Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  So while the Dutchmen explored their morose natures inside their sandbagged building, he’d slipped under the barbed wire and gotten into the Humvee, one of several parked outside. The guard posts weren’t even manned by Dutchies, but by Afghan army troopers and they were at low readiness, so Ray had no trouble getting by.

  He cracked the plastic dashboard, peeled the broken shielding off to reveal the ignition wiring, probed it with his knife blade, and in a bit it had stirred to life; he let it idle, peeped up to make sure no one in the guard post had noticed and that no drunken, high Dutchie was coming to check. He was momentarily secure.

  He looked to the radio, saw that it was the standard mounted high-frequency AN/MRC-138, a higher-powered version of the PRC-104, the universal talk box of the war on terror. Ray knew it well, having been a radioman sometime in an ancient Marine Corps past, and turned it on, watching it pop and crackle to life as a small red light reached peak intensity, signifying full power, then went to the frequency knob, turned it slowly, and finally acquired 15.016 MHZ, the battalion operating freak. With no mountains in between, it ought to be a loud-and-clear chat.

  He held the push-to-talk button down, and spoke into the phone.

  “Whiskey-Six, this is Whiskey Two-Two. Do you receive, over.”

  “Whiskey Two-Two, this is Whiskey-Six, roger. Authentification, please.”

  “Olympic downhill,” said Ray.

  Commo tumbled out of protocol.

  “Ray, Jesus—”

  “Whiskey-Six, do you have Six Actual there, over.”

  “Negative, Two-Two, I’ll get him, over.”

  “Whiskey-Six, negative, no time now. Be advised Two-Two is on-site and will execute tomorrow. I say again, Two-Two on-site, running hot, straight and dead zero, will execute as planned tomorrow and then exfiltrate by any means possible. Scrub the chopper pickup, Two-Two will hump it out the soft way. Do you read, over?”

  “Copy that, Two-Two, will advise Six Actual ‘On-site and will execute to—’”

  “Whiskey Six, that is all. Two-Two out.”

  Ray cut off the power, hung the phone on its cradle.

  He turned off the idling engine, eased out of the vehicle, low-crawled seventy-five feet to the sector of fencing farthest from the guard post, staying out of the lights, and took his cuts and punctures while slowly picking his way through the lower coils. That wasn’t easy but far from impossible, for the barbed wire was meant to slow down, not stop, incursion. A little beyond the wire, he found shadow and rose and slipped away to the site where he’d cached his SVD. Tomorrow was shaping up to be a very interesting day.

  2ND RECON BATTALION HQ

  FOB WINCHESTER

  S-2 SHOP

  ZABUL PROVINCE

  SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

  2350 HOURS

  Jesus Christ,” said Colonel Laidlaw, “and kiss my ass! He made it. The Cruise Missile made it.”

  S-2 asked, “He didn’t say anything more? No details, no—”

  “I had the idea he was stressed,” said the corporal who’d been on radio watch. “He didn’t want to talk at length. He just communicated the message—those are his exact words, sir—and signed off. I have no idea of the origin of the call. He had all call signs right, authentification code right, and I know Sergeant Cruz well and recognized his voice.”

  “That’s fine, Nichols, you can go now,” said the colonel, and the young NCO rose, left the bunker tent, and headed back to his duty station.

  The colonel, in his nighttime sweats, the exec still in camos, and S-2, also still in camos, sat around the working table under the now-dead monitor on which they’d watched the fate of 2-2 play out. Cigarettes were consumed, and the colonel had the whiff—just the tiniest—of bourbon to him.

  “Should we notify higher HQ, sir? The Agency liaison? At least helos at Ripley so we can put a bird airborne to get him out if he calls in again and needs emergency extract, no matter what he says tonight.”

  “Negative, negative,” said the colonel. “I don’t like the way they were jumped and that the shooters knew exactly who they were.”

  “Sir, it could have just been Taliban assholes. They’ll shoot up anything and say it was God’s will.”

