Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “I have money,” said Bilal. “Lots of money. I can pay. No need for anything unpleasant to happen.”

  “See, that’s the attitude. My friends, the young man here will cooperate, he understands.”

  One of the two huskies came over, grabbed Bilal by the lapel of his decades-old sports coat, and threw him hard against the side of the truck.

  He opened the coat, looked up and down, then backed off, nodding.

  “You tell me where the money is,” said Rodriguez amiably. “Emilio doesn’t like to be kept waiting. He is an impatient person. You tell me where it is, and I will get it. Oh, and another thing. We must have a look at what treasure behind the curtain is so important to get into Los Estados. Oh, it must be something very interesting to go to all this trouble.”

  “It is religious tracts. Booklets on the true faith.”

  “Oh, yes, I believe that one. You must think I’m a fool. Besides, the true faith is our lord Jesus and his immaculate mother, heathen.”

  “Sir, I—”

  Rodriguez struck him hard in the face.

  “Money, then treasure, monkey asshole.”

  “Yes, of course, sir.”

  Professor Khalid called, “What is happening, Bilal? Why did he strike you? Who are these men?”

  “Tell the old one to shut his yap,” said Rodriguez, “or Pedro, I’m afraid, will kick in his teeth.”

  “Professor, it is not a problem. Just another few minutes and we will be on our way.”

  “Indeed,” said Rodriguez, “now tell me where—”

  Bilal hit him with five bunched fingers in the center of the throat, crushing the larynx. He began to make unpleasant sounds and quickly lost interest in his firearm. Bilal pivoted, way behind the two AKs coming up, but he had hands faster than Allah’s, it was said in the training camps. He got the .380 Ruger LCP taped inside his left wrist into his right hand and in the next second it became evident that the nasty boys Pedro and friend had yet to cock their AKs before firing, an amateur’s mistake that Bilal or any of his cohorts would not have made, and each bolt was at the halfway point when Bilal fired the tiny pistol twice, putting a .380 into each head. He was a superb shot, even with so small a gun having all but nonexistent sights. The bullets were so tiny they didn’t deliver much impact, that is, other than the instant animal death they generated by pulping the deep central brain, and one of the men began to walk around strangely, blood pouring down his face, as if he were trying to remember how a chicken dances. He disappeared into the blackness, clucking. The other merely sat down disappointedly and sagged off into an eternal nap.

  Rodriguez sat against the wheel of the van. He was coughing blood as well as expelling it copiously from his nostrils, holding his ruptured throat as his lungs and all other available vessels filled with liquid, drowning him. Bilal had not been trained to recognize any kind of mercy, as the camps were not an environment that emphasized mercy as a value, but the look of pain was so extreme that without willing it, he shot the man in the temple.

  Professor Khalid came racing over.

  “I have to get away from him! If he tells me he read the myth of Prometheus in the original Greek one more time, I will strangle him, and then where will we be?”

  Dr. Faisal was not far behind.

  “What can you do with the uneducated? The fool knows nothing. He is all hot air and opinions without a single reliable fact. I cannot continue this trip with such a fool!”

  Somehow, Bilal got them into the truck and on their way.

  TGIF NUMBER 133

  915 BRAVERMAN AVENUE

  JACKSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

  2030 HOURS

  Anything would do. Did they still sell breakfast at this time of night? Maybe eggs and bacon. But eggs and bacon wouldn’t work without coffee, and he couldn’t drink the decaf and he couldn’t afford a sleepless night in the motel, even if, on the FBI per diem, the Hilton was an upgrade from many of the places he’d stayed.

  Swagger had a headache, the beginnings of a cold, and a serious case of exhaustion. This “investigating” was debilitating. You had to be “on” all the time, your mind alert. And even after fifteen hours of it, you got nothing.

  “Have you decided?” asked the waitress.

  “Double Jack neat, please, with a side of water.”

  “Sir, we don’t—”

  “I know, I know, my idea of a little joke, ma’am, peculiar, I know.”

