by Project Itoh
I knew that his paramilitary outfit’s MO was to go around to the far-flung villages of the country, drafting all able-bodied youths into their ranks. We were heading toward one such village right now. I knew that the paramilitary group, headed by the ex-brigadier-general-who-now-called-himself-defense-minister-of-the-interim-government, was engaged in the modern equivalent of witch-hunting: terrorist-hunting. That’s what they called it, anyway—shooting dead any signs of opposition, only leaving alive youths who might be useful if impressed into service.
I could see a town in the distance through the front windshield, and I supposed that it would have been subjected to the same “with-us-or-against-us” massacre/draft. An orange light emanating from the town lit up the undersides of the clouds in the sky. Huge chunks of the town were blazing, no doubt. Thick plumes of smoke rose into the sky, reminding me of a painting I once saw of Chinese dragons.
“Looks like we’re getting close, boys. Let’s keep it together,” Williams called out from the cargo bay.
We pulled our scarves up over our mouths. A pathetic attempt at a disguise, maybe, but all of us knew full well that it would probably be enough to get us through any checkpoints.
We entered what once must have been a picturesque little town, now reduced to rubble. The old buildings that had been built and cared for over the years were now little more than a collection of bullet-ridden empty husks, such was the double whammy from the aerial bombardment at the start of the war and the mortar shelling that came later.
Soon there were people, and we arrived at a checkpoint. The guard beckoned for us to stop. Alex, who spoke the local lingo fluently, barked out gruffly that we were on patrol and were running short of food and fuel. The guard nodded and waved his handheld wand out toward each of us in term.
The blood-covered dog tags in their protective gel coatings that were in our stomachs did their jobs. We were identified as the soldiers we had recently killed, and the guard took down our details, cross-referenced them with the data on his laptop, and, satisfied, waved us on our way.
Candy from a baby, I thought, not for the first time.
The guard couldn’t have cared less whether we were actually the people our IDs said we were. It was as if the only thing that mattered was the fact that the tags in our body said that we were someone.
Unthinkably lax security by American standards—but then, we were the most advanced capitalist nation in the world. Unlike this two-bit outfit, our data protection was enforced with sophisticated biometrics. In the States you couldn’t just “identify” yourself. You had to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you were who you were claiming to be. They’d built a public database for exactly this purpose. Hell, Domino’s wouldn’t even hand over your pizza until you had your thumbprint checked by their finger reader.
In comparison, the soldier back there was satisfied by the simple ID that showed up in a simple database—who knows, maybe even something as basic as Microsoft Excel. The very fact that there was some sort of computerized data seemed to be enough. As was more or less the case in all countries suffering from this sort of civil war. When your country’s falling apart at the seams, computer literacy just isn’t a priority, I guess.
We pulled up alongside the ruins of an old church and dismounted from the truck.
“Gunfire, sir,” said Alex. Sure enough, there was the intermittent sound of single shots being fired in the distance, somewhere to the east of the town. “I guess they haven’t got this town totally under control yet.”
“That’s one possibility,” said Leland as he inspected his dirty AK. A bit of mud wasn’t going to stop it from working, but I guess he missed the SOPMODs that we’d had to ditch earlier. Still, he didn’t forget to remove the first bullet from each full magazine: when the magazines were absolutely full they pressed down on the spring that released them, meaning that the bullets wouldn’t always eject smoothly. “Although if I had to guess, I’d say it’s more likely they’re executing people.”
With that, we walked quietly into enemy territory. Here and there were buildings still aflame, with civilian corpses scattered about the place. There was a woman with a shapely physique, who you could have called attractive were it not for the fact that half her face had been blown off, with the light from the flames illuminating the contents of her head for all to see. She held a hand attached to the arm of a child. Her son? Her daughter? Hard to tell, as it really was only the arm of a child that she held on to; the body had been blown away.
Over there—Alex tapped my shoulder, and I looked toward where he was indicating. The town square, full of youths in civilian clothing, lined up in rows, having ID tags implanted into their shoulders. Children being transformed into armed insurgents.
Children, still pliable and malleable, abducted and turned into soldiers. In fact, some of the children might not have been abducted—plenty came forth voluntarily. If you became a soldier you were given an ID tag, after all.
Ordinary ID tags at that—no different from ones used to sort inventory in a market stall. Only now they were being subcutaneously injected into the armed insurgents and drafted children. The ID tags being used in this war—including the ones that we all had in our stomachs—were no doubt mass produced cheaply in some factory somewhere, Oklahoma or Osaka or anywhere else in the world.
In countries like this one where the government had all but disintegrated due to civil war, it wasn’t at all uncommon for family registers and birth records to be lost completely. Citizenship papers? Who was to tell whether you were even actually a citizen? Was someone going to take a census, dodging bullets as they did so? Sure, you might live here, work here, grow crops on the land, but you’re not from here anymore—how could you be, when no one knew where here was? No, all you had left was your name, and you had to hope that was enough for you to get by in what now passed for the local community.
