Metal Gear Solid Fan Fiction ❯ Grenades ❯ Chapter 1 ( Chapter 1 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

GRENADES

January

Smoke floated out of Snake's mouth, wrapped around his nostrils, and was lost in the atmosphere above.
The dark, hazy atmosphere happened to occupy the back booth of Ella's, a dingy little short-order dive that filled the space beneath Philanthropy's headquarters.
At least, Philanthropy HQ du jour.
Ella was never seen. The diner was run by a man who Snake interpreted to be her husband: a well-built, aging Midwesterner with an ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips. He jawed with the regulars and left Snake to himself in the back booth.
Refilled his coffee cup dutifully, but stayed the hell out of his business.

The bell on the front door rang brightly as a tall, curly-haired man walked into the restaurant, bringing the cold air and the snow in with him. His unsure eyes scanned the patrons through the smoke and settled on the man in the back booth. He strode confidently towards his target and Ella's husband coolly paid him no regard.
"Snake," Otacon slid into the opposite side of the booth, "why is it whenever you 'disappear', I can always find you down here, sucking down cigarettes and coffee?" He was given a non-committal grunt in return. "You know, for a master of stealth, you have quite conspicuous patterns." Otacon smirked triumphantly. Snake took a long drag and blew the smoke as angry steam from his nostrils.
"Did you come down here to badger me and get your daily dose of secondhand smoke, or was there something you actually needed?" Otacon pushed his glasses up on his nose, managing to smooth his face into a mask of nonchalance. The annoyance leaked out of his voice instead.
"Yes, actually, there is something I need. I don't think it's prudent to discuss it here, so I'll kindly ask you to finish your cigarette and follow me." Otacon knew that Snake knew exactly where he was going so he didn't provide him with a leisurely minute or two to finish. He simply left, garnering the stares of some of the less savvy clientèle.
Snake, in response, calmly finished his cigarette, stubbed it out in the bottom of his dry mug, tossed a few bills on the table, and slunk out.
Ella's husband carefully kept his eyes elsewhere, on the coffee pots, on the other patrons, on the muted television. He could tell that something tense and dangerous clung to those men: the way they strode, the way they spoke. He wasn't about to muddy his hands in it.

"Is now a prudent time?" Snake slammed the apartment door behind him, nicotine doing nothing to calm his nerves.
It was the middle of a miserable North Dakota winter and both he and Hal were at each other's throats constantly. The cabin fever and disappointment had built to an unbearable level.
"...Of course it is, Snake." Hal sighed, his tone subdued, all business. He cut straight to the point. "I found some intel on the decommissioned missile silos in the area which indicates they are not precisely decommissioned."
Snake collapsed on the sofa, springs creaking under his weight.
"I've got a bad feeling about this... First off, let's not jump to conclusions and two, where did you get the info from?" His skeptical eyes pinned Hal to the wall. It had been three months since a chance photo in an AP story about Bismarck, ND captured a blurry semi trailer in the background. A semi trailer with a mysterious and strangely indicative bipedal-tank-equipped-with-nuclear-rail-gun shape tarped on the back of its flatbed.

It was all chance, it was all pure coincidence... And then nothing. For three whole months.
Three months spent in the back booth at Ella's sucking down cigarettes and coffee.
Three months for Otacon, spent hunched over his computer, scanning articles and files for another lead, another connection. Anything.

"Okay, number one, I'm not jumping to conclusions. The Dept of the Interior has been conducting an infrared scanning project from orbital satellites to show the effects of urban sprawl.
What those photos are showing are present, not high but present, levels of heat from one particular abandoned missile silo. I'm not concluding what specifically is causing that heat signature, I'm merely saying something is happening there. Those silos are nearly the best insulated structures in existence. If there's heat leaking through, there's something big happening." Snake's eyebrows raised in interest and his mouth opened slightly in apology. Hal abruptly cut him off.
"Two: the intel or rather the friendly nudge in the right direction came from an unknown source. Before you say it's too undependable, I know, trust me..." Hal shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. "Someone who claims to be a DOI employee posted a file server address on a branch of the old 2600 BBS where conspiracy theorists gather." Snake gave him a silent, suspicious glare. "Before you draw any conclusions, let me just say that the file server is real. I hacked it this morning, and the photos are genuine." He shrugged off that morning's accomplishment with nonchalance. Fried up some eggs, hacked into a government server, did the dishes... Small feat for a WMD engineer turned global vigilante.

