Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (10 page)

Snake flatly replied, “Yeah, I believe her words were, ‘I’ll never forgive that womanizing piece of shit.’ ”

“I see.”

With none of us having any desire to linger on the aggravating and bizarre revelation, we instead sought refuge in our various battle preparations. I tested Snake’s OctoCamo and calibrated the power assist on his Sneaking Suit. Then I ran the Mk. II’s system tests and went through
Nomad
’s inspection checklist to prepare for our eventual departure.

When the time came for Snake to leave, Sunny stood at the edge of the cargo bay, waved goodbye, and called out, “S-see you, Snake!”

Snake returned a smile. He would be gone for at least several days—several days without having to endure her fried eggs. I looked at Sunny, watching Snake reach the edge of the tarmac, and I thought,
We’re something like a family, aren’t we
.

We weren’t really a family, of course, but at that moment, I felt at peace.

If only everything could have stayed like that.

I shook my head. What was I thinking at a time like this? Snake was about to enter another battlefield.

Using an ID Campbell had provided, Snake passed through customs and immigration. He climbed in the four-by-four and headed up into the mountainous region on the other side of the border. Just a few years ago, the high altitude wouldn’t have been a problem for Snake, but with his aged lungs Snake was having trouble adjusting to the low oxygen.

Fortunately, he’d have time to adjust—the mountains were quite far. But as the elevation increased, Snake only seemed to become worse off. He rarely spoke, and the occasional bead of sweat rolled down his cheek.

“Snake,” I asked over the codec, “how are you holding up?”

Snake, as reluctant as ever to discuss his body, simply asked, “What’s our current situation?”

I sighed. “Rebel guerrilla units are advancing on the base of the government PMC troops. The building appears to be Liquid’s safe house. According to Naomi’s data, she’s being held prisoner inside the compound.”

I sent a satellite image of the compound through the Solid Eye.

“That’s where she is?” he asked.

“Assuming Naomi’s data are correct. According to satellite imagery procured by Mei Ling, the facility where Naomi is being held is to the north, along a mountain road. I’m sending the location to your map.”

Snake hadn’t heard that name in a while. “Mei Ling?”

“Yeah.”

Along with Colonel Campbell, Mei Ling was part of Snake’s wireless support team during the Shadow Moses Incident. Back then, she was still a teenager, but now, nine years had passed, and she was a grown woman.

She’d become the captain of the USS
Missouri
, a battleship from the time when giant turrets were still the backbone of naval power.
Missouri
had a long and storied history (including serving as the setting for a Steven Seagal movie), but with the advent of carrier fleets, the expensive and inflexible battleship-class vessels became obsolete. Although cannon power attacks on coastal areas remained in sporadic use through the Gulf War,
Missouri
was retired as an aged soldier, no longer of use to the modern era, in the following year, ’92. The rest of the battleships would meet the same fate by the mid-nineties.

Now the seas were dominated by frigate-class ships and cruisers powered by the mighty Aegis system.

After its decommissioning,
Missouri
was sent to Hawaii to live out the rest of its years as a tourist attraction, but after its museum contract expired the ship was recommissioned and used for virtual training. Rather than actual combat training, the goal seemed to be getting the sailors acclimated to seamanship aboard an analog vessel.

In short, everyone involved with the Shadow Moses incident had either become fugitives or had been sidelined into nonessential dead-end appointments. The same had happened to Meryl. She was wasting away in some desk job when Campbell pulled some connections in the army to place her within the PMC inspection unit—an assignment considered extremely dangerous even for the CID.

“Otacon,” Snake said, “I just saw a PMC armored truck. I think I’m not far from Pieuvre Armement patrols. I even saw some giant billboard advertisements for them. ‘Arms of the Octopus, Arms for Your War!’ ”

“That might sound appealing if you were desperate. But in the fog of war, even eight arms aren’t enough.”

Even some nonsense name like Octopus Armaments takes on an elegantly feminine quality when said in French. Pieuvre Armement. Personally, I found all this ebullience over the booming war economy distasteful.

I confirmed Snake’s positional data on the GPS, then said, “You’d better ditch your car. That area’s a veritable hornet’s nest of PMC patrols.”

Snake voiced his acknowledgment. He left the four-by-four hidden in a thicket of trees and lowered the Mk. II from the back. He adjusted the OctoCamo and took slow, even breaths to condition his breathing to the thin atmosphere. He studied his environment and attuned his senses and his intuition to the South American highlands.

The smell of the grass.

The smell of bugs.

The smell of the earth.

Crawling on the ground, the smells were unavoidable—and to Snake, they were an essential component of his senses.

When others were or had recently been nearby, they left ripples in what Snake liked to think of as a baseline. The forest and the earth were a delicate system within which Snake could pick out the traces of human disturbance. By attuning his senses to the ripples in the baseline, his situational awareness surpassed what most would consider possible.

Even with some of his attention dedicated to keeping track of PMC forces, Snake soon reached the path. Nestled in a dell at its mouth was a village with several houses, a barn, and a PMC armored truck.

The battlefront had arrived ahead of Snake.

