Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “Señor?”

  “Can you throw it in the pool?” Mick asked.

  “It would not be a good idea.”

  “Agh,” said Mick. Who knew he was here? No one. That meant someone with the connex.

  “Hello?” Mick said.

  “Bogier. Enjoying the view?”

  MacGyver. He thought he was done with that asshole. It played out as per, and indeed the agreed-upon large sum had been wired to Mick’s account. Mick had also decided it was time to quit Kabul, in case someone caught on to something and marines came looking for him. So he awarded himself liberty. Maybe it would stop the ringing in his ears.

  “I was until I heard from you.”

  “Don’t be testy.”

  “I’m on vacation. I’m whipped.”

  “Vacation’s over. A detail has come loose.”

  “And that would be?”

  “The guy you were paid to handle? Well, chum, you didn’t handle him. He’s back.”

  “Hey,” said Mick, “you guys cratered that hotel. He was there, I put him there for you, and you pushed the button and ka-boom, no more hotel. By the way, thanks for almost killing me too. However you did it, that sucker blew like a nuke. Man, that was a payload.”

  Mick remembered. How could he forget? He was a little off the street with his screen of Izzies in the alleyway. He disconnected the phone, turned, and signaled the war party to fall back. Then a screaming came across the sky, and the det went. Jesus fucking Christ. He had been around explosions his entire professional life. He’d set them, he’d planned them, he’d been inside a couple, he’d been close enough to a couple to catch a ride through the air for twenty-five feet, he had a thousand pepper marks on his otherwise glorious body from supersonic debris. But nothing like this. Explosions have personalities and they express ideas, they are not all the same. This one carried the message of serious mega destruction. It wasn’t a warning or an exclamation point, it wasn’t witty, ironic, amusing, or earnest. It was the end of the world in a very small package and it literally evaporated the hotel in a single nanosecond with a percussion that seemed to drive the oxygen from the surface of the earth and in the next nanosecond deposited a rain of dust, wreckage, human and animal parts, chunks of iron and masonry, windowsills, curtain rods, shards of glass on everything for miles around. It knocked him down. What the fuck. That was a goddamned blast and a half.

  “It was thermobaric. We warned you to take cover. Did you need an engraved invitation?”

  “The timing was a little off. It came in ahead of sked and capped thirty-one pilgrims and almost buried yours truly under a pile of heads and arms.”

  “Cry me a river why don’t you. That’s the suck, your chosen workplace. You’re in this particular operation, you’ll work it through to the end. Got it? We don’t have time to do a recruitment drive. We pick you and you don’t have the latitude here to say no, mister.”

  Unsaid: whoever MacGyver was, his power in finding and reaching Mick here or in the Cat’s Eye cafe in Kabul where all the coyotes hung meant again: he had the connex. A phone call from him could bring major heat beaucoup fast on Mick’s ass.

  “Not on the same bill,” said Mick. “That one’s over. This one’s starting up. Same fee structure. I don’t work cheap.”

  “Corporate, aren’t we? ‘Fee structure,’ very Graywolf. Yes, of course, lots of money for you.”

  “Okay,” said Mick, “come to think of it, I would like to fry this little bastard for good.”

  “I’m sure he feels the same way about you. Can you reassemble your team?”

  “Tony’s with me, Crackers went home to his wife and kids in Fayetteville. I can get him back, no problem. What’s the play?”

  “This time, not only are you hunting this character, but so are the FBI and the CIA and just about everybody else. So you’ve got some competition. But to make it harder, they just want to stop the guy. You have to kill him, Mr. Mission Impossible.”

  “That’s what I do.”

  “Little evidence of that yet, friend, though I understand you’re hell on goats. He’s trying to finish the mission you stopped him from completing. He wants to put a bullet in Ibrahim Zarzi, the Afghan politician, who arrives in Washington for a high-profile visit in two weeks. This time, you stop him, permanently. He is under no circumstances to whack Zarzi or fall into police hands and go all Chatty Cathy on us.”