He turned back to the computer and his nimble fingers called up an array of false-color photos of the barren Dakota plains. He swiftly overlaid them with a latitude/longitude grid and another of a road map. The whole puzzle blossomed before Snake's eyes. The old Cold War ICBM silos were laid out, 10 in a Flight, across the high plains of the US. Several dozen were grouped in North Dakota, where the United States government of yore presumed few would care about nuclear collateral damage.
At the end of the Cold War, and with peaceful disarmament the buzzword of the 90s, the missiles were removed, disassembled, and the silos flooded with water.
The whole infrared map was a sea of black interspersed with tiny points of red and orange intersecting with highways, towns, ranches. Except for one dot, a bright red glow in the middle of nowhere. An unmapped singularity.
Otacon found and snapped the last map over the array of photos: the missile Flight group map. The red point of light aligned perfectly with the position of the silo marked N38.
Snake's eyes narrowed. Even if this was sent by some anonymous joker, the files were real, and the map was real.
Something was really going on at location N38.
The next task was to find out what.

The following day dawned bright, crisp, clean, and 20 below. It was the warmest day out of the whole week.
Hal had spent most of yesterday and last night hunched in front of his computer, ruining his posture, atrophying his muscles, typing away furiously to gather as much information about the silos as he could. He heard Sleepy Snake shuffle behind him, out of his bedroom, not quite ready to greet the day. Tact eroded from lack of sleep, he called out just as Snake was propping an unlit cigarette between his teeth.
"Snake, you'll never guess what I found." Silence while the solider clicked his lighter repeatedly. Click. Click. "I spent all night working on this, and finally my efforts bear fruit! Seriously, just take a guess." Click. Click. "Please, just take a guess?" A slow growl erupted in Snake's throat, his lighter officially dead. Hal sighed tiredly, the long hours finally showing in his voice. "Why do you always have to be so obstinate, Snake? Why can't you just humor me?"
"Why do you always have to be so irritating? I'm not even fucking awake." He marched into the kitchen, and the sound of the gas stove lighting soon followed. Tense silence settled in the air, followed by the soft sigh of smoke through dry lips.
Snake returned to the living room, cigarette effluence rising carelessly into the air. Hal frowned and plowed forward.
"I found the facility map and specs for the OEM sensor kit which DOD installed on each silo. I've got everything: circuit diagram, room placement, lock configuration... You name it." More smoke and silence filled the stagnant air. Hal frowned in frustration and threw his voice into falsetto. "Gosh, Otacon, that's wonderful news. This information will make my hellish job so much easier! Oh, no problem, Snake, that's what partners are for. It's not like I needed sleep last night or lung cancer this morning."
Snake pulled the cigarette from his mouth and leveled Hal with a burning stare.
"If you're done being sarcastic, do you think we can start being civil to one another?"
"If you're done with that cigarette."

Snake pinched the bridge of his nose, holding back whatever foul words were hovering on his lips. He needed this one so he could start dealing with the day, he really did. It was too cold and too windy to have a chance at smoking outside. He took one more long drag and dramatically blew the smoke over his shoulder, away from Hal. He cocked his eyebrow dangerously as the butt was stubbed out in a wayward dirty coffee mug.
"Better?"
"Much. We can go over the security specs briefly, I-" Hal turned back to the computer, sighing. "I-I'm sorry for jumping you with it this early in the morning..." Snake perched behind him on the coffee table.
"S'okay. Sorry for smoking inside..." Hal glanced over his shoulder, a contented smirk on his face. "You're forgiven, for now." They shared a brief smile and suddenly the tension was gone, the violence dissipated from the air. Why, lately, did frustration and boredom cause so many petty squabbles? At least these bouts blossomed and died quickly, the mood settling like smoke in the air. But would it always?

"So, these sensors - they're 1960s 'state of the art' Active Microwave. They shouldn't present much of a problem. The DOD installed them on poles, 5 feet in the air. I guess they weren't expecting a terrestrial assault... But..." Here, Hal hesitated, pushing his glasses back to their proper position. "We can be pretty much guaranteed that whoever is now operating at N38 has installed their own security system, with much better technology, and better camouflaged. We've just got a tiny advantage knowing the basic setup." His fingers ran lightly over the LCD monitor. "But I think we can draw on past experience to gauge the capabilities of the current security." The engineer and the soldier locked eyes. "Visual monitoring, that's a given. I think we can put down passive infrared as well." Snake counted off the different types on his fingers.

"They probably have a magnetic sensor field closer in, and ultrasonic tremor sensors on the blast doors, vent, and entry hatch." His lips quirked upwards in a smile. "Nothing we haven't handled before." Hal grabbed a sharpie and started scribbling furiously on a nearby notepad. "Magnetic's easy, you'll go in with only a carbon fiber KA-BAR and procure firearms on site. Ultrasonic... I'll whip up a directional shielded EMP and once you get close, you can knock out the sensors on the air vent door." It was Snake's turn to smile, strangely entranced with the dancing light in Hal's eyes, creating schematics on the fly.

