Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “On the other hand,” someone said, “maybe Cruz is playing the only card he’s got the only way he’s got and he thinks he’s doing it for the corps, not in spite of it.”

  Swagger turned to face Ray Cruz.

  UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

  OUTSIDE STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY

  DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

  0305 HOURS

  Mick was now an up-to-speed expert on Steel Brigade Armory and the life and times of its founder and presiding genius, Colonel Norman Chambers.

  “So,” he explained to Tony Z, putting down the phone after his callback from MacGyver, “this guy’s some kind of sniper guru.”

  “I think I read a piece he wrote in Precision Shooting. He’s not a bipod guy. He doesn’t think sniper rifles ought to have bipods. Cause more trouble than they’re worth.”

  “Try shooting a Barrett without a bipod,” said Mick. “See how far into the next state it gets you. Anyway, Swagger may have somehow come across something suggesting that Cruz the sniper at one time knew Chambers the guru. So Swagger decides to come hell for leather across South Carolina in order to have a chat with Chambers.”

  “At three in the morning?”

  “Swagger’s an action hero. He can’t sleep on a twitch. He’s got to go check it out.”

  “He thinks Chambers can lead him to Cruz,” said Z. “God, I wish we had a mike in that room.”

  “Now, when Swagger leaves, what the fuck do we do? Do we stay with him? I guess so. I mean, we got the plant on him, right? We went to all that trouble. But if we switch to Chambers, maybe he’s the magic ticket to Cruz. Maybe he goes to Cruz tomorrow, to tell him about Swagger, and we can put the Barrett on him, blow him out of his boots, and go back to the pool much richer than we are.”

  “Mick, it’s tempting, but it ain’t orderly. As you say, we have Swagger in our pocket. We can stay on him out of sight, no rush—”

  “Hey hey hey—” came the sudden crackle of Crackers the Clown through their earphones, “hey, I got another guy in the room.”

  “What?”

  “I just discovered it. This thing, this optic, you can go ambient light, you can go thermal, you can go combined ambient/thermal, which is where I’ve been, but I just went all thermal.”

  Mick wanted to strangle the guy. He didn’t care about this shit. Who was the third man?

  “So I flick on thermal, reads heat, you know, cool night, that building’s pretty much an aluminum eggshell, plus they’re in an outside room with only one wall, and goddamn I got three body heat signatures. Three. I don’t know where the other guy came from. He wasn’t there when they went into the room.”

  “Was he hiding?”

  “Maybe there’s a dead zone, a strong room, another entrance, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I see.”

  “Jesus,” said Mick.

  “If it’s Ray,” said Tony Z, next to him, “we could maybe go for the kill tonight. Now. In the next ten minutes.”

  “If it’s Ray,” said Mick, thinking.

  “How can we find out?”

  “We can’t,” said Mick.

  He was right. Without some visual or at least aural penetration of the room, there was no way of knowing from outside if indeed the third man was Ray Cruz.

  What to do now?

  Bogier’s mind ratcheted through possibilities.

  1. Nothing. Maybe Swagger’d convince Ray to leave with him, they could ID him in the car, and do a drive-by on the two of them, spray-paint Swagger’s car with 5.56, get two, good, confirmed kills.

  2. Nothing also. If Swagger had led them to Cruz this time, he’d do it again. If he leaves alone, we stay with him. We can’t stake out in this little town in daylight, because by 7:30 A.M. everybody’s going to wonder who’s in the black SUV parked on the roadside. That’s the way small towns are. That gives Ray Cruz, if he’s there, plenty of time to make a good E & E and they might never get him again.

  3. Nothing a third time. The mysterious third man is Colonel Chambers’s son or an employee, his wife, his ho, whatever, and came in to join the conversation. It means nothing, and tomorrow they’d be hard on Bob again and maybe he’d strike pay dirt then. Maybe that would be the smart thing, though of course it went against Bogier’s nature, and as he considered that nature, he came upon—

  4. Go in hard now. Blow the door, hit the steps, kick in the office, dynamic entry SWAT style. Could probably make it up there in twenty seconds. If it’s Ray, blow him away and the witnesses as well. If it’s not, kick the shit out of them, rip out the phones, steal some rifles and what cash is on hand, and then disappear and try and disguise it as a gun robbery. Or maybe kill them anyway, what did it matter? Well, it mattered in that it informed whomever that another team was on the field and that would cause a stir, raise questions, start investigations that couldn’t be controlled, lead to all kinds of unforseen questions. Agh.

