Project Itoh - Genocidal Organ

“So, Boss, why have we been summoned here today?” I asked. Colonel Rockwell adjusted his beret as he looked around at the other people in the room to secure their tacit consent to continue. Having received it, he said in a calm voice:

“It’s been decided that we’ll be putting into effect a plan to assassinate John Paul.”

Williams frowned. Uh, wasn’t that already decided a couple of years ago when you first sent us in to try and kill him? he obviously wanted to say.

I, on the other hand, immediately grasped what Boss meant. “A search and kill op, sir? Will we be trailing him?”

“Exactly.”

A trailing op. Find him and hunt him down like a dog. A team of us were going to be dispatched into the thick of a war zone, armed to the teeth with the latest gadgets, primed with all the prep work the intelligence community could throw at us, and then left to it.

“It’s thought that John Paul is currently entrenched somewhere in Europe. Now, Intelligence Corps assassination work has, of late, been producing spectacular results. In particular, Unit G’s stock has never been higher. There’s only one fly in the ointment, and that’s John Paul.”

“So you want us to go undercover? Like spies?” I asked.

“Exactly,” the navy-blue-suited CIA lady spoke up. “As much as we hate to admit it, the CIA simply doesn’t have the experience or the track record that you do at assassination, and even our best operatives simply don’t match up to your level of toughness and training. We did consider the option of having one of our moles on the ground do the work, one of the local radicals, but this is an extremely delicate and precisely planned operation, and we need to do everything we can to maximize our chance of success. Once upon a time this was the sort of plan we would have put in the hands of the Green Berets or Delta Force. As it is, Special Operations I Detachment is undoubtedly the most suited to this line of work.”

“Most of all, the important thing to remember is that this is a preemptive strike,” Colonel Rockwell continued, turning to look directly at us. “So far, it’s always been a case of a massacre occurring followed by Intelligence determining that John Paul has somehow been involved, before finally sending us in to try and tidy up the mess. Considered from this perspective, our missions in the past have essentially been nothing more than glorified police work after the event.

“This time, though, it’s different. This may be a tracking mission, but it’s not a simple case of finding a target of opportunity and taking him out. When the chance presents itself, you’re not just to kill him—you’ll need to discover the seeds of the next genocide he’s planting.”

Colonel Rockwell finished speaking, and the undersecretary of defense took over. “You will be appointed staff officers and temporarily attached to the Intelligence Department of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

No surprises, given how closely integrated the two intelligence departments of the DIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were. “In other words, under your command,” I said.

“You’re being assigned to J2,” said Boss, “but as this is a joint operation between Intelligence and DIA, we’ll be able to provide you with comprehensive support from our end too. This is a crucial mission after all. There are a lot of people relying on our success.

“In short, gentlemen, to coin a phrase, you could well be our only hope. Our last line of defense before another massacre takes place. Shit, even as we speak, what’s to say that John Paul isn’t trying to turn a country somewhere in the world into a new living hell?”

3

Corpses.

The crater in the ground was like a giant’s stockpot, packed full of the remnants of charred people.

Humans have a higher proportion of subcutaneous fat than most mammals, which means that when they’re heated up good and proper, their skin crisps up like pork crackling, and were it not for all the other things that inevitably end up getting burnt to a crisp with them, they would give off a similar savory aroma. Burning corpses get their characteristic foul odor from things like clothes and hair in particular. Were it not for those, burning humans wouldn’t smell much different from any other meaty barbecue.

All these thoughts ran through my head as I sat on the edge of the still-warm crater and surveyed the mass of human flesh that spread out before me. A thought flickered through my mind: the carnage in front of me was really no different from a meal that someone, somewhere was about to eat. As I brooded, one of the corpses opened its eyes, its eyelids cracking as it did so. Its skin and bone and flesh were all burnt to a crisp, and the eyes that stared out through the eye sockets made the corpse look like something from a Hammer horror movie.

“I’m all burnt to a crisp,” my mom muttered, looking at her charred hands.

“Yep, like a crispy Peking duck,” I said.

“I wonder if I taste as good as Peking duck,” my mother said with a laugh. As she did so, a crack appeared in her hardened cheeks. She was like a painting that had been in the sun for too long.

This was really funny. “Looking at you like this, Mom, I can’t help think that you’re nothing more than a pile of flesh and bones.”

“Manners, manners! After all, you’re not exactly much more yourself, are you?” Mom seemed offended. “If a corpse is just a pile of flesh and bones, then how can you pretend that a person who just happens to be alive is any more than that either? We’re all just objects.”

“Just objects, huh? Try telling that to Williams. Better still, try using him as an object … what, like an ashtray, maybe?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t be too happy at first. But he’d come around sooner or later.”

Warplanes were circling the sky at a dangerously low altitude; they reminded me of the underbellies of great whales. There was an occasional smattering of gunfire, and the smell of gunpowder permeated the area.

“He’d come around to what?” I asked. “The idea that he’s just an object?”

“Yes, that he’s just a piece of meat, O-son-of-mine-who-calls-himself-an-atheist-but-can’t-quite-bring-himself-to-accept-one-of-the-central-tenets-of-his-so-called-belief-system.”

I laughed. O son of mine. That’s what Mom always used to call me when we played our high-falutin’ language games. Putting me in my place for being the innocent that I was.

“ ‘I am naught but flesh, and the flesh profiteth nothing,’ ” I countered.

“Naught but flesh, maybe, but don’t take that as a bad thing. Your body is not a prison, you know.”

I nodded. Because Mom was always right. If she said something was so, it must be so.

“Look, your friends are here to pick you up,” she said.

There was a roar. A transport craft was descending from the skies, and the blast was whipping up the air around us, causing the trees around the crater to blow this way and that. I lifted a hand to my face to shield myself from the debris that swirled in the air. The plane’s hatch opened, and there was Williams, beckoning me toward him.

“See you later then, Mom.”

“See you later, O son of mine.”

I waved goodbye to my charred mother.

My mother waved her blackened matchstick arm back at me.

The personnel carrier started its ascent. I lay back in my recliner seat and before I knew it I was asleep and the crater full of corpses was no more than a speck in the distance, a memory.

I fell asleep on a passenger craft in the world of the dead; when I awoke it was on a passenger craft in the world of the living.