Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot (16 page)

“Hold him down!” Naomi yelled.

I put the helicopter on autopilot and pressed my hands over his wounds. Immediately, the slippery white liquid engulfed my hands. This was Raiden’s life. Life, created by man, different from the red blood inside us.

But looking at Snake and Raiden, I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate the achievement. The only difference between the curses those two men bore was that Raiden was born normal. Snake came into the world a clone of Big Boss, already bound to the fate in his genes.

“He’s losing too much blood,” Naomi said. Her hands pressed against the white tide. Beads of nervous sweat formed on her forehead.

“Can you save him?” Snake asked.

“I don’t know. He needs a blood transfusion. No—an infusion of artificial blood.”

Raiden’s coughing fit continued, and the blood kept on pooling under him. If he had still been a normal human, he’d have been dead by now.

Then Raiden squeezed the words out from his throat, “Snake … Europe.”

His chin hadn’t moved, and it took a moment for us to realize he had spoken. His mouth overflowed with his own blood, and the white liquid bubbled with each breath. I couldn’t believe he had been able to speak at all.

“Go meet … Big Mama.”

With that, Raiden slipped into unconsciousness.

All we could do in the helicopter was press against his wounds.

As we gritted against the realization of our helplessness, I sent the helicopter to El Dorado at full speed.

ACT 3: THIRD SUN

LET ME TELL you a story about a flower.

The most beloved flower in America.

No one knows her real name. “The Boss” might be her most famous.

Back when the world was in flames, when Adolf Hitler led the Nazis against Britain and France as Japan bombed Hawaii half a world away, her talents blossomed.

Those who knew her well, and those who lavished her with honors, often gave her stars-of-Bethlehem as a token of their admiration. Flowers with pure white petals. Flowers with a meaning—virtuous.

Her talent was her ability to fight on someone else’s behalf.

I don’t know when people first started to call her The Boss. But from what I’ve gathered, in World War II, she created a new class of fighting unit—the special forces unit. Before The Boss, armies had long performed operations far behind the battlefront into enemy lines—cutting off supply routes, destroying weapon stockpiles, inciting resistance movements in enemy-held territories—but those kinds of covert actions hadn’t been conceptualized as an organized function of the military.

That was The Boss’s modest revolution in the history of war.

She was involved in the founding of many special forces units across the globe, from the British SAS—considered by some to be the world’s best—to America’s renowned Green Berets. The last would go beyond the scope of special forces as they had been known. She took a group of operators—nothing more than dogs of war—trained them in the art of espionage, and created a new class of agent.

Alongside Major Zero of the SAS, who sought the ideal next generation army, she put all of herself into the foundation of that unit—Force Operation X. Later, the unit became known as FOX, and its existence was revealed to US government leaders along with its new focus: to cultivate the world’s number one agent—to create a young soldier inheriting the traits of the “Mother of the Special Forces.”

The man chosen for this task was named Jack.

Whether that was his real name I can’t say for sure, but The Boss and Major Zero called him Jack.

For more than a decade, The Boss and Jack had shared fates. They fought in many dangerous missions and witnessed many wrongs. Their experiences had undoubtedly shaken their faith in God and humanity more than once. Jack had already lost the ability to father a child. Before he met The Boss, back in the days when we were still ignorant of the effects of radiation, he was involved in America’s hydrogen bomb tests. The cursed ash blanketed his body and denied him the chance to create a life for the next generation. Then, in the world’s battlefields and in hells unknown to the public, he learned the fragility of the human conscience. He saw how war could twist a man.

But Jack never wavered. He absorbed all of The Boss’s teachings and all of her knowledge. Maybe she had seen the latent ability within him. But he only survived that cruel training with his soul intact (I call it training, but most of it was on real battlefields in real wars) because of the example The Boss set for him—purity, righteousness, and a nobility that could stare into the abyss and feel no fear.

