Genocidal Organ by Project Itoh Read Free Book Online Page A

real,” said Alex, a mournful smile passing his lips.
    “Sure it exists. It’s right here! Just take a look around you!” Williams said with a laugh. Well, if this was hell, our job was to go to hell and back. Mr. Dante, eat your heart out.
    But Alex disagreed, pointing at his own head. “Respectfully, sir, no. Hell is here . Inside your head. Inside your mind. Seared into your cerebral cortex. This scene around us, it might be hellish, but it’s not hell. After all, you can escape from all this. Just close your eyes and it’s gone. And when you get back to America and return to normal life, the scene in front of us now will be gone forever. But you can’t escape from hell. Because hell’s right here, inside your mind, and you carry it around with you.”
    “Is that where heaven is too?” asked Leland, who was also laughing now. Leland was, I knew, a regular Sunday churchgoer, but in his case it was more of a social thing, to fit in with the neighbors. More habit than anything else. I doubted that most of your typical flock of Sunday sheep had the same level of fervent religiosity as young Alex.
    “Who knows,” Alex told Leland. “I know that hell is inside us because I’ve seen it. But I’ve never seen heaven. Heaven is the realm of God, after all. Man’s feeble mind isn’t enough to contain it in all its glory. I suppose you need to actually die before you can experience heaven.”
    “Ladies, ladies,” said Williams, butting in, “let’s leave the theological debates to one side for the time being, shall we? We’ve got a mosque to infiltrate, and I doubt that these shitty little disguises we’re now wearing are going to be much use when it comes to getting us into the inner sanctum.”
    “Okay.” Time for me to take charge. “They may have wall-mounted ID readers installed, so let’s remove our tags. The guys they belonged to were just foot soldiers—there’s no reason to believe they’d have clearance for a secure area like the one we’re penetrating.”
    On my orders, we all pulled the strings attached to our soft palates and the dog tags out of our stomachs. They were all wrapped in string, encased in the pale blue protective gel, and still glistening with the blood of their original owners.
    We slipped into a nearby ruin of a house and buried them in the ground. Then we went over our plans one last time. We sprayed ourselves in nanocoating and activated the Environmental Camouflage software. The disguise algorithms generated by the camouflage patterns fired through our systems, transmitting through the natural salts in our bodies to the nanocoating layer that covered our clothes and equipment.
    The change was instantaneous. We disappeared into the background of the bullet-riddled ruins.
    “As planned, then. Leland and Williams to wait here on standby, ready to secure our path of retreat in the event of unexpected developments. Alex and I to infiltrate the mosque and strike when the two targets meet. All clear?”
    “Sure thing, boss,” said Williams. “Just try and keep it down, huh? I could do without having to take on the whole town in a shootout afterwards. There’s only four of us, right?”
    Williams was fucking with us; that was his way of diffusing the tension. Of course there were “only” four of us. Four was exactly the right number for this sort of mission. That’s the way it was—the way it had been ever since the Second World War. Fewer than four and you ran the risk of coming up short; you only needed to lose one guy and the whole mission was in jeopardy. More than four and you lost the clean, clear line of command, and it also became exponentially more difficult to move covertly.
    The four-man formation was first perfected by the British SAS on their anticommunist ops in the tropical jungles of Malaya. The real advantage was that it was possible to subdivide into two smaller battle units of two-man cells. The two-man cell, or buddy system, was effectively the