Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (11 page)

I switched my feed to Campbell’s office—his home office, to be exact. Rose was already at the screen, and I connected her with Snake.

“What’s going on, Snake?” she asked.

“Rose, I just got a call from Raiden. It sounds like he’s close by.”

Rosemary took in a sharp breath. I couldn’t tell if the confusion in her eyes was from joy or terror. With some effort, she assumed a calm expression.

“Did … did he seem okay?”

“Yeah, as far as I could tell from his voice.”

Softly, she said, “That’s great,” but the words hadn’t reached her expression. “Snake, I have a favor to ask.”

“What?”

“Don’t let him know I’m involved in this operation, okay? For now, I think it would be best for Jack if I let him be.”

Did she really think that? From where I sat, it seemed like she was the one afraid of him. Filled with regret over abandoning him, over not being able to save him, she was clearly upset by his sudden reappearance.

Not many could ever escape their sins. The same way I hadn’t been able to say something, to say anything, to Emma’s final words before she slipped away.

Rosemary said, “After we lost our baby, all Jack did was avoid me—he blamed himself for the miscarriage—but Roy, his commanding officer, worried for me.”

When he was a child, Jack was forced to kill many other children. But after the events on the Big Shell, he tried to face his past sins, but they only began to gnaw at him more and more.

The final blow had been brought by the death of his unborn child.

“Roy was so kind to me,” Rosemary explained. “I know it sounds like I’m making excuses, but I needed to get over it, to move on with my life. I’m worried about Jack, of course, but … I’m also afraid of him.”

If there were a man free enough of guilt to condemn her after that confession, he wasn’t on the codec channel. I suppose Sunny would have been pure enough, had she been in the command center and not on the second floor immersed in her quest to make better fried eggs.

“All right,” Snake said. “I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“Thank you, Snake.”

Snake soon came across the APC from Jack’s warning.

Chipped paint revealed patches of rusted armor plating. I don’t think many would look at the junker and see anything more than an abandoned vehicle.

But if what Jack said was true, someone—or some ones—waited inside.

Snake, keeping his presence concealed, inched toward the APC. But even right up next to it, he still couldn’t sense anyone around.

Had the enemy not noticed us? Was there even anyone in there, waiting this still for Snake to come?

A preemptive strike on the occupants of the APC was out of the question. Any attempt to smoke the would-be ambushers out with a grenade or something of that kind would have alerted nearby PMC troops—an unacceptable risk considering that the APC might be deserted.

Snake slowly rose. He withdrew a cigarette from the pack he’d purchased at the airport and lit it as if to say,
If you’re in there, go ahead, come at me
.

A small shadow whirred right past his nose.

Not a bullet.

An animal.

The creature climbed atop the APC with surprising speed, then started taking a leisurely drag from a cigarette. Only then did Snake notice the cigarette had disappeared from his mouth. He’d seen that animal before—the hairless gibbon in the Middle East.

The rear hatch of the APC opened, and from within came a cheerful voice.

“Yo! Over here.”

At the same time, the rust and the damage on the exterior of the vehicle faded away. In its place was the smooth armored shell and a stencil that read
EYE HAVE YOU
!

OctoCamo. The whole body of the APC was coated with a layer of OctoCamo material.

From the rear hatch, Drebin was waving Snake over.

“Come on, hop in. It’s getting rough out there.”

The gibbon, cigarette in mouth, tried to climb inside, but Drebin shoved him away. The arms merchant pointed at the monkey’s mouth and then the ground. Reluctantly, the animal rubbed Snake’s smoke into the dirt. Snake dutifully picked up the snubbed-out butt and stuffed it in his portable ashtray.

Climbing into the rear hatch, Snake asked, “Have you been following me?”

Drebin closed the hatch and snapped his fingers—probably instructing the APC’s computer system to re-engage the OctoCamo.

“You seemed like an interesting guy, so I decided to check you out. There’s a lot of stories about you out there in the intel community—especially the CIA.”

“How did you find me?”

“You know those nanomachines I injected you with back in the Middle East? They let me track your location.”

Snake cursed his own carelessness.
Isn’t that exactly how I got myself injected with FOXDIE before Shadow Moses?
Snake seemed to respond with the same inexplicable and baseless defiance whenever asked if he didn’t like shots.

Drebin appeared genuinely pleased to see Snake again. “Figured it’s only fair that I tell you. After you showed up in the Middle East, the five big PMCs all got orders to kill. ‘Your number one priority is to eliminate Solid Snake on sight.’ But from where I’m sitting, I’d say ‘Old Snake’ seems a little more appropriate.”

“Old, huh?” Snake had thought he’d come to accept his accelerated aging, but hearing it from Drebin stung. After all, he was still in his forties.

To someone like me, having known him for about a decade, the whole business of Snake reacting to someone asking, “Do you not like shots?” was clearly him just putting up a strong front. He’d never admit it, but he dealt with the aging disease the same way. I guess that’s one of the things we found endearing about the man.

“Drebin, I thought no one was supposed to be able to hack into the System. Are you with the Patriots?”

Drebin threw his head back and laughed. “No sir, I ain’t no la li lu le lo.”

