The drive through the long strip of desert was totally uneventful and, for once in her lifetime, relaxing. The soviet jeep was battered and smelled of gasoline and cheap vodka, but Snake knew how to drive. He wasn't afraid to go fast, even on unpaved roads, but his hand was steady on the wheel and he had absolute control on the rather wobbly vehicle.
She slumped a little bit on the seat, cradling the rifle close to her chest in case she needed to act fast, but there were no patrols in sight. Snake's plan to divert the soviets' attention to another area was proving to work very well, as they drove north west to the Lamar Khaate Palace, one of the strongholds the soviets had claimed as their outposts.
"Are you familiar with the place?" he asked, as they crossed a sandy slope and came into view with their destination.
She nodded.
"Good. There are no foolproof ways to get inside that place, last time I had to crawl all the way to the barracks and extract the target so fast I can barely remember what the hell happened, but it was night time. If you look at the map you should see that there are rocky ridges on the left side of the ruins, I was thinking to use that makeshift pathway to sneak in the back and… well, do what I do."
She checked the map on her iDroid. The plan wasn't bad, according to the topography of the area there were some good sniping points she could exploit to follow him and cover his infiltration in case things went wrong. Yet, it was a dangerous place nevertheless, full of nooks, dark corners, crumbling walls and caving floors. She had been there a couple of times, and she didn't like the place much. Yet, there were reports from vanguard scouts that the soviets had moved a lot of resources there so they had to at least take a look if there was anything useful.
And she could go ahead and do some scouting before he arrived, so they'd both have a better idea of what to expect.
As if he had read his mind, Snake slowed down to a halt. "Quiet, feel free to go ahead if you want. I'll bring the ammo bag once you're set at the sniping point, alright?"
With another nod, she cloaked and sprinted towards the place.
She wasn't expecting massive surveillance, but there were enough people to cause some trouble. There were indeed some containers of resources, mostly gasoline and other types of fuel and what looked like a container of rations and other provisions, enough to feed the outpost for a month or more. She chuckled, thinking how bad soviet rations were and how disgusting they tasted, but in war, you eat what you can get.
In her case, sunlight and water.
I wonder if I can still eat and drink normally. She thought, inspecting the third floor of the now wrecked building for marksmen or other soldiers. Doctors said my lungs got burned, but never spoke of the rest. Oh well…
It wasn't the right place to think about food. Maybe one day she'd try, but that wasn't the right moment.
Having learned from her past mistakes, she double checked inside the barracks and tents for possible prisoners, but this time, she found none. Better, less stuff to think about.
As soon as she was done, she climbed on a rocky ridge slightly offside the building and reported her findings to Snake through the iDroid, then waited. He appeared about ten minutes later and sat beside her. "Now, this is what I call fun," he spoke softly, looking at the outpost.
Fun? She thought.
"Yeah, fun. I mean… open space, few guards, lots of spots to hide behind and ambush people… in my line of work, this is awesome! In yours though…"
Not so much. She completed his sentence.
"Now, seen something interesting?"
It was almost becoming a catchphrase between them. Did he trust her judgement on what was interesting that much?
"Mhh, gasoline tanks, a shipment of firewood, rations… they can be useful. The men though…" He carefully inspected each soldier with his scope. Quiet still had to understand how that thing, that looked like a standard issue binocular scope, could actually determine how good a soldier would fare on the battlefield or anywhere else. "There are a couple of good people down there, I might extract them," he stated standing up. "And no, the scope doesn't exactly tell me how good a soldier is, it's just powerful enough that I can read the badges and medals on his uniform. And I'm kind of good at judging people."
She barely stifled a sudden burst of hilarity at his last comment. As if he had read her thoughts, Snake had answered a question that had been going through her mind for a while.
If you're so good at judging people what the hell am I doing here? She asked herself as he climbed down the ledge and, keeping his profile as low as possible so the enemy wouldn't spot him.
