Master Class.

March of 1990.

Kenya.

"Guys like this are trained to give misinformation…"

Larry was not looking when he pulled the trigger, and he barely noticed as the bound man collapsed. He was defeated, and now, destroyed.

"… half-truths…"

He fired again, into the chest of the next in line, who had been a corpse before the lesson began. His body jumped and grew still.

"…to stop death from coming…"

Larry paused at the third, who had led the platoon, and pressed the hot tip of his gun to an already bloodied forehead. His comrades were defeated, but this man looked defiant. He held himself there, upright, while the metal singed his skin. Larry fired, and the force of the bullet threw the defiant man down, and took the fight out of him.

"…to wait for rescue…"

He walked down the line, to the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth, and took the fight out of them as well, until only the dead or dying remained.

It was at the eighth, the spy, that Larry finally looked back at me. He toyed with his handgun, now down to two bullets, maybe one, if I had counted wrong, and let out a casual sigh that was out of place in this hellish setting.

"We show up with a mission to complete, and sometimes we have to forget about diplomacy and all that bureaucratic bullshit, and just get it done. Guys like this are here to stop us, to make us wait, to sit on their asses in handcuffs while our targets move further and further away, while our brothers and sisters are dying."

"You disarmed them," I argued, feebly, because there was little left to say in defense of the dead bodies left in his wake. If I had spoken sooner, they might have lived.

Larry nodded thoughtfully, handing his gun to me, and motioning to the spy. "I did. He helped. Our little friend here gave us their location, told us their weaknesses. He drew me a damn map! Look at him. Look how smug he is, sitting there while his friends die around him."

I was looking at the spy, and I saw no smugness, only terror. He must have expected this to go differently. Larry had tied him up like all the others, put him in this horrible assembly line, shoved a gag in his mouth so he couldn't plead for his life. Larry must have promised to arrest the combatants, and to let the spy go free. He must have promised something other than what this turned out to be – a slaughter. His words run in my head, 'Whatever happens, you just follow me, kid, and keep your mouth shut.'

We had strolled right up to the platoon, and I followed the orders Larry gave me, wishing I had been paired off with any other person at that moment, or assigned to any other operation. It was unbecoming for a soldier of my caliber to admit fear, but there was nothing like having fifteen automatic weapons trained on my face.

It was then that the spy took action. He set off a grenade, and Larry and I mowed down the armed soldiers, and dragged the injured into a line. We went to work disarming them, tying them up, and preparing them for questioning.

Larry had another plan, though, and a lesson for me.

"I told you the world was full of scum. Well, there you go. Prime example. Promise a man six figures and a new identity, and he turns on the people who trust him."

He was talking about the spy, glaring at him, snarling like a rabid dog, but I was looking back at the line of bodies he had left with the gun that was now in my hands. He had started without warning, and I had done nothing to stop him. "Why did you…?"

"I told you." Larry grabbed me by the shoulders, turning me back to face the spy, who was quivering and trying to make himself smaller. "We could have been here for hours trying to get information out of these guys, and gotten nowhere. But now Dubwana is down twenty of his elite soldiers and he knows one of his men had to betray their location. So where might his attention be going, kid? What effect do you think this will have?"

It was very hard to look at him without feeling sick, but I answered, "His compound."

"Yes. But more importantly, away from the villagers we occupy. You see, warlords have a few blind spots. When you worry too much about loyalty and rank and file, you put other things on the back burner – like securing food and water. If he pulls his forces close to home, he loses the last hope he had of taking the villages back, and we tighten our grip on the surrounding area. He can hunker down all he wants, mount missiles on the walls, arm his men with rocket launchers, whatever, but everyone has to eat, everyone has to drink."

His plan had never seemed so brilliant. I tore my eyes away from the spy, away from the bodies, and looked instead at the horizon. Somewhere out there, Dubwana was dug into his compound like a tick, becoming more paranoid as their operation closed in on him.

"Maybe you are useful alive," Larry said to the spy, tugging the gag from his mouth. "But that depends on how cooperative you want to be. Feeling cooperative?"

I looked back in time to see the spy nodding vigorously.

Larry snorted, "I bet you are. Get up."

It was both horrible and fascinating to watch Larry work. He walked the spy to our vehicle, hogtied him in the backseat, and threatened to take off a limb if he caused any trouble. While his execution of the platoon had been quick and dirty, his staging was meticulous. He moved the bodies, laying them all in their tents and even zipping some into sleeping bags. He shut their eyelids, laid their guns beside them, and made it look like the whole platoon had been sleeping.

I walked around the camp, kicking sand over bloodstains, putting as little thought as possible into what I was doing. Larry was right. If we tried to question these men, we would get nothing, and spend hours here under threat of discovery. We already had the spy. We had come here to eliminate a threat, and it was done, permanently.

But there was a creeping sickness in my throat, a nasty cramping in my stomach. Something told me I shouldn't be able to look at the bodies, the blood, without revulsion. I shouldn't be so used to seeing it, so accustomed to it. I could feel myself changing, shifting, becoming hardened. It was getting easier and easier to side with Larry, to see his logic, to accept his wisdom.

When the scene was set, we loaded up in the jeep and headed back to base. I hung out of the back, drawing a broom back and forth to make our tracks look like the surrounding sand, and tried to ignore the soft sound of the spy crying.

"You and me, kid," Larry was saying, "I think we make a great team."