There was that word protection again. Just like Naomi. That meant, whether he was aware of it or not, Drebin was within the System.

But then the man said with a laugh, “I mean … I’m no Patriot.”

Snake sighed. Did this guy have to be so dramatic about everything?

“The nanomachines I got in me aren’t military issue,” Drebin said. “No speech restrictions for me.”

Still
, Snake and I both thought,
you know the Patriots exist. Few people had heard of the Patriots, and most who did thought they were something dreamed up by paranoid nuts, like the Freemasons or the Jewish conspiracy.
Almost none knew that the Patriots were not only real but continued to exist in the form of technology.

Thinking that Drebin must know something, Snake asked, “Who the hell are these Patriots? Are they human?”

“Not anymore, they ain’t. They’re the law of this world, created over the course of history. They’re America, the world’s greatest military power. They are the war economy. Which makes you and me just cogs in a much grander schematic. We’re just the context.”

The context. That was how the AI had explained it to Jack on the Big Shell.

“I mean,” Drebin said, “someone obviously had to start the whole thing at the beginning. But now their law has taken on a life of its own.”

“A life of its own?”

“Yup. The country, the war economy … It ain’t run by people. It’s run by the System. No need for high-level decision-making authority. It’s all handled by a massive yet simple information processing system. An AI, you could say.”

Snake wasn’t entirely convinced.

The Patriots had built a marine decontamination facility to hide the construction of Arsenal Gear. In order to set the stage for that, they set a trap for Snake and sank a tanker with him in it. And after the Big Shell had served its purpose and the Arsenal Gear was made, they used the facility to reenact Shadow Moses as part of a test for a global information control system.

To do all that required the manipulation of a great number of people—their fates, their thoughts, their feelings. Jack, Rose, Solidus, the members of Dead Cell—even Ocelot, who thought himself to be one of the Patriots. Is a mere AI capable of such complexity?

Reading Snake’s misgivings, Drebin spread his arms and said, “It works just like natural law. The world’s a much simpler place than most folks realize.”

“But what is the Patriots’ AI, exactly?”

Drebin held up three fingers. “The Patriots’ System is closely monitored by three peripheral AIs and a core AI that ties them all together. The SOP System, controlling the world’s military power, is one part of that. It’s all backed up by a foolproof control system. So not even yours truly can sneak inside the Patriots’ AIs.”

“What if, hypothetically, someone found a way?”

Drebin was startled by Snake’s insistence, but he took a moment to think it over.

“If they could fool the Intrusion Detection System, I guess they could use it as a haven to lie low.”

“A haven?”

“You know, like a tax haven. Online, we have net havens, data havens. An extraterritorial place where social conventions and the rules of the net don’t apply. Last century, the superrich would open bank accounts in countries without income tax laws. Won’t be long before people start using havens to escape from ID control.”

“So, thinking along those lines, if someone got into the Patriots’ AI …”

Drebin shrugged. “Either way, it’s absolutely impossible to access the Patriots’ AIs from the outside. No chance in hell. Like I said, there’s no breaking into those AIs. Not from the outside.”

But everything had a hidden side. Everything had a hole. Meryl had said that it was impossible to interfere with the SOP, and yet Liquid proved it could be done. No matter how many times Drebin assured us the AIs couldn’t be broken into, neither Snake nor I believed it for a second.

Snake pressed further. “But Liquid’s got something in mind. You sure there’s no way?”

Drebin let out a derisive laugh as if to say,
Give me a break already
, then said, “I’m just a gun launderer. Only reason I’m interested in you is ’cause you start a lot of fires.”

“All right then, I guess I’d better take a few weapons that can cause some sparks.”

Snake bought a DSR1, a German-made bolt action sniper rifle. After each shot, the shooter manually opened the breech to eject the spent shell and rack the next one into place. It was built more simply than automatics, making it more accurate and more reliable. Snake checked the weapon over and, satisfied with its condition, slung it over his back.

“Thanks, friend,” Drebin said. “All right then. You need anything else, give me a ring. Eye. Have. You.”

Snake dropped down from the rear hatch to see the APC’s OctoCamo blur into the same markings as the PMC vehicles. And, just as it had in the Middle East, the vehicle sped away and out of sight.

An explosion sounded in the distance. The noise of battle, and of death.

Snake looked up the mountain path.

On the other side of the battle was the woman who knew the truth.

4

BRAVING THE BARRAGE of PMC gunfire, a lone bulldozer advanced.

Thick, welded-on steel plates protected its sides, and the front lifting blade repelled the PMC bullets at its front. The vehicle, a Caterpillar D9, came with enough horsepower to be unaffected by the added weight of the improvised armor plating. Not that its top speed really mattered much. For all the militia cared, it could crawl like a turtle as long as it smashed through the enemy barricades.

The D9s had been used to great effect by Israel in clean-up operations in Palestine. And once, an American citizen armored up a Japanese-made Komatsu bulldozer, went on a rampage, and destroyed much of a small town’s main drag, completely impervious to SWAT team fire in his shell.

As Snake watched from a shaded cliffside, the militia’s D9 smashed through a thick gate to the mansion safe house. The rebel forces poured through the opening, using the bulldozer as cover.