The Colonel shifted Kickoff’s weapon on its bipod and trailed the eerie scope across the wrecked and glowing landscape. Repeated bombings had reduced the local storage tanks to fragments of riveted steel. Spindly trees, ten years old, grew from the tortured heaps of black tarmac and bad concrete. The hotter surfaces glowed vividly in the scope’s computer lens. It looked uncanny, surgical, as if the veins of the earth had opened and bled.