  And that led to another possible outcome of 4. That Swagger, the colonel, and the third man were just as much spec op superstars as Mick and his guys were, and in the twenty seconds after they blew the door and began the big rush, the targets got all gunned up and went to total war and instead of, like moron citizens, being behind the action curve were actually in front of it, and so Mick, Tony Z, and Crackers the Clown found themselves on the wrong end of a 5.56 shitstorm and bled out eight seconds after they hit the ground.

  And then there was 5.

  5. Hmm.

  5. Oh yeah, number 5.

  5. Oh, he liked it.

  Mick toyed with it, savored it, tried to look at it from a batch of directions to find a flaw and found none.

  “Phone,” he said.

  “Mick, I see a tiny gleam of piglike intelligence in your eyes. Are you cooking with gas?” said Tony Z.

  “Just listen to daddy, little amoeba, and learn something about how we adults go around blowing up shit and killing people, but not in a bad way.”

  He punched the button. MacGyver was quick to answer.

  “Well?”

  “We have a situation,” said Mick, and laid out the scenario.

  “But you are not sure it’s Cruz?” said MacGyver.

  “No, sir. But who else could it be?”

  “A tinker, a tailor, a candlestick maker. The man in the moon. Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, Ernest Borgnine, David Nix—”

  “And suppose someone mysteriously kills David Nixon? Actually, I think you mean David Eisenhower. Suppose someone kills David Eisenhower? We took a risk, we didn’t get a payoff, but are we any worse off than if we let David Eisenhower live?”

  “Yes,” said MacGyver. “Because you’ve informed the world that you exist.”

  “But nothing would connect the bodies with Ray Cruz and an Afghan politico. The forensics here are still in the Stone Age. It would just be some local crazed trailer-camp murder spree. And down here all’s you got is Barney Fifes on the case and no evidence. We’re out clean.”

  MacGyver’s silence told Mick he’d gotten the control’s attention. So he laid on the rest.

  Unlimber the Barrett and rest it on the window ledge of the SUV, just like a Chicago gangster’s tommy gun in 1927. Full ten-round magazine of 750-grain warheads moving out at about 3,000 feet per second. Mick’s on the big gun, crouched next to him in the seat well is Crackers the Clown with his thermal imaging instrument, and Tony Z is driving. Pull around corner, take road to Steel Brigade Armory in its flimsy tinfoil building. Halt when distance to the building was shortest and the angles flattest, about thirty yards from the roadway. Crackers goes to thermal, which would be even stronger at the closer range, and gets a fix on the three living bodies behind the aluminum walls. He indexes Mick on the body locations using the window as the baseline, as in “two are clustered in same line about three feet to the right of the right line of the window, and one is two feet farther right.” Hell, maybe he’s able to throw a SureFire circle of light at the wall position.

  Mick fires ten times in f
our seconds. He’s that good, he can be depressing the trigger even as the beast is setting down from its recoil impulse. The bullets shear through the metal, almost without deviation, and they whack the citizens so hard they are fluffy puffs, gossamer unravelings, oozy twists of pink mist before they know it.

  The car pulls off into the night. And though the gunfire racket is terrific, it takes a good forty-five minutes before any serious cops can get there. Best part: the Barrett ejects its spent casings into the SUV, leaving no evidence at all.

  Three dead for sure. No links, no tracks, no evidence, no forensics because the .50s are moving so hard that after passing through metal, flesh, and more metal they fly out into the countryside. Best of all, there’s no sense of high-tech professionals at work. It could be any gun guy with a Barrett, and in this neck of the woods, there were probably dozens of them. It was big-bore territory.