  “These guys were not Taliban. They were too disciplined. They were all in prone, they were in a good tactical array, when they moved, they moved professionally, not like hadjis going to a book burning. And let’s not forget: they hit the target. No, we’ll keep this to ourselves. It’s our party, we invented it, it’s our man, our materiel, our mission. No, this is for us. Tomorrow I want a patrol in force to head out on the road to Qalat and I want a lot of other smaller patrol activity in that sector. I want Humvees all over the place, lots of corpsmen and sniper teams. Lots of marine presence and I want the troops on the alert in case Ray needs help fast or needs a place to go to with a pack of hadjis on his ass.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the exec. “I’ll draft the orders.”

  The colonel turned to S-2.

  “Will we be able to eyeball him from above at that time tomorrow, or is the satellite somewhere helpful, like Hawaii or Omaha?”

  “We only get real-time satfeed from 1400 through about 1530 tomorrow, sir.”

  “Ach,” said the colonel. “That is not pleasing. S-Two, try to think of something that might please me. Think real hard. I know you can do it.”

  “Sir, I can request that the Agency task a recon Predator tomorrow and get us a real-time feed while this thing is going down.”

  “And what are our chances that these wonderful folks will cooperate with us?”

  “I would say somewhere between zero and negative two thousand.”

  “That is not pleasing to me.”

  “Sir, I will take a Humvee, with your permission, and personally make the request.”

  “Tell them if they don’t, I’ll call in an artillery strike on their operations bunker.”

  “Sir, I don’t think they’ve got a sense of humor. These people take themselves very seriously. But I do know a guy. In person, maybe I can get something set up. I know if we go routine channels through radio request, some Army dental hygiene unit will be in an ambush somewhere up-country and they’ll get all the drone action.”

  “Then you do that, S-Two. You do that and get me my picture show.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  “Good. Now everybody get some sleep. And pray for Ray if you’re religious. And if you’re not religious, pray for Ray. That’s an order.”

  ROOF OF ABDUL THE BUTCHER’S

  GUIZAR STREET

  TANBOOR NEIGHBORHOOD

  QALAT

  ZABUL PROVINCE

  SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

  0700 HOURS

  Bogier felt a little less edgy. He’d fucked two houris in a house of ill repute in the district, and at least had his rod problems quieted for a bit. He’d taken two dexes and a Chinese red tiger and his mind was racy with energy. All his boys had gotten a little shut-eye, and the two Izzies seemed in good spirits, and not likely to cut his throat while he slept. Now he had to call in, see what was going to happen. Maybe they could all go home. That would be the best result.

  He got out the Thuraya, activated it, pressed the button, and waited.

  In time Mr. MacGyver picked up.

  “Did you have a good time at the whorehouse?” he asked.

  “We all needed some R and R, Mr. MacGyver. Those satellites don’t miss a trick, do they?”

  “Not when you’re carrying that GPS with you. Funny, I didn’t think you were a doggie-style guy.”

  “Wow, that’s some satellite.”

  “Joke. Bogier, even the great MacGyver has a sense of humor. So now you’ve gone to ground less than half a mile from the compound.”

  “That’s right, sir. And I’ve eyeballed the Many Pleasures Hotel. It’s the usual fucking joint. Not exactly a Holiday Inn. Ugh, negative stars in Frommer’s.”

  “I don’t need to know the detai
ls. Here’s the play. Get one of your Izzies into the place tomorrow morning or afternoon. He’s got to get to the roof somehow, and plant that GPS. We need a satellite lock-on to watch and see what goes down.”

  “Is that where the marine is shooting from?”

  “Bogier, if I don’t tell you something, it’s because I don’t want you to know it. So no questions, that’s still the deal.”

  “Got it. Sorry. But it’s the only site with enough elevation to get a shot into the compound.”

  “You’re a genius, Bogier. No flies on you. Let’s get back to tomorrow, shall we? After you plant that GPS, I want you to surveil. You set up all around. You cover each entrance. There can’t be that many.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You make sure the marine has entered the building.”

  “Suppose he’s there already?”

