by Project Itoh
And yet all Williams could do was kill me with kindness. Gentle, thoughtful, funny Williams. The last thing in the world that I needed right now.
1
A war zone.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had taken high-resolution satellite images of the territory formerly known as India and Pakistan.
A mass of craters. Their circumferences in direct proportion to the size of the warheads used to create them. The effects of the nuclear war had been as far reaching as they had been unsubtle. It was as though the earth had bubbled up and boiled over. Over the years, purling mountain rivers had poured into craters where warheads had dented the ground, gradually filling them up to form giant concentric reservoirs. The craters themselves were desolate places, reddish-brown pits devoid of all life; the radiation had seen to that. But venturing away from the circumference, the ground gradually started to turn greener until finally the stench of death had all but disappeared and you were back into the territory of India’s verdant forests.
The picture zoomed in. The numerous NGA lenses in orbit shifted in their trajectory, enlarging the image of the land far below. The heat radiation present in over ten kilometers of atmosphere, combined with minuscule imperfections in the lenses themselves, caused the new image to momentarily blur until the adaptive optic software embedded in each of the lenses kicked in to correct the final image so that it was crystal clear again.
The cameras employed twenty-four bits per RGB channel, which meant that it was possible to identify green pixels on the mountain roads and distinguish them from the deep greens of the forest all around them. This paler green color was the green of war, the green of the army. Antiaircraft guns, armored vehicles, personnel carriers, tanks. When the generals who had pressed the nuclear button had fled from justice, the courtroom, and their inevitable death sentences, they were welcomed with open arms by the paramilitary organizations—provided they brought along with them a handful of toys.
The cameras zoomed farther in, five centimeters to a pixel, the maximum resolution. We could now distinctly see faces of the dead villagers scattered across the center of the paramilitary’s latest stronghold. There must have been at least fifty corpses, burnt and twisted into various fetal positions. The satellite video was still focusing, showing an ever-clearer image of the agglomeration of dead bodies.
People had been killed there. An entire village. At the hands of other people.
There was an acronym that we in the Special Forces had come to hate. CEEP: Child Enemy Encounter Probability.
It meant exactly what it sounded like. The possibility that we’d end up in a shootout with prepubescent girls.
The possibility that we’d end up having to blast their little skulls open and riddle their developing bodies with bullets.
Probability. Traceability. Countability. Searchability. Viability. Everything was “-bility” this and “-bility” that. It was enough to drive the world mad.
In reality, when the word probability was used, we were looking at a hundred percent chance. The suffix -bility lost all meaning. It was a weasel phrase, a phrase used only by fraudsters and fools.
Words don’t have any smell.
Neither do images or satellite recordings.
For some reason, this fact annoyed me.
The smell of fat frying and muscle shrinking. The stink of proteins in human hairs turning into ash. The distinctive odor of people burning. I knew it all too well. I wouldn’t quite say that I had become used to it, but I had encountered it enough times over the years in the line of duty that I was at least familiar with it.
The smell of gunpowder. The smell of old rubber tires aflame, lit as beacons by the soldiers.
The smell of the battlefield.
There was something inherently vile about watching these satellite images, and it was making me feel uneasy. Not because of the horrific nature of the images—though they were horrific enough, all right—but because they were so sanitized. Sitting here, it made no difference to us whether we were looking at people burned whole, with guts spilling out, or with blood seeping out onto the ground. It was all so clean and deodorized. That was the most disgusting thing of all. The lenses that coldly looked down at the corpses from on high in the freezing void of space were like an omniscient yet supremely indifferent god.
The only smell associated with these images right now was the smell of the conference room at HQ in Fort Bragg. A brand-new smell, the smell of concrete and plastic and resins and monomers and adhesives and chemical wizardry.
“These images were taken by the air force’s space recon satellites four days ago,” the man from the National Counterterrorism Center explained. “At the New India government’s behest, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court at The Hague has issued arrest warrants for eight leaders of a Hindu fundamentalist faction currently active in rural areas. The charges include crimes against humanity, use of child soldiers, and genocide.”
He sounded like every other civilian state official. There was a complete, bizarre mismatch between the bland tone of voice he affected and the gravity of the actual words. It was as though he was taking half-digested pieces of jargon and spinning them ever further away from their true meaning, taking them to the point where they became almost completely nonsensical, before presenting them in a nice and orderly fashion. I would have called it superficial, except that the word didn’t really do justice to that weird sense of detachment he was projecting. When he talked of crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide, you had no sense that he actually understood or felt what these words meant. At that moment I felt a lot of sympathy for the soldiers who listened to Robert McNamara’s account of the Vietnam War and simply couldn’t relate to it in a meaningful way.
Still, this man from the NCTC was here, now, in this meeting room in Fort Bragg, giving a skillful, efficient, and entirely superficial briefing to the assembled soldiers.
“Eugene and Krupps are on the ground as the Japanese government’s proxy, carrying out the UNOIND remit for postwar reconstruction and stabilization. As the US Armed Forces maintain only a token presence in this area, it’s fair to say that Eugene and Krupps are effectively the dominant military power on the ground.”