Her code name in battle: The Joy.

She gave herself to fight for others, to protect others. And in it she found her joy. Her soul stood pure white among the pools of blood, but in the end, she was buried among the graves of the nameless.

And Jack, her cherished apprentice, was the one who stole her life.

Upon Major Zero’s orders, he undertook an official FOX operation called Virtuous Mission. Its goal was the rescue of a defecting Soviet scientist. But Jack failed after the sudden betrayal of one of the FOX specialists—The Boss herself. She revealed to Jack her defection to the Soviets and escaped with the researcher and a Soviet colonel.

Events turned even worse when a Davy Crockett nuke destroyed a research facility near the operation, and US-Soviet relations, already jeopardized by the Cuban Missile Crisis, were only moments away from disaster. Unless America could prove it wasn’t behind the explosion, the two superpowers would soon enter a war capable of global destruction.

Then the president gave FOX one chance to clear their names of the failed mission—and of the defection of their founder.

To prove America’s innocence, they were to assassinate The Boss.

Jack—under the code name Naked Snake—again infiltrated Soviet territory. The USSR’s first secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, cooperated with the mission and provided FOX’s communication system. With the aid of KGB comm satellites, Jack returned to the site of the failed mission to kill the woman who had been his life.

In a certain sense, to kill The Boss was to kill himself. The two had been inseperable. When the government ordered Jack to kill her by his own hand, they might as well have ordered him to cut a pound of flesh from his side and offer it on a platter.

And if you’re wondering why Khrushchev and the KGB would want to help America, even covertly, it was due to a complex power struggle within the Soviet ranks.

Khrushchev had been building a relationship of trust with JFK, the previous American president. When the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, the two leaders came to a chilling realization—global destruction was at hand. Both sides had already amassed great numbers of nuclear weapons out of concern for their own safety.

More than just fine words, compromise and détente were a singular approach necessary to avoid the annihilation of the world. Their attainment would be difficult, but this wasn’t a matter of idealism, rather of realism—and survival.

Yet in both America and Soviet Russia, many equated the concepts with weakness. Such people have existed in every age—vulgar voices shouting,
Strike them down before they come for us!

This was a new era, however, one in which war between the two countries would imperil not only their own futures, but the future of the entire planet.

The man who engineered The Boss’s defection, Colonel Yevgeny Borisovitch Volgin of the GRU, firmly fell into the warmongering camp. A hawk, the colonel believed Khrushchev weak and that too much compromise with America meant danger.

Volgin wanted a way to deliver Soviet missiles across the divides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to American soil—one that didn’t rely on giant missile silo complexes dug into the earth. He sought a mobile weapon that could be moved freely through Soviet territory, striking swiftly and decisively while hidden from enemy satellites. He found it in the Shagohod.

Volgin had now acquired the aid of both Dr. Sokolov, the developer of the Metal Gear’s precursor, and The Joy, the legendary soldier known to the Soviets as Voyevoda (Warlord). In a remote fortress, he rushed completion of the Shagohod. But he did so without the funds of the Soviet army. Rather, Volgin paid for it with his own wealth.

Snake infiltrated the fortress to rescue Dr. Sokolov and terminate The Boss, but once there, he found himself in the middle of an unconventional battle for control over those finances. Volgin’s funds had once belonged to his father. To state it more accurately, his father had stolen them. This reserve was known to few as the Philosophers’ Legacy, an unimaginably large sum of money belonging to certain members of the global intelligence community.

Before the Great War, twelve of the most powerful figures in America, Russia, and China—collectively known as the Wisemen’s Committee—founded an organization called the Philosophers. The men pooled their money together to fund the reconstruction efforts that would be needed after the inevitable outbreak of world war. The likely core of this effort was an underground mail network, known by its symbol of three postal horns, created to compete with the House of Habsburg’s commissioned House of Thurn and Taxis, which itself served as the basis for modern-day postal service systems. Volgin’s father was in charge of money laundering for the Philosophers, and upon his death, he left the means to access those funds to his son.

