Chapter Thirty-Four: He Would Know Their Names
"Klaymore!" Snake yelled, raising his SOCOM and aiming for the Russian's forehead. Quickly, Klaymore had lifted the trigger in his right hand and was shaking it playfully.
"Ah, ah, ah," he said, and began to step through the narrow hall as the elevator doors closed behind him. He walked, his feet always stepping directly in front of each other, as if he was walking a balance beam, and his eyes struck the air like sharp knives, his pupils small and defined. "You don't want to end up like Peg-Leg Peter."
Snake stopped. "Stillman," he said quietly, and the day returned in a terrible vividness. The cool, brisk air breaking around the struts and twisting trough the structure of the Big Shell like a torrent of raging water just let loose from the shattered remnants of a dam. Everything returned to him.and to Jack.
'I knew he had the real thing up his sleeve,' Snake remembered him saying. And he knew it was his fault.not Stillman's or Fatman's or Jack's, but his. He had sprayed the last charge of C4 and the 'real thing' had been armed. He'd been hiding there, next to that charge, as Shell 2 felt the repercussions of his mistake. 'Damn,' he thought to himself.
He'd looked the man in the eyes and then he'd let him die. 'Damn!' he'd yelled aloud. To Jack he seemed unaffected, but that was never true. Snake was human; everything affected him.just like it affected others. But, he didn't keep his feelings inside either.even before he committed his actions he dismissed them. It was a method he used.one to keep all of his feelings away from him, as well as from others. And even though Stillman was far from the most emotional trauma he'd endured, it was the last he could handle. On that day, when that happened, he sat against a wall and for the first time in a long time he cried.
His elbows rested uneasily on his knees and his arms crossed making a table on which he laid his forehead. There was no more tolerance left in him.the pain had built so great, and he'd forgotten it so long that when Peter died it all came rushing back; every past experience. And with it came the tears, each one reminding him.and for that he cried a long time.
"Poor fool," Klaymore interjected, "faking injury to protect himself from the 'public outcry.' What rubbish!" Klaymore paused and stepped calmly into the computer room, his foot missing the sensors entirely. "They.never did find the man responsible.did they?" Snake looked at Klaymore in horror.
"You," Snake muttered, only loud enough for Jack and Otacon to hear. Klaymore, in the meantime, was stepping skillfully through the maze of sensors, his eyes shooting from conductor panel to conductor panel. His strides were perfect and never jerky. Even when he was required to step a great distance he did it elegantly.it was like hopscotch without the jumping. An art.
Then he stopped, his left leg bent up at his side, and his right straight and firmly placed in a gap. "Poor old Peg-Leg."
"It was you!" Snake exclaimed, forcing his SOCOM on him from meters away. "You blew the church!" Klaymore looked back, his eyes the only things moving, and then a smile broke across his face and he took another step with the trigger held up by his head. His eyes squeezed into a thin crease of white and black, the pupils elongating with the pressure from above and below, and Snake was waiting reluctantly to pull the trigger of his SOCOM.
"No matter your anger, Solid Snake, you must bare in mind the fact that you and a thousand tons of metal and concrete lay on this trigger, and in my hand," Klaymore said. "And don't forget that the rest of Manhattan also has a consideration toward future renovation. Charges of C4 have been inserted throughout Manhattan, marking the key spots of demolition. With the touch of another trigger this island could be swept into the tide and lost at the foot of the ocean. No lives would be lost.other than ours, of course." There was a sick grin on Klaymore's face, one that inspired a sense of anger and hate in Snake that was on the brink of boiling over. His finger was settled uneasily on the shiny trigger of his SOCOM, and the thought of pulling it was not far out of mind.
"Why?" Jack asked, cutting through the silence and adding an unwelcome sense of tension to the situation. "Why would you attack a church?" Jack's face had changed over his time in the military and Philanthropy. It had hardened, and he was no longer the well-kempt model that he once posed a position as. Now, there was a roughness to him, one that reminded Snake of himself.
