12dz Chapter 933 A Conspiracy from Hell
Chapter 933 A Conspiracy from Hell
[Time]: Autumn 1956, morning
Location: Mount Maestra, "Ghost's Bane" ruins camp
"Sizzle—snap."
A piece of charcoal, freshly pulled from the fire, made a short hissing sound as it hit the bottom of the kettle.
Castro sat on a cracked, grayish-white rock, his military overcoat, which had been torn in several places by the monster's claws the night before, now draped halfway over his shoulders.
The "Broken Army" mech, which was already half-destroyed, looked like a black giant with its skeleton dismantled. It leaned quietly against the stone wall behind it, with several hydraulic oil dripping from its pipes hanging limply to the ground.
"Come on, give me your hand."
The medic accompanying the team—a bearded man in his forties—opened a bottle of medical alcohol that he had seized from the American soldiers as he spoke.
Castro extended his right hand. That hand, which was usually so powerful whether commanding battles or giving speeches, now bore a deep, bone-revealing laceration—a souvenir left from the edge of the hatch when the mech's cockpit was forcibly rammed open.
"This might hurt a little, Commander."
"Pour it out." Castro bit down on the cigar that was now just a cigarette butt. "This pain is nothing compared to the feeling of almost being chewed up by that monster last night."
A clear liquid was poured onto the red, swollen, and everted skin.
Castro's cheeks puffed out suddenly, and several veins bulged on his forehead.
But he didn't utter a sound, still holding the cup steadily in his other hand, without spilling a single drop of coffee.
Not far away, about ten meters away, on the flat ground of the rocky beach that had just been "cleared".
Che Guevara was lying on a makeshift stretcher made from ammunition boxes.
His left arm and chest were wrapped in thick bandages, and a splint could even be seen sticking out unnaturally.
His mech was the most severely damaged; the impact nearly shattered him like a sardine in a can.
But he wasn't asleep yet.
Even though the medic gave him two injections of morphine.
He was tilting his head slightly, gazing intently at the vitrified pit that still reflected the blue sky above.
Sunlight shone on the smooth, mirror-like curved surface, refracting a strange rainbow-colored halo.
"Still watching?"
After quickly bandaging himself, Castro limped over and placed the still-warm cup of coffee next to Castro's stretcher.
Doesn't it feel a little unreal?
"No... I think it's...too clean."
Turning her head, her usually pale face now had a sickly rosy glow.
His gaze was somewhat unfocused.
“Last night, this place was hell. There was blood everywhere, and that… that chewing sound of people eating their own flesh.”
He tried to lift his finger to touch it, but pulled at the wound and frowned.
"But it was just like that. A 'whoosh.' No explosion, not even a flash of light. All that filth, those monsters that killed dozens of our good lads..."
"It's like writing on a blackboard, which someone wipes away with an eraser. Gone."
“Even the smell has dissipated. You smell it… now it smells like ozone. It’s so clean it’s unsettling.”
After saying that, he coughed lightly twice.
The cough aggravated his lungs, but he didn't seem to care about the physical pain.
Castro silently patted his shoulder, then plopped down on the edge of the still-warm shell crater next to him.
He picked up a transparent stone that had completely melted and crystallized; it was a specimen left after the rock had been instantly baked at thousands of degrees Celsius.
"That's why we need to industrialize. Why listen to the big boss and build those seemingly useless chimneys?"
Castro held up the "crystal" and waved it at the sun.
"Because of that passion, because we fought desperately with machetes... even the hardness of this stone couldn't compare to that beam of light last night."
"Without this kind of thunder in our hands... even if we liberate Cuba a hundred times, that old geezer from the US could just press a button and we'd end up like those monsters."
"Turn to ash".
"Yes...turned to ash."
She closed her eyes, as if the morphine was finally taking effect.
"After this battle is over... Fidel, you take your men to Havana to form the government. I'm not going."
"Where are you going?" Castro looked at him with some surprise.
"I want to go to the Dragon Kingdom. To that place... what's it called 'Shenzhou Academy'?"
"I want to see for myself what the place where this sword was made looks like. I'm not going to be a doctor anymore... I want to study some physics."
Castro didn't speak, he just smiled. That smile looked very kind in the morning sunlight.
"Okay. I'll pay your tuition. Even if it costs me a whole warehouse of sugar."
