Genocidal Organ Read Online Free PDF Page A

feeling it too. We lay down in a thicket, hidden from view, and our nanocoating sprang into action, blending us in with the colors of the vegetation that swirled around us. A little piece of magic that came in ever so handy when planning an infiltration or ambush.
    On this occasion, though, it looked like we had become a little too reliant on it.
    It turned out there was a pickup truck parked just the other side of the thicket in which we were hiding. Of course, our muscles all sprang into a state of high alert. Breathing silently, we became one with the vegetation around us and watched as three men clambered out of the car brandishing AK rifles. It goes without saying that they were completely oblivious to our presence. They lit a bonfire.
    They didn’t seem to notice or care about the ammo in their guns. They threw their guns down right beside them, beside the fire, even though the magazines were fully loaded.
    “Amateurs,” mouthed Williams. I shrugged. In this land, the qualification for being a soldier was the ability to plunder and terrorize a defenseless village when the opportunity presented itself. Training didn’t really come into it.
    Having said that, we couldn’t exactly take off while they remained here, amateurs or not. And we had no time to spare if we were to make our target before dawn. So we had no ethical compunction about deciding to kill these unfortunate patrol troops who bore us no specific ill will, who hadn’t tried to harm us, and who were just trying to snatch a moment of warm respite.
    The men remained completely unaware of our presence as we silently flanked them. They would also have been completely unaware of the brief flash of steel before their windpipes were slit open with surgical precision. They wouldn’t have known what happened, who killed them, or why. Even as their lifeblood poured from their throats, their eyes wouldn’t have even caught a glimpse of us. They just flickered orange, reflecting the licking flames from the bonfire in front of them. And so it came to pass that where there had been four men, there were now four corpses.
    We frisked the bodies quickly. No sign of any dog tags or other ID. Then I used my knife to open up my guy’s sleeve, starting at his already blood-soaked shoulder.
    As I expected, there was the slightest of bumps at a point among the muscles of his back. Completely undetectable to the naked eye unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, a bulge about the size of the fingernail on your pinkie.
    I used my knife to shave off the chunk of flesh. Inside it, sure enough, was a small disc.
    His ID tag.
    Williams looked over at me, eyebrows raised. The usual, huh? he was asking. As the ranking officer, it was my call.
    We were four white men standing there—only whites were chosen for this mission, for obvious reason. The soldiers we had just killed were also white. As were all those in this country who were massacring their fellow countrymen for believing in a different version of a god.
    My eyes met Alex’s and Leland’s. They shrugged their shoulders: you first, sir. There was nothing for it. I took the protective gel out of my backpack and used it to coat the blood-soaked dog tag I had extracted from the flesh of the dead man’s shoulder, placed the tag in the palm of my hand, and gulped it down like an aspirin.
    4
    The truck was mounted with a .50 caliber gun, set up so that it could fire while moving. An ordinary Toyota pickup turned into a machine of war by virtue of a simple machine gun grafted onto it. The air force of this country was taken out of action shortly into the civil war, but they had somehow managed to preserve most of their radar and associated antiaircraft batteries. It seemed almost comically imbalanced that a country that managed to fight on with the vestiges of a modern air force was reduced to fielding such amateur DIY efforts in lieu of proper armored vehicles.
    And so it came to pass that we were now using an enemy