Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (39 page)

Snake was surrounded.

I flipped open my notebook computer to see gun barrel after gun barrel after gun barrel.

While I moved down from the bridge, the Mk. III had been on autopilot, following directly behind Snake. The image on my screen was a direct feed from the robot’s camera. A chill ran down my spine. At the inner entrance to the microwave corridor, Snake was in a hopeless situation.

The gray door isolated the server cluster from static electricity and even electromagnetic pulses. Thick sandwiched sheets of tungsten, gold, and ceramics stood like a monolith before Snake, who helplessly struggled against his own body. His legs had buckled under repeated spasms, and Naomi’s nanomachine injection had lost any effect.

Gasping for air, Snake had just made it to the doorway when the
Haven
troopers rushed out of their hiding places. The armed soldiers, about ten or so in number, crowded the confined space and moved to surround the old man, who had dropped to hands and knees. Like a ghastly lynch mob, the soldiers closed in.

“Come on,” I shouted, “get up. On your feet, Snake!”

He tried to stand, but the strength had left his legs. He slumped back against the doorway and slid down to the floor.

If I don’t do something, he’s done for.
I steadied my resolve. I didn’t think the Mk. III could win against the mob, but the little robot might be able to buy some time. I routed full power to the Mk. III’s wheels and balancers, and sent the Metal Gear charging at the line of troops.

“Wait,” Snake said, and a flash of light flicked above the soldiers’ heads.

Like a ball of lightning, the thing spun through the air, emitting fierce electricity, and planted itself between Snake and the soldiers. It was a man. From head to toe, bolts of electricity emanated from him. He stopped the soldiers in their tracks with a murderous glare.

“Raiden,” Snake said.

“I am the lightning … the rain transformed.”

Raiden’s muscles tensed, and an arc of lightning flew from his body. He was the god of thunder reborn. In his mouth, he held a sword by the blade.

After the events on Shadow Moses, he was left without arms. His tissues and circulation system remained closed at his shoulders, from which draped a long black leather coat. He had reached the depths of
Haven
in his condition. He held the long katana blade wedged between his lips as if to keep balance, and the sight reminded me of a balancing toy. To make it this far, he could scarcely be human.

“Snake,” Raiden said, “leave this to me. I’ll go to the server room.”

The look in his eyes caused me to shudder—and probably Snake too. They glistened with a tinge of madness.
Here I fight, and here I die. My life is but for this moment.

But Raiden’s conviction was nothing more than an idea he’d quickly grasped to protect his own breaking heart. Snake understood this.

His voice raspy but firm, Snake said, “The corridor’s awash in microwaves. It should just be me.”

Jack’s world of fighting as a child soldier, then as a member of FOXHOUND, was gone. Even Colonel, in command of the Big Shell operation, had only been a simulation, projected by the Patriots through nanomachines into Raiden’s mind. The FOXHOUND unit he believed he’d recently joined was nonexistent, having disbanded after the incident on Shadow Moses. Then, when the new life carried in Rose’s body met a sorrowful end, Raiden needed to find some purpose to hang on to, to preserve what he was.

“My body is a machine. I can—”

Raiden’s burden was too heavy to bear. His despair dwarfed anything Snake or I could imagine; his loneliness, a thousand blades piercing his body. But to bury his despair and loneliness, he clung to his yearning like a feral beast. Someday, he would forget he was ever human.

Snake raised his voice, hoping to bring this young warrior, who Snake himself might have cursed to this condition, back to humanity—back to a life with Rose.

“Your body may be a machine … but your heart is human. You’ve got a life to go back to.”

“She means nothing to me now.”

“Raiden, look me in the eye.”

Snake knew words wouldn’t be enough. He found the strength to stand and presented to Raiden the battered countenance of an old soldier. Raiden’s eyes, wild with obsession, perceived the magnitude of Snake’s burdens and shrank back.

“You still have your youth,” Snake said. “Don’t waste it. You can start over. You’re not saddled with your troubles—you’re only clinging to them. You think destiny and fate to be burdens, but no shadow falls over your future.”

Even now, despite being surrounded by enemies—no,
because
of it—Snake tried to sever the illusory bonds that tightly bound Raiden. This too was a duty Snake felt compelled to fulfill.

“From here on,” Snake said, “this is my fight. I …
we
tore the world apart. We made your life a living hell. It’s my duty to put an end to all of this.”

Perhaps in this moment Raiden began to understand why Snake continued to fight, even in his current state. Perhaps Raiden finally comprehended the true meaning of Snake’s words, in that early morning on Manhattan Island:

“Maybe you were only forced to play the role of Raiden in the Patriots’ script, but everything you felt and everything you thought is yours.”

After five years, Raiden—Jack—had taken in the deeper meaning of those words.

He had been fighting to free Snake. That was the reason, he told himself, that he had been born. That was the only way he could find meaning in a life once spent as a child soldier, and once spent as an imitation Snake.

But by doing so he only bound Snake.

Raiden realized that his intent to save the legendary man who had once rescued him, only added to the tired old man’s burdens. What Snake wanted was for people like Jack to be free from Snake himself—to be relieved of the weight of Snake’s
memes
, to have their own lives back.

“I’ll release you
,”
Raiden had once told Snake.

