THE END OF WAR (Watty Award Winner)

2

Chartreuse

Northeast Afghanistan

Near the Pakistan border

3:30 p.m., local time

May 29

The wait is almost over.

Chartreuse hasn't moved in 14 days. Not to sleep. Not to eat. Not to brush the dust from its eyes. Not to coax away the Halys pit viper, Gloydius halys, burrowed beneath its belly. Prone against a rocky mountainside overlooking a modest, mud-and-timber house by a small stream one kilometer away, it's as if Chartreuse isn't even there.

The naked eye would see it as so.

Chartreuse's "skin" mimics the arid surroundings in real-time. Should some unsuspecting person trip over the obscured ACM, Chartreuse could present itself as one of the locals, complete with a vocabulary of Dari or Pashto.

But an interruption isn't likely to happen, in part because of the awesome camouflage, and also due to the rifle Chartreuse has held without a flinch for two weeks. Locals know what a gun means, so they'd keep walking by. If they could see it.

Such an encounter took place only a few days ago, when two children wandered up the mountainside from the house below. They had no idea they nearly stepped on the barrel of Chartreuse's rifle. After crossing paths with a viper farther up the mountainside, the children went back to the house and never returned.

Which is why Chartreuse is here in the first place.

Intelligence from Roja's "enhanced interrogation" identified the house below as the location of an infamous ISIS leader. Known in the English-speaking world as simply The Butcher, he fled Syria for this remote and rugged part of Afghanistan. ISIS has few allies, and sympathizers from the former Baath Party in Iraq had lost their enthusiasm for sheltering war criminals, so The Butcher skirted his many enemies with a trip into Afghanistan inside a truck loaded with dried figs.

The Butcher found his soft spot near the Pakistan border, where he surrounded himself with local children, feeding them sweets and, presumably, dried figs to keep them at the mud house he rented from a shepherd. This sudden turn toward the paternal came from a place of paranoia rather than love. He'd convinced himself that the U.S. wouldn't strike a house full of children.

And he was right, except for two things.

First, The Butcher personally executed 144 Syrian citizens he accused of homosexual activity, hurling them one by one from rooftops. He also ordered the grisly deaths of another 987 members of a religious minority. As a matter of record, 17,711 innocent civilians would still be alive today had he been shot dead when the last opportunity to do so came about two years ago. And that's only the deaths the international community could confirm. Those buried en masse in ditches remain out of sight. In short, being a wanted man in dozens of countries, The Butcher's demise was more of "when," not "if."

Second, a shot from a sniper on the mountainside is much more discriminate than a bomb dropped from one of the U.S.'s unmanned aerial vehicles, colloquially called "drones," that ceaselessly patrol the skies.

The trick is making the shot count without hitting one of the children living with The Butcher. Because of the layout of the house against the mountainside, such a shot would be impossible for even a world-class sharpshooter.

Unless that sharpshooter is a walking computer.

The shot needs to connect inside a three-inch gap between the entrance to the house and the spot next to the door where a pickup truck normally pulls up for various errands. The Butcher might be twisted, but he's not stupid. When the truck stops, the window is rolled down and a couple of children are hurried into the cab. The Butcher climbs in last.

The timing must be supernaturally perfect. For the shot to connect successfully, it takes recognizing The Butcher's profile through the three-inch gap, calculating environmental conditions, aiming and firing in a fraction of a second without hitting any of the children. As such, the shot must be fired in blind anticipation before The Butcher actually exits the house. And it must be done from a kilometer away, or a little less than two-thirds of a mile, after two weeks of hiding on the mountainside without relief.

That's why Chartreuse performs a self-check every 30 seconds. It's never once found an error.

A shot that misses its nearly impossible target would equal not only a blown opportunity, but also the chance of killing an innocent. Chartreuse's algorithms, burning hot in the background, offer plenty of alternatives, and they're all messy. If the End of War Project is to gain political traction, its marquee achievement must not only be well beyond human ability, it must also be clean. However, not risking the shot isn't an option, either. It'll take years of further intelligence gathering before another opportunity presents itself. The Butcher is like a phantom, and there's no telling how many innocent people will die at his hands in that time.

The Butcher doesn't leave the house often, usually relying on couriers for supplies and communication. Today, however, is different. The intelligence Roja garnered indicates The Butcher needs treatment for an infection in his foot, and a house call isn't possible. Chartreuse digested the information into an algorithm, adjusting for a height differential; The Butcher will hobble when exiting the house. It's yet another variable that a human would struggle with, but not for Chartreuse.

Dust rises in the two-track road leading to the house. Chartreuse's programming taps into a live camera feed from a satellite in orbit miles overhead and zooms in on the dust. It's a pickup truck. The pickup truck.

Chartreuse's sniper rifle, an M24A3 chambered in .338 Lapua adapted for ACM use, is already trained on the door to the house, as it has been for some time. If the shot is successful, it won't be the longest on the record books for humans. It will be, however, for ACMs, and it will likely stand only so long as the next extreme scenario presents itself.

The pickup truck slows as it approaches the house. Anyone inside is shielded by the glare from the windshield, but the infrared embedded in Chartreuse's eyes detects a single driver. In a fraction of a second, the ACM confirms that fact with satellite imagery, which also monitors the area with infrared.

Next up is an infrared sweep of the house. Chartreuse sees four distinct heat signatures inside; three small and one large. It's been monitoring them as a way to anticipate when The Butcher approaches the door, but it needs satellite confirmation to be doubly sure given the circumstance. Everything checks out. The only thing left for Chartreuse is to run a final self-check and continue waiting in silence.

The waiting pays off as the pickup rolls to a stop. The passenger side rests a few inches from the front door of the house. The driver leans over and wags a clear container containing what Chartreuse sees are "brides fingers," a confection similar to baklava. The smaller heat signatures move toward the door. Or, more specifically, the sweet treats. One by one, three children crawl into the truck's cab through the open passenger side window. They each grab a "finger" and then exit through a rear window into the open bed of the vehicle. It's a trusty tactic to keep U.S. drones at bay; make sure the human shields are visible from the sky.

Except a drone isn't lining up for a shot from the mountainside.

In line with its programming, Chartreuse taps into a database stored in Washington, D.C., to further confirm that the larger heat signature inside the house now hobbling toward the door matches The Butcher's historical signatures. There's a 99% match. The Butcher's time on Earth will be over in four steps.

Three steps.

Two steps.

Chartreuse pulls the trigger.

Bang.