Genocidal Organ (2 page)

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.