  She smiled. She had the look of some kind of marine wife or girlfriend here a couple of miles off the main entrance to Lejeune, and maybe her husband or boyfriend was deployed somewhere and she needed the dough, serving old coots such as himself to keep going with two kids and not enough allowances. It was sometimes harder on the ones left behind, and there were no guarantees the man wouldn’t come home in a box.

  “Okay,” he said, “I guess I’ll have the Caesar salad and this grilled fish special.” No meat; that would make Julie happy.

  “Anything to drink? We do have wine and beer.”

  “Ma’am, water’s fine.”

  She left, and he pulled his briefcase up to the table. It contained the notes he’d taken today during a full day of interviews on Camp Lejeune in 2nd Recon Battalion headquarters, a Xerox of Cruz’s career-long 201 file, and preliminary reports from field agents and NIS canvassing of previous duty stations for information and background, still woefully incomplete.

  He got his yellow notepads out from today, recording his conversations with Colonel Laidlaw; Lieutenant Colonel Simpson, his successor as 2nd Recon commander; Major Morton, former S-2 of 2-2, now at Division S-2 while he waited to get out and head off to law school; Sergeants Kelly and Schuman, both snipers who’d served in Sniper Platoon with Ray Cruz; and Lance Corporals Sigmond and Krahl, who’d been friends with Lance Corporal Billy Skelton.

  It was pretty much the same all the way through. You couldn’t find a bad word about Ray Cruz on this planet, much less the South Carolina sector of it.

  Colonel Laidlaw: “I didn’t know Cruz except by report and reputation. I’m not one of those meet and greet leaders. I just can’t stand it when the boys get hurt or killed: I keep my distance so I can do my job. I’m way too old for combat, I know. Anyhow, I found him to be a quiet, intense professional. I was aware of the many times he’d been offered commissions and his opportunities outside the corps but I understood his commitment to his job. He was one of, hell, maybe he was, the best.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Simpson: “At any time, he could have written a ticket out of there. He didn’t have to keep going on the missions. I said to him, ‘Look, Sergeant Cruz, I’m getting tired of writing commendations and listening to you call me sir when I should be calling you sir. Will you go be the next commandant or something?’ He’d smile, and say he was fine with it the way it was. He liked saving people. He believed that’s what a sniper does. If some unit got in a firefight, Ray was the first one on the track to get out there; he’d work his way around, taking incredible chances, and bring fire on the hadjis, and after he dropped two or three, they’d be gone. It must have happened a thousand times. A sniper dings a kid and Sergeant Cruz saddles up and slithers out. A few minutes later we hear a shot and a few minutes later, Cruz is back, checking on the kid. And note: we didn’t have to go to Hellfire and blow up a house or go to Apache and blow up a neighborhood or go to F-16 and blow up a town. One shot, one kill. Everybody’s happy.”

  Morton, the intelligence whiz: “Look, I’ll be frank with you. When you brief or debrief these guys, you do become aware of the limits of their minds. Some aren’t what we’d call ‘smart’ in an intellectual way, but their strength is doing exactly what they’re told and then reporting back exactly what happened. Not Cruz. He was smart smart, if you know what I mean. He got it. He’d seen through all the follies of the corps, he knew Simpson was sucking up like a whore to Colonel Laidlaw to get the battalion, he knew that Kelly was smarter than Schuman but that Schuman was more reliable under fire, he knew th
at Skelton was one of those college guys in the marines who hide from some issue in civilian life but was still the smartest and the best of the spotters. Cruz knew what was bullshit and what was real. Yet still: he risked. He risked so much, even knowing that in the end it would all be decided by assholes in suits sitting at tables. To me, to have that kind of IQ—what was it?”

  “One hundred forty-five,” Bob had said.

  “Much higher than mine. But to have that kind of IQ and understand that it was all a kind of bullshit and yet still believe in it and still go out, day after day, that was something.”

  Sergeant Schuman: “Ray was, you know, Oriental in his ways. He was kind of zen, you know? Never got excited, never raised his voice, never had to, because he never made a mistake. Everybody knew he knew a better way, a faster way. Even under fire, never any panic in his voice, never a wrong move, and if you got hit, he’d stay with you until evac. Ray would never leave anybody behind. If we’d had a mascot, Ray would have stayed behind with the pooch, putting down hadjis to the end.”

