Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (2 page)

More Metal Gears were coming. They hopped through the helpless militia forces, scattering the fighters and kicking them into the air like soccer balls. The robots were produced by AT Corp under the code name IRVING, but were commonly known as “Gekko” or “Lizards.” The machines quickly overwhelmed the militia with an adroitness befitting their moniker.

The militia forces dispersed into the ruined city. Perhaps that was the PMC’s goal—to split up their opposition into smaller, weakened units and then pick them off one by one.

Snake realized it was time to go. He wasn’t here to help the militia.

With the snipers’ attention drawn to the scattered soldiers, he began moving away from the area in front of the gate.

Snake hadn’t come to the battle to throw in with either side. History had seen its like in many lands and many times, and more would surely come.

But one point differentiated this war from those known to the past—this was a proxy war, fought by contracted mercenaries and manufactured unmanned weapons, not on behalf of any nation or ideology, and not for the purpose of obtaining resources or advancing the cause of a people. ID-tagged soldiers carried ID-tagged weapons, used ID-tagged gear. Nanomachines inside their bodies enhanced and regulated their abilities.

Genetic control. Information control. Emotion control.

Battlefield control.

Everything was monitored and kept under control.

The PMCs were supervised and controlled. Battlefields, once the embodiment of chaos, were regulated, made routine.

Supervised battlefields. Supervised lives. Not the war to which Snake had become accustomed.

But even if the war had changed, Snake still had a role he must play in it.

His last role. His life’s finale.

To stop his brother’s plan to throw the world into chaos.

Three days earlier, I’d briefed Snake on his final mission.

The rotor blades of my helicopter hung over the cemetery, the downwash spurring the carpet of flowers into a mad dance. I climbed down from the helicopter and landed in the white field of the virtuous stars-of-Bethlehem and walked toward Snake, who stood fixed before one of the graves.

The graves belonged to warriors never spoken about—those convicted of war crimes, those whose records for some reason had all been stricken. Among them, some were regarded as heroes by more than a few soldiers.

Snake’s back was to me, and he didn’t speak loudly, but his low, powerful rumble carried clearly over the rotor’s noise. “Otacon, even the dead have ears.”

“Snake, we’ve got to go.”

He turned to give me a dubious look. I responded, “You’ve got an old friend waiting for you in the helicopter.”

He followed me through the rows of tombstones. Then, he said, “The test results …”

My reply caught in my mouth. Of course I’d known he’d ask. I’d thought and thought about how to tell him, but still I had no idea what I should say.

I started with the scientific facts. I tried to present them as objectively as possible.

“Proteome analysis was positive. But the mRNA analysis turned up negative. The wrinkled skin, the hardened arteries … Your early aging symptoms look like classic Werner syndrome. But none of the tests were able to pinpoint the cause.”

“So?”

Snake wanted to cut to the heart of the matter—the painful end that awaited his body.

He wasn’t afraid. He’d seen his body dying, and he’d accepted it. He’d accepted that he wasn’t human, that he wasn’t born from nature. From the very beginning, he’d seemingly accepted the fate that awaited his cloned body.

I was the one who couldn’t accept it.

“Well … judging by how rapidly the aging has progressed, I’d say …”

My words trailed off. Snake was waiting for me to continue. I had to tell him. I had to give him the truth. He was ready to hear it; he’d long been ready.

But my throat was frozen with sorrow and fear. I opened my mouth, but no voice came. Instead, I felt tears well up.

“A year at best, right?”

My reply felt hollow. “Yeah …”

Snake paused to gaze at the bed of blooming flowers and the white petals kicked up into the air by the helicopter’s wind. He watched them as if his life were floating away.

There was such sadness in his eyes, I found myself saying, “Snake … let’s try another doctor.”

“Some ordinary doctor won’t make any difference. I’m not an ordinary man to begin with. Not to mention FOXDIE.”

“You’re right.”

FOXDIE, a virus programmed to selectively kill specific people, had been injected into Snake’s body as part of a plan nine years prior to annihilate the terrorist group FOXHOUND. It still lived on inside him.

I added, “But we don’t know where Naomi is …”

Even if we found her, would she be able to do anything?

It was then I realized I was clinging to a narrow hope. No one in the world would better understand Snake’s cloned body than Dr. Naomi Hunter. She had participated in the mission at Shadow Moses Island and helped create the FOXDIE virus.

But would she be able to stop his relentless aging?

I couldn’t make myself think so. To a stranger, he’d likely seem to be in his seventies. In actuality, he was still in his forties. An ordinary man experiencing such rapid aging would be inconceivable. This was clearly a genetic disease stemming from his manipulated genome.

But old age was old age. No matter how extraordinary the circumstances of this one case, aging remained a mechanism within all life—a mechanism that mankind had not yet devised a method to halt. No one could escape death from old age. Neither I, nor Snake, could believe that Naomi would have any power to prevent it.

Snake turned at the sound of a familiar voice calling his name. An elderly man was seated in the back of the helicopter, leaning on a cane for support.

“Colonel!” Snake said, and I was relieved to hear a little brightness, no matter how brief, return to Snake’s voice. Snake and I climbed into the helicopter, and he shook Colonel Roy Campbell’s hand.

“I’m not a colonel anymore, Snake.”

Campbell had long since retired from the military. But to Snake, he was both a superior officer and a friend, and he would always be Colonel.

