*
Sean had been recently forty-one. At school not far from Springfield, he did not immediately get a diploma at the college. Some time he served in the US Armed Forces. For a long time he has been working as a security guard at the, during his spare time he attended lectures of computer science. Then, he went uphill. His little pig eyes flashed with poorly concealed secret pleasure. He had dark hair with a forelock with dark locks, square glasses and careless unshaven stubble, which usually disappears just in front of the administration. He began often taking weekly holidays and he wasn’t in need of money and got married a Malaysian student. Sean had never told anyone about the place where he worked and where he was going. His wife and children got used not to ask Dad about anything. The family, except his father, spent 150 thousand dollars a year, had a good house and a bungalow in Hawaii. The raid of secrecy gave the family extra zest.
The chief, who had never been seen again, had noticed long ago a gifted employee and gradually promoted him to the rank of the top management. However, the last quickly became bored working in Maher’s offices. Really, Sean had confided during the field work, especially during the "royal hunt." It was his element. He succeeded in hunt for people.
In the ominous office there was believed that to get quality material of the sacrifice, he must be pumped with adrenaline. As a rule, before it, they made an express portrait of a miserable person. They made rating of miserable affections and what he was afraid of very much. Anxiety of the client reached its climax.
Sean’s fantasy knew no bounds. He was proud of his beautiful decisions on a variety of fantastic smart drives, and enough number of beater. When, after the twilight, appeared his greenish grey hood, almost not touching the ground, then the miserable before his death had only terror.
*
Sean considered himself a perfect sniper. He raised a heavy Magnum, with both hands turned with his back, immediately turned around and fired three times into the condemned. He did not know if he had hit him, then he took off his headphones and approached the shot.
He seemed to be alive and was dozing peacefully and quietly. His face was full of spirituality. Dark salient shadows were floating along strange for him trajectories.
"It's some kind of glitch!", - Sean said to himself quietly.
He came closer, closed his eyes and shot the miserable. Opening his eyes, he was sure that he would see a bloody mess. But in that place was a peacefully looking naive old man, a playful sage, a lamb full of good. Sean turned pale.
He was taught that the world was sometimes something ordinary, which could disturb the average mainstream existence. Sean decided to shot the full clip at the miserable. There was a misfire. That crazy man was smiling and cheering inside. He infectiously laughed at the place of execution, breaking the memory of thousands victims screaming before their death.
Sean removed a cold false mask from his face. He threw out the Magnum. They began to laugh at this absurd and beautiful world.
- I have killed you - choking with joy said Sean. - But it is impossible?!
- You know, there is love. Even death is powerless in comparison with it.
*
Transformed and completely another Сolonel stopped. Sean bowed before him as before an icon. Dux was going up from the hell through tangled corridors, tunnels and mines. Sean, having drunk a flask of straight Scotch whiskey, was following him like a latter-day Sancho Panza. He wanted again very much to smoke.
Piercing with their inner eye the thickness of hundreds of concrete floors, the two were waiting for each other, Сolonel and Maher. They both knew that they would meet.
They both knew that the bunker had been surrounded.
It was a day when hundreds of airports have been completely blocked for one thousand miles. The air force of dozens of countries has been raised to the air. Hundreds of different types of missiles were aimed at a small suburb of Belgrade. The city was tightly surrounded by the army, the police, the secret services.
In light of recent events there have been created special units of military psychologists. They tested both civilians and the military. Black gloomy troops of cleaners with a chevron of the plague nib exterminated infected patients, sending them to special areas surrounded by the military equipment. However, the whole units of cleaners suddenly fell ill with the silver plague and fresh units were fiercely fighting with new patients. A heavy smell of a new universal holocaust was spreading for tens of kilometers.
There was active evacuation of people. The city was quickly becoming deserted. The curfew was enlarged. Anyone who was outdoors at an inopportune time was subjected to shooting.
Maher’s residence was surrounded by hordes of tanks, armored troop carriers, guns, guided grenade launchers, missiles and drones. The institute of human military thought struck imagination by its diversity. From the side of the Danube there came a few ill-assorted squadrons filled with various submarine instruments. There were snipers everywhere. The sappers were undermining everywhere.
For the first time in the modern history all potential opponents gathered in the face of terrible danger. In Inđija, twenty-five miles away from Belgrade, there was quartered the international General Staff. Eternal enemies faced with each other, trying to work out a common line. The representatives of the "rogue" countries were walking with stone-faced in dense groups. The representatives of Latin America were waving long frightening carbines, sometimes they touched each other discreetly, sometimes expressed emotionally everything they were thinking about. Variegated Africans were walking around the city, holding AK-47 in their hands. Singaporeans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thais, Burmese, Cambodians patrolled in regular lines. Everybody was spick and span. Modern samurais moved forward in a special detachment. A large army of Indians marched. As always, the Chinese prevail over everybody, one of whom sometimes raised a sign with hieroglyphs.
Officers wearing sand-colored uniforms and headed by the Muslim leader in white clothes moved forward. Tired from the wars of many years, they, with the millennial wisdom, looked at the Europeans, the Americans, also the Israeli military, who seemed to smile invisibly.
*
The eternal sweet and vicious war of the peoples always differ from that one it had been born, it gives the highest triumph of victory and bitterness of defeat with the humiliation, suffering and death. Nobody could do over the whole mankind for five thousand years. It seemed that, for an instant, the whole humanity fetched up at the sinking ark. All family hardened peoples’ squabbles must have retreated to the background in the face of the common threat. Intrigues and frictions must calm down like disturbed bee hives. Coalitions must to hide behind the fig leaves of decency.
However, in any large and small isolated community, there almost immediately appears an energetic monad, which often gives atypical roles. No doubt that the monad plugs easily and quickly into the fabric of the unity of the world. Suddenly, one person has to play the role of the chief, another one has to play the traitor, the third one plays an informer, the fourth one plays the jovial fellow and the fifth one plays the hero, the savior of everybody. Like romping puppies which are now playing, now painfully biting, they continue to tie intricate beautiful knots of fates, swapping peace and war, enemies and friends.