The day is hot as the survivors of first platoon cross through check point bravo and into the demilitarized zone. We have just returned from a thirty hour kill sweep of an area on the edge of the dead sea where a group of Mossad insurgents had their camp. When Israel seceded to Utopia these hardcore fighters had refused to lay down arms and were now waging a guerilla war on our pacification efforts. After a day and a half we finally found their bolt hole. Surrounded, outnumbered and out gunned, they choose to die.
Ignoring the fact that we are killing them, crack assault troops, men harder than grenades, come charging out of their mountain lairs. First platoon is on the firing line, selector switches set to full auto as they put rounds on target. The IDF don’t care. They come in through rifle fire, through grenade blasts and everything we can throw at them. A thin khaki line soaking up all our ordinance and our anger and hit by so many shells and bullets that they can't fall down. As I burn through magazine's I feel proud to be attacked by these brass-balled hard asses, and proud to be killing them. The most inspiring thing I've seen around here lately are these insurgents and the way they attack. They come in lean and mean, the best light infantry since we arrived in Israel and had our identities stolen. We are no longer shock troops. We are a police force. Manning border checkpoints and patrolling streets. It feels good to shoot at something which shoots back. The Mossad die well. So highly motivated that they stand up against a force ten times their size until an air strike rolls in and levels the mountainside.
Back in down town Jerusalem a girl runs up to Bearn, our squad leader, and hands him a flower. He crouches down and lets her thread it into his webbing before she toddles off, back to her smiling parents. This scene unsettles me. I have seen Bearn tear a man's throat out with his teeth in the frantic hand to hand combat that filled the final hours of the battle of Johannesburg. We are warriors, stone cold killers. We should not be accepting flowers from little children.
That night we get drunk. Sitting in a shadowy bar eating local food and drinking local spirits we pay our respect to the fallen, ours and theirs. On their blood is Utopia founded. I find myself watching the half naked curvaceous dancer on the stage, trying and failing to find a spark of lust, revulsion, anything. After so long with the Rosasi I am barely human any-more. I cannot relate to these normal people around me. They do not know what I know, they have not seen what I have seen and they do not believe what I believe.
A man enters the bar and even through the haze of cigarette smoke I know that he is one of the damn assassins that we brought with us when we moved into Israel. He crosses the room with undeserved confidence and stops by our table.
“I’m looking for first platoon.” he says.
I finish my drink before speaking up.
“You've found it.”
He gives us a wolfish grin before telling us that we're going on holiday to sunny south America. Seems that some higher up got herself into a mess and now it was time for us to go get her out of it. Ms SaDiablo was sending a unit of Sands in to provide support for the rescue operation, we just drew the short straw. Nobody cares. We know that Black Orchid wouldn’t send us in unless it was necessary and intel stated that Sparrow was running the op, so we knew that our leaders would have it together.
The flight to South America is uneventful. I spend it thinking about the men I killed. Feeling an odd sense of remorse which I cant quite come to terms with. They fought well and died cleanly. So why cant I stop thinking about a man I used to know? He would say that they didn’t need to die. That I was an invader in their country. That my way of life was an intrusion, that I didn’t have a right to impose my ideology on them. I thought I saw him at a checkpoint a month ago, but that's impossible. For all I know this man drank himself to death years ago. But I still cant shift the feeling of unease.
Four hours after landing we are in the jungle. Crouching down in the dark bush, sweaty and mosquito bitten. We sit tight and grin at each other, it feels good to be back in the sh!t. Ghosts move in the blackness. Silently they twist and coalesce into men, men in Rosasi uniform. We don’t move, pretending that these arrivals haven’t just flitted through our perimeter undetected. They are death commando's, pledged to a cause even to their dying breath. At their head is a man we all recognise. Sparrow. I can see that he's hurt, but no one here will dishonour him by asking if he is all right, we respect him too much. I turn nonchalantly to face the roughed up team, catching Sparrow's eyes in the gloom.
“We're the assault element, what's the plan?”
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