Location: Corridor Alpha, mountain pass at the borders of Bosnia and Kosovo.
Date: 12 January 1997.
Point of view: Captain Armand Thomas.
The Balkan winter had nothing of the geometric rigor of the frosts of Western Europe. In the shredded foothills of the Dinaric Alps, the cold was a wet and sneaky beast that crossed the kevlar, bit the seams of the bariolated trellis and numbed the phalanges until the weapons were relaxed.
The wind of the north planed the ridges with a dirty snow, immediately brewed by the caterpillars into an ochre thaw, thick as fresh cement, sticking to the boots and weighing each step.
Captain Armand Thomas, commanding the lighting and support company of the 3rd Regiment of Marine Infantry, wiped from the back of his glove the mud that was covering the thick ballistic glazing of his Front Shielded Vehicle.
Outside, the column stretched for almost three kilometres along a high cornice, stuck between a vertical limestone wall and a ravine drowned in a mashed milk pea. A total of 12 ATMs covered 20 white trucks loaded with flour, generators, heated tents and surgical lots for isolated civilian enclaves.
But the life insurance of the convoy was rolling in front and in the tail of the device: four fifty-six-ton Leclerc tanks, whose hyperbaric turbines groaned deafly between the rock walls while their caterpillars crushed the living ice.
The order received from Strasbourg was in one line: to open and sanctify the Corridor Alpha to evacuate the columns of refugees trapped by militias.
"My captain, cracked the voice of the master sergeant in the helmet intercom. We're getting into the Black Throat parade. Visibility falls below 100 meters. The gully closes."
"Maintain fifteen kilometers an hour,"Thomas ordered by tightening the jaws. Reduce the interval between the trainsets to 20 meters. No dead space. Continuous sweep with turrets."
In any War School manual, sinking into such a funnel in icing fog times was a tactical nightmare. The Serbian paramilitary militias knew every crack of this karst, every goat path, every cave hidden under the black pine trees. They no longer had anti-aircraft radars since the Rafale passage 36 hours earlier, but they had rock, gravity and hatred.
Thomas lowered his gaze towards his plastron. Locked on his bulletproof vest by an anodized aluminum chassis and shock-resistant rubber, his tactical terminal diffused an amber and slate glow. On this high-resolution screen, there was no fog. The valley unfolded in three-dimensional curves where each French armoured aircraft slipped in the form of a blue diamond permanently connected to the low orbit.
At exactly 1412 hours, the mountain fell on them.
It wasn't a harassment shot. It was a slaughterhouse prepared by rope.
A strident whistle torn the mist, followed by a trail of white smoke from an invisible rock vire. The RPG-7 anti-tank rocket struck the front flank of the head VAB with full whip.
The shock wave shook Thomas' cabin sixty metres below a hail of piercing and burning steel shrapnel. The composite shielding had held, but the right front half train of the lead vehicle had just been torn off, setting the 13-ton carcass across the runway.
The convoy was nailed on the spot.
In the second that followed, the ridges burst.
The heavy, slow and metallic hammering of the Soviet DShK 12.7-mm machine guns took the column from the heights. The tracer bullets scratched the red flash fog before ricocking on the armored hulls in blinding sparks.
"Contact! Multiple contact on northern and eastern ridges! yelled Thomas in his microphone while unlocking his FAMAS. Get in here! Find cover behind the axles and the slope!"
The rear ramp slammed against the rock. When Thomas jumped into the ice mud, he struck him in the chest like a ram. It was a primitive acoustic chaos: the supersonic slamming of large-calibre bullets that ripped the pine trunks over their helmets, the dry gusts of three strokes of the porpoises reposting to shadows, and the acrid smell of cordite mixed with melted snow.
"Sergeant Garcia! Deploy the support section behind the shoulder at three o'clock! shouted Thomas, throwing himself flatly against the giant wheel of a logistics truck. Set aside their kicks!"
"You can't see anything, Captain! sent Garcia away, the cheek smeared with fanges, while a gust of 12.7 made the armored mirror burst over his neck. They've been shooting from casemates in rock!"
Then came the sound that every infantryman dreaded more than the machine gun: the churning modulated, almost silky, of a salve of 82 mm mortars diving vertically.
The first gerbe of black earth and shale exploded twenty metres from the column, lifting a wave of overpressure that placed men against the frozen ground. The militiamen had pre-regulated their tubes on every lace on the road before the French arrived. They shelled blindly, methodically, through the mist layer that prohibited direct optical shooting.
Nurse! We got two injured in the fourth vehicle!"
