The Colonel’s eyes now smolder with obsession. His face is like that of a prophet who once experienced otherworldly bliss and tries to convey just a fraction of it to a lesser mortal.
“I bathed in his grandeur with my men and let it wash away the bonds shackling me to the past. He opened my eyes and made me invincible. Cast away that doubt from your eyes, Major! It was the fear in his enemies’ hearts that made him invincible. To be invincible, you must be feared! Kill one man, terrorize a thousand! The rules of war haven’t changed from the times of Sun Tzu and Genghis Khan. But in our war, whenever my country killed one man she apologized to ten thousand! Could such methods ever lead to victory, Major?”
“Sun Tzu also said that none can see the strategy from which comes victory.”
“Because Sun Tzu was no Marine!” The Colonel proudly exclaims. “But we understood that even if our country was not to be feared anymore since her backbone was broken, we could still be — I could still be feared. By the time I emerged on the surface I was filled with power and strength. The men who were with me in those catacombs were no longer simple Marines. The… Spirit had turned them into true warriors and they became my Lieutenants. The Spirit imparted our bodies the strength to follow the call and crush anyone in our path. The Spirit… it is powerful beyond your wildest imagination, Major. Had our willpower not been tempered and honed like fine steel by the discipline of my beloved Corps, it would have crushed us and turned us into wild animals. We detonated the tunnels after we left to prevent anyone from finding it again. I know about your scientists, Major Tarasov, and also about the people wanting to hijack their mission. They will all die, if they are not dead already.”
“Will it be the Tribe that kills them?” Tarasov cloaks all his vulnerability behind a simple question.
The Colonel looks at him like a father whose son has asked something of a futile nature. “If I am talking to you, Major, you’d better not interrupt. But to answer your question: no. They will not be so lucky. The spirit knows how to defend itself.”
The Colonel falls silent for a moment, smoking his cigarette. Tarasov doesn’t dare speak.
“After we emerged from the catacombs, there were a few grunts who still didn’t understand. My warriors were only too eager to finish them off, and a day after the battle I was finally relieved of my duties. They charged me with mutiny, with operating without any decent restraint and beyond acceptable human conduct. But the generals no longer had any power over me. They sent people after me to terminate my command, but they either joined us or died.”
The Colonel discharges his cigarette and falls quiet.
Tarasov hesitates before asking the Colonel how the Marines, supposedly the most loyal unit in America’s armed forces, could cope with apparent treason. But, emboldened by the thought of being executed anyway, he risks asking one tricky question without caring much about the Colonel's possible reaction to it.
“What happened to ‘semper fidelis’? No matter what reasons you might have — what you did was, after all, plain mutiny.”
“What makes you think you can judge me?” the Colonel questions him, grimly. “We had to choose between heeding the call of the Spirit or keeping true to a morally corrupt country that has no appreciation for our way of life anymore. Do not dare to judge me and my Marines.”
“And to keep up with your losses, you took in Afghan children to let them fight for you?”
The Colonel waves a hand towards the table. “Have you studied Napoleon’s works, Major?”
“Yes. We had to study his battles.”
“That’s only the surface of his genius. Back at Quantico, we too had to read Napoleon. In his memoirs, he wrote that his soldiers could have stayed in Egypt forever, had they used the local women to supply the army with new soldiers. Back when I read that, it sounded like madness, or at least like a broken old man’s desire for the young women he must have enjoyed in his youth in a foreign land. When we found ourselves here on our own, I wasn’t laughing about him anymore. Strong and desperate men come to join us now and then from all over the world, but they are not like my Lieutenants. And while invincible, my warriors are not immortal. Yes, we need natural born warriors, who have the spirit in their heart as soon as they are born, who are like the flesh growing from the rocks of this land. The Hazara are not just any tribe, Major. They are the direct descendants of Genghis Khan’s warriors. Or so they claim… and once I took up his heritage, it was my duty to protect his lost tribe. With my guidance, they have recovered their roots.”
Tarasov feels odd. At the beginning, what the Colonel told him sounded like the ranting of a lunatic, but the longer he listens to the big man, the more it seems to him that his words start shaping into a steadfast theory — a cruel and savage, but nonetheless logical, theory. It is the logic in the Colonel’s words that he finds the most frightening.
He looks at the girl. Using a short pause between the Colonel’s words, he dares to speak again. “It seems that in the end, you did win over some hearts and minds.”
“In these valleys, Major, the Pashtu were fighting the Tajiks and the Taliban both, and all three were murdering the Hazara. We offered the Hazara widows protection and their orphans education — proper education. You call us mutineers, but where are the billions of dollars my country spent to ‘help’ these people? Where are the NGOs, the rights activists and other idealists? It is only us, the warriors you dare call mutineers, who remained and accomplished the mission we were sent here to do. Don’t you think so, Major Tarasov?”
“But you didn’t do it to give them freedom and peace.”
“Both freedom and peace have a different meaning here than in our countries, Major. This is what our politicians could never understand. Here, freedom means to be free to live according to a code of honor. Peace means that this code is upheld. Our code of war and their code of life created the Tribe. The only real treasure this land can offer is its women. They will never betray you. They will never want to rip off your manhood by claiming to be equal to you. They want you to be stronger than them, to protect and care for them. All they ask in exchange is loyalty… and fair justice. They use the same word for justice and revenge: badal. For the mistreated, be it orphans or widows, nothing makes a better leader than one who offers badal. And we were all thirsting for… for someone who would at last appreciate our code of honor, our strength and our loyalty.”
While the big man spoke, the girl sewing up his wound has finished the last stitch. With a pass of his hand, the Colonel sends her away. He reclines and sighs, as if relieved of torturing pain.
As the girl passes by Tarasov with a jingle of bangles that adorn her ankles, she gives him a look of curiosity. Their eyes meet for a moment and Tarasov shudders once more, but this time at the regret that his life will soon be over and he will have no more chances to meet and love beautiful women like her who, as it seems to him now, has eyes yielding some unique quality that makes him forget about her gruesome scar.
“What happened later only proved me right,” the Colonel continues, “so right. We had shelter and were well equipped. We survived the nukes. Thrived, even. Soon, when enough men have joined us and the sons of our women grow up, there will be enough of us to conquer more of this land. And after that… but there’s no point in telling you more. I wanted to share this long story with you so that I don’t have to shoulder its burden alone. It is not often that I meet a fellow officer, and only men like you could possibly understand. And now, Major Mikhailo Yuryevich Tarasov, tell me — what do you think of my methods?”