After a few kilometers, the mines thin out, until the road is essentially clear. We send up a drone to check how far it stays that way. Two kliks down the road, there’s the wreckage of an Albanian helicopter. Not far beyond that is a trail of bodies, which only gets thicker down the way. To see further, I bring the nose of the drone up. That’s when I see something bloody weird. Another klik away is a figure. At first, it seems like a vaguely humanoid figure 3 meters tall. Then I zoom in with the drone’s camera, and it resolves itself into a man on a horse. There’s no chance of it being some rustic who can’t afford a car. The man’s wearing what looks like a gas mask, but I can just make out a hose that must connect to an external air supply- pretty fancy, the best thing the Serbs have. The horse has its own mask, which at first glance looks like a feedbag. The horse itself looks pretty odd: It’s short, wouldn’t be much higher than the man’s waist if he dismounted, but quite stocky, almost like one of those big Clydesdale carthorses reduced to 1/4 scale. That’s not as strange as it seems; look at a Mongolian wild horse, or a Pleistocene painting of a horse, and it won’t look different from this. What’s a lot stranger is the coloring, which is light gray spots on dark gray. It doesn’t look natural, more like mange.

I take this in in a few seconds, and I’m already calling it in. “We’ve got a live one on feature 4-1789,” says I. “He’s on a horse, possibly of genetically-engineered origin, and wearing top-level NBC gear. It must be a Serb officer or official. Instructions?” I’m thinking it’s already too late to do anything about him. He’s taken out a pair of electronic binoculars. He looks at the drone, then sights down the valley toward us. The response comes: “Mark him and track him, but take no hostile action. Our orders are to take officers and officials alive.” But the guy on the horse is obviously under no such constraints. He draws a four-barreled flare gun, and lets fly with all barrels. I take evasive action, but it’s not enough. The shells are seeker air-burst rockets. I catch a glimpse of one changing course as the drone pulls up. Then the drone shakes, and the feed starts cutting in and out. The last I see is a mountain very close up.

We go down the valley, but find no sign of the man on the horse. Then we move on. Soon, the bodies start coming thick: We pass more than 200 in the space of two kilometers. Perhaps one body in three has purple lesions, usually in easily concealed spots such as the armpits or the groin, and one in five has blood around the mouth- both symptoms of bubonic plague. But this is never the cause of death. They have instead died by violence. We find them in groups, usually next to a vehicle. The story told by the remains is always the same: the vehicle stops, and the men get ordered out. Then one or two of them destroy the vehicle, kill the other men, and then committed suicide. Sometimes, one or more run away, only to be shot. A few times, the men get the better of their executioner and then flee, either in the vehicle or on foot- the latter if they’re smart. Their trails usually end in a shot-up hulk or a greasy smear in the snow, testament to the ruthless efficiency of the helicopters. However, the helicopters don’t win without a fight. We find the wreckage of two more in the midst of the destroyed ground vehicles. I suspect that it was their loss that allowed some of the mutineers to reach the mine fields. We conclude that this fratricidal massacre has occurred in the last day, while we were on our way to help.

A kilometer or so down the line, we start finding civilians among the dead, looks like a mix of Serbs and Albies. For once, they’re all facing the same direction- away from the valley. They’re less concentrated than the soldiers, occurring singly or in small groups all along the valley. Almost all of them have been shot, and about 70% have lesions. We find one nasty scene where someone was nailed to the ground with tent pegs, had his head bashed in, and then set on fire with a steady stream from an oil drum with holes shot in it. Whoever did it knew that gasoline burns too fast to burn up a corpse without a steady supply. Business as usual in the Balkans. But there’s some odd details. The head trauma is to the back of the head, but the body’s face-up. So, he was probably hit before he was nailed down, and after the blow, that should have been entirely unnecessary. The hands are even weirder. The stakes weren’t put in quite right: through the palm instead of the wrist. In the palm, there isn’t any bone to stop the nail from tearing out. Incredibly, that’s what the victim did. But how could he have lived long enough to do it?