Genocide of One: A Thriller (33 page)

The villagers, who were gathered in one spot, screamed and scattered. Several who
were too late to escape were sent flying, struck by the armed vehicles.

The villagers began fleeing for their lives toward the forest. A family ran in Yeager’s
direction—father, mother, and five children. But the field was wide open and provided
no cover—the worst possible place to run. Soldiers leaped off the trucks, aimed their
guns at the retreating family, and opened up on full automatic. Blood showered up
toward the bright sky as the parents and children, one after the other, collapsed.
As the bullets struck them their shouts changed to bloodcurdling howls—not the calls
of humans who had lost all hope, but the screams of dying animals.

“Meyers!”
Yeager said into his wireless microphone.
“Have Pierce and the others cover up their ears.”

“Roger that.”

In the middle of the field, beside the family writhing in agony, a boy, uninjured,
was sobbing. Eight or nine, about the same age as Justin. The militia aimed a merciless
hail of bullets at him, and his head exploded.

“Yeager,”
Meyers’s voice said in his headset.
“Pierce is asking whether we’re going to help the villagers.”

“Negative,”
Yeager said, suppressing the desire to vomit. “
They outnumber us ten to one, so there’s no way we can take them on.”

Garrett, next to Yeager, gave a low groan. “What the hell. Look at their pendants.”

All the militia had accessories hanging around their necks, strings of human ears
and penises. Some of them had attached them to their rifles. Yeager remembered hearing
how US soldiers in Vietnam had done the same thing.

Until five minutes ago Amanbere had been a peaceful village, but now it was a war
zone. Not a war of ideology or clash of religions, but straightforward, naked war,
stripped of all pretense. The militia burst into the houses of people of a different
race and began looting their food, fuel, and belongings. The villagers were rounded
up in the village square, where the women were raped in front of the rest. The soldiers’
lust for anything female was indiscriminate, as infants and old women suffered the
same fate.

The violence soon escalated, and the soldiers, their penises still stiff, plunged
their bayonets into the vaginas of the women they’d raped, the same method used by
Japanese soldiers in Nanjing against the Chinese. When he’d been in the military Yeager
had been trained not to lose his composure when he saw scenes like this. Part of his
training involved watching snuff films showing Russian soldiers massacring prisoners.
But if the slaughter he was witnessing now had been any closer to where he was, he
doubted he could maintain his cool. At any rate, he knew that as long as he lived
he would never forget this gruesome scene.

The actions of these men, letting their violent nature run wild, were not those of
a particular race. Winners in wartime always become fierce and crazed and slaughter
those of a different race as a way of making clear which group is inferior. As these
militia sliced off the villagers’ hands and legs and beheaded them, their actions
were one with all the genocides that had ever been carried out in history by various
races, peoples, and human beings. Humans are fully capable of creating their own hell
on earth. But never heaven.

If a journalist were here, he could report this massacre. The article would plant
the seed of a desire for peace in the hearts of those who read it, at the same time
arousing their taste for the macabre, for the frightening. They knew that those who
were slaughtered were the same living beings as they, yet those who produced and consumed
this vulgar entertainment would view themselves alone as privileged and be content
with merely mouthing platitudes about peace.

Every adult in Amanbere village was murdered. The children watched their parents being
slaughtered and were then herded into one place, where the teenage girls were separated
out and loaded onto trucks. To be sex slaves, no doubt. One boy tried to escape, tripped
over a severed head, and fell, and a militia soldier attacked him with a hatchet,
splitting his skull in two. The other children, nearly insane with fear, watched the
brains spill out of their friend’s head. They all knew their turn was next. The soldiers,
armed with heavy weapons and sharp blades, surrounded them.

Yeager had reached his limit. These barbarians had to be killed. He lifted his rifle
and drew a bead on the militia’s leader.

“Don’t do it, Yeager,” Mick whispered. “You’ll put us all in danger.”

Yeager felt sick to his stomach when he looked at the Japanese man’s face. “So the
only thing you can shoot are apes?”