A mountain breeze blows.
This brought news of the guerrillas' movements to the remote area.
The remaining squad leader, along with a few others, was at the edge of the woods that hadn't been affected last night, lowering the body of a young soldier from a tree branch.
That was the young man who had half his body bitten off by a monster while he was holding a flashlight.
No one spoke.
Everyone just quietly dug the hole.
This silence, and the madness of a few hours earlier, are like two extreme worlds.
But Castro knew that this peace would not last long.
There were still tens of thousands of enemy soldiers on the beach, who were terrified but still fully armed.
War never gives anyone a real holiday.
……
……
[Location]: Pentagon Central Conference Room, Washington, D.C., USA
"boom!"
A thick document was slammed onto the expensive mahogany conference table, sending cigar ash flying everywhere from the crystal ashtray next to it.
General Hughes, who had previously been a strong advocate for war but now had bloodshot eyes, pointed at the gaunt man opposite him who was elegantly adding sugar to his teacup, his spittle almost spraying across the center of the table.
"Allen! Look at this! This is what you call your 'secret weapon that can turn the tide of battle 100%'?!"
The general pulled a photograph from the documents—a photograph that had just been taken by a top-secret U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and urgently faxed back.
The Cuban jungle in the image is magnified countless times. You can clearly see that abrupt, pale, vitrified crater, resembling a cataract spot.
"It's one thing if we didn't wipe out their entire family. But what's with this mess? Your 'Atlas'... does it have a built-in self-destruct function, and a nuclear equivalent?"
"Moreover, the latest signal interception report shows that those two or three Cuban warlords are not only alive, but their radio signal is still chattering away about astronomy!"
On the other side of the conference table, several staff officers and junior generals were also whispering among themselves, the suppressed noise like hundreds of flies trapped in a jar.
"This is absurd. Twelve samples, each costing enough to buy a state-of-the-art jet fighter."
"And then? In those few hours... *poof*, it was gone."
A consultant in charge of financial auditing wiped the sweat from his forehead and kept pressing his temples with a handkerchief.
"I've run out of ideas on how to write a reason for this loss report. Should I write 'God took them back'?"
The Secretary of State still didn't turn around. He stood by the window with his hands behind his back. The back of his suit was soaked with sweat, but he was like a plaster statue, unwilling to move even a finger.
Faced with this overwhelming wave of doubts.
Allen Dulles put down the somewhat childish-looking tweezers he was holding.
The sugar cube landed smoothly in the black tea without spilling a single drop.
He looked up and pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, which were always kept very clean.
Under the light, the lenses reflected a white haze, obscuring the contents of his eyes.
"Lost?"
He asked softly, his tone even carrying a hint of barely perceptible doubt, like a math teacher hearing a primary school student miscalculate a basic addition and subtraction problem.
"General, I suggest you go back and take that... West Point statistics course again."
"What do you mean by this?!" General Hughes was so provoked by this attitude that he almost drew his gun, a vein throbbing in his neck.
Dulles slowly pulled out another, slightly thinner telegram from under the file folder.
"These are the scattered pieces of information we collected last night from several of our high-altitude listening buoys, as well as sonar buoys on the edge of the battlefield."
He didn't look at the paper; it was as if every number on it was already etched into his mind.
"The guerrillas' radio silence lasted six hours longer than average."
"Although their troop loss reports were encrypted, the changes in the number of signal sources at those surviving nodes..."
"If my intelligence analysts hadn't produced those reports while drunk—"
Dulles extended a pale, bone-white finger.
“Our twelve ‘expensive’ samples last night. Although they suffered some kind of…devastating blow beyond the realm of ordinary physics at the last moment—I’ll explain that later. But before that…”
"They wiped out at least...45 highly trained elite guerrilla fighters with those powered exoskeletons."
"It even includes the enemy's two important frontline communication hubs, as well as an entire reinforced platoon of reserves."
"And don't forget the most important thing."
Dulles leaned forward slightly, his gaze like a cold snake, locking onto the general's face.
"According to the surviving civilians—the informants we bribed—there are about six hundred armed militiamen outside the camp. Listen carefully, six hundred of them were preparing to attend that carnival party. They were so terrified that they threw down their weapons and fled into the deep mountains."
"The non-combat casualties caused by this chaos are even more valuable than killing them outright."