So, if you became a soldier, you’d be tagged, you’d have an identity that the armed insurgents’ portable devices could read and process. You’d become somebody. A number on their free spreadsheet, with a record as to whether you lived or died. Even here, out in the boondocks, in a country where all semblance of rule of law had long since broken down, it still seemed the most natural thing in the world that people could—and should—be organized according to what was essentially an inventory management system.
That was how the children of the region became soldiers. So they could advance in the eyes of somebody—not even their fellow countrymen, as they didn’t exist anymore. So that they could move up in rank, in status, as an item of infantry. They went to war so that they could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Snickers and M&Ms and cans of Pringles.
As for the four of us who were now marching through the nightscape of this foreign land, we were a bit more sophisticated than supermarket merchandise. Our built-in internal sensors that monitored our physical status were able to transmit detailed information back home. Not something your typical merchandise tag can do.
It wasn’t really much of a choice for the kids, of course. Basically they either joined the ranks of the men who had just killed their parents and raped their sisters and girlfriends, or they died along with the rest.
Leland had been right. The source of the intermittent gunfire was a firing squad.
There was a large circular pit that had apparently been dug in the ground by a piece of heavy machinery that probably would have been used on a construction site during peacetime. Men and women were lined up on the edge. The executioners gave the signal, the AK rifles were fired, and the men and women, shot in the head and torso, toppled into the pit.
I’ve seen corpses burnt to a crisp before. The skin blackens like charbroiled chicken. Muscle shrinks when it’s cooked, causing the brittle bones to bend or snap, and when you look at the resultant mess you can’t help but realize that humans are really just physical objects. By which I mean just a mass of raw ingredients. When it comes down to it a dead body really is just a thing, l
ike any other thing.
The soldiers pushed the crumpled bodies further into the hole. A dead body isn’t exactly light, and with the corpses that didn’t conveniently fall backward into the pit, it took the soldiers much more than the couple of light kicks you’d imagine it would to push the lifeless bodies over the edge. In many cases, the soldiers had to kneel down and really put their backs into it.
Now, it’s not as if I was unaffected by the scene in front of us, even if I had seen it all before. This was a blatant mass murder of innocent townsfolk, plain and simple—nothing can ever desensitize you to that completely. But the fact was that I’d seen so much casual, meaningless death in my life that I no longer felt the impulse to stop it at all costs. After all, it wasn’t as if we were much better equipped than the soldiers here. We might have been able to take them, or we might not. Anyway, we weren’t here as stakeholders. We were here as outsiders, neutral observers who had but one single-minded purpose: to kill our target.
Not only that, I was carrying the responsibility for both the mission and my three subordinates on the team. We might have been able to rescue some of the people dying in front of our eyes, but it would mean the mission would end in failure for sure, and the crazed ex-brigadier general would escape to kill and kill and kill again—creating more innocent victims that would otherwise be saved if we took our target out now.
Sure, some people might have called it a moral crossroads. All I knew was that now wasn’t the time to meditate on the finer points of ethical semantics.
To be thick-skinned is to be enlightened. So, develop a thicker skin than the next man.
So, as usual, we hardened our hearts, thickened our skins, and proceeded with the mission. This was made easier by the fact that our target was approaching, or rather our two targets were about to have their rendezvous. We finished the necessary emotional adjustments so that we could cope with the tragic scene in front of us, and in an instant we were ready for action.
The ex-brigadier general who now styled himself defense minister led a peripatetic existence. He was always on the move, precisely to reduce the threat of assassination. Similar to what Saddam Hussein had done for many years to avoid capture. They say that Hitler too used to change his plans and his movements at the last minute, also to reduce the risk to his person. Once the sheer scale of the humanitarian disaster in the region became known to the world, the US decided to consider assassination as a tactic to help curb the chaos, but by that time the defense minister knew what to expect and what precautions to take to minimize the risk. After all, in his former incarnation he had been the beneficiary of training from the very same US intelligence apparatus that was now trying to assassinate him …
Which was why it was only dumb luck that allowed our people to happen upon the intelligence that our targets would be meeting in this former mosque at this time. If we let this opportunity slip, who knew when the next opportunity would come about to stop the murderous yet prudent ex-brigadier general? We simply couldn’t afford to fail. And that was why we were able to abandon the dying people in front of us to their fates.
“I guess we’re all going to hell,” said Alex. Young, devout Alex, with his master’s degree in Catholic theology. How he managed to cope with seeing hell on a daily basis in his work I never could work out. I guess he must have had some sympathetic—and very discreet—padre to whom he could make a copious confession after every mission.
“As an atheist, I don’t really have a reply to that, I’m afraid,” I said.
“You don’t have to believe in God to know that hell’s real,” said Alex, a mournful smile passing his lips.
“Sure it exists. It’s right here! Just take a look around you!” Williams said with a laugh. Well, if this was hell, our job was to go to hell and back. Mr. Dante, eat your heart out.