  Lance Corporal Krahl: “Billy hated the corps but he loved Ray Cruz. He’d never let Cruz down. Cruz was the mythical sergeant. He seemed like he was out of the movies or something. In the end, I wish he’d loved Ray less because he wouldn’t have worked so hard to impress him and to become Ray’s spotter. Loving Ray got him killed. I hate to say it, but that mission was a major fuck-up from the start, sending guys way out in bandit country with no air, nothing but fucking goats as cover, help two hours away. But if anyone could do it, it would have been Cruz, and if Cruz was going, Billy had to go. God, I miss Billy. Such a good kid, deserved so much more than a facedown in some shit hole full of people with funny hats.”

  Swagger’d also watched videotape of the ambush over and over, this under the guidance of the S-2.

  It took a while to make out, the angles so grave, the visual information so sparse: the men were, viewed from the top down, just glowing jiggles of light against the multihued dark of the landforms beneath them, the goats faster moving, longer. Still, in time, it became clear. You could watch the ambush team setting up. You could see them checking maps, and whoever was in charge put his security people exactly where any experienced soldier in any army in the world would have put them. He set up his big gun, squirmed behind it. Next to him had to be his own spotter. They held to good ambush discipline, no fucking around, utter stone stillness, no excess motion, men hunting hard and well.

  “The colonel wanted to put a Hellfire into them. Would have blown the mission, I think, but would have saved our guys. But there was no way we could get an Apache in close enough in the time frame. We just had to watch and hope the bad guys didn’t shoot, but they did. It was horrible in the bunker, watching it all happen, not being able to do anything about it.”

  The major froze the video image of the ambush team setup and still, the targets moving in along their goddamned goat track a distance calculated to be 841 meters out, completely blind to anything except the bleating of the goats.

  “Did you request Reaper coverage from the Agency?” asked Bob.

  “No, sir. It involves going through a lot of protocols, and no one really trusted that the info would stay private. It’s one thing when a big unit moves out—everybody already knows everything—and another when an outfit is under fire and you can bring Reapers in fast, so there’s not an issue of security. Here we wanted to run as tight and quiet a ship as possible.”

  “Major, how do you figure these guys knew where Ray and Skelton were, and set up so perfectly? I mean, if I had to textbook an ambush, I’d use this tape.”

  “I don’t know. A leak? Maybe. More likely these hadjis were on some mission and they saw targets. They had a new toy, a .50 Barrett they’d recovered somewhere. They’re not the most mature individuals, are they? So they set up to take the goatherders down, to test the weapon, to spread the word, maybe to blame the Americans. Only, one goatherder gets away, so they follow him, because he’s no longer a random victim, now he’s a witness and maybe if he makes it out, he gets them in trouble with their own command. I don’t really get how their minds work. I don’t know how they can kill so much and think it’s moral. It’s baffling to me.”

  The food came, jarring Swagger back to the real world. He shoved his notepads to one side, ate sparingly, not really paying attention, trying in his mind to find something that would tell him any little thing. Was there a Ray Cruz explainer in there? A little anecdote that revealed an insight, if indeed it was Ray Cruz on the other end of that radio message? The one thing that stood out had come from the sniper Kelly, when Bob asked him, “Tell me about his shooting. He was, for sure, an excellent shot. But was there anything peculiar or unique about his shooting?”

  Kelly thought awhile. Then he said, “There wasn’t a shot Ray couldn’t hit and a position he couldn’t hit from. He was like a machine, mechanical, unhurried, classic by the book. But, this is strange, we never shoot standing in battle. No one stands up in a battlefield. Good way to get your head chopped.”

  Bob nodded. It was true.

  “Ray decided he needed that shot. I thought it was a waste of time and ammo, but he didn’t even bother arguing the point. He just put hours in on the range on his legs, used up crates of Match 7.62, until he could put three in an inch offhand from a hundred yards. He was slim, but very strong, very tough, much stronger than you’d think for a guy like that.”

  “Offhand?” Bob wrote.