Defeated rebel soldiers were gathered together on their knees. A number of battle-scarred corpses were scattered around the village, all of them antigovernment forces. The rebels had no uniforms and carried mismatched sets of whatever equipment they were able to scavenge or improvise. The PMC soldiers, of course, wore combat chest harnesses and Protec helmets, their equipment on par with that of the US Army.

Flames spewed from one of the houses. Likely, this village had been a rebel hideout. By blurring the line between the battlefield and civilian life, guerrillas could evade the attacks of conventional armies.

The guerrilla warfare tactics employed in the mountains of South America owed much to Mao Zedong. A mountainous expanse covered much of China’s territory, and in farming villages in those highlands, Mao had made his stronghold. He knew that urbanized forces would not be suited to the steep ranges. South America, with a similar share of mountains and villages, had a lot in common with China.

At one with the forest, Snake observed the PMCs through his Solid Eye. A figure emerged from the flaming house. The man was noticeably taller than the PMC soldiers, and he wore a long black coat utterly out of place in a battlefield. Snake recognized him.

The man was one of the monsters of the rebel unit, Dead Cell, whom we thought had been shot to death by Raiden on the Big Shell. But death never seemed to take for him, as he could be stabbed in the chest or shot through the head and laugh it off.

The man’s teeth had once been in Snake’s throat, and Snake could still remember how his eyes had looked. Bottomless. Black. Lifeless. Like a vampire.

“It’s Vamp,” Snake said, and when I heard the words, time stood still.

Vamp. The heartbreak of seeing his knife stick into my sister’s stomach had haunted me for years. How much better would it have been had the knife been pointed at me instead? How many times have Emma’s last words echoed inside me just as I was about to fall asleep?

All I could do every night was grit my teeth and clutch at the bedsheets and endure the memory of her feeble lips forming the words
Call me Emma
. Reliving that moment reduced me to tears every time.

That man—that Nosferatu—killed Emma.

“Otacon!”

I snapped back to the mission. Snake must have been calling my name over the codec for some time. I put my hand to my chest and tried to calm my hastened pulse and breathing. No easy task with that man on the other side of the monitor—on the other side of Snake’s Solid Eye.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He could be involved with Liquid’s plans.” Vamp had been working in concert with Ocelot on the Big Shell.

“It’s possible. But I thought Jack took him out in Manhattan!”

I bit my lip. Was Vamp really immortal? Maybe I should have felt afraid, or incredulous, at the possibility of facing an enemy who couldn’t die, but all I could feel was the rising anger for the man who killed my sister. I tried to fight it back, but my racing heart sent blood straight to my head. My temples started to ache from the intensity of my emotions.

“I swear, the next time I see him …”

“Otacon, get a grip!”

Snake’s shouting broke me free from the magnetic draw of my hatred. For the moment, at least, I was thinking straight again.

The burning anger had subsided into an icy black river. I said to Snake, “Let’s see what the PMC troops are up to.”

Snake acknowledged and moved to where he could hear their voices, from which we gathered the Pieuvre Armement soldiers were searching for Snake’s whereabouts.

The soldiers reported to Vamp that Snake hadn’t been in the village. Vamp’s skin was whiter than it had been on the Big Shell, and veins stood out on his cheek like neural pathways.

“The guerrillas have scattered,” Vamp said to the men, his voice low and smooth, straight out of a nightmare. “But they’ll be coming to storm the safe house. He must be among their numbers. Sooner or later he will come. Don’t let down your guard.”

The PMC troops saluted, and Vamp climbed into the armored truck and left the smoldering village behind. Somehow, they knew Snake was coming.

“This could be a trap,” I said.

“Yeah. We’ll need to stay sharp.”

3

THE PATH TWISTED, turned up the mountain, and wound in and out of the forest. But this wasn’t a small, irregular trail created by the occasional passing of man and beast—it was a road of packed-down earth, complete with tire tracks laid down by military vehicles. From the look of the tracks, the trucks had been numerous and heavy, perhaps weighed down by armored plating and weaponry.

Or by materials brought in for research purposes.

Snake continued his crawl, hugging the earth like an inchworm. His OctoCamo constantly matched its patterns and colors with his immediate surroundings. He moved in a slow and steady rhythm, pausing whenever he sensed the slightest ripple in the baseline—perhaps some shift in the odor of the dirt—and once satisfied that no danger was present, he adjusted his senses to the change and pressed on.

This continued until a sudden call came from his codec and broke his rhythm.

The caller’s ID tag was blank. Blended in with the background noise was the sound of odd, irregular breaths. No, odd wasn’t quite the right word—the breathing seemed inhuman.

“Who is this?” Snake asked.

“Snake …”

Snake had heard that voice before. “Is this …”

“There is an APC parked up ahead. It looks junked, but a strange man is inside. It could be a PMC trap. Be careful.”

“Is this Jack?”

The voice was unmistakably Jack’s, although there was a mechanical tinge to it.

Jack.

Raiden.

The former FOXHOUND member who fought at our side on the Big Shell. Although, strictly speaking, he had only thought that he belonged to FOXHOUND—the group had been disbanded. After he’d rescued Sunny from the Patriots, he vanished without a trace, as if his role were over.

Where had he been?

“Jack is dead. Snake, I’m at your side.”

The line disconnected.

“Otacon,” Snake said, “is Rose there?”