But Alex disagreed, pointing at his own head. “Respectfully, sir, no. Hell is here. Inside your head. Inside your mind. Seared into your cerebral cortex. This scene around us, it might be hellish, but it’s not hell. After all, you can escape from all this. Just close your eyes and it’s gone. And when you get back to America and return to normal life, the scene in front of us now will be gone forever. But you can’t escape from hell. Because hell’s right here, inside your mind, and you carry it around with you.”
“Is that where heaven is too?” asked Leland, who was also laughing now. Leland was, I knew, a regular Sunday churchgoer, but in his case it was more of a social thing, to fit in with the neighbors. More habit than anything else. I doubted that most of your typical flock of Sunday sheep had the same level of fervent religiosity as young Alex.
“Who knows,” Alex told Leland. “I know that hell is inside us because I’ve seen it. But I’ve never seen heaven. Heaven is the realm of God, after all. Man’s feeble mind isn’t enough to contain it in all its glory. I suppose you need to actually die before you can experience heaven.”
“Ladies, ladies,” said Williams, butting in, “let’s leave the theological debates to one side for the time being, shall we? We’ve got a mosque to infiltrate, and I doubt that these shitty little disguises we’re now wearing are going to be much use when it comes to getting us into the inner sanctum.”
“Okay.” Time for me to take charge. “They may have wall-mounted ID readers installed, so let’s remove our tags. The guys they belonged to were just foot soldiers—there’s no reason to believe they’d have clearance for a secure area like the one we’re penetrating.”
On my orders, we all pulled the strings attached to our soft palates and the dog tags out of our stomachs. They were all wrapped in string, encased in the pale blue protective gel, and still glistening with the blood of their original owners.
We slipped into a nearby ruin of a house and buried them in the ground. Then we went over our plans one last time. We sprayed ourselves in nanocoating and activated the Environmental Camouflage software. The disguise algorithms generated by the camouflage patterns fired through our systems, transmitting through the natural salts in our bodies to the nanocoating layer that covered our clothes and equipment.
The change was instantaneous. We disappeared into the background of the bullet-riddled ruins.
“As planned, then. Leland and Williams to wait here on standby, ready to secure our path of retreat in the event of unexpected developments. Alex and I to infiltrate the mosque and strike when the two targets meet. All clear?”
“Sure thing, boss,” said Williams. “Just try and keep it down, huh? I could do without having to take on the whole town in a shootout afterwards. There’s only four of us, right?”
Williams was fucking with us; that was his way of diffusing the tension. Of course there were “only” four of us. Four was exactly the right number for this sort of mission. That’s the way it was—the way it had been ever since the Second World War. Fewer than four and you ran the risk of coming up short; you only needed to lose one guy and the whole mission was in jeopardy. More than four and you lost the clean, clear line of command, and it also became exponentially more difficult to move covertly.
The four-man formation was first perfected by the British SAS on their anticommunist ops in the tropical jungles of Malaya. The real advantage was that it was possible to subdivide into two smaller battle units of two-man cells. The two-man cell, or buddy system, was effectively the smallest unit in Special Forces ops. Solo operation was virtually unheard of.
Two units of two. That was where we were at as we moved into the final stage of the plan. I was actually more used to buddying with Williams, but as we were the two ranking soldiers on this mission it didn’t make sense to have us both in the same cell.
Alex and I moved smoothly and silently out of the ruined house toward the mosque walls. There were plenty of guards on the lookout, but the combination of our Environmental Camouflage, the route we took, and the cover of darkness combined to form the perfect storm of disguise. We were indistinguishable from the ruins that surrounded us.
When we
arrived at the mosque I gave the hand signal for us to split. Given the darkness and the thoroughness of our disguises it should have been virtually impossible for us to have even seen each other’s hand signals, but the software in our eyes was able to make out the contours of the other person and transmit their outline straight to each other’s retinas. Alex nodded to show he understood and started moving toward the rear entrance of the mosque.
As long as we kept close to the ground and the walls, the combination of nightfall and our nanocoating disguise meant that we were for all practical intents and purposes undetectable without infrared scanning technology. I crept alongside the mosque wall until I found a hole that went underground.
In the distance I could still hear the sound of gunfire as the civilians were murdered. I put the sounds behind me as I started crawling under the floorboards and into the mosque. This once-holy place, built to praise Allah, now reeked of stale gunpowder and rotting human flesh. I was sure that the mosque would be full of decomposing corpses. Moreover, amid the carnage would be the source of all the trouble—the so-called defense minister who was running the whole show.
As I continued crawling under the floorboards, I heard classical music emanating from a point in the distance. I would love to say that it was Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries or something similarly cartoonish for the situation. But it wasn’t. It was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. A beautiful melody, singularly inappropriate for this moonless night where the only light in the sky was from the burning fat of the corpses as they lit the clouds above with an eerie crimson hue. I scurried toward the source of the sound and before long found a hole in the floor above me.