It was then that she spotted a sniper climbing up a precarious ladder, just ahead of her. She quickly notify him through the iDroid and she saw him stop dead behind a rock in the corner of her vision.
"Sniper?" he asked via radio. Quiet replied with a short affirmative sound in the open mic and waited for his orders. Were it for her, she'd shoot him as soon as he took position, just to avoid the bother of keeping out of a sniper's cone of vision. "Shoot him."
She took a quick breath, knowing perfectly well that it meant less than nothing to her burnt lungs, held it and aimed. A split second after she had pulled the trigger, the tiny narcotic dart stuck in the sniper's neck and he fell on the dusty roof, asleep like a baby.
"Listen…" Snake said when he started walking again. "Why don't you have some fun and put some people down for a nap?" he proposed. "What do you think?"
She only wished he could have seen her face as she gleefully proceeded to put every soviet soldier down for said nap. Once she had got accustomed to the low recoil that had put her off the thing a while ago, she found that characteristic actually useful because her arm wouldn't get so sore.
As she planted a second dart in the neck of a really big guy for good measure, she recalled that time she had to eliminate a column of vehicles from a distance using an anti materiel rifle that probably weighed more than herself and her equipment combined. The recoil of that monstrous hunk of steel was strong enough to bruise her shoulder.
The tranquilizer rifle she was using now was way better. And lighter, way more suitable for her new abilities and fast ways of movement.
A couple of minutes after the iDroid had happily chirped its message Outpost Captured, Snake called her. "Come down here."
Quiet found him as he tied a soldier to a pole. "Down there," he waved at the general direction of the barracks. "There's something you may like."
The something she may like was a fully functioning shower. She turned towards him as if to ask permission and he waved at the barracks again, while he checked the ligatures around a soldier's wrists. "Go, Quiet. You've been out in the sun all day. I know you need water."
The water was lukewarm, because of the metal tank exposed to the bright sun of the desert, but at least, it was water. He was right, she had been standing in the sun for hours, not to mention that she had her last drink of water way before they had departed from Mother Base, hours earlier. She let the parasites drink their fill, feeling energy zap through her as the tiny beings metabolized the liquid into nutrients.
After the more than welcome break, Quiet wore her boots and walked out of the barracks, running her fingers through her let down hair to loose the kinks that had formed through the dark strands. Snake was waiting for her just outside, sitting on a cardboard box in a shaded area, eating a sandwich. "Feel better?" he mumbled as he munched. She nodded. "Good. Excellent work, by the way." Then he looked at his watch, strapped to his bionic arm, taking another bite of his snack. "Mhh, we have time for another sortie before the sun goes down. I've called the Support Team and they should arrive to pick up any minute now to pick things up. Feel up for another ambush?"
Before she could reply, a soviet soldier woke up and, seeing them, started babbling about in Russian. They both looked at the guy, tied to one of the poles that held a tarp above one of the machineguns with a generous dose of duct tape, and couldn't help but laugh as the interpreter translated his terrified rant via radio.
The comedic interlude didn't last long as Snake took his own tranq gun from its holster and deftly shot him in the neck. The soldier turned off like a toy without batteries.
"He'll have a rough wake up call when he realizes he's not in Afghanistan anymore," he explained. "Come on, let's go back to the jeep." He stood and patted the crumbs from his shemag. "Or you prefer to go ahead?" She nodded. "Mhh, alright. See you at the guardpost then."
As soon as he finished speaking, she sprinted off to the selected location.
She took a moment to go through everything that had happened the day that was now ending and realized that she was having fun. A lot of fun, actually. First, Big Boss had given her the means to keep herself entertained during deployment in the forms of huge, doorstopping books. And she had to admit that The Shining was a good one, for what she had read up to that moment. Then, everything that had happened, the two outposts and guardposts they had raided… the new rifle that fit her perfectly not to mention the fact that Snake had been kind enough to allow her to shower.