Raising his head under the rain of earth, Thomas crawled for 15 meters in the ice rudder, the elbows debarked by the flint, to the rear flank of the fourth VAB. There, snuggled against shielding, Sergeant Nurse Lefèvre was already working on his knees in a reddish pond that smoked in contact with snow.
Two young porpoises were lying side by side. The first, a Breton corporal of only twenty years old, had his right thigh opened with a serrated cast burst; Lefèvre had just tightened a tourniquet with his phalanges.
The second, the first class Moreau, was looking for air with a wet and pink whistling on his lips. A fragment of shrapnel had ricocheted under the armhole of his vest to perforate the pleura.
"Pneumothorax suffocating, Captain! shouted Lefèvre over the thunder of a second mortar impact. I put an exufflation needle down, but he's bleeding inside! If he's not on a surgical table in forty minutes, he's dead!"
Thomas lifted his eyes to the low cloud ceiling, zebrabed by the tracers. In an ordinary war, those he had known in Chad or in the early months of Bosnia under blue helmets, asking for a heliported evacuation to the bottom of a canyon beaten by heavy machine guns and mortars under a hundred meters of ceiling was pure madness.
No Puma could have gone down without being turned into a torch. Moreau died in the mud holding his nurse's hand.
But they were no longer in 1992.
The captain folded his terminal over his chest and wiped out the mud and blood crust that defiled the glass slab with a furious boost.
The screen answered the millisecond. Up there, six hundred kilometers above the thermal inversion layer, the satellites of the ASTROLABE constellation ignored the fog of men.
Thomas tilted the telemetric fusion interface. In less than a second, the on-board processor crossed the acoustic sensors of the VABs, the reverse ballistic trajectory of mortar shells detected by the counter-battery radars, and satellite infrared imaging filtering the mouths under rock. Seven scarlet triangles appeared with their exact decimal coordinates on the side of the mountain.
Without saying a word in the radio saturated by the vacarm, the captain surrounded the seven targets with his gloved index finger and pressed the direct transmission key.
A thousand and eight hundred metres back, behind the rocky elbow that was masking the Black Gorge, the four Leclerc tanks of the Armoured Squadron received the package of data on their firing consoles. In the air-conditioned turret of the lead tank, the shooter only saw grey in his episcopes.
But on his digital monitor, the seven red dots designated by Thomas were instantly aligned. The ballistic calculator integrated the wind, humidity, powder temperature and spilled it in four tenths of a second.
The four 120-millimetre cannons rose in synchronous hydraulic churn.
"Data link locked. Fire."
The simultaneous roaring of the four heavy pieces rolled in the canyon like the collapse of a glacier. Four programmable explosive shells split the mist one thousand five hundred meters per second and struck the north cornices by the nearest metre.
Lying against the body of the wounded, Thomas felt the whole mountain trembling. Up there, two casemates of DShK machine guns flung into a geyser of pulverized rock and pruned pines. Ten seconds later, a calm voice opened on the encrypted channel of his earpiece:
"Here Rafale Falcon One, in orbit at twenty-five thousand feet. Counterbattery coordinates received by ASTROLABE relays. Laser and inertial guided drop. Impact in 12 seconds."
Thomas placed his helmet against Lefèvre's shoulder. The tearing of the air preceded by a fraction of a second four deaf deflagrations, of seismic violence, which plowed the back of the eastern ridge where the Serbian mortar tubes were hidden. The breath fell a shower of powdery snow on the convoy.
Then silence fell. A sudden, almost unreal silence, where one could only hear the crackling of wood burned on the heights and the wheezing breath of the young Moreau.
Not a single enemy weapon was firing. In less than two minutes, the curtain of fire had been erased from the map.
Thomas immediately pressed the sanitary extraction icon on his terminal.
The logistic algorithm at Strasbourg headquarters had not waited until the end of the firing: from the moment the nurse's biometric telemetry had reported the collapse of Moreau's oxygen saturation and the neutralisation of the ground-to-air sources, two Puma early warning helicopters had plunged into the topographic corridor calculated in three dimensions by their flight instruments.
A deaf throttle of rotors made the air vibrate. Emerging from the mist curtain with precision of automatons, the two aircraft came to lay their wheels thirty meters from the locked armoured. The side doors collapsed, the German and French military doctors leaped in the mud with their heated stretchers and chest drains.
In one hundred and eighty seconds, Moreau and Corporal Breton were on board, infused, drained and torn from the bottom of the ravine.
While standing in the middle of the high roadway, his rifle hanging at the end of his strap, Captain Thomas looked at the helicopter position lights fainting in the clouds. His legs trembled under the brutal reflux of adrenaline.
