CHAPTER ONE

1

So, there was this little girl’s head shoved face first into the tire tracks in the mud.

It looked almost like a scene from Alice in Wonderland—it was as though the girl were trying to enter the magical kingdom through the deep furrows in the mud left by truck tires. Only I don’t remember the back of Alice’s head being shot clean open or the contents of Alice’s skull glistening under the sky like a crimson flower in full bloom.

The next thing I laid my eyes on was a kid sprawled on his side in the mud. Less than ten feet away from the girl. Bullets had ripped his back open and had spun their way through his guts before exiting his body somewhere around his belly. His intestines flopped out, washed pink by the rainfall that had just stopped a couple of hours ago. His mouth was open a little, just enough for me to see he had an almost goofy-looking little overbite. It was as if there’d been something he had wanted to say before he died but never had the chance.

We followed the tire tracks and arrived at a small village, maybe twenty or so families in size.

A large pit had been dug in the area that could have been called the village green. At the bottom of the pit was a pile of bodies, charred and smoldering, all heaped on top of one another. There was the smell of singed hair and the smell of burning flesh. The heat had caused the muscles of the half-cooked bodies to contract violently, so the corpses were spread out in a whirlwind. Many of the bones were broken, defeated by the contracting muscles, and limbs were folded over and twisted in ways that no limb would or could ever bend naturally. A tangled web of bodies.

Everyone’s dead.

Everyone’s dead. I open the door to see my mom, whose body has just been treated with the cocktail of preservatives, sanitizers, disinfectants, and additives as mandated by law in Washington. The embalmer has made her face up good and pretty, and she’s ready for her eternal sleep.

“Take a good look behind you, darling. You’ll see all the dead pass by,” my mom says to me, so I do as she says and turn around. I see a vast landscape of dead people, grinning and waving at me. Some of the dead are fully intact, others have virtually disintegrated. Don’t ask me how I know that even the headless ones are somehow smiling at me—I just know, I can tell, and as I look on at them they casually fiddle around with their guts that are spilling from their bellies.

“Everyone’s dead, aren’t they?” I ask, turning back to my mom.

Mom nods and then gestures to me. “Of course they are, darling. Just take a look at your own body.”

I look down and notice that I’m starting to rot away. That’s when it clicks that I’m also dead.

Up in the distance I see a stream of dead bodies—everyone who has ever lived and died—flowing gently and inexorably toward their destination, wherever that is.

I ask Mom whether we’re now in the underworld. But Mom just shakes her head gently. Just like when she used to correct me when I was a boy.

“No, darling. This is just the regular world. The world you and I have always lived in. The world that’s always been here right beside us.”

Oh, I see, I say. Tears of relief are streaming down my face. I can now recognize some faces in the distance. Benjamin, who died of cancer as a child. My dad, who blew his own head off.

Mom takes me by the hand. “Ready to go?” she asks. I nod, and we start walking toward the line of dead people in the distance. This is a bit like how it was the first day of school, I seem to remember. My tears turn into tears of nostalgia. And then I realize that they’re all here beside me—the girl in the tire tracks who had the back of her head blown off, the boy who had his guts blown out, the villagers who were burnt up in a seething mass in the pit. They’re walking alongside us, and we head on over to join the column of the dead.

2

I killed my mother with my own words.

I’ve killed plenty of people in my time, using all sorts of guns and every caliber of ammo. But I didn’t need any of that stuff to kill my mother. Just a couple of little phrases: “yes” and my name. Put the two of them together and my mom died.

Yes, I’ve killed plenty of people in my time. Mainly using a gun.

Sure, I’ve killed using the blade as well, but truth be told I’m not so keen on that as a method. Quite a number of my colleagues do swear by it, though. They make it a point of honor to specialize in the blade for “professional purposes.” These are the guys who can approach you from behind in absolute silence, slice your windpipe clean open, slit your jugular, sever your aorta, and then go on to pierce your heart, all in less than three seconds flat.

I’m not quite at that level myself, although I’m pretty confident I could acquit myself well enough on this front if I needed to. But guns and ammo are what I know best, and I guess they’re what I’m going to carry on using to do my killing for the foreseeable future. All because a couple of airplanes plowed into two buildings standing side by side in New York, back during one fine morning in the year 2001.

Before that day, no matter how much of a bastard you were, the United States of America wouldn’t sanction an assassination attempt on you. Not officially, at least. Late last century, Executive Order 12333 reiterated President Gerald Ford’s original proscription of assassination or any government involvement in assassination. Even the Public Enemy Number One of the day—say the drug lord Pablo Escobar who flooded the US with South American drugs, or the US’s pet thorn-in-the-side dictator Saddam Hussein—however much the US might have wanted them dead, there was never any official attempt to actually assassinate them.