Even if we take a conservative estimate.
"Twelve units. They exchanged for nearly seven hundred combat personnel on the other side, including core members... paralyzing them."
That is, one to sixty.
Dulles smiled. The smile was stiff; the muscles at the corners of his mouth merely twitched upwards a few millimeters.
"This level of efficiency. I ask you, which general here, even using the best 1st Red Army Division from World War II, could achieve this overnight with just a platoon?"
The meeting room fell silent briefly.
The only sound was a low rumble from the air conditioner vents.
General Hughes opened his mouth as if to refute the absurd logic of the data, but after a few moments of hesitation, he swallowed back the insults he was about to utter.
That is indeed the case. Although the methods were horrific, and the outcome... is indescribable.
But from the cold, hard perspective of battlefield accounting, this deal was outrageously profitable.
"But……"
The financial advisor finally spoke up weakly, his voice barely audible.
“That’s only twelve. You’ve already mentioned almost all the hardened criminals available in the best death row prisons in the entire United States… those matching test subjects with ‘antisocial violence genes’… are not just roadside weeds.”
He was holding an inventory list in his hand.
"If we want to achieve that kind of... strategic deterrence, like completely submerging the entire Cuba."
“We need thousands... even tens of thousands of these.”
"This quantity of... 'raw materials'... even if we emptied all the prisons in the US right now, we still couldn't gather enough. And if we were to use prisoners on a large scale, those human rights organizations..."
He was interrupted before he could finish speaking.
This time, it was Dulles who spoke with an even more contemptuous nasal tone.
"what."
He didn't even turn around, still staring at the slowly melting sugar cube in his teacup.
"I knew it. You people spend your whole lives stuck in rules and regulations."
"That's why you've been arguing here for a month and still can't figure out how to fight those peasants from the jungle."
Dulles casually tossed the tweezers onto the table, the crisp sound like a sentencing hammer.
"Prisoners? Those low-quality junk materials, half-burnt out of their brains by drugs or syphilis... are just the initial test version of this program."
He stood up. This time, his movements no longer resembled those of a gloomy intelligence officer, but rather carried the unsettling fervor of a missionary preaching.
He slowly walked to the huge Caribbean battle map hanging on the wall.
He gently drew a circle on the main landing area, which was covered with red pins marking "Victory Beach".
"Who said that you have to use prisoners to create the strongest warrior?"
General Hughes' pupils suddenly shrank to a single point.
An extremely ominous premonition, a hundred times colder than when he had just seen the monster photo, instantly surged through his body like an electric current.
"Allen... what do you want to do...?" His voice trembled slightly.
Dulles turned around, and the backlighting angle hid his entire face in shadow, with only his gold-rimmed glasses reflecting the pale fluorescent light of the conference room.
"There. On this beach that you call 'the huddlehouse'."
"Aren't there a full 30,000... strong and healthy young men who have undergone basic physical training, and many of them are filled with anger and... despair because of their failures in the past few days?"
The meeting room was so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat.
The pen in the financial advisor's hand fell to the ground with a "clatter" and shattered, the ink spreading slowly on the expensive carpet like a pool of black blood.
"You mean..." Admiral Hughes sprang up from his chair, the movement so forceful it overturned the chair, "You mean our own... those are thirty thousand American citizens! Those are American Marines!!"
"These are 30,000 terrified soldiers who have no fighting value and will only waste supplies. If they were to return alive, their PTSD and their endless 'monster stories' would shake the very foundation of the country's rule..."
Dulles's voice remained calm, as if he were discussing the destruction of a batch of expired rations.
"Think about it. Rather than letting them scream in nightmares every night and end up being surrounded and slaughtered by the Cubans."
"Why don't we... give them a chance?"
"A...last chance to serve one's country."
"All we need to do is add the latest kind of... 'reagent' to the water source for the next airdrop supply."
He turned around, opened his arms, as if to embrace the whole world.
"Get some sleep."
"I woke up the next morning."
"We no longer have a group of weeping deserters."
"Instead, it is a true, fearless, painless... and numbering as many as 30,000... Atlas Hell Legion."
"by that time."
"Unless Fang Yu can pluck all the stars from the sky and smash them onto the ground one by one."
"Otherwise, that island, even a fly... would be eaten clean by our children."