  “I don’t know if he ever had a use for it. He just didn’t want no holes in his game, no matter how small.”

  He saved the picture for last. It was an official Marine Corps promotion shot, on the occasion of the last stripe, couple years back. He didn’t want to stare at it, let it become a blur of dots and shadows. It lost its voodoo with overconcentration.

  Bob just stole a glimpse, trying not to bore too hard into it. It seemed so straightforward: white sidewalls, the face smooth, the eyes with that slight Asian cast, the cheekbones prominent, the lips thin, maybe Cruz’s father’s Portuguese aquilinity to the thin nose; Swagger also picked up on the sniper’s wariness, his quickness and depth of vision. Or maybe he didn’t, maybe he was dreaming things. After all, it was just a picture of a marine NCO on what was nominally a good day professionally, a souvenir utterly banal in its lack of meaning.

  He put it back in the file, wondering about only one thing: why was the sensation it generated so connected with the idea of loss? Losslossloss. Why did it cause an ache so deep and inconsolable?

  He thought maybe in Cruz’s face there was a trace of a first lieutenant named Bill Go, Japanese-American, his first officer in Vietnam, 1965. Great guy: smart, fair, calm, steady as a boulder in combat, judgment superior, a real superstar. Bill didn’t make it beyond month six. Some meaningless firefight, some worthless jungle ’ville, over in a second, a spatter of shots from them, a spatter in response from us, and only Bill Go didn’t get up because he’d been shot just under the lip of the helmet in the right eye. So much loss, so much grief. It fell to Buck Sergeant Swagger to get the boys back humping, to finish the job, to make it back to the compound. His first “command,” as it were, and he got through it by going into hard NCO mode so no one could imagine how much he felt the loss of Bill.

  Or was it Bill? There was another, an Army master sergeant with SOG, second tour, Russell Blas, a Guamese, great guy, pure guts in a fight, captured on one of the hatchet missions he so loved to lead, and never heard of or seen again. Poor Russell, probably dying of malnutrition in some shit hole . . .

  He didn’t want to go there anymore. That’s what had eaten a decade of his life away in a wash of bourbon and rage and self-hatred. He told himself that the picture had no connection with anything. It’s just a new marine. It has nothing to do with Bill Go or Russell Blas or Vietnam. Those memories were too hurtful and could not be entertained cavalierly, in schlock restaurants on jobs set in the real, the new, the only world that counted.

  UNIDENTI
FIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

  DOLLAR STORE PARKING LOT ACROSS FROM TGIF

  914 BRAVERMAN AVENUE

  JACKSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

  2035 HOURS

  It’s gotta be him,” said Crackers the Clown. “Check it out. Right age, thin, rangy, sniperlike, discipline, dignity, seems to have a limp, he’s looking at data, he’s on the wagon.”

  The three of them sat in a nice black Ford Explorer. They looked at Bob through the window, each with a pair of high-end European binocs.

  “Plus,” said Crackers, the unit intellectual, called “Crackers the Clown” because he had the demeanor of an Iowa mortician, “the time matches up. We caught him out of the main gate at 1950, he’d been there all day talking to folks, now he’s tired out, he’s reviewing his shit, he’s eating a little, and he’s going to go back to the hotel, send out e-mails, call the wife, and go to bed. Tomorrow, the same thing again.”

  “On the other hand,” said Tony Z, the cynic, “he could be the guy trying to sell Lejeune on a new brand of trash masher for the enlisted dining areas. He’s here trying to make a fucking pitch. He works for Grinders-R-Us dot com, out of Gomerville, Indiana.”

  There were no pictures of this Swagger, that was the problem. Everything was theoretical and judgmental and the theoretical and the judgmental were slightly beyond Bogier’s areas of competence.

  “I hate this shit.” He stewed. “I’m an operator. I break things and kill people. Now I’m supposed to be some kind of James Bond super-agent bullshit performer. Man, I hate this shit.”

  Crackers was pro IDing the john as Swagger; Tony Z, despite his cynicism, was leaning toward pro, but still a little unable to commit.

  “It should be him, it has to be him, nothing else makes any sense, but when you make an assumption, it always bites you in the ass.”