Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes - The Novel

The Peace Walker Events

"We will forsake our countries. We will leave our motherlands behind us and become one with this earth. We have no nation, no philosophy, no ideology. We go where we're needed, fighting not for country, not for government, but for ourselves. We need no reason to fight. We fight because we are needed. We will be the deterrent for those with no other recourse. We are soldiers without borders, our purpose defined by the era we live in. We will sometimes have to sell ourselves and services. If the times demand it, we'll be revolutionaries, criminals, terrorists. And yes, we may all be headed straight to hell. But what better place for us than this? It is our only home. Our Heaven... and our Hell. This... is Outer Heaven." – Big Boss, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.

There lived a man who was a legend among mercenaries.

A man who put together a formidable unit of soldiers of fortune, long before the advent of private military companies, that dared to call itself a nation

A man who, with his nation at his back, made an enemy of modern capitalist society and the world.

This is his story.

Known by the codenames such as "Snake," and later "Big Boss," he proved himself as an agent of U.S. special forces unit FOX, but a certain incident spurred him to part ways with the military and he is said to have roamed the world's warzones as a gun for hire.

In 1974, Snake and his partner, Kazuhira Miller, were running a small military outfit in Columbia when they were visited by a man claiming to be a professor from Costa Rica's University of Peace. According to this professor, there had been several incidents involving a mysterious armed group in Costa Rica, a country without a military of its own. The professor was accompanied by one of his students, a girl named Paz, who had abducted and assaulted by this group.

The professor and Paz offered to hire Snake to drive the group out of Costa Rica. However, Snake saw through their deception in an instant.

The professor was actually a KGB agent, and the armed group in question backed by the CIA. The Cold War was no stranger to such overseas clandestine operations between U.S. and Soviet agents, but the CIA motives were a mystery.

Paz had escaped from one of the CIA group's facilities with a cassette tape. On it was the voice of the woman known as the Mother of Special Forces – The Boss. With a popular song from 1973 playing in the background, it was reasonable to conclude that the recording was made recently. Snake was stunned.

The Boss was supposed to be dead. What was she doing in Costa Rica?

The Boss was Snake's mentor, and the only woman he ever loved. But 10 years prior, Snake was forced to take The Boss' life as part of a mission – a bitter memory that still haunted him. Despite realizing that she simply could not have survived, Snake was unable to turn the professor down.

Telling himself he was intervening as a deterrent for a defenseless country – as well as to honor the virtue of Paz's name, "peace" – Snake departed for Costa Rica.

Once there, he ran into a unit of the Sandinista National Liberation Front that had fled Nicaragua. After rising up against the pro-American Somoza regime, these rebels had become targets for the CIA group, who killed their commandante and left the unit in shambles.

Snake rescued the Sandinistas and invited them back to Mother Base – the new offshore base of operations provided to them by the KGB.

The fallen commandante's children, Amanda and Chico, saw something of their hero Che Guevara in Snake, and grew to idolize him. This triggered a rapid expansion of Snake's forces.

However, he was still no closer to discovering what the CIA was really up to in Costa Rica.

Snake then encountered Huey, a wheel-chaired bound scientist being forced to work for the CIA. Huey revealed the CIA's terrifying plot – they were developing a system by which, following radar detection of an enemy nuclear launch, an A.I. would analyze all available data and automatically execute a retaliatory strike at appropriate targets. Although designed to increase the power of nuclear deterrence, Coldman, the CIA's Central American station chief, planned to actual launch a nuke to demonstrate the effectiveness of automated retaliation.

This "demonstration" was only five days away. Snake rushed to the development lab to stop their A.I. from being completed.

Upon infiltrating the lab, Snake was greeted by the voice of the tape, that same voice of his lost mentor, but this was in fact the voice of the retaliatory system's A.I.

Its developer Dr. Strangelove had selected The Boss – the so-called greatest soldier who ever lived – as the A.I.'s intellectual model. However, succumbing to personal obsession, Strangelove had deviated from the research's original purpose – not only had she reproduced The Boss' voice, she was on the verge of bringing her psyche back to life in A.I. form, driven by a bizarre kind of love.

What if The Boss could truly be revived in every detail, if only in A.I. form...? Snake hesitated as Strangelove's idea touched his sense of loss. His guard down, Snake was immediately captured. The Boss A.I. was completed, and Peace Walker, the nuclear-equipped walking battle tank housing this retaliatory A.I. system, went active.

Snake fought in vain as Peace Walker prepared to fire the nuke. But in the face of catastrophe, it was ultimately a machine that saved mankind from nuclear annihilation – The Boss A.I. sank Peace Walker to the bottom of Lake Nicaragua, stopping the launch.

With the crisis behind him, Snake took advantage of his recent mobilization to continue Mother Base's expansion indefinitely.

Snake understood that the A.I. had acted to save the world, but that did not change the fact that this system based on The Boss' mind had chosen at last to lay down its weapon. As a weapon himself, Snake felt the act to be a rejection of his life.

Undeterred, Snake and Miller invited doctors Huey and Strangelove to Mother Base to develop Metal Gear ZEKE, a bipedal weapon they eventually equipped with a nuclear warhead, suddenly making their unit a nuclear power.

Meanwhile, Mother Base took in Paz, already an orphan but now left without even her KGB benefactor following the end of the crisis. However, this was all engineered by an intelligence agency known as Cipher.

Under Cipher's orders, Paz got close to Amanda, Chico, and the others while exploring more and more of the base, secretly plotting to hijack ZEKE. Her objective was to use the weapon as a bargaining chip to force Snake into becoming the military arm for Cipher.

Paz's attempt failed when Snake defeated ZEKE, and she was thrown beneath the waters of the Caribbean. It was the only then that Snake learned Chico had fallen in love with her.

A diary she kept while on the base was discovered several days later. It revealed a young girl torn between serving Cipher and following her heart. This discovery made them wonder if whether she left it behind to help them or not and who she would side with if she had survived.