Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “Ma, we won the war,” said Tony.

  Mick pulled the big rifle back into the truck, awkwardly got it into the back space over the edge of the seat, and said, “Okay, punch out. No, punch out slow, no howling. No more than fifty-five. Just drive, son, drive into the dawn.”

  “Fuck,” said Crackers. “I didn’t get to see any of the hits.”

  “It looked like a fucking movie. Man, did those suckers kick ass.”

  “It would have been cooler,” said Mick, connoisseur of destruction, “if we’d had tracers.”

  “Oh shit yeah,” said Tony Z. “Man, what a fucking show that would have been.”

  “Should we go and check—”

  “Yeah, and run into Barney F with his double barrel who happened to be pissing behind the gas station? Punch it.”

  They got so far so fast they never even heard any sirens.

  STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY

  DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

  0306 HOURS

  Ray didn’t know his reflexes worked in that science fiction time zone. He was on the ground before the desk, lofted mightily into the air by the first shot, crushed Swagger hard in the head, putting him over backward in his chair. Ray squirmed into the fetal as another big hammer punched through, and hit his own chair—the one he’d just vacated—and sent it spinning crazily through the air as well. Nothing stood against these heavy hitters and he knew without putting it into words that it had to be Ma Barrett and her half-inch, 750-grain progeny, atomizing all that lay in their way.

  The next shot hit flesh and it could only be the colonel’s. The sound of bullet on meat is instantly knowable and completely unforgettable to those who’ve heard it: a kind of whap! of vibration being quieted by the density of flesh, a sickening wetness implied under the abruptness of the noise. Either in that second or the next, the back of Ray’s neck felt a shower of warm droplets and mist.

  He got his eyes opened for the next six big hits. Whoever was shooting was damned good. He kept the recoil in check and put the six in a neat pattern, almost a group, between the first two holes with but half a second between, and each, hitting the wall, blew it asunder in a cascade of vibration that lifted Ray from the floor and sent shards of supersonic metal spraying into the atmosphere but, following the laws of physics, on a slight upward direction and thus mostly missing him.

  Dust jetted everywhere, as did debris of mysterious origin, flaming chips of wallboard, chunks of metal from the struts of the structure, all of it illuminated in the fluorescent light up above: it was an image of a turbulent universe. Would they reload and fire another mag? Would they now rush? He had the Beretta and knew he’d go down hard, taking many along on the trip.

  But it stayed quiet, even though his ears rang like alarms. It was through an actual hole in the wall that he spied a flash of motion that told him the shooters had been in a vehicle and had now taken off.

  Shakily, he stood, turned to see the colonel against the far wall, the impact of the huge bullet unkind. Metal does things to flesh, as no one knew better than Ray, and he deduced in a second that no first aid was capable of fixing the colonel. He felt a stab of pain: old friend, good guy, sound advice giver, supporter in time of need, really a true believer in the Church of Ray. And for that he’d been taken down hard by assholes on a .50. That goes in the book, he thought. Ray will deal with that when the time is right.

  He then turned to the old sniper. Swagger, a dry stick of a man, all ribs and bones and sinewy grace, under a butch-waxed moss of gray, was either dead or unconscious. The edge of the flying desk had opened a bad, deep cut along his cheekbone, and it was oozing blood, though the lack of squirt action suggested no arteries had been cut. It ran down his still cheek, caught in his nostrils, then sluiced to the floor, forming a lake. Ray touched him, felt a heartbeat. Quickly he lifted the desk off the bottom half of the fallen man and dragged him to the wall. Had to get him upright so he wouldn’t drown in his own blood.

  Ray peeled off his hoodie, wrapped it around the broken head, and secured it with his Wilderness belt. Maybe that would keep the crotchety old bastard alive until the medics arrived.

  Having done what he could do, Ray turned and zipped out into the hallway. Knowing the building well, he got to a rear door, unlocked it, and slipped out, and set out across farm fields and backyards, even as sirens were finally beginning to sound, as firemen and officers tumbled out of bed. Ray knew exactly where he was going; he was far from unprepared.