“No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” That’s how the executive order was worded. Just words, maybe, but each president in his turn—Reagan, then Bush, then Clinton—found himself increasingly bound by their power. That’s not to say that assassinations never took place, of course, but the executive order was respected. Assassination had become a risky move politically. More trouble than it was worth. Easier and cleaner all around simply to face the enemy down: engage in formal negotiations or have a war. As a political tool, assassination just didn’t have the priority it used to. Unless it could be guaranteed top secret, it just wasn’t worth it anymore.

After all, couldn’t the US start a war with anyone they wanted to? All they needed to do was find some pretext. The bar was much lower than assassination. Far easier to convince the media that we should kill large numbers of people “fair and square” than it would be to try and explain away a botched assassination attempt. Who was it who said that a single death was a tragedy but that a million deaths was a statistic? Well, either way, it was easier to paint yourselves as the “good guys” when you killed tens of thousands—who must therefore have been bad—than when you killed an individual person. This was what the world used to be like anyway.

Everything changed the day we were attacked on home ground. Things started heating up. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that assassination was now back in as the flavor of the month, but within the halls of power in Washington it was at least back on the table as an option. A worthy contender. A necessary evil in the war against terror, in the fight for humanity. That’s how they’ve explained it. The dark arts that EO 12333 were supposed to have suppressed forever reemerged into the light of day.

And that, more or less, is how I ended up as an assassin.

Not because I’d particularly wanted to—it was just that my job seemed to involve increasing work of that sort. I had duties besides killing, of course. But we in Special Operations I Detachment had sole responsibility for all the assassination jobs parceled out by USSOCOM—the Unified Combatant Command that oversaw the various Special Operations Commands for the US Army, Air force, Navy, Marines, and Intelligence. Back last century the Green Berets sometimes used to get involved in that sort of work, as did that US Army detachment called Delta Force. But now, in the twenty-first century, it’s basically taken care of by us “Snake Eaters” in Intelligence. So much so, in fact, that the guys from the LRRP in the Marines and the Navy SEALS had contemptuously started referring to us as “wet boys”—a nickname derived from “wet work,” the Cold War–era euphemism for assassination. Novelists like Graham Greene and John le Carré used the term a lot.

Think of that famous poster for the film Carrie. Poor, abused Sissy Spacek, standing petrified, doused from head to toe in pig blood. Same for us, only in our case it was human blood we were drenched in. The official headhunters of the United States of America. Or, as Intelligence had named us, Special Operations I Detachment.

And that’s pretty much how I’ve come to be sitting here in the belly of this Flying Seaweed Craft, double-checking the files on our next target.

The face, name, movement patterns, household setup, political leanings of our target were all here, collected in a single file. The next person we were going to kill. We had all sorts of observation techniques drummed into us during our Special Forces training. After all, we aren’t just about blowing things up. No more wham, bam, thank you Uncle Sam. These days, we were usually tasked with jobs along the lines of training allied forces in developing countries or winning the hearts and minds of locals through medical care, education, and propaganda. In other words, this job was a lot about the “soft skills” and not as suited to the cliché of the grizzled, misanthropic lone wolf as is often imagined. Those sorts usually became mercs instead—although in all honesty, mercenaries often ended up as tactical advisors for the armies in these Third World countries as well, so their job wasn’t all that different from ours.

In addition, we in Special Operations I Detachment had to undergo a rigorous program of psychological training to enable us to grasp a person’s character based on a cold reading of their psychometric graphs. You see, the assassination game was still a particularly delicate business—even though the level of political risk, ethical bias if you will, had grown more manageable. The world may have moved on from EO 12333, but there were still a shitload of CIA operations that had failed miserably. No, this was no gig for amateurs.

Bungled CIA ops were referred to as “paramilitary operations,” but really they were just playing Cowboys and Indians. And so it came to pass that a new category of forces was formed—Intelligence, specifically the Special Operations Branch with its Special Operations I Detachment. A military department that took over the CIA’s former remit in intelligence gathering. A sort of soldier-sailor-tinker-spy hybrid. The way the twenty-first century was panning out, intelligence activity was much more relevant in a military context than a civilian one anyway. Military intelligence is a moveable feast, and anywhere and everywhere was a theater of war these days.

Things just ain’t what they used to be, you see. There’s always that element of uncertainty that needs to be factored in. And because the name of the game was now all about trying to predict and manage that uncertainty on the one hand, and to adapt when that uncertainty did rear its ugly head on the other, it made sense for Special Forces personnel to have a clear mental image of the sort of person their target was.