Snake noticed Campbell’s suit and grinned. This was the first time he’d encountered the man in anything but a uniform.

“I’d figured the only place I’d ever see you dressed like that would be at your daughter’s wedding.”

Campbell’s face briefly darkened. Meryl. She was his daughter, though he still hadn’t been able to tell her as much. Meryl was the result of an affair—with his sister-in-law. Campbell’s brother later died in the Gulf War, and the colonel seemed too ashamed to tell her the truth. She knew Campbell only as her uncle.

We all are burdened by our sins. Even Campbell.

Even me.

Snake asked, “What are you doing these days?”

Campbell pulled himself back from thoughts of his daughter and replied, “I’m working for an organization under the UN Security Council—the analysis and assessment staff of the PMC Oversight and Inspection Committee.”

“I remember the resolution being passed a few years ago.”

“Snake, I came across some information in my work.”

Snake narrowed his eyes.

Campbell continued. “We’ve found him … in the Middle East.”

Him. Snake knew who that was in an instant.

“We’ve got to stop him,” the colonel said. “Now. Before it’s too late.”

Snake looked at me.

I nodded. “Liquid’s made his move.”

The whir of the helicopter’s rotor increased in pitch. The aircraft lifted off the ground, and the white stars-of-Bethlehem quickly faded into the distance.

“The Manhattan Incident triggered a serious public backlash,” Campbell explained. “Now the US has to think twice before intervening militarily in other countries’ affairs. This has fueled a push toward military privatization, with PMCs at the heart of that movement.”

“Every age has its mercenaries,” Snake said. “These PMCs are nothing new—we’ve been dealing with them since before the turn of the century.”

“No, Snake. They’re nothing like the mercenaries of the past. The Department of Defense’s new battlefield control system has produced a decisive difference between the hired guns of the past and the PMCs of today.”

I added, “The system was developed by ArmsTech Security.”

A glimmer of recognition came to Snake’s eyes. “ArmsTech? You mean AT Corp?”

Campbell nodded. “In recent years, AT Corp has shifted focus from weapons development to security tools. And since the establishment of AT Security, business has been booming. The system makes it possible to integrate not only micro-level information on individual soldiers and units, but also macro-level information about field conditions and order of battle.”

Snake sighed. In an effort to recreate the prosperity of the Atomic Age in the post–Cold War world, ArmsTech and DARPA had worked together on the Metal Gear REX project. After the Shadow Moses incident and the death of ArmsTech’s president as a result of FOXDIE, the company fell on hard times, but now it had undergone an unorthodox restructuring. If that president could now see the fruits of his labors, I wondered if he’d laugh.

“So,” Snake said, “they’ve finally managed total real-time battlefield control?”

Campbell nodded again. “There’s more. State governments and rebel groups can’t match the maintenance price of standing forces. PMCs, by comparison, are reliable, easy to use. It wasn’t long before everyone had them on the payroll. And as a result, regular armies began to decline worldwide.”

I thought back to the graveyard of fallen warriors. The legendary mercenary, Big Boss, and the true patriot, The Boss—and all the other soldiers buried there—had fought for nations.

War has changed. Now there was no place for heroes or legends. They had been replaced with pure profit and efficiency.

“It’s hard to believe, I know,” Campbell said, “but PMCs are beginning to overtake conventional armies in terms of scale. Nowadays it’s the PMCs that serve as standard battalions. They already make up sixty percent of all combat forces in conflict zones.”

Snake was taken aback. “Sixty percent …”

“The fact is the world now depends largely on PMCs for waging its wars.”

“I thought it was the UN that authorized the PMCs in the first place.”

“The US abstained from voting on that resolution. In effect, Washington was endorsing PMCs without ever revealing its true intentions.” Campbell drew in a deep breath. “Until they got wind of the uprising, that is.”

I pulled a report out of my briefcase and handed it to Snake. The documents outlined the five major PMCs—Pieuvre Armement, Raven Sword, Werewolf, Otselotovaya Khvatka, and Praying Mantis.

“There are hundreds of PMCs in business worldwide,” I explained, “and their numbers are growing. Currently, five of them are big enough to be labeled global powers—two in the US, and one each in the UK, France, and Russia.”

Campbell nodded. “Reconnaissance has revealed that those five PMCs are run by dummy corporations that act as fronts for a single mother company. Its name—‘Outer Heaven.’ ”

Snake’s eyes popped open. “You mean …”

Outer Heaven. The place where soldiers could always find sanctuary. Big Boss had founded the mercenary agency, and Liquid Snake—his son and Solid Snake’s brother—had attempted to reestablish it at Shadow Moses Island.

“That’s right,” Campbell said. “It’s Liquid. He’s taken command of this immense army and is now preparing to unleash an insurrection.”

“I watched him die.”

That was at Shadow Moses. Liquid was killed by Naomi’s modified strain of FOXDIE.

“His will lives on,” the colonel explained, “in the body of the man once known as Ocelot. He aims to fan the flames of war even higher—to create the perfect world once envisioned by Big Boss.”

“The one world in which soldiers will always have a place.”

A world where soldiers were needed. A world where a soldier could say, “This is where I belong.” Many times had Big Boss and Liquid Snake sought to bring about that world, and many times had Solid Snake stopped them.