  He’d loaded his equipment in the trunk of a clean, legally purchased, and unstolen Dodge Charger, parked behind the Piggly Wiggly in town. He popped the lock, got in, and quietly started up, turned left and headed out. As far as he could tell, no one had seen a thin, athletic man in jeans and a UCLA T-shirt with a Baltimore Ravens ball cap up top. He disappeared—it’s the sniper gift, after all—into the night.

  HOLIDAY INN MOTEL

  ROANOKE, VIRGINIA

  1730 HOURS

  The phone awakened Bogier. It was Tony Z in the next room; he and Crackers were up now, and were going to start drinking. Did Bogier want to come? No, Bogier did not want to come. Had Bogier heard from MacGyver? No, Bogier had not heard from MacGyver. He would wait until he did and then join them.

  Bogier lay naked in the dark room, under clean, crisp sheets. His massive, beautiful body was a god’s, though he’d been a week out of the gym and yearned to get back to the discipline and purity of the heavy-iron dead lift. He could tell; the ridges that defined the tectonics of his delts were a little less precise, the knobs that represented his abs a little less jagged, the bulge of his veins a little less prominent. It was, ever so slightly, beginning to soften. He was still doing this shit.

  He’d been up for forty-eight straight, the last twelve of it driving mad-assed across the mid south, monitoring radio stations for news on the incident at Danielstown, South Carolina, where it was said a deranged ex-sniper had opened fire on the offices of Norman Chambers, a former marine and some kind of sniper warfare expert, who had been killed in the incident. But no other news was forthcoming.

  So when they hit Roanoke, it was nappy-nap time. A Holiday Inn just off the interstate would do fine. He hit the sack, and drifted into thick, dreamless sleep. Now, he was awake, hardly feeling perky. Agh.

  After a while, he got up groggily, took a shower. The Suunto showed him it was close to six. What to do, what to do? When would that bastard call? Was it over? Had they—

  The satellite didn’t ring, it buzzed. He picked it up, and hit the button.

  “So?”

  “So you didn’t get him.”

  “Shit,” said Bogier, feeling disappointment bite deep and hard. He knew what would come next. Asshole MacGyver would ream him hard and he’d have to sit there and take it like a schmuck.

  “He was there all right. You got that part right. His prints were all over the place.”

  “Christ,” said Bogier.

  “That’s the bad news. The good news: you also didn’t get Swagger. You conked him hard on the head, and he’s out like a light in some hick hospital, but expected to recover. You did, however, blow a hole the size of a football through Colonel Norman Chambers, USMC, retired. Congratulations: you managed to kill the one man in the room who had nothing to do with this shit.”

  “Fuck him if he can’t take a joke,” said Bogier. “Collateral damage.”

  “Yeah, well, be careful you don’t ‘collateral damage’ your way into the gas chamber, sparky.”

  “It’s war. It happens. Nothing personal. You go for an objective and a shell lands in downtown Shitbrick City, population, people seventy-five, chickens two hundred forty. Sorry little brown people, but important personages put our nation’s values over Shitbrick City.”

  “I forgot. You’re a patriot.”

  “You forgot. You okayed the hit. You’re pretending like I went rogue.”

  “Bogier, your job isn’t to outsmart me in debate. Remember, you never got higher than master sergeant
. I’m the guy in the officer’s tuxedo eating pheasant at the post club. If I want, I can arrange a nice duty detail for you—stables to be mucked out, garbage cans to be scrubbed, grout on latrine floors to be scraped out with toothbrushes. Your job is to outsmart Cruz, another sergeant. You’re both mud crawlers, sentry knifers, bridge blowers, laser painters, macho action jocks, so you ought to be up to that, or at least I’m betting you think you are. So let’s concentrate on what’s what.”

  In Bogier’s mind: an image of this ponce, with a goatee and a cigarette holder, wire-frame glasses, an ascot, as he crushed his head in his bare hands, spurting gray matter out of the ears and nose before the eyes popped like Ping-Pong balls from a toy gun.

  “Good idea,” said Mick, grinding his teeth.

  “Okay, what we have to worry about now is whether they shit-can Swagger.”

  “Why would they?”

