God was speaking to me, I could feel his words ringing in my head. “No more sinning,” he told me, “no more souls resigned to hell.” It was so clear, so simple. Officers killing soldiers had cost us too many good officers, and soldiers killing themselves had cost the Lord too many good souls. Suicide was a sin, and we, his servants—those who had chosen to be his shepherds upon the earth—were the only ones who should bear the cross of releasing trapped souls from infected bodies! That is what I told division commander after he discovered what I’d done, and that is the message that spread first to every chaplain in the field and then to every civilian priest throughout Mother Russia.
What later became known as the act of “Final Purification” was only the first step of a religious fervor that would surpass even the Iranian revolution of the 1980s. God knew his children had been denied his love for too long. They needed direction, courage, hope! You could say that it is the reason we emerged from that war as a nation of faith, and have continued to rebuild our state, on the basis of that faith.
Is there any truth to the stories of that philosophy being perverted for political reasons?
[Pause.] I don’t understand.
The president declared himself head of the Church…
Can’t a national leader feel God’s love?
But what about organizing priests into “death squads,” and assassinating people under the premise of “purifying infected victims”?
[Pause.] I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Isn’t that why you eventually fell out with Moscow? Isn’t that why you’re here?
[There is a long pause. We hear the sounds of footsteps approaching. Someone knocks at the door. Father Sergei opens it to find a small, ragged child. Mud stains his pale, frightened face. He speaks in a frantic, local dialect, shouting and pointing up the road. The old priest nods solemnly, pats the boy on the shoulder, then turns to me.]
Thank you for coming. Will you excuse me, please?
[As I rise to leave, he opens a large wooden chest at the foot of his bed, removing both a bible and a World War II–era pistol.]
ABOARD USS HOLO KAI, OFF THE COAST OF THE HAWAIIAN ISLANDS
[Deep Glider 7 looks more like a twin fuselage aircraft than a minisub. I lie on my stomach in the starboard hull, looking out through a thick, transparent nose cone. My pilot, Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Choi, waves at me from the port hull. Choi is one of the “old-timers,” possibly the most experienced diver in the U.S. Navy’s Deep Submergence Combat Corps (DSCC). His gray temples and weathered crow’s-feet clash violently with his almost adolescent enthusiasm. As the mother ship lowers us into the choppy Pacific, I detect a trace of “surfer dude” bleeding through Choi’s otherwise neutral accent.]
My war never ended. If anything, you could say it’s still escalating. Every month we expand our operations and improve our material and human assets. They say there are still somewhere between twenty and thirty million of them, still washing up on beaches, or getting snagged in fishermen’s nets. You can’t work an offshore oil rig or repair a transatlantic cable without running into a swarm. That’s what this dive is about: trying to find them, track them, and predict their movements so maybe we can have some advance warning.
[We hit the whitecaps with a jarring thud. Choi grins, checks his instruments, and shifts the channels on his radio from me to the mother ship. The water before my observation dome froths white for a second, then gives way to light blue as we submerge.]
You’re not going to ask me about scuba gear or titanium shark suits, are you, because that crap’s got nothing to do with my war? Spear guns and bang sticks and zombie river nets…I can’t help you with any of that. If you want civilians, talk to civilians.
But the military did use those methods.
Only for brown water ops, and almost exclusively by army pukes. Personally, I’ve never worn a mesh suit or a scuba rig…well…at least not in combat. My war was strictly ADS. Atmospheric Diving Suit. Kind of like a space suit and a suit of armor all rolled into one. The technology actually goes back a couple hundred years, when some guy 1 invented a barrel with a faceplate and arm holes. After that you had stuff like the Tritonia and the Neufeldt-Kuhnke. They looked like something out of an old 1950s sci-fi movie, “Robby the Robot” and shit. It all kinda fell by the wayside when…do you really care about all this?
Yes, please…
Well, that sort of technology fell by the wayside when scuba was invented. It only made a comeback when divers had to go deep, real deep, to work on offshore oil rigs. You see…the deeper you go, the greater the pressure; the greater the pressure, the more dangerous it is for scuba or similar mixed-gas rigs. You’ve got to spend days, sometimes weeks, in a decompression chamber, and if, for some reason, you have to shoot up to the surface…you get the bends, gas bubbles in the blood, in the brain…and we’re not even talking about long-term health hazards like bone necrosis, soaking your body with shit nature never intended to be there.