"Russia has been in line for peace for far too long," Klaymore stated. "With my birth came my mother's death, and then I came into this place.this world.and I was left to fend for myself. My father had died sometime after the Cold War, an agent assigned to countering the American operation titled A: Objective, and my much older brother disappeared when I was not even four."
"I was adopted into a military family, my father being a prominent officer in the Russian army. When I was only 15 I was sent to an academy for training to become a Spetsnaz. I was taught many things - Intel analysis, hand-to-hand combat, firearm tactics, and bomb identification and removal. That was what I was later interested in. In a rather unfortunate incident, I found myself surrounded by sensors and wires, all designed to rip apart three blocks of my hometown. In a failed attempt at defusing the explosives, I found myself in flames.burning."
Snake looked at Jack for a moment and then returned to Klaymore who seemed dazed and without recollection of his audience.
"I got away with fewer injuries than expected.death being the expected outcome." Klaymore's legs began to move again, stepping casually through the maze of sensors his face slightly pale and his eyes not moving from a spot on the far wall where they lay fixed. "Two years in a hospital, hooked up to cords and tubes.but I came out of everything with just a few bruises and burns.
"After I was released I left the Spetsnaz along with Russia and met up with an American man in Italy. He had told me he was a reporter, but that wasn't true. He spoke with something of a Russian accent.hardly, but it was there. I suspect he was a citizen there for some time and grew a custom to the tongue." Klaymore stopped again and pointed to the ceiling of the room where a projector sat on a lowered platform. Snake's eyes followed the Russian's gesture and saw a faint, green glow. Another charge of SEMTEX.and when he looked at the floor below it he saw a bump in the carpet and a change in the design throughout the fabric: another sensor. Klaymore grinned and stepped to the right before walking straight again and continuing.
"This American man," he started up again, "I.don't remember his name. He carried two pistols, an obvious sign that he was no reporter, but I don't think he expected me to believe his lie anyway. When our meeting had ended, he gave me a gift: a thick.blue.pen." Klaymore had snuck his hand into the pocket of his jacket and had pulled the pen from its depths, brandishing it before Snake. "I thought it was worthless, but when I inspected it closer I could see small pin-holes where the tiniest screws had been screwed." Snake was rummaging through his sneaking suit pockets as Klaymore spoke. "It took me weeks to pick every last one of them out, and inside I found the usual innards of a pen: an ink tube, a spring, but then I also saw another thing.a small, gray piece of an electrical-something-or-other. It was smaller than my thumbnail, but when I looked at it closer I could tell exactly what it was," Klaymore paused as Snake pulled three shiny blue pens from a pocket in his suit and held them up in bewilderment, "a bug."
Klaymore stopped walking again, having passed Snake now, and turned to face the three characters at the computer desk. "I see you have eliminated three of FACtion all ready," he said, and Snake thought back. He remembered Formal handing two of them over - belonging to him and Frost - on the rooftop of the coffee house, and then he remembered Tauran throwing the third at his feet. Snake's eyes slowly abandoned the pens and began focusing again on Klaymore, whose frightful grin remained broad and thin.
"Each and ever man in FACtion owns a pen just like it.and I wonder now, who that man really is. You see, I saw the American man here today. He was in the lobby no more than an hour ago.firing off his shotgun and his cheap UMP. He has been watching me for more than four years.watching all of FACtion.and now he's watching you." Klaymore flipped his pen into Snake's arms and he quickly put the pens away. "There, go start a collection."
Klaymore's eyes flashed just as there was another ring from the elevator, the doors peeling open, revealing another character whose back was turned to them. Fro the angle, Snake could see only his shoulder and his left arm, and when the figure turned he could see Klaymore raise the trigger and grin. "You," he muttered, and then Snake saw the figure's right arm go up, and he saw a familiar gun gripping tightly in his hand, magazines taped to its sides.
