The Road to Outer Heaven
Chapter 10: More Dangerous Than A Jackal
By, Frank Hunter

Suhn bolted down the dimly lit corridor with the blueprints tucked under her arm, and Fox kept his distance behind her. He had never in all his years chased after someone who was so incredibly fast. Doors and fluorescent lights blew by meaninglessly, blurred by the speed, and still no progress seemed to be made. Each stretch of the hallway seemed identical to the last, the distance between the two never quite closing.

Moments like these had a way of making one forget. Big Boss didn't matter anymore. Solid Snake and Commander Steele didn't matter. Outer Heaven and South Africa didn't matter. The monstrosity out in the hangar no longer mattered. The only, single thing that mattered at that very moment was catching the girl so that those pieces of paper could be in his possession, not hers. The mission was the only thing on Fox's mind, and not the mission for a great and noble purpose either. Just the simple task in front of him of retrieving the dossier.

There was something Fox had said to his student on the plane as the two were on their way into this mess. "Snake, there is nothing more meaningless than a soldier who does not understand what he fights for. Becoming a simple tool in a politician's war will not give your life worth." Fox knew that there was absolutely no point fighting solely for someone else. If a soldier does not know why he is doing what he is doing, then he is nothing more than an instrument, a gear which is essential for making the big machine move but may go its entire existence without ever seeing that machine. Maybe Fox would have questioned himself as he pursued those documents blindly, documents he was required to retrieve but commanded never to look at. Maybe Snake would have found the irony of the situation, endlessly debating his mentor's position and philosophies about completing this mission and serving Big Boss. Maybe…

Maybe these things would have happened if there had been any time to consider anything but the documents.

A "t" appeared in the hallway and Suhn took a quick left. Fox's reflexes allowed him to follow and keep up, but his speed forced a shoulder into the wall as he turned. He ignored the sting that ran down his arm at the force of the blow, and still only focused his sharp mind on the girl in front of him and the papers in her hand. His pistol hung uselessly in its holster at his waist. He had tried to fire on the girl in the first stretch of hallway out of the hangar, right after he heard that loud explosion echo from behind him. He emptied his clip at her, certain that this would only be a quick engagement, and still was not entirely sure how every shot had missed. Suhn, never losing a step, seemed to dance down the corridor from side to side, dodging bullets if that was at all possible, and one time even took a quick hop off of the right wall. Fox had decided against reloading. It would slow him down and, if she was really good enough to dodge the first clip, what was there to say that she wouldn't do the same exact thing with the next?

The two passed by an open door in a flash, Suhn not losing a beat. Fox chanced a glance inside and spotted the frame of a large open safe. Take the blueprints back to the safe, Steele had said. But there it went. The girl had no intention of stopping and depositing the papers. Fox knew at this point there was only one thing she really could want. A fight. A battle to the death. And, he was sure that if she was going to chance an engagement like this while still holding something as valuable as those papers, she had a great deal of confidence in her skill. They turned another corner, this one a bit more gracefully than the last on Fox's part.

A little further down the chase ended as abruptly as it began, and Suhn got what she really wanted. The girl turned around mid-stride and threw the folder at her pursuer, papers scattering across the hall and the folder spinning like some weird frisbee at Fox's head. He spun his body to avoid the projectile and dampen his momentum, but upon righting himself saw that the girl had deployed two small daggers from sheaths hidden at her wrists. He grounded his feet as Suhn began a lunge at him, her right arm forward. Without missing a beat, he pulled his combat knife from its place at his hip, parried the assault and took a step backward. The left arm came around for his side, and he parried this as well, backing down another step, treading carefully over the fallen documents.

Fox was quick to learn that Suhn was as fast with the knives as she was on her feet. Her assaults were relentless and she continually pressed the soldier backwards, invoking a series of parries, dodges and retreats. This girl, not even close to being out of her teens, was giving FOX-HOUND's greatest warrior a run for his money. This young girl. This scrawny girl. This deadly girl.

Other thoughts began to force their way into Gray Fox's mind.

He didn't bother wondering what had been done to her to make her like this. He knew all too well the horrors that the armies of the third world committed on children. He himself was a survivor of those horrors. Having fought all his life, he didn't even really know who he was. His own real name was a mystery to him. His whole life had been one alias, one identity after another. Now, he was Gray Fox, FOX-HOUND's elite. He thought that he liked this best. Gray Fox was elegant, it was descriptive and fearsome. He identified with it well, and it had been given by Big Boss, the only superior he'd ever had whom he respected.

Before that, he had been Null. The "Perfect Soldier." It had all been nonsensical brainwashing of course, there was no such thing as perfection, Big Boss had shown him that, even if he was damn close to it. They had taken him as an adolescent, experimented on him, hypnotized his impressionable young mind, put knives in his hands and told him to kill. That's all he did back then, in his youth. Killed, because someone told him to. How many children in the world did the same thing without real motivation or reason?