  “Duh, went in without backup or informing HQ. If he were a special agent, his ass would be grass. Maybe they let him slide but keep him on a tight leash because he’s fundamentally an amateur who happens to know a lot about the bang bang.”

  “Don’t forget, that ‘amateur’ found Cruz in twelve hours his first day on the case while everyone else was jerking off.”

  “He’s a smart guy, no lie. That’s why we have to hope they keep him aboard. Assuming he hasn’t found the magic credit card in his back pocket. So let’s assume next they still want to use his brain in scoping out the sniper. So they move him to DC, does that make sense?”

  “We’re on our way.”

  “My guess is, you’ll pick up that RFID response at the FBI building on Pennsylvania. You stay on it. He’ll figure out where Cruz is sooner or later. Maybe you can get a hit on Cruz that saves Zarzi’s life and be a big hero. Mick Bogier, the new Bob Lee Swagger. Then you and your new best friend Bobby Lee can go on dry-drunk rages together.”

  MacGyver insulted Mick for another few minutes and then let him go. Mick checked the Suunto and headed toward the bar to drive out the image of MacGyver roasting in flames to the laughter of all the fellows in the grog-and-wench shop called Sergeants’ Valhalla. Tonight would be a big night for getting drunk. Tomorrow: Washington, D fucking C.

  INTENSIVE CARE UNIT

  BRIGHTON COUNTY GENERAL HOSPITAL

  HOPKINS, SOUTH CAROLINA

  1642 HOURS

  THE NEXT DAY

  The first time he awoke was when some doctor was pulling up his eyelids and shining a flashlight into his eyeballs. That hurt. The second time, someone had given him a shot. That hurt. The third time it was Nick Memphis, poking him. That really hurt.

  His eyes came open. It felt as though a camel had been licking his face for a month. His limbs were dead, his fingers dead, his legs and feet dead. Consciousness was a thick sludge, and he fought his way through it, struggling for focus and breath.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, his voice evidently not dead.

  “He’s coming out of it,” Nick said, and the next person who leaned in was Susan Okada, beautiful and untouchable—why had she come back, damnit?—and looking at him as, say, the shogun’s executioner might look at someone whose neck he would in the next second split.

  “Hello,” she said uncheerily, “anybody home?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he replied and found that his body did move, he wasn’t quadded out. He had a headache that only a dozen Jacks in an hour would justify, and the right half of his face was swaddled in bandages, the eye occluded by pouches of something—his swelling, he guessed—pressing against it from all sides.

  “Water, please,” he said.

  She poured it for him from a bottle.

  “Our hero returns from vacation,” she said.

  “How do you feel?” Nick said.

  “Like shit.”

  “Funny, that’s what you look like,” said Susan.

  “Oh, Christ, what happened?”

  “You were smashed in the head by a flying desk. You have a concussion. Your cheekbone for some reason refused to break, but it took thirty-one stitches to close up the slice beneath your eye. The swelling will go down in November. You look like an abused grapefruit.”

  “Agh,” he coughed. “And what about, um, that colonel, and Cruz.”

  “The colonel’s dead, Cruz is gone. Total catastrophe.”

  Bob swallowed the water. Goddamn, his head hurt. The news about the colonel hit him hard. The guy was just—

  But what was the point?

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Sure. Then you tell us what happened.”

  Nick explained: ten .50-caliber slugs through the wall of Steel Brigade Armory, a fluke of ballistics that the first one hit and spun the desk through midair instead of blasting Bob into particles, another one zeroing in on Colonel Chambers—“You don’t want to see the crime scene pictures”—and the others generally ripping the hell out of the place. Cruz’s prints were all over, but the lack of blood samples suggested he’d gotten to the floor in time to just miss getting jellified, then slipped out the back after the shooters pulled away. There were no forensics on the shooters except a partial tire track near the edge of the road that pointed the way to sixteen million Goodyear Wrangler P245 tires.

  “Oh, hell,” said Bob.

  “Now, your turn. Excuse me for asking the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, but what the hell were you doing in a conversation with the object of a federal manhunt and why oh why oh why didn’t you call for backup, for guidance, for anything?”

