occurred to me."
The young man slumped his shoulders, sure he would spend the rest of his time at the Jeffersonian playing an exhausting game of mental catch-up with Brennan's mach-speed mind. "What?" he asked, his voice muted as he waited to be smacked-down for his slowness in arriving where she clearly already was.
"We know there are twenty-one servicemen, correct?" she asked. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded. "Five aircrew on each aircraft: a pilot, a copilot, a door-gunner on each side of the helicopter plus a door-gunner in the rear, plus five or six Special Forces soldiers—Booth's compatriots—depending on which aircraft. One aircraft would have carried ten persons, and the other eleven, correct? For a total of twenty-one."
"Right," Wendell said, still not sure where she was going with this.
"I've dealt with aircraft crashes before," she said tersely. "If these two aircraft collided in midair due to pilot error, which is the Army's assertion, then you would expect to have all twenty-one sets of remains showing injuries indicative of an aircraft collision: bodies being thrashed around the inside of an aircraft, injured by contact with the aircraft's structural features when the aircraft impacted one another and/or the ground, and subsequently damaged by fire and, possibly though not necessarily, low-velocity explosions due to rupture of fuel compartments."
"Right," he said, encouraging her to continue, biting back a smile as he knew she was onto something even though he was not yet sure what it was.
"But there are remains here with perimortem injuries indicating a far greater degree of trauma consistent with high-energy, high-velocity explosions," she said. "Some of these bodies were blown up with a high-explosive of some kind."
Wendell's eyes widened and his face slackened as realization washed over him. "Oh, right," he mumbled.
"In fact," Brennan continued, walking around to another set of remains. "I'd really place the remains in three categories: one group of individuals that were five to ten feet away from a high explosive material at the time of detonation, which remains are almost completely disarticulated and very badly damaged skeletally, a second group that were perhaps fifteen to thirty feet away from the explosive material at the time of detonation, which remains show substantial disarticulation in certain portions of the body and significant skeletal damage due to explosion, and then a third group, the remains which were largely intact, with limited disarticulation except for that associated with low-velocity traumatic amputation of limbs or heads due to impact."
Wendell snapped his fingers. "Yes!" he gasped. "And, based on your notes and the labels affixed to the various crates, the ones in the first two categories came from the same group of body bags, which presumably means they came from the same aircraft."
"Correct," Brennan said with a nod. "And—"
Wendell interrupted, determined to beat her to the punch, if not mentally, then at least verbally. "And the remains with the worst damage are the ones from which the slivers of metal were found when I removed the flesh."
"Yes."
"These helicopters didn't just crash because of bad piloting," he said, his voice low and his words solemn. "One of them was hit by some kind of explosive and hit the other one, which is why they both went down."
"Exactly," Brennan said, gesturing for him to follow her back to her laptop. She motioned towards an image on the screen. "I think that," she pointed to a photo on the Wikipedia entry for Rocket-Propelled Grenade, "is what these are from." She held up a Petri dish with three more of the brown metal slivers. "Booth could confirm that," she added, a certain sadness in her voice as she wondered when—and how—she would tell Booth about her revelation.
Wendell's mouth fell open as the full scope of what they'd found finally dawned on him. "And the writing you found on them—in Urdu—that means that whatever those are, they came from Pakistan originally."
Brennan shrugged and quirked an eyebrow. "Or, in any case, were labeled at some point for use by Urdu speakers. The weapon that took down one of those helicopters was brought into Afghanistan from Pakistan."
"Damn," Wendell said.
"Although I can't be certain," she said, "There's little doubt in my mind that these helicopters crashed as a result of one of them being attacked by an explosive RPG warhead imported into Afghanistan from Pakistan. These aircraft were not brought down by pilot error, and they were not brought down by friendly fire from an Afghan National Army unit, whose soldiers are equipped with RPGs but not with RPGs from Pakistan." She narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath. "This was a hostile act."
"These men were killed in action," Wendell whispered.
"Yes."
A/N: So, what do you think? (And don't say, "Hell, it took you twenty-one chapters to tell us THAT?")
Do you want more? I sure want to give you more. In fact, I'm dying to tell you the rest of this story.
Please, please, PLEASE—don't read and run. Tell me what you think.
I pour my heart and soul into each of these chapters and I'm desperate to know what you think of the direction I'm taking the story.
So, please, don't leave me hanging. Leave a review. Your reviews feed my muse. My well-fed muse keeps this story coming more quickly.
Tell me what you think...