In other words we needed to be able to apprehend, down to the last vivid detail, the personality of the person we were about to kill: what he was like, how he led his life. We had to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes, building our empathy with them to a crescendo—and then kill them. A task fit for a sadist. The stuff a Nazi’s wet dreams are made of. So why did this sort of work not cause us to go mad with psychological trauma of our own? One reason, and one reason only: Battle Emotion Adaptive Regulation. A powerful combination of pre-combat counseling and mind treatment that would “configure” our emotions, our morality. This allowed us to draw a clear dividing line between our personal ethics and our duty. Orwell’s “doublethink” made a banal reality by technology.

So: when I looked down at the data of my next target, I wasn’t doing so with any trace of pity or compassion for him. Rather, I was thinking about the last person I killed. My mother.

The land of the dead. It came to call on me, to pay a visit, to scratch away at the surface of my heart—only to fade away again as I opened my eyes.

In the land of the dead, there were a number of variations on a theme.

The version that haunted me incessantly was that of the hordes of decomposing dead trundling across an endless plain in a line stretching out for all eternity. There were others too: the graveyard that seemed to sprawl out forever, each former inhabitant sitting atop its grave, waiting in endless tedium. Then there was the version I experienced regularly just after my mother died: the almost comical scene of a hospital ward populated entirely by patients who were already dead. This was the one that hit home the most. I guess because it was a direct projection of my emotional state the moment after my mother died.

Well, I’m a soldier, Special Forces, and an assassin. So I’ve seen my fair share of dead bodies. There was one time I saw more corpses than a regular Joe would ever have the opportunity to see in an entire lifetime. It was just after a massacre had taken place in a country in Central Asia. I was an assassin back then too, part of an I Detachment mission to infiltrate the country by way of Afghanistan and assassinate the former chief of secret police who had been fanning the flames of ethnic cleansing. We finally caught up with him in this village.

The man died, of course. I know this because I was the one who pumped an entire magazine of rifle rounds into his head at close quarters. But the man’s regiment had already managed to “cleanse” the entire village by that point. Oh, I saw plenty of corpses that day, all right. The rain stopped, and there was the girl with her face embedded in tire tracks in the mud, the back of her head shot to shit, with what was left of her brains exposed to the elements. There was the boy whose back had been ripped apart by the hail of bullets that forced his guts to spill out of his belly. And there was the pile of bodies of women and children who had been thrown into the makeshift pit in the village green, doused with gasoline, and set alight.

Finally there was the man who had orchestrated it all. After I shot him, his corpse seemed to twist into a gruesome parody of the hordes of dead that were his own handiwork.

Returning from my memories of that scene in Asia, I found myself back with my mother. She was being kept alive by a cocktail of drugs and nanomachines, intravenous tubes everywhere, and I was being asked by the doctor whether I wanted to continue the course of treatment. To look at her, there was nothing outwardly wrong with my mother as she lay there all neat and orderly in her pristine bed, silently awaiting my judgment. She even looked alive—an illusion maintained by the nanomachines that coursed through her veins, no doubt. Machines not unlike the ones pumped into us as part of our PIC conditioning (Persistence in Combat, they called it).

I stood there, in the pure silence of that pristine hospital, and the paperwork was passed to me: official consent to pull the plug. The confirmation they needed, proof that I had understood and agreed to the termination of life-support treatment. The consent having been given, the army of life-giving nanomachines sped forth from her body, never to return, and my mother segued into a smooth, quick death.

Having said that—could it really have been said that my mother was now dead? How could I really know that she wasn’t already dead at the so-called moment I gave the order to end treatment?

That ambiguous fine line between life and death had become increasingly blurred due to medical advances in the latter half of the twentieth century, but humankind seemed to be content to close their eyes to this increasingly delicate problem, just as we did for other difficult problems. Let’s deal with that tomorrow seemed to be our attitude.

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 and 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 been 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.

I make it sound simple now, but truth be told, a nighttime stealth march ain’t easy. Easier than it used to be, of course, thanks to the technology that we were blessed with these days. The snug inner lining of our clothes absorbed the moisture we perspired and wicked it away to be recycled, and the nanolayer surgery coated our eyeballs with a film that not only auto-adjusted ambient light levels so that we could see clearly even on a cloudy midnight such as this one, but also projected useful combat data straight to our retinas.

Even with these developments, it still wouldn’t do just to land the Intruder Pods right next to our target and have at them. The basic precepts of special ops remained unchanged: you still needed to land some distance away from the target, replete with guns and explosives and other useful goodies, and then get marching. Considering how varied special ops work was supposed to be, we sure did spend a lot of time walking—at least, that’s how it seemed to me. Our job was to walk and walk and walk and then finally, at the end of it all, close in on the target. The first part of selection for joining our outfit involved them strapping a huge Bergen rucksack to your back, filling it with rocks, and sending you on an extended forced march at breakneck speed. This separated the men from the boys, all right—most applicants were weeded out at this stage.

Our team had consulted closely with Intelligence before the drop to decide the very best landing point that took into account all factors. Even so, we were still looking at a brisk four-hour uphill march, and that was assuming no distractions or detours.