The next image was brought up on the screens of the notepads of the assembled meeting. A picture of children mingled with skinny adults, smiling at the camera without a care in the world as they brandished AK rifles that seemed comically oversized in their tiny hands.
“This group that now calls itself the Hindu India Provisionals was founded by the same faction that started the nuclear war. The official postwar Indian government that had formed following international intervention established a secular state. Hindu India smoldered away in the rural hinterlands for a number of years without causing any real damage, but recently their activities have escalated. They have started attacking remote Muslim villages, massacring their inhabitants, raping their women, and abducting and indoctrinating their children and assimilating them into their own ranks.”
I watched as the screen in front of me started graphically enumerating a list of the atrocities. Rows of corpses lined up and bleached white with caustic lime. The lime looked like flour and the bodies almost like pieces of chicken ready to be breaded and fried. Then there were the charred black houses and the alleyways between them littered with the naked bodies of women. Just images. No smell, no sound. Just pixels trapped inside our notebooks on our desks.
“The postwar New India government has, for the most part, exceeded international expectations. The Hindu India Provisionals were until recently a mere fringe cult group with limited influence. The population of India is still poor, but the government managed to hold a successful round of democratic elections. Infant mortality was dropping rapidly. And then, as of last year, things started going downhill.”
“Who are these Hindu India when they’re at home?” blurted out a voice from behind me. Williams.
“They are a fund
amentalist paramilitary group who draw their strength mainly from the rural poor. For the last year or so they’ve been inexplicably growing and expanding the scope of their activities. They mostly kept their heads down in the immediate postwar reconstruction period, confining their activities to the countryside, far away from any center of power. They offer a simplistic solution to the national identity crisis brought about by years of foreign intervention. Up until recently, though, there weren’t many subscribers to their particular brand of antigovernment fundamentalist religious rhetoric, as most of the populace quite rightly associated it with the sort of rhetoric that caused the nuclear war in the first place.”
“So why the sudden escalation?” Williams asked again. “I thought everyone in the region had their fill of war?”
“Indeed, that is what we all believed. Our political scientists and economists have tried to come up with a hypothesis to explain the sudden surge in Hindu nationalism, but no one has yet been able to posit a model that’s in any way convincing.”
“Ah, they’re just missing the battlefield,” Williams said, grinning. “Just like us—we get blue balls when we’ve been away from the action for too long. Am I right or am I right, Clavis?”
And with that, all eyes were on me. I sighed.
“Whatever floats your boat, Williams. To each his own, I guess. All I know is it’s best to keep your dirty thoughts to yourself rather than air them in public—it scares off the pretty ladies.”
The NCTC man coughed theatrically in a plea not to let the atmosphere descend any further toward that of a high school locker room. We all settled down for the next part of the briefing, albeit with smirks on our faces.
“The ICC prosecutor investigated and found that the New India government’s accusations were well founded. The prosecutor found evidence of crimes against humanity, mobilization of child combatants, and genocide. Accordingly, The Hague has issued arrest warrants for the leaders of this brutal paramilitary group, but as yet the New India government has lacked the firepower to do anything about it.”
“Aaand that’s where we come in, the poor bloody infantry!” Williams interjected.
The speaker nodded. “Exactly. Your mission is to capture the head of the Hindu India Provisionals along with three of the eight leaders. We are acting as a military proxy for the Japanese government and will capture these villains and bring them to account at the International Criminal Court. There they will answer for their crimes against humanity. However, I should warn you that there is a, uh, delicate matter regarding your combat status. As you will technically be tasked by the Japanese military as their proxy, you will officially be classified as mercenaries under the Geneva Convention. As such, should you be apprehended by the enemy, the standard terms of the Geneva Convention for enemy combatants will not be available—”
“Get captured and you’re on your own, we don’t know you—that’s what you’re saying, right, Phelpsie?” Williams was thoroughly enjoying himself now. If ever there was a man who enjoyed living on the edge, it was Williams. The greater the odds, the more enjoyable the challenge. In that sense he was one of nature’s supreme masochists.
A more serious interjection came from Leland. “What I don’t understand is why we have to somehow be representing the Japs in the first place. What’s that all about?”
The speaker, Phelps, smiled indulgently. “The US is not a signatory to the Hague Conventions. The Hague has given the Japanese government the mandate to act; the US is able to intervene legitimately only as an external contractor.”
Williams groaned. “Shit, so we’re no better than Eugene and Krapps now?”
“Lame. This is so totally lame,” Leland agreed.
“We’re not some amateur mercs, you know,” Williams said.
At this point Colonel Rockwell rose from the corner of the room where he had been sitting quietly up until a moment ago. “Thank you very much, Evan. We’ll take it from here.”
And with that, Evan Phelps of the NCTC was summarily dismissed. He looked somewhat doubtfully at the colonel—he still had plenty he wanted to say, no doubt—but in the end he scurried off, overwhelmed by the colonel’s military aura.