"I can handle visual monitoring without an issue. You know me."
"So presumably, there will only be infrared and microwave left." He bit the end of his sharpie in thought. An idea was slowly occurring to both men, but they were rifling through their brains for another option, another way. Snake caught Hal's eyes and unspoken words said they had hit on the same idea. One way to defeat both systems at the same time. "Spring. We've got to wait until... Don't we? I mean..." The ensuing pause enveloped the room. "Snake, there's got to be a better way!" Hal rubbed his temples in frustration. "That will mean weeks, months, of waiting!"
"I know, Otacon, but I don't think there's a better, more subtle method. The melted water from the snow will drive the microwave sensors nuts. We'll have to modify the suit to deal with infrared, but if the air temperature is warmer, it will be less of an obstacle. After all, there won't be any walls for me to hide behind in order to take out thermal sensors in the old fashioned way." The answering silence said it all. For these reasons and more, there wasn't a better option.

Spring would eventually come to the frozen Dakota plains. The barren landscape outside didn't seem capable of warmth, and yet, the seasons would change as they had for eons. In spring, they would be able to topple the perimeter security and destroy this newest Metal Gear - should it exist - in the dark abyss of N38. The only problem was the wait.
It would be weeks before the wind subsided and longer still before the sun claimed back the land and melted the snow into large, shimmering puddles.
Too long.
The bipedal weapon could be operational by that time, could be gone, and they would have lost their best chance to neutralize it for all their delay.

The days ate away into weeks. Hal had converted the kitchen table into a metallurgy lab, the sneaking suit cut apart and lying under a half dozen lights like an alien autopsy. There were tools, large and small, scattered everywhere. Carefully shielded copper wires were being laced through the suit like spiderwebs. This network of wires was the backbone of his infrared shroud. The copper would lie against Snake's skin and draw body heat away into minutely feathered heat exchangers mounted on his Nomex knee pads. Otacon took advantage of the fact that his knees would spend much of their time against the ground, simultaneously acting as a conduit for the waste heat and cloaking the signature of the exchange.
Snake, on the other hand, spent his days alternating between occupying the back booth at Ella's, doing infinite pull-ups on the bar he'd drilled into the bathroom door frame, and peering over Otacon's shoulder at the suit and the engineer's deft hands.
"Snake?! Ah, jeez, would you find something else to do?" Snake mumbled a 'sorry' as Otacon gently blew the fallen cigarette ash off the suit. He was going crazy waiting but knew that Otacon was even more on edge than himself. It was a race against time, boredom, and anxiety.


***


March

The air temperature yesterday had risen to 45 degrees and the snow was slowly melting away. Soon, very soon, and they would have to move.

It was Tuesday morning and Snake was propped up on the couch watching the Action 4 Wake Up newscast. It was always pleasantly boring news in North Dakota, but over the past few weeks there had been several reports of missing persons. Did the snow and the cold finally get to people, drive them crazy, and they just walked off to more temperate climes? Or did the slowly warming weather bring the maniacs out of hibernation? Perhaps the dozen or so missing people had been abducted and murdered, not merely run away? What drove a thin section of humanity to do such things to others? He ground his teeth together as another picture popped up on the screen. She was a school teacher, mid 40s, short brown hair, glowing smile. Snake hoped she'd just decided she'd had enough of winter and teaching bratty kids, but knew it couldn't be true. Why were they chasing shadows and men with phantom WMDs, when there were real people dying in daily life for easily preventable reasons? He knew Philanthropy's work was terrifyingly important, and yet the powerless feeling that invaded his lungs grew and would not budge.

His ears twitched as he caught the sound of Otacon's chair scraping on the kitchen linoleum. He knew the engineer had finished the suit without a word spoken. There was a certain unmistakeable relief permeating the air. The time line had been penciled out and Thursday was the unofficial execution date. The picture of the missing school teacher disappeared and was replaced by the weather. Murder and weather, how American. The buxom weather girl who filled the screen predicted a jump from an average of 30 to a balmy 55 degrees and NOAA's radar seemed to confirm it. There was a high pressure front moving up through the central plains from the west coast. When it hit them, it would be Wednesday afternoon and the snow would melt like butter. On Thursday morning, the first day of April, the high would still be overhead and they would have their best chance to break through all N38's defenses at once.

If not, this would be the worst April Fool's joke in history.




Chapter 2