Alex was a cut above the rest of us in terms of fitness, so he sped on ahead to scout more effectively whenever there were any contours in the landscape. This was a short mission, in and out within twelve hours, so we didn’t need our Bergens stuffed full with food, water, and ammo. This meant that we could set a punishing pace. We marched on the target town as fast as it was possible to walk while still keeping an adequate lookout for indications of enemy presence.

There was a road that led toward the town. No more than a rough dirt footpath, really. But our satellites had shown enough traffic along it that it was never really a viable option for us. Having said that, the Eurasian landscape that we were now in, mostly consisting of fields and forest, was easy enough for us to traverse. Desert or jungle terrain would have been much harder.

The official line was that this country was suffering from the same old story as found the world over: Muslims versus Christians. Of course, conflicts usually have more than one catalyst. After all, there were countries where Islam and Christianity could peacefully coexist, even when right next door. It seemed that this even used to be the case in this country, historically. A former state of the USSR that had declared independence after the disintegration of the old Communist Party, this country had taken the usual course of confrontation with Russia over natural resources, but there had been nothing to suggest that religion was going to be the cause of bitter internecine warfare. Not until a few short years ago.

How had the conflict developed so rapidly? How had the flames of hatred in people’s hearts been fanned so quickly that massacres had become commonplace? At such an exponential rate? There wasn’t a scholar in the world who had been able to come up with a convincing hypothesis.

We had to avoid an encounter with the enemy at all costs. At least until our targets were safely dead. If we were sighted, it would all be over. They’d radio ahead to our targets, who’d be spirited out of harm’s way. With our equipment and training we’d have no problem fighting our way through an enemy company or two until we reached the safety of our pick-up point. But the mission itself would be a failure.

We took a short pit stop after our second hour of marching. We’d virtually been running the whole way, and Williams was on the verge of breathlessness. I couldn’t say I wasn’t feeling it too. We lay down in a thicket, hidden from view, and our nanocoating sprang into action, blending us in with the colors of the vegetation that swirled around us. A little piece of magic that came in ever so handy when planning an infiltration or ambush.

On this occasion, though, it looked like we had become a little too reliant on it.

It turned out there was a pickup truck parked just the other side of the thicket in which we were hiding. Of course, our muscles all sprang into a state of high alert. Breathing silently, we became one with the vegetation around us and watched as three men clambered out of the car brandishing AK rifles. It goes without saying that they were completely oblivious to our presence. They lit a bonfire.

They didn’t seem to notice or care about the ammo in their guns. They threw their guns down right beside them, beside the fire, even though the magazines were fully loaded.

“Amateurs,” mouthed Williams. I shrugged. In this land, the qualification for being a soldier was the ability to plunder and terrorize a defenseless village when the opportunity presented itself. Training didn’t really come into it.

Having said that, we couldn’t exactly take off while they remained here, amateurs or not. And we had no time to spare if we were to make our target before dawn. So we had no ethical compunction about deciding to kill these unfortunate patrol troops who bore us no specific ill will, who hadn’t tried to harm us, and who were just trying to snatch a moment of warm respite.

The men remained completely unaware of our presence as we silently flanked them. They would also have been completely unaware of the brief flash of steel before their windpipes were slit open with surgical precision. They wouldn’t have known what happened, who killed them, or why. Even as their lifeblood poured from their throats, their eyes wouldn’t have even caught a glimpse of us. They just flickered orange, reflecting the licking flames from the bonfire in front of them. And so it came to pass that where there had been four men, there were now four corpses.

We frisked the bodies quickly. No sign of any dog tags or other ID. Then I used my knife to open up my guy’s sleeve, starting at his already blood-soaked shoulder.

As I expected, there was the slightest of bumps at a point among the muscles of his back. Completely undetectable to the naked eye unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, a bulge about the size of the fingernail on your pinkie.

I used my knife to shave off the chunk of flesh. Inside it, sure enough, was a small disc.

His ID tag.

Williams looked over at me, eyebrows raised. The usual, huh? he was asking. As the ranking officer, it was my call.

We were four white men standing there—only whites were chosen for this mission, for obvious reason. The soldiers we had just killed were also white. As were all those in this country who were massacring their fellow countrymen for believing in a different version of a god.

My eyes met Alex’s and Leland’s. They shrugged their shoulders: you first, sir. There was nothing for it. I took the protective gel out of my backpack and used it to coat the blood-soaked dog tag I had extracted from the flesh of the dead man’s shoulder, placed the tag in the palm of my hand, and gulped it down like an aspirin.

