by Project Itoh
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 t
oo 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.
1
Hell is here, Alex had said.
You can’t escape from hell. Because hell’s right here, inside your mind, and you carry it around with you.
Two years had passed since the night I killed the former brigadier general, but to be honest I seemed to be doing a good enough job of evading my own personal hell. I did occasionally return to the land of the dead in my dreams, but that was too peaceful a place to really be called hell.
I never knew what Alex’s personal hell looked like to him. He never did tell me, and now it was too late. As I looked on at his coffin being carried out of the church I wondered whether he had finally made it to that heaven he’d talked about. After all, Catholics had moved on from their unforgiving dogma of the past, hadn’t they? The pearly gates were open to all these days.
Even to those who chose to die.
That’s how it was possible for Alex to have a Catholic funeral service even though he had taken his own life. In medieval Europe, suicides were buried at crossroads. People couldn’t forgive the grave sin of taking away the most precious gift given by God, and so the sin was punished by forcing the ingrate’s spirit to roam the earth without respite until the ultimate release of Judgment Day.
These days the Catholic Church didn’t feel the need to punish the dead who had, presumably, already suffered enough. Alex’s ceremony and burial were just like any other Catholic funeral service—solemn, dignified, and grave. The eulogy was given by the same old Irish priest who had delivered Alex’s first communion.
We were all notified immediately on the night that Alex gassed himself in his car, and it was our job to enter his lodgings to find his last will and testament. His room was orderly to the point of obsession. His book collection consisted entirely of theological monographs and various editions of the Bible. Once upon a time Williams had asked Alex to recommend him a good book. I’ve finished all mine and I’m bored, he had said. What sort of book do you like, sir, Alex had replied. I dunno, something entertaining, plenty of sex, drugs, and violence, Williams said. Then Alex just laughed and proudly presented Williams with a Bible.
We scoured the apartment but found no sign of a will or a suicide note. Alex had evidently made up his mind to sail his ship alone, without saying anything to anyone.
Alex was actually the second suicide I had known in my life.
As a result—and no offense to Alex—his death didn’t have as much of an impact on me as it might have. After all, the first person I’d known who’d killed himself had been my dad, and they say there’s no greater trauma than that—although that’s horseshit, frankly, as I was still a little brat when my dad offed himself and had no real conception of what death meant, so how was I supposed to be shocked by it? All it did was set the precedent for people close to me dying all the time, something that I could never quite get away from.
Why had my dad chosen death? Best rephrase that question. I doubt my father had the capability to choose. Suicide isn’t a choice; it’s what you do when there are no choices left. At least I’m sure that’s the way it was in my father’s mind—blank, except for one final course of action.
It might not be correct to say that he chose to leave this world, but he sure did choose how he left it. After a number of failed attempts at hanging himself when no one was at home, he fell back on the nation’s favorite default method of suicide. In other words, he blew his brains out. The method of choice of roughly fifty percent of all American suicides, statistically. That’s how it was twenty years ago when my dad did the deed, and it’s still true now. It’s such an easy way to go. When you look at the demographic of people who already have access to firearms—most adults, in other words—you’ll see that for them the statistic is closer to seventy percent. From the bum on the street to the mightiest CEO, the gun was the great leveler: all citizens were alike when their brains were splattered on the wall. Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Cobain a
ll used this method; and as it needs no special preparation beforehand it can be as quick and easy as whipping it out of your pocket and blasting your head off. There’s still footage circulating on the web of Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out at a press conference. In a sense it’s unfortunate for minors that they can’t easily get their hands on guns, and thus have to resort to hanging themselves or some other inferior method. Hanging is the second most popular method of suicide in the States.
They couldn’t pin down a precise time of death for my father. Well, back then they didn’t yet have the Firearms Registry that we have now, and it goes without saying that guns weren’t routinely tagged at the point of sale either. These days, if you used a gun to kill yourself, the Federal Firearms Registry tag implanted in the grip would take an exact record of when the shot was fired, and the data would be transmitted instantly to the central database of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives, so it’d be possible to get an accurate time of death, or rather the exact time the bullet ripped through its owner’s brains. The time recorded on the BATFE database was a de facto gravestone. My father didn’t have the benefit of this modern technology to mark his legacy, though, so his epitaph had to state “died at some unspecified time one afternoon when everyone else was out of the house.”
Of course, there was also no way of asking my father why he had gone to the effort of trying the second most popular suicide method first. Why did you decide to die? Why did you settle on a gun in the end? You can’t interrogate a dead man. You can’t ask him any questions, and you can’t ask him for forgiveness.
I’d like to tell you that, with a child’s intuition, I picked up the scent of death and was unusually affected by my father’s suicide, but as I said before, that’d be a lie. What I actually remember is that one day my father was there and then one day he wasn’t. He disappeared. Don’t put too much stock in this “children’s intuition” bull.