by Project Itoh
Humans can, on occasion, end up prioritizing love or morality over their own lives. We’re warped. We’re a perverse species, capable of sacrificing ourselves in the name of altruism. Never underestimate morality. As Lucia said, altruism is to a certain extent an evolutionary instinct and as such has taken root deep inside the brain. Plenty of soldiers were, quite rightly, afraid of this instinct taking hold in them, blindsiding them, controlling their actions when they least expected or needed it.
That’s what BEAR was for. To protect against that worst-case scenario. Because the worst-case scenario would inevitably result in death. There was no recovery from it. That was why the ability to protect yourself absolutely against the unexpected encroachment of emotion and morality, even if only for that specific window of time, that little festival called war, where you were detached from society and a different set of rules applied, was so powerful.
I had been made perfect by counseling and chemical substances.
My ARs showed me where my targets were. On this floor. The team had the whole hotel under control. Our targets were trapped.
And then a bullet brushed my cheek. I ducked for cover as soon as I perceived the pain, and Williams fired off a salvo at the window where the shot had come from. Had my sense of pain not been totally subdued, I would undoubtedly have been unable to react so quickly and efficiently. I acknowledged the pain in my body without feeling it in any sense at all. A sniper had fired the shot from the fourth floor of a building some distance away. About five meters in front of me there was a girl whose head had just been opened up like a rafflesia plant. The sniper must have thought she was one of us.
“What do we do now, boss?” Williams asked, scowling. “It’s not safe to advance. Should we crawl under the windowsill?”
I used my battle link to contact Leland. “Calling Blue Boy. This is Jaeger One. Your current location is the corridor on the opposite side of the target room from us, correct? Over.”
“Roger that, Jaeger One. But there are also windows on this side en route to the target room. I’d say odds on that there’s a sniper or two pointed this way too. Over.”
“Let’s smoke the corridors, boss,” said Williams.
I considered this idea for a couple of seconds but discarded it. “No.” It’d stop the sniper fire, but it’d also make it too difficult to fight off another enemy charge.
“Then I guess we just have to pray to God,” Williams said.
He wasn’t being facetious. I nodded and linked up to the Flying Seaweed.
“Come in, Seaweed. This is Jaeger One. What is your current location? Over.”
I heard a crackle and over that the voice of the pilot who had wished me Godspeed.
“Just overhead, circling the fireworks. Over.”
“Good. I need you to take a building out for us. We’ll identify the target with laser. Over.”
“Roger that, Jaeger One. Over and out.”
I nodded, and Williams stuck the tip of his rifle out of the window. He used the SOPMOD laser pointer and activated his ARs so that he could send a visual confirmation of the building where the sniper was hiding.
“Gotcha!” Williams smiled viciously. Data regarding our location and that of the target was beamed up to the Seaweed, and the pilot confirmed that the data had been received.
A few seconds later there was an almighty roar. Our hotel shook, and pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. I stuck my head quickly over the windowsill to see what was left of the sniper’s hideout collapse to the ground in the distance. The Seaweed had used one of its emergency Smart Bombs.
“Thanks, Seaweed!” Williams shouted, and he was already off, charging through the dusty corridor toward our final target. I shrugged inwardly and followed. Williams arrived at the door to the room, unstrapped a sawed-off shotgun from his back, and made sure it was loaded before blasting the door open. Meanwhile, I had a stun grenade timed perfectly, two seconds exactly, and I tossed it in. I plugged my ears and opened my mouth just before light and noise erupted on the other side of the doorway.
Williams and I charged in, followed by Leland’s unit, who had joined us. I pumped a bullet into the forehead of a boy who was still floundering in shock from the blast of the stun grenade, and while I was at it I took out a half-naked young girl who held a PPSh semiautomatic in her hands. No doubt she had been one of the boss’s bodyguard-slash-sex-slaves. In no time flat the leadership of Hindu India had surrendered unconditionally, either cowering in the back room or kneeling before us, hands in the air.
Williams brandished his sawed-off shotgun theatrically. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” he cried.
“Who are you people?” one of our prisoners asked. No trace of an accent—his English sounded pretty fluent. Well, it wasn’t too unusual for an intellectual elite or two to be mixed in with monkeys such as these. No doubt educated at Eton and Oxford.
“We’re agents of the ICC. You know there are arrest warrants out on you sons of bitches—who the hell were you expecting?” Williams laughed. A little too diabolically for my liking.
“Mercenary scum. Vultures of war,” the prisoner spat.
I was perplexed by this. We were US Army regulars, of course, but he was technically right in that we were classified as mercenaries for the purposes of this mission. If we were doing things by the book, I guess Williams should have said we were military proxies of the Japanese government here to arrest you on their behalf. But that didn’t quite have the same ring to it. Anyhow, Williams didn’t seem too troubled by such niceties.
“Yup, and it takes one to know one, buster,” he said, his maniacal smile now twisted into something closer to a scowl. He and the Blue Boy team were now calmly binding and tagging the Hindu India leadership, who had all lost the will to fight.
All except one. “We are most certainly not the same. We are warriors protecting our holy motherland against encroachment from Muslim scum. We are on a crusade. The only God you worship is Mammon,” the educated prisoner said.