Each day she spent on Mother Base, each hour she worked with whom she thought was the enemy, the less she actually wanted to fulfill her mission and kill him and his Diamond Dogs.
Despite the best training and mental conditioning cutting edge technology could offer, XOF hadn't managed to turn her into the perfect killer after all. She still had doubts, from time to time, about killing people. Most of all people that treated her fairly and not like an expendable pawn in a larger game like her commanding officers at XOF.
Halfway to her destination, she stopped on top of a rock and inspected the area around her.
Holy fuck! She thought when she saw the huge wall of sand coming right in their direction.
"Quiet!" Snake's voice blared the earpiece of her radio. "Come down here, there's a sandstorm incoming, we need to find a place to hide!"
This is bad she told herself as she ran down the gorge where Snake was driving, just a couple of miles behind her. When she reached him, she jumped in the passenger seat and uncloaked.
When she appeared, Snake jolted on his seat. "Goddamit Quiet!" he screamed. "Don't do that! I'm not that young anymore, my heart isn't as strong as it was!" he reprimanded her.
She grunted, not even caring. On her face she knew there was written something like what do we do now? Like a neon sign.
"I don't know, wait a sec." He pushed a button on his radio. "Ocelot, where do we go?"
"Up ahead," she heard the Russian's voice in her own earpiece too, then the noise of countless paper sheets being moved around. Maps probably. "Yes, up ahead, three miles. There's an abandoned building, probably the old shack of a shepherd. It isn't big but it should be solid to keep you safe. If you rush, the storm won't catch you."
Snake pushed hard on the gas pedal and the keep accelerated on the uneven road. The jeep creaked with each bump they struck, and Quiet found herself holding tight to the seat in order to remain inside the vehicle. Snake drove like he had the four horsemen of the apocalypse behind his ass and if she had to be honest, she'd drive just the same way, knowing there was a sandstorm approaching.
They finally reached the building Ocelot had spoke of, Snake parked the jeep behind it so it wouldn't be visible from the road and they proceeded to force open the door. In the dim light of the setting sun, clouded by the approaching wall of whirlwinding sand, they saw that the inside of the small shack contained nothing more than a couple of chairs, a table, the metallic structure of a bed, completely stripped of everything except for a ratty mattress, and a couple of oil lanterns in serious need of some repair.
"Well, it's not the Savoy…" he spoke. "But at least we won't wash sands off our clothes and hairs for months."
She watched him as he fiddled with one of the oil lamps until he managed to make it work. With finally some light to see, he set a backpack and a large gas canister he must have pilfered from the soviets to the floor, then proceeded to strip of his weapons and arrange them in a neat row against a wall. He took off the tactical vest and hung it to the back of a chair and stretched. "Make yourself comfortable, I fear we'll have to stay here for a while."
A bit awkward at the prospect of being locked in a tiny room with him for an unknown amount of time, Quiet tried to make herself comfortable. She took the rifle off her shoulder and set it upright against the wall, then took off her own tactical equipment and stretched herself. She didn't bring much with herself these days, but after a day carrying a large caliber gun, four smoke grenades, a bag of ammo and a rifle, even her trained shoulders felt a little strained.
And now? She thought, sitting on one of the run down chairs.
Just to have something to do, she took the rifle, unloaded the magazine and wiped some of the dirt that had stuck to it, but without a proper cleaning kit, there wasn't much she could do to pass the time.
Snake appeared to be in the same predicament. Now stripped of everything but his fatigues and boots, she sat on the chair opposite of hers, arms crossed and legs stretched out. On his face, she could read the boredom quickly creep out. After all the fun he had, being stuck in an abandoned shepherd during a sandstorm with a XOF operative wasn't probably the best way to end the day.
"Well, this sucks," he declared after a while.
She could only shrug in reply to that. You can say that.
"And damn it's just a huge clichè!" he chuckled. "Straight out of a movie. A bad one too!"