Even before that, in his earliest days, he was Frank Jaeger, a name which was not his own but was now the closest thing he had; a little German boy who threatened even the most hardened African soldiers. The little hunter. The little monster. A little child, and that was all. Yet the world let this happen. Fox had left his youth behind him years and years ago, but the cycle continued. Children continued to be taken, abducted, tortured, experimented on, given weapons and shown what to do with them. This girl was living proof. No, Fox didn't need to wonder what had turned her into this creature of death and destruction. He knew what it was. He knew, he was familiar with it, and with all of his soul he hated it.

Grabbing a water mane running along the ceiling overhead with his free hand, he arched upward and connected the sole of his boot with the skin on the girl's cheek. Fox heard the packing sound of beaten flesh as she went down, hard. He pulled his honed body into a back flip, letting go of the pipe and landing on the girl's opposite side. Before he could turn to face her, Suhn had shaken the blow off, launched into a handspring, jumped to her feet, and swiped another narrowly missed blade at Fox's chest. He backed off and the dance continued, but now blood flowed from a wound on her face.

There needed to be some government in the world which looked out for these children, which ensured that no harm like this would come to them. That they would never see the horrors that Fox saw in his youth, that this girl, Suhn, must have seen too. Someone to protect them so they wouldn't need to die in the way that Fox knew he would now have to kill this one. A government, a nation which controlled war, thrived on war, but managed it in a way that supported the soldiers who fought in it. Yes…yes a cause like that would be one that Fox could follow for the rest of his days. If only someone would step up and just do it…

Another few minutes of getting nowhere and the girl finally slipped up, and Fox was given his opportunity. A hasty stab to his right side allowed for a quick sidestep, and before the girl could bring her second blade down on Fox's back, he brought his knife across her right hand, slicing the palm and thumb and forcing her to drop that weapon.

She screamed, and in her pain swung her second weapon at Fox's neck. But now she was panicked, and these weren't the timed, precise movements that she had shown before. He caught that arm with his free hand and, before she had the chance to react, plunged his own weapon straight into Suhn's belly. She fell to her knees, gasping and crying as he pulled the weapon back at the ready.

The girl looked up at Gray Fox. The battle fever was gone from her and now that look was replaced with a great fear and dread. Her eyes were wide, and Fox knew what he saw there. Reflected in her pupils was the look of the childhood that was robbed of this girl when she was no doubt taken from her family. It was the terror of a little child that did not belong in this awful place, but rather playing with toys or laughing with friends under the sun in some faraway place. It was a life she would never know, because she was forced to be here by some politician's hand, and now he was forced to have done this.

And she spoke. "J…just," she whimpered out of her mouth in a heavily accented version of English. "…just stop it."

Suhn's arms hung limply at her sides. Fox knew the wound he caused to her stomach would result in almost fifteen minutes of excruciating pain before death finally took her. As she broke eye contact with him to close her own, and tears streamed down her face, Fox decided, with as much mercy as the soldier was capable of mustering, to save her that final torture. With a final and powerful slice of his blade, the girl's head was severed from her body, and she collapsed in a lifeless, unmoving heap on the floor.

Fox took a deep breath, closed his own eyes, and exhaled slowly, returning his own weapon to its place on his belt. Her last words had combined with the musings that had been going on in his head. "Just stop it," she'd said. The exploitation of child soldiers, yes, he would work to stop that if ever he could, there was no doubt about it. But, Fox was fairly certain that wasn't what the girl meant. Very literally she might have meant the pain in her gut, but as he turned back down the hall and began to collect up the papers that would be his ticket out of this place, he thought that he really understood.

Yes, Big Boss had told him and Snake not to look at the documents, but with them scattered across the floor Fox didn't have much of a choice. The blueprints detailed a machine unlike any the soldier had ever seen before. The feet outside in the hangar were indeed only a starting point. Flipping through the pages Fox saw, under the heading TX-55, that there would be an entire mechanical creature built on that foundation. It would tower over conventional artillery, and would be armored enough to protect it from mortars and cannons.

The creature would be a walking arsenal, toting guns and missiles, more ammunition than could be supplied to a small army. His mouth hung open as he looked over all of this, and flipped to another page. On this new paper, under the same heading, Fox could make out a round shape: three curved trapezoids around a circle which formed the international symbol for radiation. This monster, in addition to a standard armament, would be authorized to carry a payload of nuclear warheads. "My God…" Fox muttered to himself, mind wandering to the nuclear stockpile that Snake had stumbled across out in the hangar. This was a nightmare.

Composing himself, Fox tucked all the blueprints neatly into their folder, and put a hand to his radio. He didn't ever like to bother his CO too often during a mission, but under the circumstances he felt it couldn't be helped. It was still tuned to the right frequency anyway.

"This is Gray Fox, your reply."

Static crackled for a second before a familiar voice answered him. "Big Boss here, what's your status."

"Boss, I've got the dossier. Repeat, mission accomplished, but the situation is far worse than we could have imagined."

"Go on…" Big Boss encouraged him.

Fox explained about the behemoth under construction in the hangar, and the mysterious documents labeled TX-55 which were now in his possession. He told his CO his suspicions about what Steele was trying to do…about what this nation Outer Heaven was planning to do.

"How do we react to this?" he asked.

Big Boss took several moments of deep silence before presenting his operative with the new plan.