At that moment I was in a perfect state. What I mean by perfect is that I could kill children without the slightest bit of hesitation. Anyone who thinks I’m stating the obvious—they were shooting at me, for God’s sake!—is seriously underestimating the power of both human morality and emotion. You never knew when either of those things was likely to spark up at the most inopportune moment and influence your judgment. Even highly trained soldiers. Of course, even in a normal state of mind I’d be able to kill children without compunction if my life depended on it. Most of the time. But you could never quite say one hundred percent. Not if you’d been brought up as a normal citizen in America.
Humans can, on occasion, end up prioritizing love or morality over their own lives. We’re warped. We’re a perverse species, capable of sacrificing ourselves in the name of altruism. Never underestimate morality. As Lucia said, altruism is to a certain extent an evolutionary instinct and as such has taken root deep inside the brain. Plenty of soldiers were, quite rightly, afraid of this instinct taking hold in them, blindsiding them, controlling their actions when they least expected or needed it.
That’s what BEAR was for. To protect against that worst-case scenario. Because the worst-case scenario would inevitably result in death. There was no recovery from it. That was why the ability to protect yourself absolutely against the unexpected encroachment of emotion and morality, even if only for that specific window of time, that little festival called war, where you were detached from society and a different set of rules applied, was so powerful.
I had been made perfect by counseling and chemical substances.
My ARs showed me where my targets were. On this floor. The team had the whole hotel under control. Our targets were trapped.
And then a bullet brushed my cheek. I ducked for cover as soon as I perceived the pain, and Williams fired off a salvo at the window where the shot had come from. Had my sense of pain not been totally subdued, I would undoubtedly have been unable to react so quickly and efficiently. I acknowledged the pain in my body without feeling it in any sense at all. A sniper had fired the shot from the fourth floor of a building some distance away. About five meters in front of me there was a girl whose head had just been opened up like a rafflesia plant. The sniper must have thought she was one of us.
“What do we do now, boss?” Williams asked, scowling. “It’s not safe to advance. Should we crawl under the windowsill?”
I used my battle link to contact Leland. “Calling Blue Boy. This is Jaeger One. Your current location is the corridor on the opposite side of the target room from us, correct? Over.”
“Roger that, Jaeger One. But there are also windows on this side en route to the target room. I’d say odds on that there’s a sniper or two pointed this way too. Over.”
“Let’s smoke the corridors, boss,” said Williams.
I considered this idea for a couple of seconds but discarded it. “No.” It’d stop the sniper fire, but it’d also make it too difficult to fight off another enemy charge.
“Then I guess we just have to pray to God,” Williams said.
He wasn’t being facetious. I nodded and linked up to the Flying Seaweed.
“Come in, Seaweed. This is Jaeger One. What is your current location? Over.”
I heard a crackle and over that the voice of the pilot who had wished me Godspeed.
“Just overhead, circling the fireworks. Over.”
“Good. I need you to take a building out for us. We’ll identify the target with laser. Over.”
“Roger that, Jaeger One. Over and out.”
I nodded, and Williams stuck the tip of his rifle out of the window. He used the SOPMOD laser pointer and activated his ARs so that he could send a visual confirmation of the building where the sniper was hiding.
“Gotcha!” Williams smiled viciously. Data regarding our location and that of the target was beamed up to the Seaweed, and the pilot confirmed that the data had been received.
A few seconds later there was an almighty roar. Our hotel shook, and pieces of plaster fell from the ceiling. I stuck my head quickly over the windowsill to see what was left of the sniper’s hideout collapse to the ground in the distance. The Seaweed had used one of its emergency Smart Bombs.
“Thanks, Seaweed!” Williams shouted, and he was already off, charging through the dusty corridor toward our final target. I shrugged inwardly and followed. Williams arrived at the door to the room, unstrapped a sawed-off shotgun from his back, and made sure it was loaded before blasting the door open. Meanwhile, I had a stun grenade timed perfectly, two seconds exactly, and I tossed it in. I plugged my ears and opened my mouth just before light and noise erupted on the other side of the doorway.
Williams and I charged in, followed by Leland’s unit, who had joined us. I pumped a bullet into the forehead of a boy who was still floundering in shock from the blast of the stun grenade, and while I was at it I took out a half-naked young girl who held a PPSh semiautomatic in her hands. No doubt she had been one of the boss’s bodyguard-slash-sex-slaves. In no time flat the leadership of Hindu India had surrendered unconditionally, either cowering in the back room or kneeling before us, hands in the air.
Williams brandished his sawed-off shotgun theatrically. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” he cried.
“Who are you people?” one of our prisoners asked. No trace of an accent—his English sounded pretty fluent. Well, it wasn’t too unusual for an intellectual elite or two to be mixed in with monkeys such as these. No doubt educated at Eton and Oxford.
“We’re agents of the ICC. You know there are arrest warrants out on you sons of bitches—who the hell were you expecting?” Williams laughed. A little too diabolically for my liking.
“Mercenary scum. Vultures of war,” the prisoner spat.
I was perplexed by this. We were US Army regulars, of course, but he was technically right in that we were classified as mercenaries for the purposes of this mission. If we were doing things by the book, I guess Williams should have said we were military proxies of the Japanese government here to arrest you on their behalf. But that didn’t quite have the same ring to it. Anyhow, Williams didn’t seem too troubled by such niceties.
“Yup, and it takes one to know one, buster,” he said, his maniacal smile now twisted into something closer to a scowl. He and the Blue Boy team were now calmly binding and tagging the Hindu India leadership, who had all lost the will to fight.
All except one. “We are most certainly not the same. We are warriors protecting our holy motherland against encroachment from Muslim scum. We are on a crusade. The only God you worship is Mammon,” the educated prisoner said.
But to be honest, his words no longer had any effect on me. All fanatics were the same. Regardless of which sect, which religion, which cult, which battlefield, which tragedy they were involved in. It was always the same type of person.