by Project Itoh
How like us, really. Such is human nature, and what can you do other than shrug your shoulders and accept it? And so I did accept it, and so my mother was embalmed and placed neatly in her little casket. Embalmed according to the statutes of the District of Columbia. After that, she was past the point of no return—no more ambiguity as to whether she was dead or not.
She was the last person to die by my own hands.
“Captain Shepherd. Come in, Captain Shepherd.”
I was awoken by a voice calling my name. I must have nodded off while trying to review the file in front of me. I touched my cheek instinctively before I even realized why I was doing so: because I didn’t like the idea that the loadmaster who woke me might have seen me crying in my sleep, as I always did when I visited the land of the dead.
“Time to wake up, sir. Fifteen minutes until blastoff.”
Having said what he needed to say, the loadmaster left me to my thoughts.
Blastoff. No kidding—that was the right term. These days HALO-style anachronistic parachute maneuvers have been superseded by Intruder Pods: sleek, high-speed pods that kept electromagnetic waves down to a minimum, making detection by enemy radar virtually impossible. The cargo hold in which I sat was lined with a row of black cylinders, like giant ballpoint pens, and the maintenance staff were primed and ready to go. I looked around at my surroundings in the belly of the Flying Seaweed Craft to see the other guys from my unit hustling and bustling all around me.
“Dude, how the hell do you sleep in the middle of this giant pneumatic drill?” Williams shouted as he approached me. “That turbulence back there bashed the hell out of us.”
I told him I hadn’t noticed.
“Jesus Christ. I’ve never seen anyone who could zone out like you can. I bet you can’t even feel your own dick when you have a boner.”
It wasn’t surprising that the Flying Seaweed Craft was shaking so much; it was a warplane after all. It wasn’t set up to be a luxury passenger liner. The actual technology involved in these craft might have improved by leaps and bounds, but amenities for the comfort of the poor infantry who actually had to ride on the bloody things remained rock-bottom priority. Welcome to my world.
The Flying Seaweed Craft were a weird oblong shape in order to reduce their electromagnetic footprint to an absolute minimum. It was only because of the sophisticated piloting software that they were even able to fly at all. And when it was almost a miracle that they could even take off, let alone not crash, there wasn’t a lot of time left to worry about how smooth the ride was.
“I don’t know about me feeling my dick, but I’ve never had any complaints from your mom,” I fired back at Williams. “Anyhow, don’t you have other things to worry about, like getting ready for the drop?”
“Nice one. And speak for yourself, dude. I’m all set. I’m just hoping you’re not going to fuck anything up too badly.”
“Funny, your mom also said that last time I saw her …” I answered, as Williams sat down next to me. Truth be told, Williams wasn’t so much a trash-talker as a shit-stirrer. He’d gossip about anything, trying to take you into his confidence over the stupidest things. Who’d picked up a new piece of ass, what perversions so-and-so was into lately—the more banal the gossip, the more likely he was to be there whispering it in your ear like a girl.
“By the way, Clavis, what’s your honest opinion about our orders on this mission?” he asked me.
Now, this was actually a question that had been troubling all of us. Not that anyone had voiced it publicly, of course. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die, such was our unwritten law. For most of us anyway. Considering he was supposed to be elite Special Forces, Williams had this abnormal fascination with trivia and an unusually loose tongue and casual manner to go with it. As a result, we were always being treated to gems such as “Did you know that Charlize Theron witnessed her own mother shoot her father dead when she was fifteen years old? Actually saw it happen right in front of her own eyes?”
“Who knows,” I said, noncommittal. “It’s going to be tight. Taking two targets out simultaneously isn’t easy at the best of times. Unless they both arrive at the appointed rendezvous spot at exactly the right time, there are a lot of variables that could mess things up.”
“No, dude, I’m not talking about the logistics,” said Williams, who was somewhat antsy now. “I’m talking about Target B. The American?”
“Well, there are Americans all over the world,” I said, and then I looked at him and sighed. “Or are you trying to say you have no problem killing the little brown people of the world, but that your conscience troubles you when it’s a fellow countryman’s neck on the line? Is—”
“Hell, no. He’s one evil twisted sonofabitch of a countryman. My conscience is just fine,” Williams said, cutting me off. “It’s just there’s something about his profile that’s bothering me. It’s like there’s some vital clue that’s been whitewashed out of the report that we were given. I’m not the only one saying this either—the other guys think the same, that it’s impossible to work out what sort of person he is. We just can’t get a mental image of who he is.”
“Other than being one evil twisted sonofabitch of a countryman, you mean.”
Williams shrugged his shoulders. “Well, that part’s not hard to figure out, is it? Our job is to go after the bad guys. If this guy is our target, it stands to reason that he must be evil, right?”
A nice, simple worldview. Williams still believed, after everything, that his country could do no wrong. Of course, this sort of tunnel vision was fostered by the job. Demanded, even. Without it, how would one be able to face strangers, look them in the eye, and kill, kill, and kill again?
The easiest way to make sure that you could sleep at night with a clear mind and an unburdened conscience was simply not to think too hard on things. A simple ideology for a simple mind.