There was an explosion from the end of the gun, and a scream of pain as Klaymore's hand burst apart, the trigger toppling onto a desk and blood spilling over the floor. Klaymore keeled over, the crucifix in his hand also tipping out of his grasp and dropping to the floor, falling luckily between the sensors. Snake's eyes shot back and forth as Otacon shifted to stand, but at the same time that the figure's arm went to it's side and Klaymore put a firm grip on his ravaged arm, there was the faint whirling of rotors in the distance and the Tiger came quickly into view.
They all turned - all but the figure in the elevator who stayed hidden - and waited to get a better glimpse of the pilot. But, before anything in that moment became clear, the American yelled desperately over the Codec: "Get off that floor!" Then, a blazing light was dispersed from a 30-mm in the nose turret, and Snake, Jack, and Otacon tipped to the left, the American yelling wildly in their ears.
"One foot left! Two forward! Three left!" The commands went on as the windows were blasted apart and as Klaymore was catapulted into a pile of computer hardware, his right hip taking the form of a hill of crimson slop and torn flesh and broken bone on the carpet floor. The cannon moved to the right and fired off again, and again, breaking through the windows that made of the left wall of the room, each shot aimed at the three, but each one missing by no more than a foot.
And then, when they had finally stumbled across the room, out of the line of sensors and SEMTEX charges, Snake looked up and saw the trench coat- fitted figure step back into the elevator, his back facing the room and his arms at his sides. Raising his right arm, he saluted the wall of the elevator - meaning to salute Snake - and the doors closed, the number "13" above the elevator highlighted.
Snake looked back at Klaymore who was still struggling to move, his arms pushing around in the pile of equipment, and then back at the elevator, his heart pumping and the Tiger still rattling off rounds from the cannon. "Take the stairs!" Jack yelled through the chaos, and Snake looked to his left seeing the stairwell and quickly darted up them, his legs pumping and his feet landing on every other step.
'It's him,' Snake thought, his SOCOM gripped as tightly as ever. 'Fourth floor,' he told himself as he stepped onto the fourth floor landing and then swiveled around to continue up the stairwell again. Otacon and Jack were not far behind, but as time passed, they went slower. Each floor they passed, they heard the shattering glass walls as the Tiger continued to plow through the building with shot after shot. 'Fifth floor.come on.come on, come on! Sixth floor.Seventh.he's on the thirteenth, Snake! Hurry up! He's on the thirteenth!' He was not slowing, that he realized. Actually, he was running faster as he got higher, his heart only beating with greater intensity as he did.
'Eighth.Ninth.Tenth.Eleventh.Twelfth! One more, Snake! Just one more! He's there.and so is Ocelot.' He didn't realize he had thought it, but he had. He didn't really know where Ocelot was, or at least he didn't think he knew, but then he realized something else. 'Thirteen!'
Then, just as he stopped on the landing, he saw the trail of the third Romantic's trench coat whip through the hall and disappear into a room on the left. Snake's mind still racing, and the truth sitting on his fingertips; he knew that he was almost there. The truth of the man's identity was essential to the web strung out in front of him.and the realization that he almost knew the answer was clue enough that he was reaching the truth in all of the lies. He was reaching the end.
And then, he came to the door the man had disappeared through, and he turned into swiftly into the room. Just then, his SOCOM in the air, the door shut behind him and a magnetic lock set in place. Snake stopped, his heart still racing, but sound ceasing in the dark room. Everything was black, but it was the twirling of a revolver, the click of two Desert Eagles, and the invisible weight on his shoulder that alerted him to the presence of those in the room.
There were three there with him.and soon he would know their names.
AUTHOR'S NOTE Only two chapters left! I have had a lot of trouble finishing this story. First, much of the MGS enthusiasm has been depleted over time, fans instead paying respects to star wars and several other new phenomenons. Second, because this is no doubt far more confusing than the Compilation. It's hard to portray the depth of the Patriot network without boring the reader or telling too much, but I've done my best to avoid both. The final chapter is still in progress, and I've been working on it for nearly a month. No, that doesn't mean it's REALLY long, just that I'm really working to make the dialogue explain what needs to be explained without overdoing it, and to enhance the excitement and give you a fabulous ending scene. Thank you so much for supporting me, everyone, and I will do my best to give you the best finale I can.