  “We don’t think he’ll take the chance. That’s our best thinking. He’s suspicious now, but he doesn’t know anything. So why put himself there with that big rifle and wait? It’ll make more sense to him to slide in late, check into a room, and cut his exposure to the minimum. Plus he’s got to buy some rope tomorrow, because he doesn’t want to come off that roof by stairway or an elevator built in 1891. He’ll want to get down fast, and rappelling is the only way, and it’s clearly within his skill set.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re looking for a man with a rifle under his robes. You think he’s hit? So wouldn’t he be moving tentatively?”

  “Yes, sir, and if a .50 grazed him, he’s purple from shoulder to ankle. He’ll be moving very tentatively. Would it be easier to tell the police an assassination attempt—”

  “No. Because they will surround the hotel crudely and he will go away. Then he will return to his HQ and make a formal report on everything that has happened and questions we don’t want to be raised may well be raised. No, we want him in that hotel.”

  “And we take him on the roof?”

  “No. You make certain he’s in the hotel, then you call me with the definite, then, if I were you, I’d take cover.”

  MANY PLEASURES HOTEL

  QALAT

  ZABUL PROVINCE

  SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

  1850 HOURS

  Soon came the call to evening prayers. Soon the sun set. Soon tea would be drunk, food would be eaten, life in all its manifold pleasures would be experienced by the rich and all its manifold pains by the poor. The city would go silent.

  In that falling dusk, the man known as the Beheader would leave his large house and walk to his jet black armored Humvee for a fuck with a woman without a voice. He would not make it. A bullet the size of a pencil tip would enter his body at well over 2,300 feet per second from a cartridge of the equivalent of an American .30-06 and would blow out several of his blood-bearing organs, most notably his heart. He would be dead before he fractured his expensive Dallas cosmetic-dentistry whitened and straightened teeth on the cobblestones.

  Or something like that.

  Ray looked up and down the street. No sign of any police or militia presence. An orange personnel carrier, bearing the emblem of the Royal Dutch Marines, had ground down the street once at around two, but since then all was normal, as lorries, bikes, scooters, to say nothing of hundreds of merchants and citizens and donkeys, even the occasional fleet of goats, filled the busy street that housed the hotel, directly across from the gated compound of Ibrahim Zarzi, warlord, politician, and best-dressed man of 1934.

  His leg pain was muted somewhat by a morning of rest in a fleabag near the railway station, and a couple of kabobs for nourishment from a street-side vendor outside and half a bottle of aspirin from what passed as a “drugstore” in Afghanistan. He could have had keefe or bennies or dex or red who’s-your-mamas? or rolling chocolate death or whatever, but stayed with the regular stuff. He’d also had about a gallon of the sugary tea.

  Now, amid the hundreds, virtually indiscernible from them, he hobbled down the street, face down, his bad leg aching, the rifle suspended by the strap around his shoulder and threaded down his pants leg. It might print if he wore it across his back, or someone in a crowd might jostle against him and feel the presence of steel. It dangled, the butt of its stock directly in the armpit, the long skeleton of wooden stock extending its length ridiculously, the receiver group against his hip, the fore end and barrel down the side of his leg. He’d taped the magazine under the wooden fore grip, to keep the thickness of the thing, with its Chinese scope clamped up on top in some sort of steel frame, at a minimum. It meant that when he came to shoot, he’d have to take a second to rip the mag from its bonds of tape, quickly peel any filaments of tape away, slam it into the mag well, then pull and release the bolt as he rose and put himself in the offhand shooting position.

  He didn’t need to tell himself, but he always did anyway, a kind of mantra: breathe, relax, let sight settle, focus on crosshairs not target, press not pull, follow through, pin trigger. He’d done it a hundred thousand times.

  He entered the hotel. It was ancient, somewhat Anglified in its shabby dignity and brass fixtures, and in pre-Soviet invasion days had been a haven for the hippies who came to rural Afghanistan to enjoy the local crops unmonitored by police agencies. The Reds had turned it into a troop barracks, and when the Taliban kicked them out it had languished, as under those stern boys not a lot of traveling had been done in the country. Since, er, “liberation,” it had enjoyed substantially more prosperity, and now and then a particularly adventurous journalist or TV crew would stay there, in for an interview with the Beheader, who sometimes kept his appointments and sometimes didn’t.

