ACT 1: LIQUID SUN
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LET ME TELL you a story about the Snake I know best.
The Snake who was my friend. The Snake who changed my life.
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Seated on the back of a crowded military truck, his AK-47 propped up beside him, he was smoking—well, I wasn’t there to witness it, not yet, but that man was never without his smokes.
If any of the other soldiers packed onto the flatbed minded the smoke, they didn’t show it. They faced a far more imminent death than lung cancer some decades down the road. For them, to abstain from the simple pleasure of smoking would be absurd. Just minutes later, their brains might be spilling onto the ground through holes punched through their skulls. Bullets might be rolling around inside their guts as they writhed in agony.
Nothing would be as ridiculous as banning soldiers from smoking. The Nazis enacted the first nationwide tobacco ban as a measure of public health, but even Hitler couldn’t keep it from the soldiers in the field. War and smoking come as a pair.
The man exhaled smoke and squinted up at the sun, too far inland for the cool sea air to reach.
The sun’s harsh glare passed unimpeded through the crisp, dry air. Most of the soldiers had wrapped cloths around their heads to protect their vulnerable skin from the brazen sun and the sand storms carried by the arid wind.
The road was, almost without exception, unpaved—it was less a road than a tire trail. The single line of trucks—old and plain, but rugged—followed the path. From the gaps between the wooden boards running along the sides of the flatbed, the man glimpsed the occasional stone building, all of them abandoned.
They were approaching a city—or what had once been one.
Its inhabitants had long since left, for how could a family casually go about their daily routine with bullets flying everywhere?
A few men, known as operators, were mixed in with the soldiers jostling about on the backs of the trucks. Most of the soldiers were local militiamen of varied experience and training. The operators had been sent by PMCs, or Private Military Companies, to organize the rabble into a disciplined fighting unit.
My friend was there in the guise of one such operator. He registered with the local PMC and came to the battlefield as a mercenary.
PMCs were the enterprise of turning war into a living—the enterprise of providing the means to make war.
PMCs offered the tools of waging war to any who sought them. They turned people who had never fired a single bullet in their lives into capable soldiers. They worked with arms merchants to provide the necessary materiel. Training, equipment, command, transport, supply, medicine—all aspects of war were organized under the domain of business.
The actual act of the war itself was only one small fraction of the vast market.
Even the operators were commodities in the battlefield marketplace, simply workers selling their labor—only their work was combat and their workplace was the theater of war.
Half a century ago, mercenaries existed as independent contractors—even the largest groups of them were small squads—and they worked for whichever army would pay them. They didn’t fight for the sake of any ideology, or for any nation’s cause, or for a religious belief. They fought for the money, and nothing else. Without any reason to band together out of loyalty, there was no means for them to organize.
With the end of the Cold War, these outlaws began to form larger groups. The era of opposing superpowers capable of mutually assured destruction had passed, and small wars erupted around the globe. It was as though the hoops had fallen off a barrel. Some peoples hadn’t been able to escape historical grudges, some zealously wanted to prove their god was absolute, and others, oppressed by hopeless poverty, gathered into armies.
If we at least have guns, we can kill each other.
With swords and axes and the like, people had to be close enough to watch their blade pierce helmet and skull. Unlike those primitive weapons, guns were tools for massacre and designed for ease of use. Just a squeeze of the trigger, and some distant foe would flop to the ground.
But to make war with them—that’s a different matter. For that, a soldier needs to undergo the right training, to be given the right equipment, and to learn how to execute the right strategy.
The first company to begin filling those needs was a mercenary agency called Outer Heaven.
Considered to be the first PMC, Outer Heaven was headquartered in a fortress in South Africa, from whence it dispatched mercenaries to conflicts around the world.
Founded by a legendary mercenary who roamed the world’s battlefields during the Cold War, the company was revolutionary, even when considering the history of conflicts that had followed World War II. In the chaos that came with the end of the Cold War, Outer Heaven announced to the world that war didn’t have to be between the armies of nations.
The man who had destroyed that organization was sitting in the military truck, an old soldier exhaling cigarette smoke. He leaned against his propped-up AK, ready to throw himself once more into the flames of war, whipping every last ounce of life out of his relentlessly aging, improbable body.
His name was David.
He was the son of Big Boss—the legendary mercenary and founder of Outer Heaven.
David was also a legend. In the secret histories of war, he was known as Solid Snake.