- espresso
"Klaymore!" Snake yelled, raising his SOCOM and aiming for the Russian's forehead. Quickly, Klaymore had lifted the trigger in his right hand and was shaking it playfully.
"Ah, ah, ah," he said, and began to step through the narrow hall as the elevator doors closed behind him. He walked, his feet always stepping directly in front of each other, as if he was walking a balance beam, and his eyes struck the air like sharp knives, his pupils small and defined. "You don't want to end up like Peg-Leg Peter."
Snake stopped. "Stillman," he said quietly, and the day returned in a terrible vividness. The cool, brisk air breaking around the struts and twisting trough the structure of the Big Shell like a torrent of raging water just let loose from the shattered remnants of a dam. Everything returned to him.and to Jack.
'I knew he had the real thing up his sleeve,' Snake remembered him saying. And he knew it was his fault.not Stillman's or Fatman's or Jack's, but his. He had sprayed the last charge of C4 and the 'real thing' had been armed. He'd been hiding there, next to that charge, as Shell 2 felt the repercussions of his mistake. 'Damn,' he thought to himself.
He'd looked the man in the eyes and then he'd let him die. 'Damn!' he'd yelled aloud. To Jack he seemed unaffected, but that was never true. Snake was human; everything affected him.just like it affected others. But, he didn't keep his feelings inside either.even before he committed his actions he dismissed them. It was a method he used.one to keep all of his feelings away from him, as well as from others. And even though Stillman was far from the most emotional trauma he'd endured, it was the last he could handle. On that day, when that happened, he sat against a wall and for the first time in a long time he cried.
His elbows rested uneasily on his knees and his arms crossed making a table on which he laid his forehead. There was no more tolerance left in him.the pain had built so great, and he'd forgotten it so long that when Peter died it all came rushing back; every past experience. And with it came the tears, each one reminding him.and for that he cried a long time.
"Poor fool," Klaymore interjected, "faking injury to protect himself from the 'public outcry.' What rubbish!" Klaymore paused and stepped calmly into the computer room, his foot missing the sensors entirely. "They.never did find the man responsible.did they?" Snake looked at Klaymore in horror.
"You," Snake muttered, only loud enough for Jack and Otacon to hear. Klaymore, in the meantime, was stepping skillfully through the maze of sensors, his eyes shooting from conductor panel to conductor panel. His strides were perfect and never jerky. Even when he was required to step a great distance he did it elegantly.it was like hopscotch without the jumping. An art.
Then he stopped, his left leg bent up at his side, and his right straight and firmly placed in a gap. "Poor old Peg-Leg."
"It was you!" Snake exclaimed, forcing his SOCOM on him from meters away. "You blew the church!" Klaymore looked back, his eyes the only things moving, and then a smile broke across his face and he took another step with the trigger held up by his head. His eyes squeezed into a thin crease of white and black, the pupils elongating with the pressure from above and below, and Snake was waiting reluctantly to pull the trigger of his SOCOM.
"No matter your anger, Solid Snake, you must bare in mind the fact that you and a thousand tons of metal and concrete lay on this trigger, and in my hand," Klaymore said. "And don't forget that the rest of Manhattan also has a consideration toward future renovation. Charges of C4 have been inserted throughout Manhattan, marking the key spots of demolition. With the touch of another trigger this island could be swept into the tide and lost at the foot of the ocean. No lives would be lost.other than ours, of course." There was a sick grin on Klaymore's face, one that inspired a sense of anger and hate in Snake that was on the brink of boiling over. His finger was settled uneasily on the shiny trigger of his SOCOM, and the thought of pulling it was not far out of mind.
"Why?" Jack asked, cutting through the silence and adding an unwelcome sense of tension to the situation. "Why would you attack a church?" Jack's face had changed over his time in the military and Philanthropy. It had hardened, and he was no longer the well-kempt model that he once posed a position as. Now, there was a roughness to him, one that reminded Snake of himself.