“What?!”

“Mick’s right,” Garrett said in a subdued voice. “I want to help those children, too,
but there’s nothing we can do,” he added regretfully.

Needing to dampen the rage that threatened to explode in him, Yeager looked back at
the forest, to those he was supposed to protect. Those big eyes were staring back.
From below where Meyers stood Akili peered up at him, then turned his enigmatic gaze
to the village in the distance. The soldiers had begun slaughtering the children.

Yeager shuddered. They couldn’t let Akili see this atrocity. He wasn’t just concerned
about the child’s feelings. It felt as if the tables had turned. Just as they had
watched the chimpanzee rip apart one of its young, Akili was observing the slaughter
of humans by humans. A foreign intelligence was gazing at the character of this ambiguous
creature that, while possessing the concept of morality, easily gave in to its baser,
brutal nature.

“Meyers,”
Yeager hurriedly spoke into his mike. They couldn’t have Akili knowing how inferior
a creature humans were.
“Akili’s watching.”

Meyers turned around, noticed Akili leaning out, and led him back under the tree.
It was Pierce’s turn to crawl out from behind the tree. He gestured to Yeager and
the others to come back. Yeager wondered what was going on, and Pierce, clearly panicked,
grabbed away Meyers’s headset and spoke into it.
“Get back here! The satellite’s picking you up!”

“What the hell?” Yeager looked at his watch. They still had twenty minutes before
the reconnaissance satellite was supposed to be overhead. He made his way back to
the forest, careful not to be detected by the militia. Pierce was gazing at his laptop,
on which was a satellite image of the village and its surroundings. In one corner
of the screen Garrett and Mick were visible, prone, observing the village.

Yeager called them back on the mike and edged closer to Pierce. “I thought we still
had time.”

“We might have been fooled by misinformation. We have to get out of here before they
analyze the image and pinpoint us.”

“Which direction should we go?” Garrett said as he ran over. “We need to know what’s
going on. Can you enlarge the satellite image?”

Pierce scaled down the image so it showed a section ten kilometers square. North and
south of Amanbere was a scattering of villages along the road. When he enlarged each
area they could make out a line of heavily armed vehicles, an antigovernment force
separate from the militia.

“Damn,” Yeager said. “More enemies. There’re three groups we have to deal with now.”
He frowned. The path to the east, the direction they should proceed, was blocked by
several armed groups.

“Hey,” Mick called out. “Check out what they’re doing.”

The mercenaries trained their binoculars on the village. Several children were still
alive, yet the militia had stopped their killing. The one who looked to be their leader
leaned inside a truck and was speaking into a wireless microphone. He suddenly spun
around and stared hard in the direction where Yeager and the others were.

“This isn’t good,” Meyers said. “Maybe he got the satellite intel.”

The Pentagon had apparently already located them and had, via the arms dealer, informed
the militia of their position.

The militia leader signaled his troops. One of the soldiers mounted the truck and
opened up with a blast from the heavy-caliber machine gun. The mercenaries ducked
for cover behind the trees. The line of fire mowed down the bushes to their left and
was getting closer.

Pierce was terrified. “Stay calm,” Yeager told him. “And don’t move.”

The flying bullets sprayed up the fallen leaves around them, but Akili didn’t stir
and held tight to his father.

As the curtain of bullets passed overhead, Yeager and the others began to withdraw,
leading the three people under their protection, one by one, deeper into the jungle.
The militia grew more active. They excitedly pointed in their direction and, with
all the weapons they could carry, ran off across the field. Apparently they had noticed
movement in the underbrush.

“Run!” Yeager commanded, keeping his voice low. “Go back to our original route!”

Guarded by Meyers, Pierce and the two Mbuti began running.

The militia moved across the open field, and Garrett and Mick set their rifles on
full auto and hit them with covering fire. Ten or so of them fell dead, halting the
enemy’s advance.

