There was a road that led toward the town. No more than a rough dirt footpath, really. But our satellites had shown enough traffic along it that it was never really a viable option for us. Having said that, the Eurasian landscape that we were now in, mostly consisting of fields and forest, was easy enough for us to traverse. Desert or jungle terrain would have been much harder.
The official line was that this country was suffering from the same old story as found the world over: Muslims versus Christians. Of course, conflicts usually have more than one catalyst. After all, there were countries where Islam and Christianity could peacefully coexist, even when right next door. It seemed that this even used to be the case in this country, historically. A former state of the USSR that had declared independence after the disintegration of the old Communist Party, this country had taken the usual course of confrontation with Russia over natural resources, but there had been nothing to suggest that religion was going to be the cause of bitter internecine warfare. Not until a few short years ago.
How had the conflict developed so rapidly? How had the flames of hatred in people’s hearts been fanned so quickly that massacres had become commonplace? At such an exponential rate? There wasn’t a scholar in the world who had been able to come up with a convincing hypothesis.
We had to avoid an encounter with the enemy at all costs. At least until our targets were safely dead. If we were sighted, it would all be over. They’d radio ahead to our targets, who’d be spirited out of harm’s way. With our equipment and training we’d have no problem fighting our way through an enemy company or two until we reached the safety of our pick-up point. But the mission itself would be a failure.
We took a short pit stop after our second hour of marching. We’d virtually been running the whole way, and Williams was on the verge of breathlessness. I couldn’t say I wasn’t feeling it too. We lay down in a thicket, hidden from view, and our nanocoating sprang into action, blending us in with the colors of the vegetation that swirled around us. A little piece of magic that came in ever so handy when planning an infiltration or ambush.
On this occasion, though, it looked like we had become a little too reliant on it.
It turned out there was a pickup truck parked just the other side of the thicket in which we were hiding. Of course, our muscles all sprang into a state of high alert. Breathing silently, we became one with the vegetation around us and watched as three men clambered out of the car brandishing AK rifles. It goes without saying that they were completely oblivious to our presence. They lit a bonfire.
They didn’t seem to notice or care about the ammo in their guns. They threw their guns down right beside them, beside the fire, even though the magazines were fully loaded.
“Amateurs,” mouthed Williams. I shrugged. In this land, the qualification for being a soldier was the ability to plunder and terrorize a defenseless village when the opportunity presented itself. Training didn’t really come into it.
Having said that, we couldn’t exactly take off while they remained here, amateurs or not. And we had no time to spare if we were to make our target before dawn. So we had no ethical compunction about deciding to kill these unfortunate patrol troops who bore us no specific ill will, who hadn’t tried to harm us, and who were just trying to snatch a moment of warm respite.
The men remained completely unaware of our presence as we silently flanked them. They would also have been completely unaware of the brief flash of steel before their windpipes were slit open with surgical precision. They wouldn’t have known what happened, who killed them, or why. Even as their lifeblood poured from their throats, their eyes wouldn’t have even caught a glimpse of us. They just flickered orange, reflecting the licking flames from the bonfire in front of them. And so it came to pass that where there had been four men, there were now four corpses.
We frisked the bodies quickly. No sign of any dog tags or other ID. Then I used my knife to open up my guy’s sleeve, starting at his already blood-soaked shoulder.
As I expected, there was the slightest of bumps at a point among the muscles of his back. Completely undetectable to the naked eye unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, a bulge about the size of the fingernail on your pinkie.
I used my knife to shave off the chunk of flesh. Inside it, sure enough, was a small disc.
His ID tag.
Williams looked over at me, eyebrows raised. The usual, huh? he was asking. As the ranking officer, it was my call.
We were four white men standing there—only whites were chosen for this mission, for obvious reason. The soldiers we had just killed were also white. As were all those in this country who were massacring their fellow countrymen for believing in a different version of a god.
My eyes met Alex’s and Leland’s. They shrugged their shoulders: you first, sir. There was nothing for it. I took the protective gel out of my backpack and used it to coat the blood-soaked dog tag I had extracted from the flesh of the dead man’s shoulder, placed the tag in the palm of my hand, and gulped it down like an aspirin.
4
The truck was mounted with a .50 caliber gun, set up so that it could fire while moving. An ordinary Toyota pickup turned into a machine of war by virtue of a simple machine gun grafted onto it. The air force of this country was taken out of action shortly into the civil war, but they had somehow managed to preserve most of their radar and associated antiaircraft batteries. It seemed almost comically imbalanced that a country that managed to fight on with the vestiges of a modern air force was reduced to fielding such amateur DIY efforts in lieu of proper armored vehicles.
And so it came to pass that we were now using an enemy vehicle to speed down the very road that we had been taking pains to avoid. With the exception of our nanolayers, we had to ditch all our fancy equipment. Even our SOPMOD modular assault rifles that, like some kiddie toy with interchangeable parts, could be turned into grenade launchers or laser-guided sniper rifles.
It was better to ditch the gear than to continue on a long-winded night march through unfamiliar terrain. When it came down to it, we pampered Americans had an overprotective attitude toward our equipment that bordered on fetishistic. Our military technology was number one, we knew, and it was great that we were able to get so psyched about how awesome we were—I’ll admit I often felt a childish glee myself when faced with our latest fancy gadgets—but sometimes a person needed to forget all about what was fashionable and trendy and get back to basics.
Alex was driving. I was sitting shotgun, keeping an eye out for anything that might be a threat while simultaneously trying to maintain a casual demeanor so that no one looking in at us would suspect anything. The fatigues we’d stripped from the dead soldiers and were now wearing had bloodstains all over them, of course, but they were in such a filthy state to begin with that a bit of water from our canteens was enough to rinse out the worst so that the rest more or less blended in.
“It’ll be no time at all to our destination in this baby, sir,” said Alex. “I wonder what’s written on the side of this pickup, though?”
“It’s Japanese,” I answered. I’d minored in the language back in college, and as a result I’d once been assigned to train up a section of their army. What was it called? Ji-eh-tai or something. … Anyway, the lettering on the side of the truck seemed to suggest that it had once been used by a tofu shop called Fujiwara. Would a Japanese tofu shop ever have imagined that their old, beat-up vehicle would have a new lease on life as a makeshift armored vehicle in a civil war in the boondocks of Eastern Europe?