  “Leads, you have leads?”

  “The Bureau-Agency team handling this has gone to an old guy named Swagger, a former marine sniper with a lot of experience in these games. He’s you with brains, talent, imagination, stamina, and guts. I’ve seen the file.”

  “The Nailer. A classic oldie. I’ve heard of the guy.”

  “I’ll bet you have. He makes Ray Cruz look like a kindergartener. Swagger has the best chance of nailing Cruz, so you’ll be given all sorts of little gadgets to make tracking Swagger something within your Neanderthalic reach.”

  “If I get ’em together, I have the okay to dust ’em both? I don’t like the idea of pulling down on a knight of the round table, but there may not be another way.”

  “Bogier, don’t go soft on me and start humming ‘Halls of Montezuma.’ Collateral’s part of the business. This one is about getting the job done by any means possible. Don’t fuck this up.”

  “Get over it. I didn’t fuck up the last one. I delivered. Your thermobaric nuke didn’t quite do the job.”

  “Bogier, this is unbelievably crucial. At your level you can’t possibly understand what’s at stake. But trust me: you must come through on this. No pussy, no blow, no uppers or downers, no new tattoos, no three hours in the gym every day. You get it done.”

  “I have it.”

  “We don’t like to use coyotes. But we have no choice. Show us we haven’t misjudged.”

  “Roger, wilco.”

  “And one more thing: no witnesses.”

  CASCADE MEADOWS, IDAHO

  32 MILES EAST OF BOISE

  1635 HOURS

  He told you?” Bob asked.

  Nick reached into his briefcase and pulled out a file, reached into the file and pulled out a decrumpled piece of yellow paper now preserved in cellophane. It was a Marine Corps incoming radio communication form. Nick handed it over.

  Bob saw the operator’s name, the unit designation “2-2 Recon” and the date, sometime last week, and the time, 0455. He read the message:

  “‘Whiskey Six, this is Whiskey Two-Two. Authentification Olympic downhill. I say again, Olympic downhill.” There was an asterisk scribbled in pencil next to the transmission, and at the bottom, after the footnote style, next to the parallel asterisk the operator had written, “No record of ‘Olympic downhill’ as verifier.”

  Unrecorded was the radio operator’s response, which must have been something like, “Codes and verifier invalid, who are you, Two-Two, over, what is your situation, why are you in communication with this unit?”

  Ray just bulled ahead, and the young man had written down:

  “Whiskey Two-Two is on-site and will proceed with operation as planned. Target will be destroyed sometime next two to four weeks. Hunting is good, morale is high. Semper Fi. Out.”

  “The kid thought it was some kind of joke, but it went into the log and the next day, the CO’s looking at the log. He used to be the exec and he remembered Two-Two. He got on the phone to division and on to marine headquarters at Henderson and then to us.”

  “So the thinking is,” Bob said, “Cruz survived the blast and didn’t limp back to his FOB but instead went AWOL big time as a way of going rogue. Somehow, he got out of Afghanistan and found a way back. Now he’s pissed at what he has decided is some kind of betrayal that killed his spotter and thirty-one Afghans. Maybe he’s a little nuts. So he’s going to whack this politician anyway, just out of spite.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Come on. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Especially now that the Afghan is on our side, publicly an
d loudly. So Ray is now betraying his country and his service. It’s like he’s working for them. He couldn’t have been captured and turned?”

  “Seems unlikely, but there are cases like it.”

  “That’s not Ray,” said Swagger, who now believed he knew Ray or at least could feel the way his mind operated. “No, he’s got some other, deeper game in play. He’s got another objective, and we’re not smart enough to see it yet.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t worry about motive at this point,” said Susan. “Maybe we should just deal with what we have and figure out how to stop it.”

  “So my part in this is to be your sniper consultant,” Swagger said, looking as if each of his sixty-four years had cost him a thousand dollars’ worth of grief.