Yeager drew a bead on the militia leader and squeezed the trigger. The second he fired,
the satisfying sensation that he’d made a direct hit ran straight from his right hand
to his brain. The bullet took a lower path than he’d hoped for, but his quarry didn’t
escape. The target’s camouflage uniform fluttered, and a red stain spread out from
inside. The 7.6mm bullet, flying at supersonic speed, ripped into the man’s lower
abdomen, shredding his genitals and bladder, and causing instant death. His shouts
were strangled as he doubled over and crumpled to the ground.

This was the first time since Yeager had become a soldier that he’d killed someone
he could see with his naked eye. He didn’t feel guilty but exhilarated. He’d given
these cruel animals what they deserved. Kill them! Blow those savages to hell!

One after another Yeager shot down four of the soldiers who had stood there stock-still,
then he fell back.

Seven o’clock in the evening.

His cell phone rang, and Kento looked up from the textbook on blood gas analysis he’d
been studying. Jeong-hoon should be arriving soon. Thinking he was calling to say
he’d be late, Kento picked up the phone, which was plugged into its charger. The LED
screen said
POPPY.

When he hurriedly said hello, the low, machine-generated voice he’d heard before responded.
“Take out the laptop that doesn’t turn on, right away.”

The black laptop.
Finally
, Kento thought, excited at the prospect of solving this long-standing riddle.

Poppy seemed impatient. Kento pulled the computer over from a corner of the desk,
cluttered with lab equipment, and opened the display.

“The apartment you’re in in Machida right now has high-speed Internet. You know that?”

The last time Jeong-hoon was over he’d connected to the Internet. “I know.”

“After you connect the laptop to the cable, turn on the start button.”

He did as he was told and waited, but all he saw was the same blue screen as always.
“The machine’s frozen.”

“No, it’s not. It’s on normally. There’s a button on the screen to input the password.”

“I don’t see anything like that.”

“The background, the entry field, and letters are all the same color. Protective coloration.”

So that’s why it was all blue! Kento felt a little let down by this simple trick.

“That laptop is already connected to the Internet. I’ll tell you the password and
you type it in, and make sure you get it right.”

The password Poppy told him was
genushitosei
, all in lowercase. A random line of letters, Kento thought—or was there some regularity
hidden within it? He couldn’t tell.

“Once you’ve inputted that, hit the enter key.”

He did, but the screen remained the same.

“Here’s the second password.”

Poppy again told him a meaningless line of letters:
uimakaitagotou
.

As soon as he typed this in and hit the enter key, the screen suddenly came alive.
The tiny display showed another world. The sounds from the speakers, though, revealed
chaos. Rustling sounds, like something rubbing together, and people gasping, struggling
to catch their breath.

“What do you see?” the low voice asked.

“A video image. I’m not sure, but it seems like somebody’s running through a forest.”

“That’s a live feed from the war zone.”

“War zone?”

“It’s what’s happening right now in the Congo.”

When he heard the name of the country his father had worked in, Kento felt confused.
Were all these mysterious things that had happened connected to what was going on
in the middle of the African continent?

“Press the control key and the
X
key at the same time to change the image.”

Kento did, and the live feed from the war zone switched to a monochrome aerial view.
It looked at first like a still photo, but when he looked closer he saw it was a video.
A satellite video, like ones he’d seen on the TV news. The audio, though, remained
the same, transmitting the sounds of war.

Poppy taught him how to enlarge and reduce the images and left him with this: “If
the people on the video ask you questions, answer them. Just face the laptop and talk.
This machine uses an unbreakable encryption, so don’t worry about it being tapped.”

“Wait a second. What is going on here?”

“It’s a rescue operation for an evolved human being. And you hold its fate in your
hands.”

“What the—” he cried out, and the line went dead.

Kento gazed, open-mouthed, at the satellite image. He soon understood what he was
viewing—the jungle photographed from above. The dappled pattern he thought was the
dark surface of the sea was actually a thick canopy of trees. Below this he caught
glimpses of white dots. He enlarged the view and saw, like grains of rice, the white,
high-signature silhouettes of people.