  The sum of the parts: if it’s Ray Cruz, end of problem. If it’s not, it’s somebody else’s problem.

  “Bogier, you are clinically insane. I had no idea how insane you were. Really, you should be studied by Harvard. Someone there would surely win a Nobel Prize in medicine.”

  “Okay,” said Mick, “it’s a little loud. It could be called messy. But consider: we may never get a shot like this again. Ever. If we let it slide, we will look back on this minute and hate ourselves into eternity. I say, fuck it, it’s here, let’s do it.”

  “Note to self,” said MacGyver, “do not invite Bogier and his insane crew of mongoloid sociopaths to daughter’s wedding. Okay, do it, Mick. And hope that God favors the incredibly brutal.”

  “He must,” said Mick. “Look at how much fun he has with earthquakes.”

  STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY OFFICE

  DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

  0305 HOURS

  Cruz, my name is Swagger.”

  “I know who you are, Gunny,” said Cruz, thin, intense, almost feral under a thatch of black crew cut. His eyes were, as promised, exotic, even Asiatic, but his face was white in its prominence of cheekbone, thinness of nose and lip. He wore jeans and a hoodie and a pair of New Balance running shoes and a purple baseball cap with a crow on it. He had a Beretta in his hand, but wasn’t pointing it at Swagger.

  “Is that pistol for me?” Swagger asked.

  “No,” said Cruz. “It’s for me. There’s a lot of people who want me dead. I’ll have a piece close at hand at all times, thank you very much. Nothing’s faster than a gun in the hand.”

  “Cruz, you sound a little paranoid.”

  “Bullets cutting your spotter in half will do that to a man.”

  “I know about losing spotters, Cruz. I also know how it can fuck up your mind. I’ve been there.”

  “Nobody’s been where I am now. And nobody can get me out but me.”

  What was it? Who was he? The information was rushing in on Swagger so hard he had trouble staying with it. He was talking to a ghost. Bill Go, all those years dead in that anonymous little ’ville? Maybe. Maybe not. It wasn’t an aura, a vibration, a tingle in the blood, but something was leaving tracks in the snow and Swagger knew he wasn’t smart enough to read them. What? What?

  “Cruz, I don’t know what game you’re up to, but you have a whole lot of important people upset. They’ll stop you to the point of killing you. That would be so fucking wrong, Sergeant. We can end this tonight and get you back on duty next week if that’s what you want.”

  “You were the best. You were a god to all of us. But you don’t get it, Gunny,” said Cruz. “If I go in and we all kiss and make up, in a day or maybe a week, I’m dead. They won’t stop now. And whatever it is they’re up to, it goes on and it finally happens.”

  “Cruz, you—”

  “I saw a very good kid named Billy Skelton torn in two by some motherfucker on a Barrett. A hadji? Uh-uh, that would have been war. No, I hunkered down for a look and the guy with the big gun and his buddies were white. Contractors. I’ve seen enough of ’em in the zones to know. These guys were sent to hit Two-Two. It wasn’t war, it was murder.”

  “Maybe Russian mercs. Maybe Iranian advisers. Maybe Chechen volunteers. It’s only skin.”

  “These were American party animals. I could tell.”

  “I’m not convincing you, I see. But I am on contract to the FBI. You say the word and I go to my cell phone here and in two hours, maybe less, you are under protective custody. Whatever you charge, it will get a fair hearing. I’m working for a very good guy who’s an assistant director, and I’ve known him a long, long time. I can guarantee you safety, that fair hearing, and a follow-up on your charges. It’s the best way and this is the best offer you’ll ever get.”

  “Everyone says you’re the best, Gunny. Love to trust you, but I only trust the colonel because he’s completely outside the system. You may not even know who’s pulling your wires. So I will—”

  In the hundredth or so of a second before he lost consciousness, Swagger was aware of the wall exploding inward in a great demonstration of the physics of high velocity and, insanely, the big steel desk behind which sat the silent colonel leaped off the deck as if it weighed an ounce and its leading edge hurled at Swagger, striking him so hard it knocked him into instant oblivion.

  UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

  SUV

  OUTSIDE STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY

  DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

  0305 HOURS

  Oh, this is going to be so fucking cool,” said Crackers.

  Z drove, turned the corner, headed down the two-lane; the building, low and unprepossessing, was a few hundred feet ahead.

  Mick, curled on the backseat, was on the big gun, which was supported on the window ledge with a combat jacket scrunched under it for padding. The weapon was an oar, a wheelbarrow, a ton of fun—close to twenty pounds of semiauto rifle, unwieldy in any but the strongest of hands and arms, looking like some kind of steroid-engorged M16. He crushed its butt plate into his meaty shoulder and with his strong right hand tense on the grip and his strong left hand tense on the comb, guided the thing deftly, as if it were a child’s .22. He was magic on the rifle. He squirmed to locate the right eye relief to the $4,000-worth of U.S. Optics scope on top of it, then cranked down to 4 power for the short-distance shots to come. He hard-tapped the magazine to make sure it was well seated. That thing alone weighed about six pounds, stuffed with the missilelike 750-grain cartridges, immensely heavy for their size.

  “Hey,” yelled Tony Z, because everybody was wearing earmuffs, “you’re shooting without the bipod, just like the guru said. He’ll be so pleased.”

  “We like to leave ’em happy,” said Mick.

  The car slowed, then halted. The black wall of the building was less than thirty yards away, one window blazing but, because of the upward angle from the vehicle, showing only ceiling.

  Crackers the Clown squirmed into position from the seat well behind Z, next to the heavy forearm, ventilated for cooling. He put the NV monocular to his eye. He was already in thermal.

  “Much better,” said Crackers, “big as life. Okay, I got one guy separated from the two other guys by about five feet. All are seated. I’m guessing the guy out of the group is the guru guy, behind some sort of desk, because I’m not getting a full-body signature on him. The other two guys are directly facing each other.”

  “Index me off the left line of the window,” said Mick.

  “I’m estimating five feet; I think you should hold a little low on center of mass because you’re shooting upward. You do the first guy, rotate maybe six inches farther right, and do the second guy. Then come back and do the colonel.”

  “I’m two feet low of the window left line,” said Mick, rotating the heavy rifle to the right a bit as he held a solid cheek weld and a solid eye relief to the scope lens, “and I’m coming right, damnit, Tony, give me another foot or so.”

  Tony took the foot off the brake, and, easily, the vehicle slid forward.

  “Good, good, good, okay, I’m going to
shoot, tighten up, three, two, and—” He felt the trigger break and then it was as if a comet had smashed into Earth, a flaming ball of destruction to suck up the oxygen and flatten the vegetation and scorch the earth in the exact moment that something hydraulic unleashed full force against his heavily muscled shoulder.

  The rifle rose in recoil, having sent a nuclear flash into the air along with its 750 grains of pure mayhem and a sonic boom, then settled, and Mick rotated just a bit, cheek and eye relief still perfect, fired again, producing the same assault upon the senses by flash and bang, sending another hot spent casing flying from the breach, which itself was in the process of ratcheting and clacking in the bolt blowback sequence.

  He waited for recovery, rotated back left, and fired at what should have been the colonel. Three shots, in under two seconds. Took a good, trained man to do that on a Barrett.

  “Rock and roll!” he shouted, while up front Tony Z was going, “Whooooooaaaaahh, mother fucker!”

  Reindexing on the zone of his initial targets—he could see two craters spewing pure illumination where the big slugs had bludgeoned through the aluminum and wallboard—he really put the pedal to the metal. He fired six more times, trying to hold his strikes within the parameters of the first two penetrations, and with each arrival a blast of fragmenting metal and spewing dust and streaks of flaming debris snapped off the wall in supertime.

  “Fucking A,” said Crackers—he’d ducked to the floor during the shooting, to save his eardrums and his night vision—“look at that!”

  The burst of .50s had literally ripped a slash in the wall next to and a little beneath the building. It looked like the hull of a ship that had caught a torpedo full on, a twisted mass of metal, bent struts, sheaves of tormented wallboard, all in a haze of dust and smoke.