And the only way he could achieve that was to see Snake off to battle.

“All right,” Raiden said. “I’ll make sure they don’t get through.”

Raiden, possessing a newfound resolve, pushed back the surrounding
Haven
troopers with a razor-sharp stare. The intimidated soldiers edged away, their fanlike formation expanding as much as the confines would permit. I connected the Mk. III’s manipulator to the identification reader next to the door, and with Naomi’s passcode opened the way.

“Hold on until we insert the virus,” I said. “You got me?”

Jack radiated lightning. If he couldn’t hold the troopers back, we’d have no chance. As Snake staggered through the doorway, Jack spoke softly, his stare holding the enemy forces at bay.

“Snake,” he said. “Thank you.”

For a moment, Snake stood still. But he didn’t say anything. He had no time to weigh whether his curse had truly been lifted from his junior. Yet hope remained.

More is yet to come. A long struggle may yet await. But this young man has been given plenty of time … unlike me.

Snake could only have faith in that hope, as slim as it might have been. He stumbled ahead. Raiden faced the
Haven
troopers’ guns, and Snake went off into the corridor of death, and the solid, heavy door slid down between their backs, as if cutting the cursed thread that bound them.

The moment he stepped into the hexagonal corridor, Snake was engulfed in microwaves.

Lethal electromagnetic waves emanated from all six faces of the hallway, their wavelength penetrating bone tissue and cell membrane and assaulting the water within every one of the sixty trillion cells within Snake’s body.

Before the mission, I had applied a thick coating of aluminum dust to Snake’s sneaking suit. The process was our best and only option against the microwaves. As in the door of a microwave oven, a metal plate—even if only a mesh—absorbed most of the energy.

I chose aluminum for the metal’s nonmagnetic properties, since metal that reacted to magnets heated rapidly when exposed to microwaves. Aluminum has been used for shielding in microwave ovens because, besides absorbing microwaves, the metal was low cost and wouldn’t radiate heat from dielectric loss.

Of course, I would have wanted to cover Snake’s entire body with a metal shield and provide complete protection from the fatal radiation. But had I done so, he wouldn’t have had the mobility to infiltrate the ship’s interior, let alone the server room.

I could do nothing for the gaps and joints of Snake’s suit. The suit was a complex assemblage of musclelike fibers, and the edges between them—the parts that moved—couldn’t be coated. And even if I had been able to, the aluminum dust only absorbed a small amount of the radiation. The shielding on a microwave oven was maybe half a millimeter thick, but the coating’s protection would not even be one one-hundredth of that.

A few steps in and the pain overwhelmed Snake and brought him to the ground.

I cried out to Snake.

His OctoCamo had gone haywire and turned the same red color as the burning floor. The sneaking suit began to change from its typical grayish blue to a deep crimson. The muscular design of the suit made Snake look like his skin had been stripped away to reveal the blood-red muscles beneath.

Snake couldn’t even cough anymore.

He couldn’t breathe. In his lungs and his heart, and every other organ in his body, Snake’s blood heated, quickly approaching the limits a warm-blooded animal could bear. Broken blood vessels hemorrhaged within the confines of the suit, and the blood, unusually thick, painted dark red stains on Snake’s skin.

Snake was boiling alive.

“Stand,” I yelled. “Snake, stand up!”I knew he wouldn’t be able to. But having the water in his body boil within him would not be a peaceful death. Through the intense heat, Snake extended his right arm.

He crawled. Excruciatingly slow, as if drowning in the inferno, he advanced, one arm at a time.

I thought I saw smoke rise from the joints in Snake’s suit, then his left upper arm exploded.

Snake screamed a bone-chilling scream like none I’d ever heard. Reflexively, I closed my eyes. Somewhere, the heat had localized, and the vaporized water expanded until it had no place left to go, then blew through muscle and skin. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing; a human body exploding bit by bit.

I fought down waves of nausea.

On Snake’s arm, his muscles were exposed, and several tendons, detached from bone, dangled like crimson ribbons from which steam continued to waft. Again Snake fell to the floor, devoid of enough strength even to writhe in pain.

“Snake … please, don’t give up on me.”

I wanted to look away. How could I face such a sight?

My friend, who I had stood with through nine years of battles, was being cooked, broken, and mutilated. A mere three seconds of watching the dreadful scene was enough to drive me mad. So just for one second, I closed my eyes, selfishly hiding from the sight of the legendary man, pushed beyond his limits in the fight to fulfill his duty.

But Snake’s moan required better of me.

More than an utterance of pain, it was a song, refusing defeat, rising above the hurt, continuing ahead. I couldn’t close my eyes to his cry. He was trying to press on. To turn my eyes away from him now would be unforgivable.

“Otacon,” Snake said, his creaky voice escaping from a burning throat. “Are you … there?”

Softly, I said, “Yeah, I’m here.”

On the verge of weeping, I forced my voice to steady. “I’m with you, Snake. Now and always.”

“Why … did you … decide … to fight … alongside me?”

I found it odd that Snake would ask such a question amid pain that would make remaining conscious a struggle. For a moment I was stunned, but I realized I needed to answer quickly and set my brain to work.

Snake needed my voice now. To retain his senses while his body was destroyed, he needed something to hang on to.

“I’m waiting for an answer.”