  “Oh, that,” said Bob, and he searched feebly for a joke, almost saying, “Backup is for pussies.” But he didn’t. Nobody seemed much interested in his sense of humor.

  He told it as simply as he could. He explained it, then justified it.

  “I just went out there to get the lay of the land. I knew I’d be back the next day, I didn’t want to go in cold. A recon, that’s all. When I seen, excuse me, saw the light on, I figured, what the hell? I thought it was going to be another old geezer who probably knew who I was and I could get more out of him on my own, man to man, than if I was part of a goddamned invasion force. I didn’t know Cruz was there. I had no idea someone was going to start blasting with a fifty. I didn’t plan on taking a ten-thousand-caliber desk in the head.”

  Nick was silent.

  Susan said, “Tell us exactly what Cruz said. Can you remember?”

  Swagger tried to re-create the conversation in his own head.

  “‘Nobody’s been where I am now. And nobody can get me out but me.’ That’s the line I remember. He had an idea people were trying to kill him. Seems like he was right on that one, or maybe these stitches on my face came from my imagination. But he’s a serious man hell-bent on a course. He’s burned bad because of the death of his spotter. He thinks he’s the only one who can figure it out because all of us are in ‘the system’ and can’t be trusted or are being manipulated by shadowy forces. Wasn’t interested in coming in. I played that line hard, but he wasn’t having none of it, any of it.”

  Nick let a melancholy ton of air escape his lungs.

  “So, basically, we’re nowhere.”

  “We do know it’s him. And we know that somebody wants to kill him. We do know that,” said Bob.

  “We don’t,” said Susan. “Excuse me, but this colonel knew a lot of snipers, he ran courses for snipers, and among them are sure to be some unstable people. Maybe one had a grudge against him. You just can’t jump to the conclusion that it was an attempt on Cruz’s life without a thorough professional investigation. Maybe he was in a love affair, a business crisis, a lawsuit, any one of a dozen mundane reasons—”

  “They’d go for him with a Barrett? His wife’s boyfriend goes for him with a—”

  “Barretts are civilian legal,” said Nick. “If you wanted a safe way to kill a guy who was known to work very late in an aluminum building, a Barrett semi would be number one on your wish list, especially if you knew a little about guns, as anyone who knew the colonel probabl
y did.”

  “So you’re not going to—”

  “Go on a witch hunt, no,” said Susan. “I know how conveniently the Agency fits all manner of paranoid fantasies, justifies any interpretation, satisfies any mandate of evil or conspiracy. We will not use this as an excuse to probe in areas that are off-limits unless we develop hard evidence, and I mean hard, that suggests Agency personnel were involved. Unknown gunmen shooting up a building in the night in rural South Carolina doesn’t cut it.”

  “High-level gunmen. You could tell because he fired so fast and he kept his shots tight. He’d ridden that recoil before in dusty places full of guys with tablecloths on their heads and daggers between their teeth. Do I need to point out that it was almost certainly a Barrett that the guys in Afghanistan used on Whiskey Two-Two? Coincidence? Sure, the world’s full of them. Anyhow”—Swagger coughed, in the grasp of a phlegm-throated oxygen debt—“who are they, what are they doing here? What’s their interest in Ray?”

  “Nothing ties them to Ray,” said Nick. “Sorry, but Okada is right. Without hard evidence we have no license to poke our way into Agency business. No one at the Bureau wants that. This temporary truce is something everybody wants and I can’t endanger it on the evidence of nothing.”

  “You people and your rules,” said Bob. “It’s like dealing with kindergarteners at a goddamn ice-cream party. ‘I want the ice cream!’ ‘No, no, it’s my ice cream.’ How do you stand it?”

  “The system is the system, Swagger,” said Susan. “Look, there is indeed a schism in the Agency: those who believe in Zarzi, those who don’t. The disbelievers have been exiled because the Administration also wants to believe in Zarzi.”

  “Is it possible some of the pro-Zarzis have gone overboard in their protection of him?” Bob said. “They want the Zarzi ice cream, they’re crazy for the ice cream, and so they’ve gone around the bend to make sure it don’t melt?”