Ekstrom froze the video clip on his widescreen monitor at two minutes thirty-three seconds, and scribbled some notes on his iPad. He hated deskwork as a rule — but this wasn’t so bad. He zoomed with the SmoothVision slider, and looked at the range indicator on the weapon. 780 meters to the wall of the Afghan compound. The infrasound weapon was run at 95 per cent power with focused beam for 85 seconds.
He resumed the video and slid forward to eleven minutes on the clip, to see the first results of the firing. Two kids lying prone in a dusty lane, a woman in her twenties and a young girl in a doorway, an old man with a donkey collapsed on top of him. Then a video of the inside one of the “dwellings”, as he was meant to call them. Shitholes more like. The video showed a woman lying half-naked in a scuzzy bedroom with clay walls.
And so on. In the eight and a half minutes between the weapon discharge at a range of nearly half a mile, and his men reaching the site, the whole village had stayed incapacitated. Four had been killed by the eighty-five second burst. Three children under five, including one breast-feeding baby lying with his inert mother, and an elderly man. These small children had suffered major hemorrhage in the ears and lungs. They had died from inhalation of blood, with no one able to help them.
Ekstrom had ordered the bodies brought from the village and laid out together under the trees. The first sign of recovery from the villagers was at twelve minutes, and the last at twenty-two.
Forty-four adult villagers and adolescents had been used for the second phase of the work. They had been tied in pairs to trees, and exposed to the weapon at a range of 250 metres through a one metre thick compound wall. Varying power discharges and exposure times were tested, with the figures written neatly on their foreheads in black marker pen. Those who survived the test, by reason of having a lower dose of the sound weapon, Ekstrom personally dispatched them with a single shot of his.22 automatic to the forehead, after ensuring their heart function and blood pressure had been recorded, along with their time of exposure, in black permanent marker on their chests.
The mean exposure of the infrasound weapon required for human adult death was 113 seconds, with a standard deviation of 25 seconds
Details of non-human deaths were not recorded, which in hindsight had been an error. The men responsible for letting the two Afghan boys escape were docked two days pay each. The village was declared sterile of native Afghans at 13:34 in the afternoon and the airstrike to dispose of the collateral bodies called at 14:13. Ekstrom ordered his men to move out 14:07, returning with three men on foot at 14:33 to verify that the bodies had been destroyed.
Though he enjoyed the detail and neatness of a job well done, Ekstrom would be lying if he said he enjoyed anything more than the incendiary weapon striking at the bodies through the line of trees. He watched it a dozen times, zooming in and out. In real time and in slow motion, Ekstrom watched the trees waving gracefully in the firestorm, and the skin peeling back from the faces of his victims. Most gratifying.
Sometimes he had to pinch himself. Did he really get paid to do this? It was his dream job.