But to be honest, his words no longer had any effect on me. All fanatics were the same. Regardless of which sect, which religion, which cult, which battlefield, which tragedy they were involved in. It was always the same type of person.
Williams, too, saw this and laughed. It was like watching a bad sitcom in reruns, he said.
In addition to the Indian leaders that we had captured, there was a white man standing in the corner of the back room, watching silently as we bound the others. I remembered that figure and that face.
John Paul.
“Good to see you again, sir,” John Paul said with a smile. “I have to say, I am impressed—not just a spy, but Special Forces too.” Now that I was looking at his face in the sunlight I could believe that he was indeed a former scholar, something I never quite saw when I met him in the dark basement in Prague. But there was one thing in common with the time I met him in Prague: his eyes were not the eyes of a madman but rather of someone who could not be more lucid.
“This is the day job,” I said, taking off my protective goggles so that I could look him straight in the eye. “Where’s Lucia?”
John Paul seemed overjoyed to hear me ask the question. “She’s not here. And it looks like your target is not exactly congruent with the mission you’ve been tasked to perform by your country.”
“I’m arresting you,” I said, keeping my emotions in check. I taped his arms together. John Paul didn’t resist.
I linked up with the Seaweed again. “The goods are in the shopping basket. Check her out. Over.”
“Roger, Jaeger One. Over and out.”
Leland switched his guidance marker on. It would act as a beacon for the Seaweed’s retrieval craft, which would now be here shortly. Our comrades who had been holding the line for us on the other floors were starting to arrive too.
“Get to the roof, everyone,” I called out.
Leland’s team had planted SWDs on the backs of the heads of the Hindu India bigwigs, and
these now kicked in, forcing the men to start marching in the direction we ordered, even if they resisted and their bodies flailed behind them. No one could remember what the official name was of these contraptions that forced prisoners to march, but within I Detachment we called them Silly Walk Devices, or SWDs for short, after the comical way in which the body and arms sprawled behind the legs when the prisoner tried to resist. No prizes for guessing who came up with the name and where he got his inspiration from.
As the last of our detachment arrived on the top floor, a deep rumble shook the whole building. The enemy forces who were trying to climb the building must have triggered a sensor and activated a booby trap of water gel explosives. They’d probably destroyed all the internal stairs by now. The children would have a job getting up here.
We climbed the stairs toward the roof, and as we did so a bird’s-eye view of the town flashed up in the corner of my eye. Images from the nose camera of the UAV helicopter sent down from the Seaweed.
We arrived on the roof and the right corner of my ARs started flashing. I kept a steady lookout for the aircraft, as indicated, and by and by a flying pig-like contraption entered my field of vision, closing in on us from the south. I could see various RPGs being fired uselessly at it—the only effect they had was to create a number of pretty little arcs in its wake—and as it approached, I could see it with my real eyes and at the same time could see myself and the hotel grow closer via the helicopter’s eyes projected back at me through my ARs.
What a motley crew and what a bizarre situation, I thought.
The miniguns attached to the helicopter were strafing the ground as it approached us, sweeping away all the ill-mannered resistance that was daring to try and fire antitank weapons in its direction. The underside of the fast-approaching aircraft was twinkling with muzzle flash as it unleashed a torrent of tracer bullets on soldiers below. This was one machine that was determined to live up to its privileged status as a people killer.
In no time flat the helicopter had reached us and landed on the roof. My comrades provided cover fire, suppressing the paramilitary soldiers who were trying to shoot RPGs at us from the road below. Williams noisily rounded up our prisoners and herded them into the helicopter, where he promptly fixed them with knockout patches so that fell unconscious. They wouldn’t be allowed the opportunity to get up to any mischief.
The north section of the roof exploded and shards of rock flew everywhere. An enemy RPG had slipped through our barrage and hit us.
“Damage report from all units!” I shouted over the roar of our suppressing fire. The two soldiers protecting our north flank stuck their thumbs up. No one was hurt, but the enemy sensed weakness and started focusing their firepower to our north. There was a hail of bullets and more RPGs. The north wall was crumbling. Time to go.
“All prisoners secured!” I heard Williams shout. I gave the signal to withdraw. The team all pulled out their hand grenades.
“Jaeger One, sir, how many floors does this hotel have again?” one of the others asked.
“Four floors, each roughly eight feet high,” I called out so that all could hear. Everyone did the math, pulled the pins, waited till the precise moment, and then dropped their grenades over the edge of the roof.
We heard the explosions as the grenades hit the ground in the distance. The gunfire coming from below subsided, and this was our cue to climb aboard the helicopter. With a sure hand Williams deactivated the autopilot mode and took the helm. It took less than fifteen seconds for us all to pile in, and during that time Williams brought the helicopter fully under his control.
“Here we go, ladies!” Williams whooped for joy, and suddenly the g-force was pulling me down. The paramilitary stronghold started shrinking into the distance. The soldiers near the gun booth rained down a goodbye salvo on the soldiers below, but we were quickly at a height where neither the adults nor the children on the ground could have any effect on us or vice versa.