4

The truck was mounted with a .50 caliber gun, set up so that it could fire while moving. An ordinary Toyota pickup turned into a machine of war by virtue of a simple machine gun grafted onto it. The air force of this country was taken out of action shortly into the civil war, but they had somehow managed to preserve most of their radar and associated antiaircraft batteries. It seemed almost comically imbalanced that a country that managed to fight on with the vestiges of a modern air force was reduced to fielding such amateur DIY efforts in lieu of proper armored vehicles.

And so it came to pass that we were now using an enemy vehicle to speed down the very road that we had been taking pains to avoid. With the exception of our nanolayers, we had to ditch all our fancy equipment. Even our SOPMOD modular assault rifles that, like some kiddie toy with interchangeable parts, could be turned into grenade launchers or laser-guided sniper rifles.

It was better to ditch the gear than to continue on a long-winded night march through unfamiliar terrain. When it came down to it, we pampered Americans had an overprotective attitude toward our equipment that bordered on fetishistic. Our military technology was number one, we knew, and it was great that we were able to get so psyched about how awesome we were—I’ll admit I often felt a childish glee myself when faced with our latest fancy gadgets—but sometimes a person needed to forget all about what was fashionable and trendy and get back to basics.

Alex was driving. I was sitting shotgun, keeping an eye out for anything that might be a threat while simultaneously trying to maintain a casual demeanor so that no one looking in at us would suspect anything. The fatigues we’d stripped from the dead soldiers and were now wearing had bloodstains all over them, of course, but they were in such a filthy state to begin with that a bit of water from our canteens was enough to rinse out the worst so that the rest more or less blended in.

“It’ll be no time at all to our destination in this baby, sir,” said Alex. “I wonder what’s written on the side of this pickup, though?”

“It’s Japanese,” I answered. I’d minored in the language back in college, and as a result I’d once been assigned to train up a section of their army. What was it called? Ji-eh-tai or something. … Anyway, the lettering on the side of the truck seemed to suggest that it had once been used by a tofu shop called Fujiwara. Would a Japanese tofu shop ever have imagined that their old, beat-up vehicle would have a new lease on life as a makeshift armored vehicle in a civil war in the boondocks of Eastern Europe?

“They’re called kanji, aren’t they, the letters, sir? Pretty cool language,” Alex said.

“Sure, when you can’t read them they’re more like a work of art than lettering, I suppose.”

“So you’re saying that they seem cool only because I can’t read them?”

“You could say that, yeah,” I said. “In the same way that it’s easy to reject a foreign culture you don’t understand, you can also end up putting it on a pedestal. Using words such as ‘exotic’ and ‘oriental’ to describe something as being cool, when really all you are talking about is a cultural code for some sort of ‘other’ compared to what you’re used to.”

“I think I understand,” said Alex. “So a foreign language isn’t just another language, it’s also foreign, is that what you mean, sir? More like a pattern or motif on a textile rather than language as we know it?”

“Something like that. Semantic bleaching, that’s what they call it when words lose their meaning—although I suppose it’s a little different if the words never had any meaning to you in the first place. Imagine a Scrabble board when the game’s being played in a language you don’t know. The whole board is just going to look like an abstract work of art to you, isn’t it?”

We often played Scrabble back at base. Many a long afternoon was made shorter by the spell that magical fifteen-by-fifteen grid cast on us as it filled up with words. Williams, for example, was constantly pestering me to play just one more game. He always lost. And he always went into a snit afterward. His regular lament went something like this:

“Okay. So they say the average American knows forty-five thousand words. Forty-five thousand! So why can’t I even think of enough words to fill a pissant board fifteen squares wide?”

Incidentally, the highest-scoring word ever sanctioned in Scrabble once came up in a game between Williams and me. I was the one who played it, of course. Quixotry, derived from an old Spanish novel. A furious Williams refused to accept it until it had been double-checked in two different dictionaries. Whether because he genuinely didn’t believe it or just didn’t want to concede the ridiculous score it gave me—365 points on that single word, was it?—I don’t know.

I’ve never lost a game of Scrabble in my life. Not ever, since my first-ever game against my mother when I was eight years old.

Looks like I’ve brought up a right little philologist. You and words are just made for each other. I remember my mother saying this to me when I was a teenager. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, but it was certainly true that I always had a certain affinity for words. I remember thinking it was both strange and hilarious that a few little words could change a person so completely. People could become enraged by words or brought to tears, or have their emotions buffeted this way and that. Words were so interesting.

I never saw words as a mere means of communication. What I mean by that is that I didn’t just “see” words, but I also felt them, viscerally, their weight pressing down on me as if they were matter. To me, words didn’t just connect people, words bound people, restricting and regulating their actions in very real and meaningful ways, even if the people using the words were completely oblivious to this fact. I sensed this, just as a mathematician could conceptualize and grasp an imaginary number as clearly as a real one. They say that physicists don’t think in terms of words, and that Einstein didn’t arrive at his Theory of Relativity just by stringing together words and formulae. Rather, it all just came together in a much simpler place, a primeval space, outside the scope of human language and number systems.

