Agent Barbara of the Interstellar Intelligence Agency breathed a sigh of relief. Sergeant Niehaus was finally dead. The last loose end had been cut. Niehaus and her teammates, now all deceased, were national heroes. Unnamed heroes, of course, as is custom in special ops.
A year and a half ago, they, Omega Force Team Sixteen, had killed Salom Hashish, the notorious terrorist who had waged war against the Earthan Republic for the last thirty years. Or at least that was the official story. He had not been incinerated and cast into an undisclosed portion of interstellar space, as everyone had been told. They had handed him over to the IIA alive.
Special forces soldiers, as deadly and loyal and unquestioning as they are, cannot be trusted to not get drunk and open their mouths. So, they had to die. None of them were murdered. That would be suspicious. They merely were all assigned on suicide missions. Niehaus was just someone who managed to keep surviving. Fifteen missions she and her new squad-mates limped back from, bloodied and with enormous body counts. Barbara had had to get creative to kill her. A tip to a local warlord that a flight of special forces soldiers would come this way on a personnel quadcopter had done the trick, and Niehaus had met her end in a fiery crash. As expensive as a lost quadcopter was for the operational budget, killing her when she wasn’t on the ground seemed the only option at that point. That and the temporary escape of a low mid-level drug trafficker in the Kalagnarican jungle was a small price to pay for national security.
He shuddered at the thought of what could’ve happened if it leaked that Hashish was alive. That he had actually undergone plastic surgery and was now retired on a beach resort on Paradian IV, with a new name and a huge bank account. The man had been an essential asset of the agency and had done more to strengthen the Earthan Republic than anyone would ever know or believe.
The public was simply not informed enough to understand the grand strategic thinking. Aside from the minor economic benefits of the vastly increased opium production the war brought, there was a more fundamental need. The Earthan Republic needed to advance its weapons technologies at a breakneck pace to maintain relevance when compared to the People’s Democratic Republic of Chibej and the Empire of Putovlad. The only way to spurn its arm companies forward was to supply them with the amount of funding that war production provided. It was basic capitalist economics. The people would only tolerate such an inflated budget if there was an imminent existential threat, and Hashish, a former IIA asset himself, had graciously volunteered, and had simply passed the torch to his successor and began his much-deserved retirement.