Quiet had the feeling he was talking about cheap pornography but managed to school her reactions and not show any sign of amusement. After all, their situation was typical of certain movies and TV shows she had seen, but most of all, it was a staple of very bad porn flicks that sometimes her male coworkers shared among them back at the headquarters.
No that she had any intention to strip for Big Boss, not more than her regular state of undress anyway. He may have been causing her some doubts about her mission, but no way in hell she wanted to have sex with him. For any reason.
She actually shuddered at the thought.
"Well, we're stuck here. Better find something to do until the storm outside wanes." He pulled the backpack closer to him and started looking through its contents. He had snaffled quite a few things from the soviets, Quiet could see canned rations, a packet of cigarettes and a cheap flip lighter, a bottle of an unidentified liquor and a frayed card deck. But he put all those items back inside and extracted a cardboard box with a blister inside it. "Ah, there they are." Then he handed the box to her.
Water purification tablets.
"I filled that canister with water, but I'm not exactly sure it's clean enough for human consumption. I'm pretty sure those should purify it, considering the picture drawn on it."
I thought you spoke Russian.
"You see, before this…" he pointed at the shrapnel poking from his forehead. "I could fluently speak Russian. Now I can't even remember how to order a beer. Do you perhaps speak it, we need to know how many tablets we need to purify four gallons."
Luckily enough, she spoke a little bit of Russian. Not enough to hold a full conversation about world politics, but enough to at least interpret the instructions on the back of the box. She pushed four capsules out of the blister and handed it to him.
"Great." He dropped them in the canister and shook it so the tablets could evenly dissolve. "Now we have water for me to drink and for you to… absorb?" She nodded. "I haven't even asked, do you think you can survive multiple days on the battlefield? I know what Ocelot said, about the photosynthesis or… but…"
He was struggling to find words to describe her condition. She chuckled, knowing perfectly well how difficult it was to describe, she found it very hard too, even to describe it to herself. She placed her gloved hand over his fleshy arm and gently squeezed it, as if to say I'm alright.
"Will you be fine?" She nodded. "So you really just need water and some sun exposure to survive?" She nodded again. "Alright then. Sorry if I prodded too much."
Quiet smiled and shrugged. No big deal, Boss.
"You don't mind then if I eat something?"
At that question, she laughed. Why should I? She asked herself, and shook her head.
No wonder he was hungry though, despite the sandwich he had while she showered. He didn't seem excessively tired, but he had skipped lunch, she thought as she watched him eat the contents of one of the small cans. By the look on his face, said contents were borderline heinous, just as she remembered from her own experience. "Twenty years and they still have to learn how to feed their soldiers…" he muttered as he chewed. "Last time I ate a soviet ration, it sucked. This one sucks and it's probably stale. I almost miss the days of eating poisonous snakes cooked over an open campfire."
She laughed again, and that made him smile too. "Really, I cook a mean barbecued snake. Thanks to the Green Berets cooking training. Got me through some nasty situations."
Ah, so you're a Green Beret then? Explains a lot then.
As he ate his dumplings in beef sauce, if the smell was an indicator of the contents of the can in his hands, they remained silent. Outside, the wind howled and she could hear the tiny grains of sand scraping over the crude bricks the shack was made of.
"I fear we'll have to stay here the night," he said, scraping the bottom of the can with a spoon. "Too bad, I was kind of considering the idea of storming the base camp, up north."
Oh no way in hell!
"During the day, it's a hell to infiltrate. But at night? Could be fun."
She snorted, as silently as she could, and threw him a piece of crumpled paper she had found on the floor beside her chair. He caught it mid air and threw it back at her. "Oh come on, give me a break! A man can dream, right?" He took a long sip from his canteen. "Nah, I wouldn't try to infiltrate that place if not forced for a good reason."
I wonder if getting Dr. Emmerich out of that place was a good reason then.
