Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot

by Project Itoh

  I looked to Snake. His face, as I’d expected, showed no emotion. He already knew what he had to do.

  I turned away. Hadn’t he already done everything he could?

  I hated myself for being unable to do anything more for my friend, this old man who would have to end his own life in three months.

  Campbell said, “You’re the only one who can save the world now. Snake, I’m counting on you.”

  I hated him for saying that.

  The world? When had Snake ever asked to be responsible for the entire world? My friend—my best friend—would be dead soon enough. Couldn’t you let him be?

  Campbell cut the transmission.

  Snake stood and tottered over to Raiden’s medical station at the side of the cargo bay. The cyborg was covered with cables hooked to monitoring devices, and tubes filled with white liquid wove in and out of his body. Thanks to QR codes, Dr. Madnar had quickly been able to locate the access shunt to the bloodway that substituted for his arteries and veins.

  A computer hooked up to a bar scanner could read the tags covering Raiden’s exoskeleton and display any relevant information for each part—its capabilities, related components, the manufacturer, the production date, even URLs for online help pages. Just as nanomachines filled soldiers’ bodies and constantly monitored data about their health, labels covered Raiden’s artificial body and contained data about his manufacture.

  Sunny was thankful for the tags. In fact, they might very well have saved Raiden’s life. If she had needed to stop to look up each and every part, he might not have survived. Still, something about the shroud of wireless ID tags rubbed Snake the wrong way.

  Sunny must have thought Snake had come to take Raiden, because she turned to him and said, “N-no! Jack can’t go. He’s not ready yet.”

  Then Raiden spoke.

  “Let me go, Sunny.”

  He slowly shifted his arm. The movement was sluggish; he clearly hadn’t yet recovered. His voice wasn’t even his own, but that of a speaking device in his throat.

  “No!” Sunny said sternly. “Your dialysis isn’t done yet.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  Raiden was strapped to the medical bed by several data cables. As much as he tried to move, the cords held him in place. The sight made me think of Gulliver captured by the Lilliputians. Except Raiden had been so weakened, I couldn’t imagine he had the strength to snap free from his binds.

  When told he wasn’t ready yet, Raiden looked straight into my eyes. I shrank back, overpowered by the force of his gaze.

  “From now on,” Raiden said, “I’m living my life by my own will. Not a proxy life, as a slave to someone else’s scenario.”

  Snake stared at Raiden, remembering what the young man had said in Manhattan—how Solidus killed his parents and turned him into a child soldier, and how he fled from that nightmare to America, where the Patriots, as part of the S3 Project, used him as a pawn and manipulated him into becoming another Snake.

  None other than Solid Snake himself freed Raiden from that life.

  Only after he met Snake did Raiden begin to walk his own path.

  So Snake felt responsibility for meddling in another’s life and skewing its direction. He let out a sigh, quiet, but heavy with his thoughts.

  “I’m a shadow,” he said. “One that no light will shine upon. As long as you follow me, you’ll never see the light of day.”

  Perhaps Snake felt responsible for Meryl too. And I didn’t want to think about it, but maybe he even did for me. Maybe my friend had always carried a sense of guilt: These young people who look up to me, can I even begin to tell myself that their lives are blessed for it? If I’m the Legendary Hero, wouldn’t the legend be of bringing nothing but misfortune upon others?

  Those feelings were a part of why he now fought for an ending.

  Raiden spoke more to himself than as a response to Snake’s words. “You and I are both just pawns in this proxy war. But once this is over, we will have our freedom. I’ll release you. It’s the only way I’ll ever be free.”

  “Raiden,” Snake said firmly, “what I said five years ago … that’s not what I meant.”

  “I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  I shook my head. He said he had nothing to lose, and yet he still clung to something—maybe to the fight itself. The sight was too painful to watch.

  His near obsession must have tortured Snake, who leveled stern eyes at him and remonstrated, “Don’t be an idiot. You know you’ve got someone to protect.”