Now it was time for the briefing to start in earnest. The room went silent. Just like a secret society, I thought. A world without outsiders, just us band of brothers. Phelps had been ejected from the room, of course, because what happened now was need to know, for our eyes only. But the instant he left the atmosphere also changed—the members of the conference collectively straightened their spines and sat alert. No more cocky teenagers putting on a show of defiance toward the world. This was now a sacred ritual of a secret society. If the scene now looked like some sort of macho fascist gathering, it was also somewhere between black magic and shamanism. We were a secret gathering here to participate in an esoteric ceremony.
“We were the ones who requested the mission from the Japanese government. We asked that it take this form,” the colonel said without preamble. “There is a strong possibility that John Paul is currently with the official targets.”
Suddenly my world exploded into life.
John Paul was in India.
Which meant that Lucia could be with him too.
“When the arrest warrants were issued by The Hague, Eugene and Krupps’s operations department presented the Japanese government with a plan. Naturally, as Eugene and Krupps are the effective military power in the region. But we can’t have E and K be the ones who capture John Paul. They’d pass him on to the ICC, and then he’d be out of our hands for good. The other targets are secondary and can be handed over if necessary, but we need to be the ones to bring in John Paul.”
At this point I thought I saw the colonel glance over at me. Of the people in the room, the colonel and I were the only ones who knew about John Paul’s grammar of genocide. We were the only ones who knew just how he was spreading his death and chaos around the world and the reason why he had to die.
Phelps had said that Hindu India had been inexplicably expanding the scope of their activities. Inexplicable to Phelps, perhaps, but there were two people in this room who knew exactly why. Because of the evil spell woven by that man. The pied piper who led his children to genocide.
The monitor behind the colonel froze, and I could make out glimpses of burning bodies on the frozen image.
Leland spoke up. “We accepted this mission so that Johnny wouldn’t end up in the hands of the ICC, sir?”
The colonel shook his head. “ ‘Accepted’ is not quite the right word. No, we actively went out of our way to pull some strings with the Japanese government. We made sure they turned down Eugene and Krupps’s initial proposal so that they could give it to us instead.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If the US had been a signatory to the Rome Statute it would have been much easier. But signatories cannot make use of antiterrorist evidence obtained by torture by third party countries. It’s deemed inadmissible. We’d have to close down Guantanamo Bay for starters.”
“So our main objective is to take out John Paul?”
“Not take out. Capture and bring in alive. Just don’t let him fall into the hands of the ICC or the New India government.”
We all understood our duty. It was obvious now why the civilian staffer Phelps had been kept in the dark.
“It’s the basic drill: aerial drop. Pickup will be via UAV,” the colonel said.
Someone asked what sort of unmanned aerial vehicle.
“Helicopter. In addition, we’ll be laying on some Flying Seaweed to provide you with close air support. You’ll be able to call on them for tactical bombing.”
“What’s the CEEP, sir?” Williams asked the question that was always asked. I could feel the room bracing itself.
As usual, the colonel answered without hesitation, compunction, or emotion. “One hundred percent.”
“I almost feel bad for asking,” Williams said, his smile sardonic now. He knew all too well from ten years of bitte
r experience that there was rarely such a thing as a mission with zero Child Enemy Encounter Probability. But he still needed to ask. To know. It wasn’t just Williams either. All of us in the room felt the same.
Man, it wasn’t a nice feeling to know you were about to go out into the field and start killing kids. Even if modern technology made it easier, it never quite became easy.
“Intelligence tells us that the hostile ground forces are comprised of roughly sixty percent minors under eighteen. All units to report for battle counseling starting tomorrow morning. The plan will commence one week from today. Gentlemen, you are dismissed.”
2
The air smelled of the desire to kill.
No, not the air.
I did.
There was a figure on the crosshair. I pulled the trigger, and it went down. Like a twig snapping. Another figure emerged. It was carrying an AK. It wanted to kill me. I pulled the trigger again. The figure went down.
The act of killing wasn’t that important in and of itself. It was the mission that was important. We had to do our duty, and if we had to remove obstacles as we did so, then so be it. Sometimes the enemy would try to stop us and attack. Often, the enemy’s attacks were virtually suicide charges. In the arena of war, life was cheap. Cheaper even than the secondhand laptops used by the leaders to keep track of their troops like the cannon fodder they were.
It was as if the figures in my scope had never even heard of the word “cover.” They just kept on charging into my crosshair. Bullets leapt out of my rifle and into the skulls of the children, exploding all the potential out of their brains and splattering it onto the terrain behind them. Or, occasionally, through their bellies, sending a mixture of their intestines and liver and kidneys to spray out. Or into a pelvis or thigh, cutting clean through an artery, causing the flesh to well up with an unstoppable flow of lifeblood.
Cheap lives. I started doubting myself even as I was snuffing them out one by one. Why was I shooting the enemy? Was it really just survival instinct? Or was that something imprinted onto me by counseling?