PART II: RAGING BULL
Chapter 1:
Cameron woke up, as usual, about an hour before the time he needed to. There was no point in looking at his watch, he knew very well what time it was. It had become increasingly hard to sleep after the event. Even several years later, it only seemed to be getting worse. He had tried everything. Medication. Vacations far away. Prostitutes. But nothing seemed to make him forget the exciting taste of the life back home, back on Mother Base. He had also tried alcohol. It didn't work either, but when he tried to stop, he found that he was not able to. He seemed to be always lost in his thoughts, in his memories of that golden age when he was surrounded by his brothers, that time when he could do the job he loved without really having to think about his life. He had taken that for granted. But his home was destroyed now, rotting with the bodies of his brothers and sisters at the bottom of the ocean.
Without realizing it, he had already guzzled down the entire flask of whiskey that he kept in his drawer. In vain. Once the taste had vanished from his mouth and the heat from his throat, it was as if he had drank nothing. He got up from his camp bed and got out of his tent. The air was still cool outside, and the silvery light of the moon reflected on the dunes to give them an otherworldly feel. Cameron grabbed his rifle, slung it onto his back and ascended the rocky hill on which a soldier was posted to watch the surrounding dunes.
"Hey chief!" the guard said. Cameron didn't reply but he made a slight gesture with his head. After a moment of silence, he muttered "You can go and rest now, I'll watch over the camp". The soldier, whose name he couldn't remember, replied with a gesture of his own and headed down to the camp. He looked down at the four tents at the bottom of the small hill he was now standing on. two for the men, one for the gear, and one for Cameron, since he was the leader of this unit. PMCs sent recruiters after former MSF members. Despite their demise, their reputation as an elite force still persisted, and a lot of the survivors of the attack had easily found a job in this booming economy. That was the same for Cameron. He had first refused, but on day he found himself in need of money, so he decided to contact the PMC who had tried to convince him for months to join them. Because of his status, he had been given a position of relative authority. He wondered where the others came from. There had been little conversation between them, so he could only try to guess. Not that he cared. In fact, he was not really able to care about anything now. Here in the desert, the heat melted everything; memories blurred, morality vanished, and the vague illusion of your own existence was quickly swept away with the ever shifting shape of the dunes. The only thing left was the mission, and its vague absurdity.
***
Without realizing it, he had dozed off, and was woken up by voices speaking in a foreign language. Suddenly alert, he crawled toward the edge of the rock to look at the camp. His soldiers were on their knees, or lying down, and a group of men in beige uniforms wearing balaclavas of the same color were holding them at gunpoint. However, they had not noticed the presence of the man watching over the camp from the hill.
Cameron thought about fleeing. He though about surrendering. But he did not think a second about saving the soldiers. He thought about his pay, weighed the probability of his survival in several scenarios. He remembered the great quantity of highly volatile explosives in one of the tents. He estimated that they would all be in the radius of the explosion. He remembered the mission, what his new boss had said about the value of human lives, and the sardonic wink he had addressed him right after. So he aimed at the tent that contained fuel and explosives and pulled the trigger without the slightest hesitation. No one in the camp survived.