He contemplated his hands covered in mud and blood from his two guys, then lowered his eyes to the dark glass rectangle hanging on his chest. His men were going to live.
But by listening to the corporal's moaning that the blades had not fully covered, the officer already knew that no one would leave the mountain unharmed.
A thousand four hundred kilometers from the Gorge Noire, behind the glazed facades of the André-Citroën wharf, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, the editorial room of Volta Info was buzzing like a live hive.
Standing on the metal bridge overlooking the central plateau, Camille Bonaparte followed the high definition screen wall with his eyes. At the age of twenty-two, the president-general of the European news chain wore a tight-cut grey anthracite pantskin, her brown hair was hurriedly raised by a pliers, a cup of cold coffee forgotten between her fingers.
On the main monitor of the control, the digital flow sent from the back of the Corridor Alpha by their special envoy, Martin, was marked with a sharpness that gave the vertigo.
Where CNN and the BBC were still broadcasting taped analog images of satellite parasites from Zagreb, Volta Info's compact transmission suitcase, directly connected to ASTROLABE's bandwidth and compressed by home chips, provided an image of surgical transparency.
It saw the ochre mud, the smoking carcass of the head-to-pneumatic ATV, and especially the running of the stretchers towards the sanitary Puma. In the image, for three poignant seconds, the telephoto lens had grasped the blind face of the young soldier with a drained thorax, his hand squeezed on the sergeant-infirmary's blood mesh, before the doors of the helicopter closed.
"The plan of the stretcher is cut off at the montage for the twenty-hour newspaper,"said Jean-Luc Vallet, deputy editor-in-chief, a veteran debauched from the public service, who stood to the right of Camille. We keep the Leclerc tanks wide plan, the arrival of helicopters and the official figure of the ministry: zero dead.
The Elysée office called twice in an hour, Camille. They want German and Italian opinion to see surgery."
Camille slowly removed his look from the screen wall and turned to his deputy. His dark eyes, so similar to those of his older brother when he was tried to dictate his conduct, took a burst of cold steel.
"Since when did the firm of the Elysée raise my subjects, Jean-Luc? She asked in a calm voice that lowered her head to two scripts in the front row."
"It is not censorship, Camille, it is patriotic responsibility, plaida Vallet mid-voice. Your brother's servers and satellites saved those kids this afternoon. Why waste such a technological demonstration by putting blood in close-up at dinner?"
Camille put his cup on the metal railing with a dry tingling.
For a fraction of a second, the air-conditioned smell of the control was erased in his memory, replaced by the stench of rust, sweat and curdled blood from a disused slaughterhouse in Pantin in December 1991. She was sixteen.
She saw her wrists covered by the Kovac brothers' wire, the cold concrete against her cheek, and Lazare' silhouette entering the dark hangar alone to get her out of hell.
That night, she had understood two things for the rest of her life: first, that the violence of the world should not fade away because we turn our eyes away; Then, that she would never be anyone's puppet, not even the man who had saved his life.
It was with this cold rage that she founded her investigation review The Equation in 1994, and that she blew up the industrial espionage and political corruption scandal of the Kröner-Vast case in the figure of European ministries.
"Listen to me, Jean-Luc,"said Camille without raising the tone. If I had wanted to run a public relations agency for the Ministry of Defence or Volta S.A. I would have stayed in the skirts of the Quai d'Orsay.
This boy on the stretcher is twenty years old, a drain in the lung and blood of his comrade on his hands. The miracle of my brother's network is that he's alive tonight at the country hospital.
But war is that hole in his chest."
She pointed at the indexing monitor.
"You broadcast the full sequence at 20 hours zero-zero. The armor destroyed, the mud, the blood on the withers, the evacuation and the faces of the refugees waiting behind. No dramatic music, no triumphalist comment. The raw facts. If the Elysée isn't happy, they call me on my direct line."
Vallet swallowed, nodded his head without a word and went down four to four towards the mounting desk.
At the bottom of the bridge, a light crystalline laughter turned Camille.
Adhesive to the vault of the firegate, clothed in a long coat of black wool over a sea sweater too large and a jeans stained with dry pastel on the knee, Linh Bonaparte observed it with fun tenderness.
At 19 years of age, Minh's twin, which Lazare had adopted in 1986 when he was only twenty years old, led Volta's entire visual identity and industrial design. She held under her arm a roll of graphic models and two boxes of smoked noodles bought on Rue Saint-Charles.
"You'll end up causing her an ulcer before the end of the winter,"Linh smiled, moving towards her. The poor man thought he was working for the docile daughter of the family."