When you’re standing at an ethical crossroads, sometimes it’s easier not to look before you leap.
To be thick-skinned is to be enlightened. So aim to develop a thicker skin than the next man.
Embrace the tautology: we’re right because we’re right.
An ordinary soldier has to kill that undefined, undifferentiated mass called “the enemy” in order to protect himself. And although in Special Forces we might have seemed more like high-tech, elite assassins, in many ways our role was closer to that of the ordinary soldier. The only difference was that it was our job to go one step further, to define and to differentiate that enemy for operational purposes. But it was still easier all around if, emotionally, we treated them as that same undifferentiated mass that the common soldier was firing at, so that the weight of all the individual lives we snuffed out didn’t rest too heavily on our shoulders.
Some soldiers still broke down, of course. Think back to the time when the US drafted in counselors by the hundreds in order to try and rehabilitate their troops stationed in Iraq before sending them home for reintegration into society. They set up repatriation camps where those on deck to return to the States would be able to experience a simulated version of American society. That’s how Baghdad came to be one big US-themed summer camp.
The soldiers who had been living in the parallel universe that is war now had to try and remember what it was like to go shopping at K-Mart. How much does a Snickers bar cost again? And so it came to pass that the men and women warped by the battlefields of Iraq wouldn’t be allowed to return to the real America without passing through the virtual one first.
The human psyche is a fragile thing. The more you dwelt on the people that you’ve killed, imagining the lives that they led and would have continued to lead had you not killed them, the more likely it was that you’d suffer emotional scarring. Which meant that we in Special Forces were particularly susceptible to this sort of thing—after all, unlike the ordinary soldier who fired into the crowds, we killed individuals, face to face. So much more stressful for us.
Or maybe the likes of Williams a
nd I only thought this way because we were Americans, cosseted and wrapped up in our little Western ethnocentric bubbles. There were plenty of places still left in the world where life was cheap or even completely without value. I knew this. I’d been to them.
In fact we were entering just such a hellish place right now, penetrating the darkness in our sleek black aircraft. We were hurtling down toward the badlands below, and when we emerged we knew we would be entering pandemonium. A scene of unimaginable tragedy that was somehow tinged with manic glee.
A scene right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, in other words.
The intercom from the cockpit sounded inside my ear: “We’re five minutes into enemy airspace, but no sign of antiaircraft fire and no response from their missile systems. We’re proceeding smoothly, and all signs are we’ll avoid enemy detection. Looks like we’ve caught them napping, gentlemen.”
All operatives on this sort of secret mission had internal transmitters and hands-free receivers built into our bodies. Other high-tech devices too: software to pick up and decipher the faintest of murmurs, so that what’s imperceptible to our surroundings is decoded and transmitted to the rest of the team. This reconstructed speech sounded nothing like your real speech of course. It was an artificial representation of what you would have sounded like, an imaginary construct that existed somewhere between your voice box and the speakers that it was relayed to.
“Our Stealth Paint strikes again. It’s absorbing all the radar,” Williams said nonchalantly. “If it weren’t for our IFF telling our guys back on the ground our position, I doubt they’d be able to spot us either.”
“Ten minutes till drop. Start wrapping yourselves up, boys. And good luck.”
“Here we go.” I patted Williams on the back. He headed into his pod without another word. The reason the pods were matte black was not to block detection by electromagnetic rays, but rather to block infrared. The loadmaster blasted out “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” by Jimi Hendrix over the speakers. Psyching us up for battle.
I thought what I always thought when I watched the men around me climbing into their pods: they’re getting inside their coffins.
The dead who crawl back into their coffins. With their faces painted for camouflage they looked just like zombies. As if they were corpses reanimated by a voodoo spell and only now finally returning to their caskets where they belonged. As I watched the guys all around me lumber into their pods I couldn’t help but notice their glazed expressions, blank like so many dead fish.
Voodoo Child. I guess the loadmaster must have been thinking the same thing? I glanced over at him to see if I could read his expression, but his face was obscured by the oxygen mask he was now wearing to cope with the increased g-forces.
I decided to join the others and stood up to head to my pod. The rest of the unit were already ensconced in their own pods, arms folded across their chests, braced for impact. From my vantage directly above they looked more like real corpses than ever.
A scene from a movie flitted into my head. 2001: A Space Odyssey. The scene in which the astronauts in suspended animation were silently killed off by the computer, one by one.
I entered my pod and adopted the posture of a dead man. I crossed my arms across my chest like the Pharaohs of old. I looked up through the hatch to see the ceiling of the cargo bay, lights shining down on me. I could hear my own breathing resonating in the casket. I was a corpse. A corpse and a horseman of the apocalypse, ready to wreak a trail of death and destruction on the unsuspecting lands below.
Then out of nowhere I was overwhelmed by a bizarre wave of emotions.
“Pressurization in the hold commenced. Five minutes until guided ejection. Prepare for blastoff.”
Complicated emotions. Something like sadness, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on them.
I saw my mom in her hospital bed, lying sideways, eyes closed.
Embalmed, ready for her eternal sleep, and smiling.