I activated my ARs and linked to the fuselage cameras. Through one reality I could see the faces of men satisfied with a successful mission and a job well done; through the alternative reality of the abdominal cameras I could see paramilitary troops firing wildly and uselessly up into the air and the makeshift beacons of burning tires.
As the scene drifted farther and farther away I could also feel the adrenaline in my body ebbing like waves retreating from the seashore. The battle was over. Now I could return to the dream, the dream of normality and everyday life. I could return until duty called again.
The long wait until the next battle.
And the long wait until I could next meet Lucia Sukrova.
I felt myself overcome with weariness. I forced myself to remember my duty and pull myself back to reality, and contacted the local base camp.
“Jaeger One calling. The battle is over and our duties discharged. The packages have all been secured. The jewel has also been secured. No casualties. We are now returning to base. Over and out.”
5
The train was a relic from last century. It had survived the nuclear war and still chugged on today, a link between India’s regions. Its antique simplicity was its strength. We had escaped the Hindu India organization’s sphere of influence by helicopter and regrouped at a Eugene & Krupps frontline base, and now all that was left to do was escort the prisoners back to Mumbai by train as per the plan. There we would hand them over—excepting John Paul, of course—to the prosecutor from The Hague, who in turn would pass them on to Panopticon for safekeeping. Our duty would then be done.
The base camp was close to the Pakistan border. The atmosphere there was heavily charged. The handpicked Eugene & Krupps sentinels there would stand guard all night, scowling at the Hindu India–controlled hinterlands on the other side of the forest. The catering company that normally supplied E&K rations refused to come this far, it seemed—during the four days we spent at the base we never saw any of the garrison rations that we had grown accustomed to back in Mumbai. Not that I’m particularly complaining about the rations they provided us with or anything.
The Eugene & Krupps soldiers—technically “employees” I suppose, but if it carries a gun and looks like a soldier and smells like a soldier, then it’s a soldier so far as I’m concerned—spent their days gazing into the surrounding forests. Leland asked one of them what he was looking for and received the answer that he wasn’t looking but rather listening. The sound of a large number of people dying at once created a huge pillar of sound, a choir of tens or even hundreds of voices that rent the heavens of the Indian sky. The soldiers here called this sound a Ligeti. Some E&K soldier must have been a classical music buff and had decided to name the discordant wailing after the modernist composer who, among other things, provided the eerie
soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The E&K troops told us that they never ventured into the forest. A while back they had tried a massive offensive push in collaboration with UN peacekeepers, but it proved a massive failure. After that, E&K came to an informal understanding with Hindu India that the forest was the boundary line.
The E&K troops, then, were all interested in our story, as we had returned from the mythical land beyond the forest. What was it like? Were there corpses everywhere? It was as if we were all Captain Willard, returning from Colonel Kurtz’s unholy kingdom beyond the border.
They eat their Muslim captives, right? No, they worship an idol made out of an unused nuclear warhead and decorate it with the ears of their victims as offerings. These tall tales might have seemed ridiculous, but it was amazing how quickly people reverted from being rational purveyors of information to Chinese whisperers when lines of communication were cut off. When soldiers were garrisoned in the asshole of the world, in the boiling heat, surrounded by hostile forest and with the threat of an unknown enemy constantly looming, it was almost inevitable that stories would be born about the horrors of war.
Stories of the brutality and inhumanity of the unknown enemy were par
for the course during war. So were ghost stories. Ghost ships, ghost submarines, ghosts of German soldiers haunting Lithuanian forests. Which was why I was hardly surprised that ghost stories had sprung up here too: tales of swarms of ghosts of massacred Buddhist and Muslim villagers who roamed the forest by night. These were passed on from sentry to sentry.
Why did soldiers fear the imaginary dead when real death was always around them?
Why should a submarine traversing enemy waters be worried about ghost submarines when they faced the very real threat of an unknown enemy minefield that could blow them out of the water at any minute? Why should a soldier stuck in the trenches worry about ghostly comrades beckoning him to the land of the dead when he was up against the real risk of a deadly hail of mortar fire? And yet people could always find ways of being afraid of the dead. Even on the battlefield, where life couldn’t get any more real, people found ways of believing in fictions—or is “delusions” a better word?—that could shock them to their existential core.
There had been a number of times when I wondered whether John Paul was such a delusion—a figment of my imagination that I had invented to scare myself. A ghostly figure who traversed the world to spread a trail of death in his wake. A mythical monster created out of human fears. After all, even though I had captured the man who called himself John Paul, I couldn’t feel any sense of closure. Could this mild-mannered scholar’s a capella song really have been the catalyst for all that death?
Dawn broke, and we climbed into a doubly reinforced Stryker to begin our six-hour journey to the nearest railway station. We used KO pads to keep our captives unconscious for the duration of the journey, so when the time came to wake them up and bundle them out, their muscles had gone to sleep. The prisoners did what they could to loosen up their stiff joints as we roughed them out of the vehicle and onto the platform. One of the prisoners moaned about how we were abusing prisoners of war. He was one of the Indian generals who had given the order to use nuclear warheads on unarmed civilian targets.