In short, Volgin drew the clandestine attention of many powerful players.

With the Philosophers’ Legacy, he constructed a fortress in remote Groznyj Grad, where he stationed his own army and began development of the Shagohod. In a way, Groznyj Grad was its own empire located within Soviet borders, and Volgin was its ruler.

His actions weren’t entirely unprecedented. A commander named Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who had pushed for the industrialization of the military and was instrumental in the development of several advanced ideas on military strategy, once raised his own army in Siberia. Stalin feared his growing power and had him executed. Back then, a surprising number of officers throughout Soviet Russia had their own private armies.

After Khrushchev’s failed agricultural policies brought hardship to rural areas, the hawks ascended to prominence in the Soviet leadership. Meanwhile, Volgin scooped up farmers from troubled soil across the territory and brought them into his army—paid for by the Philosophers’ Legacy.

EVA, the woman sent by Khrushchev to assist Naked Snake, had been tasked by an unknown entity to obtain the stolen fortune. And when Volgin captured Naked Snake, he subjected his prisoner to cruel torture and interrogation, certain the man had been sent by American strategists to reclaim the Legacy.

In the end, Naked Snake carried out his mission—the rescue and the assassination. He destroyed Shagohod and defeated Volgin. He killed The Boss.

By his own hand.

With hands The Boss herself had forged. With techniques she had taught him. With a soul she had imparted to him.

After the long and brutal battle, she collapsed into a bed of stars-of-Bethlehem beside a lake. And when Naked Snake fired the killing shot, something inside him died. And something else was born.

When EVA and Naked Snake parted, she told him about The Boss’s final joy, her desolate desire—that if she had to die for her duty, let her life be ended by her beloved disciple.

Of course, that hadn’t been The Boss’s plan from the start. Her death had been part of a top secret op—so secret that even its instrumental player, Naked Snake, was unaware of it—to secure the Philosopher’s Legacy.

When she captured Dr. Sokolov and defected in front of her own countryman, The Boss’s deception of Volgin was absolute, and she cemented the ruse with the gift of two American-developed small-scale nuclear warheads. But when Volgin fired one upon Soviet soil, the scenario changed.

The Boss couldn’t abandon her mission—and her cover as a defected agent—without leaving the Legacy in foreign hands. But in order for America to prove its innocence in the bombing, she had to be killed. And if America couldn’t prove its innocence, the world would be consumed by a nuclear blaze.

Therefore, she could never be allowed to return home. Neither could she take her own life.

But even with all hopes dashed, The Boss never gave up. She accepted the responsibility that came with her gifts—to love someone, to fight for someone.

She loved the world, this world in which we live. This world in which a few billion small and foolish souls live in a mixture of misery and despair. Those were the makings of the world she held dear. She possessed too much love for too great a thing; but she was so great a woman, with strength enough to bear that burden to the end.

But nobody can carry the weight of the world by herself.

As the events played out, her last joy was a prospect so sorrowful it couldn’t even be called a wish—for death to come by the hand of her own disciple.

And on the far-off Russian lakeside blanketed with stars-of-Bethlehem, Naked Snake made her wish come true.

Upon his return to America, he was summoned to the White House. There he met the praise of his assisting team—Major Zero, weapons and technology coordinator Mr. Sigint, and medical coordinator Para-Medic. President Johnson personally bestowed him with the title of Big Boss.

“You have surpassed The Boss,” stated the president.

Naked Snake stared at him, as though thinking,
What the hell do you know about her?

But he wasn’t angry. He had nothing left in him to feel anger. He had killed his own mentor; she was killed by her own disciple. Sure, there was a difference between killing and being killed, but for two souls bound together so tightly as to be seamless, either was nothing more than suicide.

Naked Snake lost a part of himself, and in its place remained only a void.