The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(158)
“You have been a bad boy, haven’t you, Captain? One hundred and seventeen men, women, and children, including babes in arms, all wiped out, slaughtered, on one very busy afternoon, deep in country. You shot them until you ran out of bullets, you bayoneted them until the blade broke, and then you finished the rest off with the butt of your rifle, your bare hands, and a series of improvised blunt instruments. You broke in skulls, you tore out throats, you ripped out organs and you ate them. When your company finally caught up with you, you were sitting soaking your bare feet in the river, surrounded by the dead, soaked in their blood, calmly smoking a cigarette. Was it an enemy village, Captain?”
“No.”
“Did anyone attack you, threaten you?”
“No.”
“So why did you butcher an entire village of civilians, Captain Marlowe?”
I showed him my smile again. “Because it was there. Because I didn’t like the way they looked at me. Does it matter?”
“Not particularly, no.” The CIA man leaned forward across the desk, fixing me with his unblinking happy gaze. “You’re not here to be court-martialed, Captain. It has already been decided, at extremely high levels, that none of this ever happened. There never was any massacre; there never was any crazy captain. Far too upsetting, for the folks at home. Instead, I have been empowered to offer you a very special, very important, very…sensitive mission. Carry it out successfully, and this file will disappear. You will be given an honorable discharge, and allowed to go home.”
“First thing you learn in the Army,” I said, “is never volunteer. Especially not for very special, important, and sensitive missions.”
“Should you decline this opportunity, I am also empowered to take you out the back of this building and put two bullets in your head,” said the CIA man, still smiling.
I surprised him by actually taking a moment to think about it. If this mission was too important for the Army, and too dangerous for the CIA, and they needed a monster like me to carry it out successfully…it had to involve something even worse than wiping out a whole village of noncombatants. And, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go home. After everything I’d seen, and done. I still loved the memories I had, of family and friends. I didn’t like to think of their faces, when they realized what had come home to them. I didn’t like to think of them with a monster in their midst, walking around, hidden behind my old face.
I didn’t want to stay in Hell, but there was enough of a man left in me that I knew I had no business contaminating the streets of Heaven with my bloody presence.
So I nodded to the CIA man, and he sank back into his chair, which made piteous sounds of protest as his weight settled heavily again. He opened a drawer in his desk, put away my file, and took out another. It was much thicker than mine. The cover was still blank. Not even a file number. Just like mine. The CIA man opened it, took out a glossy 8 by 10, and skimmed it across the desk to me. I looked at the photo, not touching it. The officer looking back at me had all the right stripes and all the right medal ribbons, and a bland, impassive face with no obvious signs of character or authority.
“That is Major Kraus,” said the CIA man. “Excellent record, distinguished career. Wrote a good many important papers. Had a great career ahead of him, Stateside. But he wanted to be here, where the action was…where he could be a real soldier. Somehow he persuaded his superiors to allow him to go deep in country, where he could try out some special new theories of his own. The first reports indicated that he was achieving some measure of success. Later reports were more…ambiguous. And then the reports stopped. We haven’t heard anything from Major Kraus in over a year.
“The Army sent troops in after him. They never reported back. We sent some of our people in—good men, experienced men. We never heard from them again. And now reports have begun trickling out of that area, mostly from fleeing native villagers. They say Kraus has assembled his own private army, and turned them loose on everything that moves. They’re moving inexorably through the jungle, killing everything in their path. It isn’t enemy territory any more, but it isn’t ours, either. Major Kraus seems intent on carving out his own little kingdom in the jungle, and we can’t have that.”
“Of course not,” I said. “The Army’s never approved of individual ambition.”
“Don’t push your luck, Captain. Your mission is to go up river, all the way into the jungle to the major’s last reported position, evaluate the situation, and then put an end to his little experiment.”
I smiled. “I get to kill a major?”
The CIA man smiled back at me. “Thought you’d like that. If the major cannot be persuaded to rein himself in, and follow orders, you are empowered to execute him. If the situation can be brought back under control, do so. If not, just present us with the exact coordinates, and we’ll send the fly boys in to wipe the whole mess right off the map. Any questions?”
“Why me?”
“Because you are completely and utterly expendable, Captain. If you should fail, we’ll just find another psycho and send him up the river. It’s not like there’s a shortage, these days. We’ll just keep sending people like you, until one of you finally gets the job done. We’re not in any hurry. If nothing else, Major Kraus is at least keeping the enemy occupied.”