  “You’re with us every step of the way. We want you to eyeball the possible shooting sites and tell us where he’d shoot from, what he’d see that we wouldn’t. We want you to analyze his ingress and escape routes, his fallbacks, his hides, all the things that even our best experts might miss. We want you to be him when we game out possibilities or permutations. We need your intuitive access to his heart and mind over the next few weeks.”

  “So you can kill him.”

  “If it comes to that,” said Susan, whose specialty, now as then, was delivering the hard truth. “Nobody wants it, but there are other issues at stake. We have to stop him, Bob. Do you have any idea how humiliating it would be to this country internationally if an Afghan politician under our sponsorship was publicly assassinated by a marine sniper?”

  Nick outlined the deal. Bob would actually carry an FBI badge and be legally entitled to represent himself as an “FBI investigator,” though not an “agent” or a “special agent.” The consultancy fee would be substantial, not that it was about money. Under certain circumstances, with written authorization, he would be permitted to carry a firearm and make arrests. He would be granted all authority and respect within the federal system and the military in accordance with his police powers. He would report directly to Nick and Susan. He would have an unlimited travel budget.

  “My heart is with the sniper,” he said. “You have to know that going in. I want to get him out of this fix, get it straightened out. I don’t want to kill him.”

  “We know that. We need that. We’re buying that.”

  “Then my first move is to Camp Lejeune. I want to talk to his CO, his peers, and get a sense of him.”

  “We’ll make the phone calls,” said Nick. “Oh, and raise your right hand.”

  Bob complied, mumbled the appropriate yeses, and, cranky and old and ever so tired, realized he was back to taking the king’s gold, which meant he might have to do the king’s killing.

  U.S.-MEXICO BORDER

  27 MILES WEST OF NOGALES, ARIZONA

  0356 HOURS

  THE NEXT MORNING

  The van was dirty and spotted and squalid, a ’92 Ford Econoline with Arizona plates. It smelled of unwashed bodies, long nights, junk food, and urine. But its suspension was sound and its engine tuned. It looked like any van from a coyote outfit, and it looked like it had made many journeys to and from el Norte.

  Now it prowled dusty trails, switchbacks, and arroyos in the dark of night, but slowly. Dust rose. No moon guided them. The landscape was raw and ugly, mostly tall, spiny vegetation that could kill you. Bilal drove, trying to stay on the donkey track before him without headlamps, and his Mexican contact Rodriguez, a veteran of many crossings to and from, sat next to him, squinting to read the map and compare it with his memory.

  Behind them, crouched in the darkness of the cargo area this side of a black curtain, were two elderly gentlemen named Dr. Faisal and Professor Khalid. Both were educated men, unused to roughness in transit. One was a university lecturer, the other an engineer of some renown. They had never met before this little adventure, but they immediately recognized in the other a kindred spirit. They could not stop talking excitedly about politics, literature, spirituality, poetry, science, history, and the law, and it seemed each knew everything about these topics there was to know and like men everywhere, of every creed and kind, upon discovering such a commonality of spirit, each wanted to totally destroy the other. The arguments! They were driving Bilal, an earthier sort, crazy with this kind of endless aggression.

  “Old buzzards,” he said, “shut up. We need to concentrate.” It turned out that of the several languages spoken by the passengers in the vehicle, the only one all four shared, if imperfectly, was English.

  “The young,” said Dr. Faisal. “So rude these days.”

  “He is such a pig. Bilal, you are a pig, you have no manners, no respect,” said Professor Khalid.

  “These two,” said Bilal. “They know everything about nothing and nothing about anything.”

  “At a certain age,” said Rodriguez, “they all go off a little like that. It should be right around here.”

  “You should know I do not like this ‘should be,’” said the testy Bilal. He was a rangy man around thirty-five, all sinew, extremely shabbily dressed in a hand-me-down tweed jacket over a frayed black sweater, jeans, and beat-up Nikes. He was a Mediterranean type of the sort usually called “swarthy,” for darkness of skin, eyes, and hair, and perhaps eternal melancholy, except that if you could get him to smile, you saw that he was quite handsome. He had a mop of unkempt hair dark as any wine-dark sea; a vague sense of coffeehouse revolutionary to him; and quick, furtive eyes that missed little. He was one of those uncomfortably intense men most people find a little unnerving, as if his rhythms were a little too rapid, or perhaps he was too quickly wired through synapse, or bore too many unforgivable grudges, or was too quick to haggle to the death over a nickel.