  “Snake,” he said, putting on a smile so awkward he looked like he was choking on it. “I’m the rain. The light of day holds nothing for me.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong,” Snake said. He was still young; he should’ve still had the strength to bring light somewhere.

  Snake put his hand on Raiden’s shoulder. “You’re the lightning. You can still shine through the darkness.”

  “The lightning …”

  “Raiden, look at me.”

  Suddenly, Snake ripped the bandage from his left cheek and revealed the scorched skin beneath. “Do you see this? I have no future. In a few months, I’m going to be a weapon of mass destruction.”

  Raiden looked into the face of the ragged old soldier, skin battered and burned and peeling off. This close, his flesh gave off a distinct, unpleasant odor—the stench of old age, perhaps. Heavy, sagging eyelids crushed the spirit from eyes that had been so astute and fearless when they first met on the Big Shell.

  This was the face of a man with no future, an old man held up solely by a longing for the closure only atonement could bring. Snake wasn’t fighting for the future. He wasn’t fighting to hold on to something. Snake fought for what he had already lost. This was the face of a man who had nothing left to lose.

  But Raiden still had a woman who cared for him.

  He had something to hold on to—a place to come home to.

  “You have a family,” Snake said.

  Raiden’s eyes flew open. “I have no family!”

  With his outburst, the medical observation systems sounded a warning in unison.

  Raiden’s hardened exoskeletal body began to convulse. I dashed to his bedside, and Sunny wrapped her small arms around him, holding him down, while Snake shook his head with finality.

  Again Raiden shouted, “I have no one!”

  His wounds were already life-threatening—if it continued, Raiden’s agitated state could prove fatal. Sunny worked the infusion pump to temporarily increase the flow of painkillers.

  Then Raiden spoke. Not with the artificial sound from his throat, but from his own mouth, he said, “I have always been alone.”

  As his chin moved, the oxygen mask, only loosely held in place, slipped to the floor. Teardrops ran from his white eyes down his cheeks and onto the bed.

  And then the drugs pulled his consciousness back into a opiate haze.

  His unsteady breaths regained a steady rhythm, and his eyelids grew heavy and shrouded his eyes. I let out a relieved sigh, and my tensed back muscles returned to normal.

  Softly, Snake spoke Raiden’s name. The man whom Snake, albeit unintentionally, had torn from a better and rightful life to further his own cause.

  Just as he fell into sleep, Raiden squeezed out the raspy words: “Don’t leave me here alone.”

  Snake got on one knee, drew close to Raiden’s ear, and gently whispered to the unconscious man, “This is my fight. My destiny.”

  Snake’s words seemed as much directed at himself, reaffirming: This fight isn’t Raiden’s. It’s not Meryl’s. You don’t have to get hurt.

  Snake stood, removed the bandages covering his injured body, and retrieved his equipment and maintenance tools from the storage area at the rear of the bay. Just as I decided to help him, he began to cough violently. The noise was terrible and sickening, like the depths of his lungs were convulsing.

  I ran over and went to pat his back, but he shook off my hand and put Naomi’s autoinjector to his neck
. Its contents had mostly calmed him down, but clearly the drug’s effectiveness was diminishing.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. The emotions I’d suppressed through Campbell’s call came out all at once.

  “Snake, stop,” I said. “You can’t handle any more of this.”

  He put his hand to the wall and tried to steady his breathing. “I’m not dying right this moment.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You can’t beat Liquid. He’s got the Patriots’ own control system on his side. Not only are weapons useless, but the US military is in shambles. And even if it weren’t, Liquid’s has the men and machines to match it.”

  All else aside, our opponent controlled sixty percent of the global military might, but now any forces that would stand against him were frozen as if by magic. So why did this man alone have to fight?

  “Things can’t get any worse, Snake. Face it. We’ve lost,” I said. “We never stood a chance.”