I can sort of relate to this. I perceive words as a sort of landscape. It’s hard to explain the feeling to other people. After all, it relates, in a most fundamental way, to how I perceive the world around me. And what people perceive as “real” varies from person to person, mind to mind. The ancient Romans never debated the meaning of taste or color, for example.

Just as I can conceptualize words, there are people who can conceptualize and relate to abstract concepts such as “nationhood” and “race.” I could no longer do this myself, probably because I was jaded by a job that essentially came down to killing people for the sake of this very same “nation.” Maybe the words were just too overwhelmingly powerful for me, who knows? All I knew was that words such as nationhood, race, and community were just that, as far as I was concerned—words. And even if I could conceptualize them as words, they weren’t concepts that I could relate to my real, everyday existence.

A corollary to this was that people who did have their own vivid, holistic idea of what a word like nationhood meant could do my thinking for me. These people would be part of the establishment, Langley or Fort Mead or Washington, thinking hard about what nationhood meant and ordering me to kill people on its behalf.

I’m sure that the same went for the leaders of the various insurgencies in the country that we were now in. They had the ability to perceive that “their country” and “other countries” were distinct entities, and this enabled them to act accordingly. After all, if you couldn’t draw a line between “us” and “them,” how could you label anyone the “enemy”? Oh, sure, it was easy enough when someone was physically in front of you, threatening violence, a clear and present danger. But to demarcate clear boundaries along the lines of race or religion, and moreover to label anyone on the wrong side of the “us and them” divide as enemies worthy of being killed? That took some serious willpower, or at least a concerted effort to conceptualize “reality” in a very specific way.

After all, no conflict, anywhere, ever, started by both sides saying “Well, we have our own version of events and they have theirs, and to each their own!”

There was no Holocaust. The lunar landings were faked. Elvis is alive and kicking and runs a thriving little diner in the Yukon.

The very fact that blatant untruths such as these could even be seriously posited was proof, if ever it was needed, that there was no such thing as an objective “history” that the world accepted. And wasn’t it that prophet of postmodernism, Baudrillard, who said that the Gulf War never actually took place?

History is written by the victors, of course, but there’s more to it than that.

History is an arena of discourse, and discourse is nothing if not subjective. So, while it’s certainly true that the victors have more chance of having their views heard, there are still plenty of nooks and crannies and crevices for the vanquished, the weak, and the marginal to slip in their versions of events. History may have been written by the victors, but it wasn’t always the victory in the battlefield that mattered more than the victory in discourse.

That’s why, as I sat there in the truck driving toward our target, I had no way of telling you which of the forces in this country were right and which were mistaken. I was just another dumb ’Murkin, worldview molded and bent into shape by a diet of CNN and talk shows. Everything I knew about the world I learned from a monitor in my home while I ate my Domino’s Pizza. All I knew was that in the last millennium there had been lots of wars, lots of terrorist attacks, lots of different ideological conflicts, and that these all happened for lots of different reasons. People had different motives, and the nature of warfare was constantly changing and developing.

The only thing that remained constant was the pizza.

It had existed before I was born and would probably still be doing a brisk trade when I died, whenever that would be. In a world where Domino’s was my only constant, it was hard to grasp the full mutability of all the variables of the world.

This, I suppose, was Washington’s new White Man’s Burden—to be born in America, land of the unchanging pizza chain and shopping mall, and to send people like me out into the big bad outside world to go and kill Mr. Johnny Foreigner for this-and-that reason. Whatever. I wouldn’t like to be in the position of making those sorts of decisions. Give me the Empire of the Rising Pizza Dough any day of the week.

Give me my life.

And why not? Just like Williams, I had relinquished the unwelcome responsibility of having to decide things for myself. No buck stops with me. It gets passed up the chain to … who knows?

Huh? What was I trying to say with all this philosophical musing? I guess I was trying to articulate just how utterly impossible it was for me to try and articulate what I thought or felt about the fucked-up political situation down on the ground where I was now. I knew that there was some sort of Muslim-Christian divide involved, but that in truth this probably only accounted for about five percent of the real reasons behind the hostilities. What I did know was my orders—to track down the target, the man calling himself defense minister of the rabble that was calling itself the interim government. I knew that the NSC had identified him as Public Enemy Number One for this region. I knew that he was a bigwig. And I knew that back when this region had been called a proper country, he’d been a brigadier general in the army, and so he was now armed to the teeth.

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, like 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.

Slowly, I raised my head from the hole in the ground. If I’d had my SOPMOD with me I would have been able to attach the probe unit and use that to have a look around, but as it was, armed with only a battered AK, I had to use the old-fashioned method of checking the space out with my own eyes. After confirming that there was, indeed, nobody out there, I climbed silently out of my hole.