"Russia has been in line for peace for far too long," Klaymore stated. "With my birth came my mother's death, and then I came into this place.this world.and I was left to fend for myself. My father had died sometime after the Cold War, an agent assigned to countering the American operation titled A: Objective, and my much older brother disappeared when I was not even four."
"I was adopted into a military family, my father being a prominent officer in the Russian army. When I was only 15 I was sent to an academy for training to become a Spetsnaz. I was taught many things - Intel analysis, hand-to-hand combat, firearm tactics, and bomb identification and removal. That was what I was later interested in. In a rather unfortunate incident, I found myself surrounded by sensors and wires, all designed to rip apart three blocks of my hometown. In a failed attempt at defusing the explosives, I found myself in flames.burning."
Snake looked at Jack for a moment and then returned to Klaymore who seemed dazed and without recollection of his audience.
"I got away with fewer injuries than expected.death being the expected outcome." Klaymore's legs began to move again, stepping casually through the maze of sensors his face slightly pale and his eyes not moving from a spot on the far wall where they lay fixed. "Two years in a hospital, hooked up to cords and tubes.but I came out of everything with just a few bruises and burns.
"After I was released I left the Spetsnaz along with Russia and met up with an American man in Italy. He had told me he was a reporter, but that wasn't true. He spoke with something of a Russian accent.hardly, but it was there. I suspect he was a citizen there for some time and grew a custom to the tongue." Klaymore stopped again and pointed to the ceiling of the room where a projector sat on a lowered platform. Snake's eyes followed the Russian's gesture and saw a faint, green glow. Another charge of SEMTEX.and when he looked at the floor below it he saw a bump in the carpet and a change in the design throughout the fabric: another sensor. Klaymore grinned and stepped to the right before walking straight again and continuing.
"This American man," he started up again, "I.don't remember his name. He carried two pistols, an obvious sign that he was no reporter, but I don't think he expected me to believe his lie anyway. When our meeting had ended, he gave me a gift: a thick.blue.pen." Klaymore had snuck his hand into the pocket of his jacket and had pulled the pen from its depths, brandishing it before Snake. "I thought it was worthless, but when I inspected it closer I could see small pin-holes where the tiniest screws had been screwed." Snake was rummaging through his sneaking suit pockets as Klaymore spoke. "It took me weeks to pick every last one of them out, and inside I found the usual innards of a pen: an ink tube, a spring, but then I also saw another thing.a small, gray piece of an electrical-something-or-other. It was smaller than my thumbnail, but when I looked at it closer I could tell exactly what it was," Klaymore paused as Snake pulled three shiny blue pens from a pocket in his suit and held them up in bewilderment, "a bug."
Klaymore stopped walking again, having passed Snake now, and turned to face the three characters at the computer desk. "I see you have eliminated three of FACtion all ready," he said, and Snake thought back. He remembered Formal handing two of them over - belonging to him and Frost - on the rooftop of the coffee house, and then he remembered Tauran throwing the third at his feet. Snake's eyes slowly abandoned the pens and began focusing again on Klaymore, whose frightful grin remained broad and thin.
"Each and ever man in FACtion owns a pen just like it.and I wonder now, who that man really is. You see, I saw the American man here today. He was in the lobby no more than an hour ago.firing off his shotgun and his cheap UMP. He has been watching me for more than four years.watching all of FACtion.and now he's watching you." Klaymore flipped his pen into Snake's arms and he quickly put the pens away. "There, go start a collection."
Klaymore's eyes flashed just as there was another ring from the elevator, the doors peeling open, revealing another character whose back was turned to them. Fro the angle, Snake could see only his shoulder and his left arm, and when the figure turned he could see Klaymore raise the trigger and grin. "You," he muttered, and then Snake saw the figure's right arm go up, and he saw a familiar gun gripping tightly in his hand, magazines taped to its sides.
There was an explosion from the end of the gun, and a scream of pain as Klaymore's hand burst apart, the trigger toppling onto a desk and blood spilling over the floor. Klaymore keeled over, the crucifix in his hand also tipping out of his grasp and dropping to the floor, falling luckily between the sensors. Snake's eyes shot back and forth as Otacon shifted to stand, but at the same time that the figure's arm went to it's side and Klaymore put a firm grip on his ravaged arm, there was the faint whirling of rotors in the distance and the Tiger came quickly into view.