  I’d let my emotions vent, and Snake just looked at me. He never appreciated becoming the subject of concern. Although he might have jokingly complained at times, he always dealt with everything himself. Snake, of all people, knew he couldn’t fight this by himself. At Shadow Moses and the Big Shell, he learned that there were situations in this world he couldn’t make it through alone.

  That was all the more reason for him to fear others getting hurt on his behalf. Even when the battles had been too much for him alone, as long as he could make any of the responsibility his own, Snake always carried the guilt.

  Having seen the crossing of Snake and Raiden’s lives, I don’t think I ever found Snake’s tragic sense of responsibility so painful as with Raiden, who had come to embrace battle.

  Snake, eyes still at the wall, put his hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s not about winning or losing,” he said. “I—no, we—started this. And it’s our duty to finish it.”

  Then, having nothing left to say, he returned to his equipment check.

  As I helped him prepare for combat, I quietly cried. I’d known that would be his response; I’d known I couldn’t stop him no matter how hard I tried. I think Snake noticed I was crying, but he didn’t speak. The two of us worked together in silence.

  With the fate of the world and that of humanity at stake, I prayed for one single thing: for the noble soul of my friend, who continued to fight despite a body covered with injuries, to find peace.

  2

  THE PLACE WHERE our battle began.

  A small lump of rock surrounded by the sea.

  The Aleutian Islands stretched like a necklace across the Pacific from the chin of Alaska to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. The Aleutian low-pressure area drew in Arctic air and often left the chain of islands exposed to tremendous cold.

  But despite being so close to the North Pole, the climate of the archipelago was milder than Siberia or Anchorage, partly due to volcanic activity along the Ring of Fire and the Aleutian Current flowing along its southern edge. The Arctic was generally warmer than the Antarctic also because the surface of the ocean has a tendency to retain heat. The temperature above frozen ground and thick layers of snow differed from that above water.

  The Fox Archipelago sat on the Alaskan side of the Aleutians, and the island, birthed from the volcanic fires of Old Moses after World War II, lay close enough to the island group that a ship would need to take care when sailing between.

  The Aleutian fishermen considered the area a place of great evil, and none came near. Even if they had, there were no natural harbors. Sheer cliff face surrounded the land on all sides.

  The fishermen called the island the Shadow of Moses.

  Snake rode the freight elevator from the cargo dock and arrived at the island’s surface.

  A blizzard awaited him. The fury of the Aleutian Low spread across the sea. Because the weather made landing an aircraft too dangerous, Snake had approached the island first by submarine, then by a smaller submersible called an SDV, or Swimmer Delivery Vehicle. For the last stretch of the icy Bering Sea, he swam. An injection of peptides temporarily boosted Snake’s blood glucose level and lowered his body’s freezing point to below zero, preventing him from freezing in the Aleutian water and drowning at sea. The concept worked the same way as mankind did during the Ice Age—essentially cultivating diabetes.

  Despite the severe weather, the island’s occupiers seemed determined to fly a helicopter. Snake hid behind a stack of containers beside the elevator and watched incredulously as the helicopter’s rotor spun up. The Soviet gunship had once been the terror of Afghani jihadist fighters.

  “A Hind D …”

  Shadow Moses was supposed to be an American base, yet here was this attack beast built by their former adversary.

  “Colonel, what’s a Russian gunship doing here?”

  “I have no idea,” the colonel said over the codec, “but it looks like our F-16s got their attention. Now’s your best chance to slip in unnoticed—”

  Another voice, sounding incredibly out of place, cut in.

  “Wow!” she said. She sounded like a teenage girl. “He must be crazy to fly a Hind in this kind of weather.”

  “Who’s that?” Snake asked.

  “Oh,” the colonel replied, “sorry, I haven’t introduced you two yet. This is Mei Ling. She designed your Soliton radar system.”

  “Nice to meet you, Snake.” Mei’s voice possessed a childlike, innocent quality. “It’s an honor to speak to a living legend like yourself.”

  That, of course, was nine years ago.