The Moonlight Sonata was coming up to its melancholy refrain. I moved carefully and deliberately from room to room, getting a good mental picture of the mosque’s layout as I did so.

The beautiful, swirling geometric patterns of the tiles, so typical of Islamic art, made the relatively simple layout of the mosque seem at first glance more like a maze than it really was. No doubt the effect of a cultural code I didn’t understand, making the “other” seem different—cool, even. I moved deeper and deeper into the darkness of the maze, following the scent of the music.

The music grew louder. I realized that I had now neared its source. The one room in the mosque with a light on. I closed in, glued to the wall, and poked my head through the archway long enough to take quick stock of the contents of the room.

The former brigadier general was alone. The Moonlight Sonata was coming from a small portable radio set on top of a table—volume cranked up as high as it could go. The defense minister was evidently deep in contemplation, his sunken pupils glued to the radio, one hand outstretched toward the speakers, as if he were somehow trying to physically absorb the sound. He was dressed to the nines in his former military uniform, spick and span, as if he were about to attend a formal ceremony.

By the look of things the room was completely unguarded. Target A was alone. It would have been a piece of cake to dispatch him on the spot. The problem was that Target A wasn’t currently deep in conversation with Target B as we expected he would be at this time. If the defense minister’s corpse was discovered before Target B, the American, arrived, he might slip through our fingers.

Is Target B even here in the first place? I wondered. Perhaps that sense of unease that we had before the drop was justified after all. Now would be just the right time for Murphy’s Law to kick in. Assassination was a complex job with many variables at the best of times. When you had two simultaneous targets, the difficulty level didn’t increase arithmetically so much as geometrically.

What to do? The one thing I knew was that I had no time to waste. We were right in the middle of enemy heartland, and all it would take was one false move for us to be overrun; Alex and I, at the very least, would be sitting ducks.

Time for a decision. The ability to act quickly and under pressure was one of the hallmarks of special ops after all. I killed my breath and silently replaced my AK with my knife. The moment the former brigadier general turned his back, I leapt across the room and pounced. Using one of my arms to pin his arms behind his back, I held the tip of my knife to his throat.

“You’re not my target,” I said. “But if you make a noise or move, I’ll kill you. Understand?” I was lying, of course, and I can’t say I was particularly proud of the fact that I was lying to a man who was about to die. That I was about to kill, even. But this wasn’t the time to be worrying about the finer points of battlefield ethics. “It’s the American we’re looking for. The man you were supposed to meet today.”

“I didn’t know he was American,” the defense minister said, his breath remarkably steady considering the position he was in, with the deadly blade pricking his throat. “He’s our press secretary. Was. Not is.”

“So you killed him?” I asked, pressing the point of the blade further against his throat.

“No. He just suddenly up and left for no apparent reason. A few days ago, this was. I wanted to know the details. That’s why we planned to rendezvous here today. I was expecting to meet him in person, but he just left a message for me.”

Shit. That meant that Target B wouldn’t be appearing tonight. Well, we’d still be able to accomplish our first priority and eliminate the former brigadier general, so the mission wouldn’t be a complete washout, not by any means. Still, it was a loose end, and that always left a bad taste in my mouth.

“What did the message say?” I asked.

“It was a short note on official government stationery. ‘My work here is done.’ That’s all it said,” the ex-brigadier general said.

“Official government stationery my ass. What ‘official government’? What ‘government’ at all? You’re just a bunch of armed thugs fighting over scraps of land and wreaking genocide on your own people. Scum of the earth, that’s what you are.”

“Genocide, you say?” he said. “Is that what you call our peacekeeping efforts? Our government needs to subdue the terrorist threat for the good of our own people.”

“As I said, it’s not a government,” I argued back. “Call yourself defense minister or whatever you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re not recognized by the United Nations, and more to the point you’re the ones going around killing your own people.”

“What has the UN got to do with anything? You imperialists are the ones who came here, trampling our indigenous culture to the ground, laughing at our efforts at self-determination, stirring up racial discord where our people have lived peacefully side by side for years …” At this point the former brigadier general seemed to run out of steam, and he abruptly stopped talking. His eyes were glinting with a peculiar emotion, not quite fear, not quite sorrow. Silence pressed down, punctuated only by the distant rat-tat-tat of the ongoing executions.

“That’s right. How did our country ever come to this?” He started speaking again. “Weren’t multiculturalism and tolerance the cornerstones of our culture? Terrorists! That’s right, it must have been terrorists! Terrorists born of intolerance and hatred, it’s all their fault … no? No, it must have been something else. The military didn’t need to declare martial law in the capital to deal with a routine terrorist threat, surely? The police had it under control? So why? Why has it come to this? How has it come to this?”

Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.

