Genocide of One: A Thriller by Kazuaki Takano Read Free Book Online Page B

that could be a sign you’re infected.”
    “I’d rather not have to check out anybody’s balls,” Meyers said, and everyone laughed.
    Mick, who’d been silent until now, spoke up in his halting English. “Why doesn’t that
     disease…spread all over the world? Like HIV?”
    “That’s a good question, Mick,” Meyers said. “The virus’s incubation period is too
     short. Once infected, you start showing symptoms in about seven days. Which means
     most patients die before they’re able to infect others.”
    “I see.”
    “So you understand how frightening Ebola is now?”
    The four men nodded. Though they didn’t verbalize it, all of them had one question
     that they answered for themselves. If one of the team got infected during the operation,
     what was the protocol? There wouldn’t be a rescue helicopter. They’d have to give
     him a needle and some morphine and leave him behind in the jungle. This was the fate
     of a mercenary in battle. In exchange for the good pay, they were expendable.
    “I’d like to turn to the main topic today: the situation in the place you’ll infiltrate,
     the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” Singleton called up the next slide. The men
     were unprepared for the gruesome scene on the screen, a muddy road littered with bodies.
     Young people, old people, men, women. Some of them had their hands tied behind their
     backs, others were headless torsos.
    “Genocide,” Singleton intoned. “Right now the Congo is experiencing a large-scale
     conflict, one that’s been dubbed the Great War in Africa. It’s responsible for the
     highest number of dead since the Second World War—four million. Cease-fires have been
     broken over and over, and there’s no end in sight.”
    As if reading the doubt in the men’s expressions, Singleton went on. “This is really
     happening, believe me. It’s just that the newspapers and TV aren’t reporting it. Discrimination
     on the part of the media, you could say. The mass media in industrialized countries
     doesn’t care how many Africans die. The genocide that occurs all the time there gets
     less coverage than when seven gorillas are killed. Of course Africans aren’t an endangered
     species.” Singleton smiled coldly.
    “The root cause of the problems in the Congo can be traced back to colonial times.
     When Belgium controlled the country they pitted the two main tribes—the Tutsi and
     the Hutu, which up until then had gotten along peacefully—against each other. They
     arbitrarily gave preferential treatment to the Tutsi, which provoked resentment on
     the part of the Hutu. This tribal hatred festered until it broke out in genocide in
     Rwanda.”
    Yeager knew all about this conflict. The Hutu president’s plane was shot down, and
     this caused the Hutu to start slaughtering the Tutsi. The state radio fanned the flames
     of the massacre, and thousands of ordinary citizens took up hatchets and cudgels and
     began murdering their neighbors. They aimed their attack at women and children in
     order to annihilate the Tutsi for all time. Murderous bands quickly sprang up, fueled
     not just by tribal hatred but also by the fear that if you didn’t participate in the
     killing you’d be killed yourself, even if you were Hutu, and by the false rumor that
     anyone murdering a Tutsi would get his farmland. The slaughter became fierce, with
     victims paying their attackers to shoot them in the head instead of cutting them up
     with dull knives and leaving them to bleed to death. In the chaos many Hutu were mistaken
     for Tutsi and butchered.
    A hundred days after the genocide began, a Tutsi-led military force was organized
     outside the country. They counterattacked, and finally the situation calmed down.
     But not before 10 percent of the population had been killed—some eight hundred thousand
     people.
    “Rwanda became a Tutsi-controlled government, and peace returned, but so did historical
     revisionism, the claim that the genocide