The iron mask of the press boss instantly melts. Camille let a long sigh escape and leaned for a second against Linh's shoulder.
Since the autumn of 1986, when Lazare had returned from Vietnam with two eight-year-old children silent and beaten by life, Camille, who had then eleven, had forged a fusional complicity with Linh.
They had grown up in the same rooms, shared the same teenage secrets and the same lucid, sometimes rebellious, admiration for this unstandard big brother who served them as father and rock.
"They drive me crazy, Linh, blew Camille by taking one of the hot boxes. Under the pretext that the algorithms of Lazare and Karim reduce the evacuation time to four minutes, all the European staffs speak of"clean war". As if the war became a video game on a SONG chip because coffins were replaced with high definition amputations."
"Come,"said Linh gently, holding his arm. Your paper is closed, Vallet won't dare touch a single image, and I have a car downstairs. I promised Minh and Karim to go back to Meudon to validate the display chassis before midnight. You will eat your noodles in the woods rather than in front of twenty-four screaming TVs."
Thirty minutes later, the sedan crossed the gate hidden under the large oak trees of the Meudon State forest.
It was the"Souche" the former Thomson-CSF research centre that Lazare purchased in 1990 to make it the true beating heart of his R&D. Unlike the underground bunker in Ivry-sur-Seine where banking and security servers were running, or the gigantic MegaFab in Strasbourg where René Castella grazed silicon on the chain, Meudon had kept the soul of a secret university campus nestled in the undergrowth.
Even at twenty-one and thirty, the brick and glass pavilions shone with warm light between the frosted pine trees.
They crossed Building B, passed the canteen where the Norman chef always left hot broth thermos, apple pies and the old filter coffee maker inherited from the heroic era of Rue d'Alésia on marble, and then went up to Linh's design workshop on the second floor.
The large room under the glass window did not look like any other company office. On the walls, Leonardo da Vinci's anatomy boards were alongside Japanese prints of Hokusai, brushed aluminum samples from the Northern foundries and the fuss sketches of the future Volta ARC computer case on which Linh worked in secret for the following year.
Camille settled on the eluted leather sofa, opening her box of noodles, while Linh lit her control screen where the visual dressing of Volta Info, this sober, slate grey and broken white bandeau, which the girl herself had drawn six months earlier.
On the monitor without the sound, the evening newspaper rebroadcasted the subject of the Alpha Corridor. The screen of Captain Thomas' tactical terminal was smeared with mud, followed by the face of the wounded soldier raised in the Puma.
Linh remained motionless in front of the screen, his long thin fingers placed on the edge of his drawing table.
"I chose this shade of slate and amber for the interface of military terminals last year,"Linh whispered without turning. Lazare had asked me for a pallet that does not tire the retina in the fog and removes any visual panic in the officer under fire.
When I drew it here under the window, listening to the Bach, they were only pixels and contrasts. And this afternoon, a captain had his soldiers' blood on his fingers touching my screen."
Camille placed his chopsticks and joined his sister in front of the monitor. She passed an arm around the size of the 19-year-old girl.
"Your interface allowed them to guide the helicopters in the fog without losing ten minutes reading a paper card, Linh, says Camille in a serious and gentle voice. Without this clarity, the soldier on the stretcher would have died at the bottom of this ravine."
"I know,"Linh replied,"by pressing his cheek against Camille's temple. But that's what scares me, Cam.
The more we make the machine fluid, beautiful, transparent... the more those who make decisions up there forget the weight of the flesh. Lazare never forgets, I see him in his eyes when he looks at us, Minh and I, as if he knew exactly the price of a burnt village.
But the generals of Strasbourg? Ministers in Brussels?
And tomorrow, when tens of millions of people will be permanently connected to our civilian networks? Who will stop them from believing that the real world is just a screen that we erase with one click?"
Camille looked through the window at the black peaks of the Meudon forest that were swinging under the wind of January. In the reflection of the glass, Linh's face and his face were superimposed on the silent images of the Balkan mountains.
"That's why we're both here,"Camille said with a quiet determination. Lazare built the armor, Minh and Karim forged the engine.
But you and I, Linh, we hold the mirror. As long as I run Volta Info, I'll put the mud and blood in front of them every time they want to play with their own gods.
And you will ensure that their screens never become blind coffins."
Linh smiled, resumed his charcoal on the drawing table and drew a clear line, almost avenging, the aluminium curve of his next machine. On Meudon night, the Balkan war continued to scold through satellites, but at the very heart of the technological citadel, the two sisters had just drawn their own front line.