  “It’s the desert,” said Rodriguez. “It changes continually.”

  “I know something about the desert,” said Bilal.

  “Then you know that the wind moves mysteriously and covers and uncovers rocks, reshapes cactus, sometimes seems to move—there it is!”

  His flashlight beam penetrated the dirty windshield to illuminate a certain crack in the earth that widened eventually into a full gully. This time of year there was no water and even the mud had turned to crushed pottery. The gully would run like a superhighway for about two hundred yards, and reach the border fence and open a channel beneath it. With a little industrious snipping, the gap in the fence would be wide enough to drive the van under. Then it was another hundred or so yards of rough but not impossible transit to a long, straight road that ran to a major highway. A left turn at that junction and into the belly of America you flew.

  “Hold on,” said Bilal. “You, old dogs, cut the chatter. It’s rough and dangerous through here.”

  Alas, Dr. Faisal did not hear him. He was making an exceedingly important point about the Greek myth of Prometheus, bringer of fire, and how he had been punished by Zeus. It was his carefully considered opinion that the tale was out of something the Jew Jung had called “the collective unconscious,” and it wasn’t really fire that Prometheus brought, it was the foreknowledge of the arrival of Muhammad and the fire was the destruction of the West.

  Professor Khalid thought this rather a stretch.

  “I agree,” he said, “that many of their myths suggest that in their view of the ethos they are unconsciously aware of something missing, something yet to come, something yet to rule, something yet to proclaim truth, but I wonder, truly, if one can be so explicit in assigning meanings.”

  “Yes, yes, yes!” shouted Dr. Faisal. “You can! Have you read the original Greek? I have read the original Greek and I tell you there are meanings—”

  “Shut up!” screamed Bilal. “It is very dangerous here. You fools have no idea what is happening. Keep those old yaps shut until we get across and up into Arizona. Then you can talk all you want.”

  “It’s almost time to pray,” said Dr. Faisal.

  “Prayers are canceled today,” said Bilal, “with Allah’s permission. I guarantee you, Allah understands.”

&nbs
p; The van puttered shakily along the rough track, rolling over rocks, grinding through vegetation, knocking down this or that cactus. It was not completely beneath ground level, as the gully was only around five feet deep; a foot and a half of van top stuck out, and when they reached the fence itself, most of the lower strands had to be cut.

  “What was that?” said Bilal.

  “You are seeing things,” said Rodriguez.

  “Oh no,” said Bilal. “See, there, there in—”

  Something poked him in the ribs. He looked and saw Rodriguez had a shiny automatic pistol in his hand, pointing apologetically at Bilal’s middle.

  “So sorry,” the Mexican said, “I must inform you of a slight change of plans.”

  Two men came from out of the dark, illuminating the van in their flashlight beams. They wore red cowboy bandannas around their heads, almost like turbans, and carried AK-47s with the easy grace of men who’d spent a lot of time with gun in hand. Bilal could see that each wore a shoulder holster under his jeans jacket, with another shiny gun. They had the raffish, ignorant insouciance of Israeli paratroopers.

  “Out, you and the old ones, and we shall see what is so important that you must smuggle it into Los Estados instead of merely driving through the border posts.”

  “What is he saying?” said Dr. Faisal. “Why does he have a gun? Bilal, what is going on?”

  The door of the van was slid open roughly and the bandits grabbed the two old men, shoving them to the ground.

  “Now you,” said Rodriguez, “don’t make no trouble. I am reasonable, but my two amigos are locos. Bad ones. I think I can control them, but you must show them you respect me, or they will get very angry. And I know you have more money, señor. I know you would not be going for a long trip in America with these two geezers without no money.”