She didn't know the details, but the tales about his infiltration at the soviet base camp to snatch the good engineer from the soviet hands had reached even her cell, travelling from soldier to soldier until one time one of those recaps had taken place right above her cell, and she could hear it.
What bothered her was the fact that her old boss had appeared out of nowhere to botch Snake's attempt to be all sneaky, while taking Dr. Emmerich to the landing zone to extract him.
She never liked the man, although he was her boss. She had always thought he was a freak, even more of a freak than herself. His methods were too… radical for her standards, and that meant something.
Good thing I don't have to work for him anymore.
Maybe.
There was still that part of her that wanted to go through with the mission and kill Big Boss. It was reduced to the back of her mind now, cornered and kept in check, but sometimes, when she observed him through the scope of her rifle, she couldn't help but think how easy it would be to just pull the trigger there and then, and his life in the most stupid way ever.
Even now, it would be so easy to get behind him and cut his throat, watch life leave his body as the blood poured over his dusty fatigues. Killed like a helpless animal, trapped in a crude building in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan.
What a stupid way to die, for the legendary soldier.
He didn't deserve it. Were it someone else, any other soldier of the Diamond Dogs or that other guy on Mother Base, the one that wanted to put a bullet through her head the moment she had set foot there, she wouldn't have a second thought about completing the mission. Snake had only shown respect for her.
Respect she thought he deserved back.
No, she would not kill him. Not after he had kept her alive and cared for her wellbeing to the extent of snatching gallons of water from the enemy only to keep her alive and well.
"Tell me something, or rather nod or shake your head to answer," he said after a while. "Do you know any card game? I found a deck and I thought we could at least try to pass the time."
As required, she nodded. She could indeed play a vast array of card games, thanks to some of her coworkers. She actually enjoyed playing cards, or other games like chess, checkers and the like. She wasn't a fan of poker though.
"Great." He pulled the table closer and put it between them, so they had a surface to place the cards. "Because one of the guys back at Mother Base taught me a new game and it's awesome, it's fun but requires a certain degree of strategic thinking. It's named after an Italian author… from the Renaissance… I think." He scratched his beard as he pulled the cards out of the box. "Machiavelli, that's it. Do you know it?"
It was one of her favorite. She was pretty sure her face had deal me in written all over.
"Nice!"
They spent the next few hours playing cards. Snake was a good player, hard to read and extremely strategic when it came to placing his cards and taking loads of time during his turn to plan his sortie, while she was more of a guerrilla player, planning ahead and delivering precise strikes. Both ways were good and each of them won a number of matches, before he started yawning.
"We better catch some sleep, it's getting alte and we've been up and about for a while. Take the bed, I'll sleep on the floor."
She tried to rebut, to tell him that she could sleep on the floor and that it wouldn't be a problem, but he was adamant in his decision. He literally pushed her over to the old, worn cot and made her sit there, and wouldn't take no for an answer.
The funny thing was that the moment he set himself on the floor, his head propped up on his buttpack like a pillow, he fell asleep. Instantly, like he had a switch that had just been turned off.
In his sleep, he didn't look as worried as he looked when awake. There were creases over his forehead, caused by the constant worrying of running Mother Base and fight Cipher off their back.
He almost looked cute.
Damn, that man was a walking contradiction. A bit like herself.
Curled up on her side, waiting for sleep to overcome her, she replayed the events of that night, how much fun it had been to spend the evening playing cards with him. They hadn't spoken much, but he had told her a bit of her past missions in Soviet Union, twenty years prior. Not the details, but minor little things like what kind of food he had to eat to sustain himself, how crazy the place was and how he had met Ocelot there. He seemed to enjoy the company, as he sipped the tiniest amount of vodka he had poured in a mess tin through their games, and certainly she did enjoy having a companion for once.
Yes, Skull face could definitely go to hell.
I know the whole "trapped by a sandstorm" is a little bit of a clichè but... hey, I had so much fun writing them playing cards that I couldn't think of a better setting for that kind of scene.
