6
Scott Becker:
“Okay, so what is this?”
Dee doesn’t answer me. It just keeps popping up the file.
Captain Matthew Burke, United States Army Special Forces.
“Am I supposed to have access to this?”
No answer. Just Captain Burke’s file, popping up spontaneously when I ask for mission status on finding Grayman. And now I can’t get it off my screens.
“Alright, Dee…” And I’m surprised to hear my voice shake a bit—the ‘ware I spent the last four years hammering out, so I know every algorithm Dee has, now seems to be honestly freaking me out. I check the security on the interface suite I’m using: still sealed in tight, no eavesdropping, and no sign of online manipulation from any other network. It’s just me and Datascan, which makes me both relieved and nervous for different reasons. “Let’s have a look. Open file.”
It’s moderately interesting stuff: Burke’s played around in the Philippines, Central and South America, done duty on both the terror front and the drug-war (sometimes being the same issue). He’d make a good FPS game character—I should sell a knockoff to the gamer circuit (changing the classified specifics, of course). And he’s got attitude, based on the number of disciplinary entries I’m finding—a lot for a Green Beret. Even more amazing that he earned promotions despite them—SOF has very little tolerance for non-pro crap. He must be good. And he never really fucked up.
Well, maybe:
Dee makes a point of highlighting a fairly fresh reconstruct of Burke’s last assignment, which makes no sense because it happened six months ago. Why has he been sitting idle for half a year? I check it again: No, he didn’t go inactive, at least not officially. He was just pulled off his last deployment, shipped home, given leave and never reassigned.
Until yesterday: Burke got assigned to the same CT unit I’m plugged into. He just landed in Rome this morning and reported for duty to their CO Richards. So—what?—he’s on the case?
“Why am I looking at this?”
Dee just keeps flashing on the simfile: some incident that must have happened during Burke’s last deployment.
“Okay, okay. I’m a little slow—yes, even for wetware—but I do eventually de-bush…”
I have to get my visor on and boot my gear, which gives me a few seconds of loading time to check out the text summary of what I’m about to dive into. The reconstruct sim was indeed made by Dee, maybe as a test, compiled from an onsite investigation of a battle we apparently lost in the War on Drugs. (Not that we win all that many: half of Columbia is still in “rebel” control after all these years, and the life expectancy of your average government official or judge is like ten seconds.)
My visor goes bright and I can’t see the room anymore. Then I’m in the jungle.
Pretty. Of course, being here in sim-form spares me the heat and the damp and the bugs, so it’s all very Disney. At least until I cruise the first of the corpses.
Dee runs the stats for me: there are a total of thirty-seven dead (of which I can only see a handful scattered about in the thick growth—at least until I get to the camp, then there’s more). “Montagnards,” it calls them. I remember that word from my geek fondness for military history: training and using local tribes for counter-insurgency. In this case—Dee elaborates—the “tribes” in question here were some of the smaller local coca growers, bought out by Uncle Sam at premium prices and encouraged to devote their talents to fighting their more successful former competitors. They were supplied with arms, intel and SpecOps training—the latter apparently in the form of onsite “advisors” from CTI, all very classified. Which makes sense, because it immediately strikes me as all very classic-bush stupid: arming and training drug dealers to better fight other drug dealers.
“Are you sure I’m allowed to see this?”
The camp they had set up in the middle of lush green nowhere is a massacre-scene right out of an antiwar activist website: guts and brains and limbs, meat and flesh and bone all shot apart and blood gone dark splattering the leaves and soaking the ground. It looks like most of them got caught sleeping (and at least one crapping in the underbrush) after the sentries got taken out. Whoever hit them must have taken some time studying the camp—that bit flashes over on the analysis track—because it happened so fast and clean. The reconstruct figures it took two minutes to pick off the sentries, then all but one of the rest got it in the next twenty seconds. It also points out—for no apparent reason—speculations as to whether one attacker could have pulled this off, popping up a list of six different replay animations of potential firing solutions that could have accounted for this mess. Different guns were used, but that doesn’t rule out someone making it look like there was more than one simply by using several weapons. I’m about to ask Dee what its own most-likely conclusion on the subject is, when I get smooth-glided through the sim and into the one hard-hut they had scrapped together out of boards and corrugated something.
What’s inside makes me regret taking Dee’s hint and diving into this gore fest.
“Aw Jesus…”
There’s a body hanging upside-down spread-eagled from a wooden frame in the middle of the room. At least I can tell it’s a body by counting the arms and legs and what must be the head. Other than that, I can’t tell much: it’s all slick red meat, rendered in more detail than I really needed right after lunch.
“Why are you showing me this?”
I default to the popups so I can look at something else: The hanging meat-puppet is body number thirty-seven. Apparently they’d skinned him alive—autopsy says within minutes after all his buddies got theirs. Which means whoever did this dexed everybody in the camp but him so they could save him for something extra special. This thought gets me looking again (despite the continuing protests from my stomach that my lunch is working on an escape plan). And thankfully it dawns on me almost immediately that the rack he’s hanging from seems too-perfectly suited to the purpose—in fact, at closer examination, wear-spots and old dark splatter stains on the lumber suggest it’s been used for this sort of thing before. The hard-packed dirt underneath it is unusually dark and almost oily-looking.
“Oh, good. I’m becoming an expert on torture engineering.”
I’m about to jack out (rip out, more like it), when I realize I’m looking at a pile of hardcopy digi-stills left scattered on the dirt floor of the hut. The reconstruct has taken the time to hi-res them, which means they must be significant. At first glance I think they’re just the camp porn collection, but then it hits me so fast I nearly do puke:
It’s snuff. And it’s home-made.
“Oh shit…”
There’s this girl. Maybe sixteen, seventeen. She’s in all of them. She’s naked. They’re raping her. They’re sticking things inside her, things that really shouldn’t be going where they’re being shoved. She’s bleeding. A lot. They’re grinning. Laughing. I recognize their faces from the bodies scattered outside—this gives me some minor satisfaction, but it doesn’t make it any better. There are photos that show her face and she’s crying and she’s screaming and she’s trying not to.
Then they’ve got her on the rack upside-down. Just like meat-puppet. And there’s this old toothless fucker. Grinning with his old well-used hunting knife. And I get to see him skin her alive, step by step, like he’s teaching a class.
“…fuck fuck fuck…”
I can’t breathe. I’m shaking and I need to get out. I need to…
But then I have to look again: I make myself. The hanging corpse, the one left after all the shooting: It isn’t the girl. It’s male (maybe, I think, I hope). I make myself look close at the flayed face, at the teeth (because there are no lips). But there are no teeth. It’s the same toothless grin as the old fucker skinning the girl in the photos—I look back through them all to make sure—it’s suddenly the most important thing in the world to me that I know that the sick fuck got what he gave—and then I see it:
In the background of the p
hotos. While the girl’s being cut. There are US soldiers there. Uniforms. Watching. Not grinning. But watching.
Advisors.
“Oh god fucking shit…”
One of them is Captain Matthew Burke.
I have to I have to I have to pull the plug…
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 5
