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.
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.
“Keep moving, Snake,” I said. “Head to the nuclear warhead storage building. There’s not much time left.”
“No, there isn’t,” Snake said, his voice heavy. Though I hadn’t meant to, perhaps I had sent his thoughts to his own body.
The FOXDIE virus Snake unknowingly carried had left both Decoy Octopus, who had taken on the guise of DARPA chief Donald Anderson, and ArmsTech president Kenneth Baker dead beneath this building.
Now that same virus was undergoing a terrible transformation. Within his blood, the viral signatures that detected Baker and Decoy Octopus were eroding.
As Snake exited the hangar and began to cross the snowy canyon that led to the warhead storage building, a thought came to me. Viruses, like influenza or HIV, could experience sudden mutations to withstand antimicrobials and medicine. As far as modern medical science had come, the viral variations numbered in the billions and trillions—surely one would slip through the net and continue to evolve, and survive.
Every virus evolved. Why would anyone expect man-made nanomachines to behave any differently?
No matter how careful the creation, how strict the parameters—only kill people with these specific genetic patterns, for example—once the virus was released into the wild, it would someday escape from the intentions of its makers. For viruses, that’s simply the natural way.
The researchers should have seen this coming. Men weren’t gods; we could never hope to control billions—no, trillions—of separate viruses. Taking the capability to suddenly mutate into account, the creation of nanomachine viruses was not a technique mankind was capable of mastering. An independent life-form, once beyond the expectations of its creators, could not be stopped.
The SOP could be said to be a virus with more hosts than any other. It couldn’t be contracted through the air, but with this many carriers, the System could someday evolve far beyond the Patriots’ imagination.
Snake walked across the field where he had first confronted the FOXHOUND member Vulcan Raven, a giant man with Inuit blood. The ground itself echoed with Raven’s dying words:
You are a Snake that was not created by nature.
In the natural world, there is no such thing as boundless slaughter. There is always an end to it. But you are different.
The path you walk has no end. Each step you take is paved with the corpses of your enemies …
He might have been right. Just as the shaman predicted, Snake’s battle had continued. Raven foresaw a new world created by a man-made snake. His memory followed Snake across the field and into the nuclear warhead storage facility.
I shuddered.
The hundreds of nukes kept here for disassembly remained in racks along the walls and stacks of boxes in the middle of the room, and not under a particularly close watch. Anyone who knew of this location could easily obtain the warheads.
But was that fear groundless? With the Patriots’ control of information, almost no one knew of the facility. For military reasons, the island had never been marked on a map. Unmanned weapons, like Gekko and Scarabs, hired from a PMC would provide sufficient security. Beyond the storage room would be another snow field, where two twin transmission towers stood like miniatures of the former World Trade Center, and across that, the entrance to the deep underground service bay where Snake once destroyed REX.
I spurred Snake on. With the frost-covered rows of last-generation warheads left untouched within these ruins, the space seemed to me a catacomb stuffed with buried relics of the Cold War. Snake walked straight through the room to the security door on the other side.
The gate had frozen over, still locked. Snake asked me what he should do, but I was already thinking of an answer.
Security is shut down altogether. He can’t release the lock without activating it.
He’ll have to go there.
There, he can log in to the security system.
“I’ve got it, Snake. My old office is close by. If the power’s on, you should be able to unlock the door from there. And if you check the facility records, we can find out REX’s status and who’s been in and out. You remember where it is?”
“I’m not senile yet,” Snake snapped.
He knew I was making fun of his strong front. I laughed at the expected response and said, “Just to be safe, I’m marking it on your map, Old Snake.”