Snake emerged through the unlocked security door of the warhead storeroom and onto another field of snow.
The raging wind sheared off the top of the snowpack and kicked up clouds of white. Visibility wasn’t even ten feet. So as not to get lost, I guided Snake with the Mk. III.
We passed between the twin transmission towers and onto a comparatively flat plain. Then I realized where we were: where Snake had defeated Sniper Wolf.
“Wolf,” I said to the computer screen.
The Mk. III’s camera showed only the blowing white snow, but this was where the woman I once loved now rested.
When I was in FOXHOUND’s captivity, she had looked after the island’s resident wolf-dogs. She was different from the rest of her group—she was kind to the animals, and to me. Maybe you’ll laugh, but that was enough to make me fall in love. At the time, Snake called it Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological tendency for kidnap victims to feel a sense of closeness or friendship toward their captors.
Whatever the case might have been, Wolf was the first woman I’d met in a long time whom I could approach without feeling scared.
Without evoking that despicable relationship with my stepmother that broke the bond between brother and sister.
For so very long, women scared me. Whenever one entered my life, my world came further unhinged.
But Wolf was different. She was born a Kurd—the name of her people came from the word for wolf—and to be born a Kurd was to live on a battlefield. She was raised fighting against Turkey and Iraq in the defense of her very existence.
Through the scope of her sniper rifle, she watched the battlefield, both a part of it yet at the same time distant. Perhaps I sympathized with her. Burdened with painful memories of my family, I too kept the world, and all its people, at a distance.
And here on this field I lost my first love in a long time.
There had been no avoiding the confrontation. Snake needed to defeat her, and Wolf needed to kill him. Neither had any cause to hesitate. I never even factored in.
If I mistrusted Naomi because she had reason to hate Snake, I guess I had reason to hate him too. He’d killed the woman I cared for. Of course, I’ve never even entertained the sentiment, but I’d bet there were more people who hated Snake for a similar reason than there were fingers on my hands.
Snake never wanted to fight, but he lived with the consequences of his battles. Those he killed might have had people who loved them. People left with enmity and the lingering pain of having lost someone dear. Their revilement, viscid and rotten, worked into his being and refused to let go.
Perhaps their concentrated emotions were the cause of Snake’s age.
It wasn’t Snake’s fault. Snake had never asked for this.
No matter how many times I said it, I doubted the dead, joined with the gods and no longer with mortal reason, would ever understand.
Snake was a sacrificial lamb. He attracted the world’s ire, but like the lamb up for offering, the responsibility wasn’t his own.
Through the wind and the snow came sorrowful howls, as if the wolf-dogs were still in mourning after these nine years.
Did the dogs that gathered around her body that day still hate Snake?
I found that hard to believe. I hoped they didn’t.
I prayed the wolf-dogs had forgiven him and come to understand as I did; there had been no other way.
✦ ✦ ✦
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