  Snake’s infiltration of the nuclear warhead storage facility captured by FOXHOUND began there. Mei Ling, who at that time had still been a young undergrad, now captained Missouri. Her transfer might have been a sinecure, but the position still enabled her to wield a significant portion of the military’s resources. She had used the position of the Mk. II’s last transmissions to predict the course of Liquid’s ship.

  Just as we’d thought, Liquid had come to Shadow Moses. Mei obtained photos of the island taken by a civilian—and free of SOP control—imagery satellite. A large, dark shape resembling Liquid’s ship had hidden within the rocky shore.

  The US government had sidelined Mei’s and Meryl’s careers out of a desire to leave Shadow Moses in the past, forgotten. All records of the incident had been falsified or erased with no trace left behind, as if nothing had ever happened. Metal Gear REX’s broken husk remained there, abandoned, along with its stealth nukes and the stockpile of warheads left over from the Cold War.

  Mei offered to give us support. The decommissioned USS Missouri survived less as an actual battleship than as a training vessel. There had been no need—or funds—to retrofit the ship to be compatible with the System, and now Missouri was the only craft in the fleet still able to move. Once, I jokingly told Mei it reminded me of the Galactica, but she never watched much TV and didn’t get the reference.

  Now Snake had returned to the same heliport where he’d been introduced to Mei over the codec. We never looked back fondly upon the many hardships that led up to this day, and yet Snake standing here, back at the same place, stirred up strong feelings of nostalgia. The facility looked mostly unchanged after all those years.

  Alone in the helipad, Snake remained still.

  “Snake,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “I was just thinking how different this place looks during the day.”

  I had spent a long time on the island through REX’s development and testing, and was familiar with the facility at any hour. But now that I thought about it, this was Snake’s first time encountering the heliport in daylight; the infiltration op had taken place in the middle of the night.

  The cargo dock he’d entered by had since been reclaimed by the ocean, a victim of global warming. The elevator was frozen over, no longer usable. But that wasn’t an obstacle for us, because this time Snake didn’t come by sea. I had rented a civilian helicopter and brought Snake, and the Metal Gear Mk. III, to the island.
r />   FOXHOUND and the Next-Generation Special Forces Unit of Genome Soldiers were nowhere in sight. I think Snake was a little spooked by this empty, daylight version of the heliport.

  If not to put him at ease, I gave Snake a word of advice.

  “I don’t see anybody around, but there are unmanned sentries patrolling the area. Be careful out there.”

  “Yeah.”

  His voice sounded more pained than ever.

  In a few short days, he’d traveled the world from the Middle East to South America, to Eastern Europe, and now Alaska. Snake’s body had aged too much to withstand the severe changes in temperature and air pressure. The cold air carried by the Aleutian Low sent the temperature to twenty below. The lungs of a seventy-year-old couldn’t last long.

  Snake crossed the heliport and stood before the facility’s giant doors.

  When he was last here, the front gate was shut down tight, and he had to find entry through an air duct. But now the doors had been left wide open, and Snake found himself feeling oddly crestfallen and unsatisfied.

  And wasn’t there a surveillance camera here?

  Snake turned his eyes to the right of the door where a CCTV camera had once kept vigilant watch for intruders. Left exposed to the ocean wind and the cold, without anyone to maintain it, the camera had gradually rusted away, and fell to the ground where it now lay half buried beneath the snow.

  Snake stepped into the building.

  This is so gothic horror, I thought. Inside, the sound of snow striking the building became an eerie howl echoing inside the empty space of the former tank hangar.

  This was our era’s version of the old abandoned castles of Eastern Europe. The only way I’d have felt it more surely would be if Count Dracula himself showed up. Him or Frankenstein’s monster.

  The room had been part of the armory, where tanks stood in rows, with the infirmary and weapon storerooms below ground. Meryl and Snake first met within the building. She had been part of the training exercise and was locked in a cell by Liquid when she refused to cooperate in his uprising. Meryl escaped by tricking her guard.