They all turned - all but the figure in the elevator who stayed hidden - and waited to get a better glimpse of the pilot. But, before anything in that moment became clear, the American yelled desperately over the Codec: "Get off that floor!" Then, a blazing light was dispersed from a 30-mm in the nose turret, and Snake, Jack, and Otacon tipped to the left, the American yelling wildly in their ears.
"One foot left! Two forward! Three left!" The commands went on as the windows were blasted apart and as Klaymore was catapulted into a pile of computer hardware, his right hip taking the form of a hill of crimson slop and torn flesh and broken bone on the carpet floor. The cannon moved to the right and fired off again, and again, breaking through the windows that made of the left wall of the room, each shot aimed at the three, but each one missing by no more than a foot.
And then, when they had finally stumbled across the room, out of the line of sensors and SEMTEX charges, Snake looked up and saw the trench coat- fitted figure step back into the elevator, his back facing the room and his arms at his sides. Raising his right arm, he saluted the wall of the elevator - meaning to salute Snake - and the doors closed, the number "13" above the elevator highlighted.
Snake looked back at Klaymore who was still struggling to move, his arms pushing around in the pile of equipment, and then back at the elevator, his heart pumping and the Tiger still rattling off rounds from the cannon. "Take the stairs!" Jack yelled through the chaos, and Snake looked to his left seeing the stairwell and quickly darted up them, his legs pumping and his feet landing on every other step.
'It's him,' Snake thought, his SOCOM gripped as tightly as ever. 'Fourth floor,' he told himself as he stepped onto the fourth floor landing and then swiveled around to continue up the stairwell again. Otacon and Jack were not far behind, but as time passed, they went slower. Each floor they passed, they heard the shattering glass walls as the Tiger continued to plow through the building with shot after shot. 'Fifth floor.come on.come on, come on! Sixth floor.Seventh.he's on the thirteenth, Snake! Hurry up! He's on the thirteenth!' He was not slowing, that he realized. Actually, he was running faster as he got higher, his heart only beating with greater intensity as he did.
'Eighth.Ninth.Tenth.Eleventh.Twelfth! One more, Snake! Just one more! He's there.and so is Ocelot.' He didn't realize he had thought it, but he had. He didn't really know where Ocelot was, or at least he didn't think he knew, but then he realized something else. 'Thirteen!'
Then, just as he stopped on the landing, he saw the trail of the third Romantic's trench coat whip through the hall and disappear into a room on the left. Snake's mind still racing, and the truth sitting on his fingertips; he knew that he was almost there. The truth of the man's identity was essential to the web strung out in front of him.and the realization that he almost knew the answer was clue enough that he was reaching the truth in all of the lies. He was reaching the end.
And then, he came to the door the man had disappeared through, and he turned into swiftly into the room. Just then, his SOCOM in the air, the door shut behind him and a magnetic lock set in place. Snake stopped, his heart still racing, but sound ceasing in the dark room. Everything was black, but it was the twirling of a revolver, the click of two Desert Eagles, and the invisible weight on his shoulder that alerted him to the presence of those in the room.
There were three there with him.and soon he would know their names.
AUTHOR'S NOTE Only two chapters left! I have had a lot of trouble finishing this story. First, much of the MGS enthusiasm has been depleted over time, fans instead paying respects to star wars and several other new phenomenons. Second, because this is no doubt far more confusing than the Compilation. It's hard to portray the depth of the Patriot network without boring the reader or telling too much, but I've done my best to avoid both. The final chapter is still in progress, and I've been working on it for nearly a month. No, that doesn't mean it's REALLY long, just that I'm really working to make the dialogue explain what needs to be explained without overdoing it, and to enhance the excitement and give you a fabulous ending scene. Thank you so much for supporting me, everyone, and I will do my best to give you the best finale I can.
- espresso