Genocidal Organ by Project Itoh

the speakers, as if he were somehow trying to physically absorb the sound. He was dressed to the nines in his former military uniform, spick and span, as if he were about to attend a formal ceremony.
    By the look of things the room was completely unguarded. Target A was alone. It would have been a piece of cake to dispatch him on the spot. The problem was that Target A wasn’t currently deep in conversation with Target B as we expected he would be at this time. If the defense minister’s corpse was discovered before Target B, the American, arrived, he might slip through our fingers.
    Is Target B even here in the first place ? I wondered. Perhaps that sense of unease that we had before the drop was justified after all. Now would be just the right time for Murphy’s Law to kick in. Assassination was a complex job with many variables at the best of times. When you had two simultaneous targets, the difficulty level didn’t increase arithmetically so much as geometrically.
    What to do? The one thing I knew was that I had no time to waste. We were right in the middle of enemy heartland, and all it would take was one false move for us to be overrun; Alex and I, at the very least, would be sitting ducks.
    Time for a decision. The ability to act quickly and under pressure was one of the hallmarks of special ops after all. I killed my breath and silently replaced my AK with my knife. The moment the former brigadier general turned his back, I leapt across the room and pounced. Using one of my arms to pin his arms behind his back, I held the tip of my knife to his throat.
    “You’re not my target,” I said. “But if you make a noise or move, I’ll kill you. Understand?” I was lying, of course, and I can’t say I was particularly proud of the fact that I was lying to a man who was about to die. That I was about to kill, even. But this wasn’t the time to be worrying about the finer points of battlefield ethics. “It’s the American we’re looking for. The man you were supposed to meet today.”
    “I didn’t know he was American,” the defense minister said, his breath remarkably steady considering the position he was in, with the deadly blade pricking his throat. “He’s our press secretary. Was. Not is.”
    “So you killed him?” I asked, pressing the point of the blade further against his throat.
    “No. He just suddenly up and left for no apparent reason. A few days ago, this was. I wanted to know the details. That’s why we planned to rendezvous here today. I was expecting to meet him in person, but he just left a message for me.”
    Shit. That meant that Target B wouldn’t be appearing tonight. Well, we’d still be able to accomplish our first priority and eliminate the former brigadier general, so the mission wouldn’t be a complete washout, not by any means. Still, it was a loose end, and that always left a bad taste in my mouth.
    “What did the message say?” I asked.
    “It was a short note on official government stationery. ‘My work here is done.’ That’s all it said,” the ex-brigadier general said.
    “Official government stationery my ass. What ‘official government’? What ‘government’ at all? You’re just a bunch of armed thugs fighting over scraps of land and wreaking genocide on your own people. Scum of the earth, that’s what you are.”
    “Genocide, you say?” he said. “Is that what you call our peacekeeping efforts? Our government needs to subdue the terrorist threat for the good of our own people.”
    “As I said, it’s not a government,” I argued back. “Call yourself defense minister or whatever you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re not recognized by the United Nations, and more to the point you’re the ones going around killing your own people.”
    “What has the UN got to do with anything? You imperialists are the ones who came here, trampling our indigenous culture to the ground, laughing at our efforts at self-determination, stirring up