The hatch door to my pod slid shut silently and smoothly, and the moment it sealed me off from the outside world I felt the reverberating thud of pressurization. Sound disappeared from the world, and all was darkness. This was what it was like to be buried.
Yes. I was now experiencing my mom’s death for myself. That’s why I was suddenly so overcome with emotion, I realized. That was why this high-altitude drop, normally so routine for people in my line of work, had taken on monumental significance.
There was a high-pitched creaking sound from the outside of the pod. The cargo bay was starting to lose pressure.
“The cargo bay is now fully decompressed. Three minutes until blastoff. Release rear hatches.”
Motors roared into action, and shortly afterward the locks were opened. The Seaweed’s belly opened up. The loadmaster was buffeted this way and that by the air currents streaming in through the open hatch, but those of us inside our pods heard and felt nothing.
“One minute until blastoff. Commence countdown.”
I wondered if this was how my mom went too. Being shut off from the light as the casket finally closed, then sealed into place with nails. On the journey to who-knows-where, trapped shut inside a box, buried for all eternity. Is that what happened to Mom—to all people, anywhere, since time immemorial when people first started sealing their dead in caskets?
The countdown continued inside my mind, but I wasn’t feeling the exhilaration I usually did just before a drop.
“We have blastoff. Godspeed to you all.”
I heard the thud that came with release: both heavy and gentle at the same time. Then gravity disappeared.
I was at the mercy of the laws of physics. Specifically, the law of gravity.
3
My coffin hurtled through the empty skies.
For a few seconds my equipment seemed to float all around me. Then the computer-guided descent kicked in, ending the free-fall section of the flight. The pods we were in had no propulsion mechanism. They were equipped with neither fuel nor engine. The trajectory could only be modified by external stability wings, on the same principle as hang gliders. They were piloted by changing the angles of fins on the wings—somewhere between a glider and a smart bomb. A smart bomb with a human stuffed inside where the explosives usually go.
The flying coffin wove its way through the currents, the wings skillfully guiding it toward its destination. The wings were made of living muscle tissue. In fact, the flying coffin that I was currently riding in—the Intruder Pod, to give it its official name—hardly contained any mechanical parts at all. Or rather, it was maybe easier to say that it was made almost entirely of living flesh. Not only could the pod control the wings, it was covered with cysts that were able to contract at will, causing the actual shape of the pod to warp so that it could adapt to and cut smoothly across the turbulent air currents.
The vibrations and the noise from the air hitting the pod started to die down. The angle of descent was growing less steep, and I could sense how the trajectory was being fine-tuned by the way the center of gravity started to shift. It looked like the pod was entering the final stage of its guidance mode.
I heard another thud, and suddenly my body weight was pressing down on my legs again. The drogue chute had opened up and absorbed most of the propulsive force. We were probably only a few meters from the earth by now. I braced myself for impact. That was about all you could do in one of these caskets. The pod’s speed completely killed, it was now falling to the ground.
Most of the shock on landing was absorbed by the drogue chute and the living tissue of the hull. The pod descended as gently as a falling dandelion spore. It was a bit like attaching a parachute to a ballpoint pen. The cylindrical pod hit the ground and then fell over to one side. The way the hull was built meant that it was weighted to one side, so there was not too much chance of it rolling on and on—and screwing up the soldier’s sense of balance in the process—unless its occupant was unlucky enough to land on one hell of a slope.
I hadn’t b
een unlucky, and it looked like my pod was now at rest. I released the lock and placed my hand on the hatch. I pushed the square door gently outward. Last time I had looked out it was at the ceiling of the Flying Seaweed Craft. Now I found myself looking up at a starry night sky.
After emerging from our pods and confirming that our positions were secure, we got to work in silence. Williams’s pod had landed not forty feet away. The other two guys were both within a four-hundred-foot radius. With smart bombs guided by GPS or laser or drones, you’d expect at least half of them to fall within the target radius; we were working at a level above all that. We never miss could have been our motto, even if it sounded a bit corny. But it was true that our technology for guided descent was about as good as it gets.
We put the pods into self-destruct mode, and the living tissue cultures had their supply of special enzymes cut off, resulting in quick cell death and rapid disintegration. The desiccated pods were like ancient Egyptian mummies, keratinized like ancient skin. We could now leave the husks to crumble, safe in the knowledge that before long they would be nothing more than fertilizer for the grassy plains on which they now lay.
All there was left for us to do was to get rid of the handful of mechanical parts not integrated into the pods’ biological structures. Even these parts were fully modularized though, and the clean-up operation was simple. We were finished in less than ten minutes. We were like teenagers dutifully tidying up after a campfire, silently removing all traces of clues that we had ever been there.
Only difference was, for us the party was just getting started …
We put our plan into action the second we finished our clean-up.
We needed to have everything finished before dawn broke. Assassination’s not really a daytime job. Ideally you want nobody to see you—including the target.
It was a four-man team: Williams, me, and two others. We’d all been in this scenario plenty of times—no greenhorns here. We followed the plan set by SOP: Alex, the skilled tracker, was the forward scout, and Leland, who graduated in the same class as Alex, on rearguard duty. Williams and I pushed through the darkness in the middle, keeping a vigilant lookout on either side.