  Ray slid up to a desk and was greeted by the suspicious eyes of a clerk and he abated that suspicion by sliding over a 250-rupee note and his beautifully forged Afghan identity card, which had him down as Farzan Babur.

  No words were necessary, nor were signatures. The fellow took the note and returned thirty-five rupees in change, and pushed over a key, which wore a brass tag with the number 232 on it. Ray bowed humbly, took the key and the dough, and sloughed to the stairway.

  “Got him,” said Tony Z-for-Zemke, a forces washout who’d done nine years for Graywolf Security before being cashiered out on the same surrendering-pilgrim gig that had gotten Bogier fired. Since there were no radios, Tony Z had come running across the street, dodging bikes and donkeys. “Mick, I got him. Definite. A ‘limp,’ some kind of awkward thing under his robes if you looked. Clearly had a load on under all the Izzie shit he was wearing.”

  “See his face? White guy, marine?”

  “Scruffy black beard, face held low, maybe a little browner than you’d expect. Maybe he’s Asian or Mexican or some weird shit like that. You know, diversity’s the thing these days. Not a native, his skin wasn’t rough enough.”

  “Okay,” said Mick, “get the other guys and fall back to that cafe. I’ll make the call.”

  Mick slipped back, tried to find some privacy on the busy roadway, couldn’t, slipped into a street that led nowhere except to stalls of Afghan wares—the kind of crap these people sold—felt good when one of his Izzies came up to offer screening, and got the phone out, unlimbered the antenna.

  “Yes, yes?” MacGyver demanded.

  “We got him.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “You didn’t give us a pic. What I have is a non-Afghani in tribal garb and turban with apparently a bad leg heading into the hotel, just as predicted. He had some kind of shit under his robes, obviously the rifle. My guy couldn’t get a close-up look-see, but all the indicators are there.”

  “A white man? American white?”

  “Ahhh—” Mick’s doubts came out.

  “Well?”

  “My guy said maybe he was a bit brown. Could have been Hispanic or maybe even Asian. He—”

  “Bingo,” said Mr. MacGyver. “Now get undercover.”

  2ND RECON BATTALION HQ

  FOB WINCHESTER

  S-2 BUNKER

&nb
sp; ZABUL PROVINCE

  SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

  1904 Hours

  Heeere’s Johnny,” said Exec.

  “I am goddamned,” said Colonel Laidlaw. “I am getting that sergeant a medal.”

  The cruciform locator on the screen centered on downtown Qalat, exactly at the site—authenticated breathlessly from maps by a triumphant S-2 who’d gotten Agency coop by calling in every favor he was owed, plus offering his firstborn if necessary to three separate officers—of the Many Pleasures Hotel across from the Beheader’s complex, as seen from a discreetly cruising Predator drone a few thousand feet overhead. Ray’s GPS was talking to its friends in the sky and by magical technical shit beyond the imagination of the colonel the chatter was being intercepted and used to pinpoint the GPS’s location, and the camera in the Predator laid out everything perfectly, despite the readouts all over the screen, the other small screens from other feeds, the gray-green-black color scheme.

  They could see the walled complex, the big main house, the garages out back; they could see the incandescent scuttle of ants that were men, the glow of cooking fires on the property, a silver ribbon where a stream ran through it. Outside the walls, a human glowworm passed to and fro, this being the blur of pedestrian traffic. The white square roofs of the odd vehicles caught in this river of humanity showed clearly. It was the best movie Colonel Laidlaw had ever seen. He watched the hotel, slightly obscured under the cruciform of the locked-on locator, and saw the street scene from his memory, as on two occasions earlier on the tour he’d been a guest of the Beheader.

  “Here comes the Humvee,” said S-2.

  Indeed from one of the smaller buildings in Zarzi’s complex, the square roof of the armored vehicle scuttled forward, scooted between buildings, and came to rest in the driveway along one wall, perhaps thirty yards from the main building. The glowing signatures of underlings scurried this way and that. They seemed to form a security cordon right at the house itself, and it didn’t take long for the door to open—so sharp was the long-range image that the narrow slice of the door, viewed from above, was clearly resolved—and a figure stepped out.