There were no cries, no screams. The only testament to the anonymous dead whose corpses were piling up in the hole was the sound of the very gunfire that caused their deaths.

I was getting fed up with this bullshit. Nothing good ever came of having an old man staring his own death in the face. What was this, some sort of deathbed confession to atone for the stream of dead he left in his wake? Did he think he would earn absolution for his eternal soul or something? Seek forgiveness with a humble heart and you will be saved? That Christian shtick isn’t going to work with me, buddy—I’m a confirmed atheist.

I told him as much. Called him out on his bullshit. I wasn’t a priest or a pastor, I explained. I couldn’t give him the absolution he asked for even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. Your repentance is bullshit—too little, too late. No religion can save you now, and if there is a hell you are going straight there.

“I’m sure I am. I’ll go straight to hell, no doubt. But you misunderstand me, son. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m just trying to work out what went wrong. How this country has gone so wrong. It used to be such a wonderful place. So beautiful. Up until only a couple of years ago …”

And that was when it finally clicked. This man in front of me, the former brigadier general of this country, was genuinely puzzled. More than that, he was filled with dread, but not thanks to the knife I was holding to his throat. He was terrified because he didn’t even comprehend his own motives for fighting in this civil war.

I shuddered. How illogical, how fucked-up it was to forget your reasons for fighting, now of all times. And how convenient.

“Why did you kill so many people?” I asked.

“Why did I kill so many people?”

That’s against the rules, answering a question with another question, I thought.

The old man in front of me was now raving, his teeth chattering in fear. He was on the brink. His answers were too far gone for me to have any more faith in his words, but I continued regardless, pressing my knife even further up against his jugular.

“Why, old man? Answer me!”

“Why? I don’t know why!”

“Answer me!”

In the short time our bodies had been pressed together my disguise had started adapting to the outfit the former brigadier general was wearing: full military regalia, replete with medals and decorations. A cold shudder ran down my spine—it was as if the old man’s madness was infecting and about to possess me. Not that there was anything I could do about it while I had his arms pinned behind him and my blade to his throat.

“Won’t you please tell me?” he was asking me now. His eyes were the eyes of a corpse, pupils hollow and void of any life. The phrase “looks as though he’s seen a ghost” is bandied around a lot, but it occurred to me that he was what a person would actually look like if they had just been confronted with incontrovertible proof of a real, supernatural terror. I gritted my teeth, trying to force myself to blot out the absurdity of the situation in front of me.

“Shut up!” This was definitely not part of the plan—it absolutely had not occurred to us that this could have been one of the reactions. A groveling show of regret and remorse for the cameras, sure, and that would have been easy enough to deal with. As it was, the words that were now spilling forth from this man’s mouth had an almost hypnotic effect, and as the words increased in intensity, I worried that the torrent of madness spewing forth was starting to encroach upon my own sanity.

“Please, sir, I’m begging you! Tell me why! Why have I killed so many people?”

He was completely oblivious to me now. Babbling. How the mighty had fallen.

“Look, old man, I can’t help you. Won’t you please just be quiet?” I’m ashamed to say that by now my own voice sounded as pitiful as his.

“Why did I kill everyone?”

“Shut up.”

“But why?”

And that was that. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I drew my blade across his throat. Fresh blood splattered and turned the mosque wall into a Jackson Pollock painting. Before he had time to choke on his own blood I quickly hamstrung him so that I could force his once-imposing body to the ground and thrust my blade into his heart. As I did so, blood bubbled from his mouth and his eyes flared open.

The former brigadier general, the man who had called himself defense minister for the interim government, was dead.

The great commander of the estimated thirty-five thousand armed insurgents who terrorized the countryside was dead.

I felt as if reality had snapped back and hit me in the face. I realized for the first time that the piano melody that had been filling the room had long since faded without a trace.

Moonlight Sonata had finished without my noticing. I shook my head to clear my thoughts before looking around. It was as if I’d been in some sort of magical alternate dimension and forgotten to breathe while I was there. I gulped again for air.

Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-tat.

The night that had briefly been caressed by the Moonlight Sonata had returned to echoing the sound of people killing each other.

“What on earth happened here, sir?”

I turned around to see Alex’s troubled expression. All I could do by way of response was sigh. I didn’t even want to start thinking about how to explain the old man’s extraordinary behavior.

“Are you all right, sir?” Alex asked again. Ever the professional, even as he spoke to me he was checking the corpse of the ex-brigadier general that lay on the floor. He was using the recording capabilities of the nanolayer implants in his eyes to confirm and record the old man’s death from as many angles as possible.

“Yeah. It looks like Target B isn’t coming here tonight, though.”

“Oh. Unlike Intelligence to get that wrong,” Alex said calmly, going about his work.

I could hear more gunfire in the distance.

The atrocities in this area aren’t quite over yet, I thought to myself.