Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “And if she gets a signifier, she’ll shoot?” asked Chandler.

  “With approval.”

  But this wasn’t a good one for Diana the Huntress. That goddess would have to wait for her blood offering from her young acolyte Jameson as her unseen collaborators and supervisor decided against pulling the trigger, and she climbed from the area, locked on a steady course, riding the grid this way before she rode it that way.

  Nelson led them onward, talking as he went.

  “The third level of permissibility is what we call Sierra, S for strategic. That’s polite terminology for assassination. That’s when the Agency develops a high-value target opportunity, specific to time and place. A big bad guy, in other words. It’s rare enough to be fun and a highlight in a duty week. We will intercept him, just like we did Yamamoto in World War Two. We’ll know where he will be and we’ll be there, real high or real low. All the permissions are already in place, legal has signed off, we’re just looking for one of a dozen preselected descriptors. Maybe an on-ground asset will be communicating with us. All the folks involved generally tune in; it’s everybody’s favorite TV show. But it’s really up to the battle manager and the pilot to bring it off, and the other people usually keep their mouths shut. That one’s all flying, just waiting for a moment when Mr. Big is in the car, there aren’t any school buses or ambulances or trucks full of violin prodigies nearby, and they drop the hammer. The Agency is very strict on collateral, particularly in a Sierra shoot. It’s one thing to blow up a school when you’re trying to save a platoon from getting overrun and another to blow it up to kill one guy whose presence you’re not a hundred percent clear on. Anyhow, you’ll see a good one when you look at the shot tapes. We got a Taliban assistant commander in Kandahar province on that shift, I’ve already checked. Poof. Instant vapors. My people like those a lot. They’re the shots that’ll end the war sooner, rather than later.”

  “There’s no other ‘level of permissibility’ as you call it, nothing beyond Tango, Oscar, and Sierra?” asked Starling.

  “No, ma’am. Not at present. Not seven months ago. Now, if we find ourselves in a fall-of-Vietnam scenario, that might change. Or if Al-Qaeda goes belly up if we get the tall man, that might change too. I can’t forecast the future. But those are our standards, our rules, and as you will see, we document everything and nothing is left to chance.”

  “And drones aren’t run out of any other base?”

  “No sir. The Air Force flies the drones, the CIA provides the intel and co-ops on the supervision. The CIA and the Air Force have a very good operating relationship, at this level anyway. Everybody’s on the same page.”

  “And you tape all your shots?” asked Starling.

  “Yes, ma’am. Partially to learn from them, but also to cover this eventuality so that we can answer any questions quickly and honestly.”

  They walked on through the center, seeing Jameson’s scene played out by a dozen other pilot operators, some in Air Force officers’ uniforms, some in shorts and T-shirts—civilian contractors, the colonel explained—passed under an archway, and came to a corridor. The colonel led them to a room.

  “This is where I’ve set you up. We’re at your disposal. You see before you duty logs, and the sergeant here will call your operators and battlefield managers for interviews. You can go through each operator’s shifts in real time—well, you won’t want to do that—or on channel two, you can see all the shots. You can talk with Captain Peoples, who was the battle manager that shift. I’ll have meals brought to you, the bathroom is down the hall, and call me if you need anything at all. As I said, I want it noted that our cooperation was one hundred percent.”

  “Thank you,” said Starling, and she and Swagger got to work.

  FBI HQ

  HOOVER BUILDING

  PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  1700 HOURS

  Nick was in records on the second floor. It looked about as law enforcement as a midsize software company, with a lot of intense people locked into their computer terminals. He went to the duty desk and waited for someone to notice him. He could have sent someone, for as an assistant director, he now had a fleet of staff, as well as endless extras assigned for the duration of this task force emergency, but somehow he felt it best if he handled it himself. He also could have had a clerk dispatched to his office, but he’d never adjusted to the perk thing. It was something you didn’t want to get too attached to or you’d really miss it when it went away.

  “Yes, Mr. Director?” one of the clerks asked, having rushed to his side. ADs were big news in this part of the building, on this floor, and assisting one could always lead to some kind of break in the career climb.

  “Hi,” he said, squinting to see her nametag, “Doris, how are you? How’re the wife and kids?” he joked, playing the sincerely-insincere card that was always good for an ice-breaking laugh.

  “The kids ran away with a motorcycle gang and the wife is divorcing me for a bull dyke in Latent Prints,” the girl said brightly, and both laughed. He liked her spirit.

  “Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. I’m not sure how you access this, but I’m thinking that in some way you ought to have records on a certain kind of guy.”

  “You don’t have a name, a crime, a booking number?”

  “Only a category.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “Okay, you know these guys who work overseas for these big security firms on government contracts? Graywolf is the biggest, but there must be more.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I know we looked into Graywolf in 2005 on the issue of illegitimate or indiscriminate shooting in Baghdad.”

  “I remember it.”

  “The guys they hire: they seem to be called contractors, they’re tough, hard guys, with a lot of military, even Special Forces, experience.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I need a list of the ones who’ve gotten in trouble with the law.”

  “I can cross-reference by affiliation against conviction. What sorts of infractions?”

  “Gosh, I’m guessing assault, second-degree murder, maybe extortion, maybe rape, the kinds of crimes you’d find in a war zone. Wouldn’t be crimes against property, but excess violence, a tendency to shoot, things that would get someone in trouble even in a wild and woolly town like Baghdad or Kabul. Maybe cross-reference with the authorities there, maybe check with State, Department of the Army, the marines, and so forth.”

  “Okay. I’ll get right on it.”

  “And maybe also check with State as to whether or not any of them have recently reentered the country. I’m looking for a hard-ass guy with lots of combat experience, a real operator who’s shady on the criminal front at the same time. I’m sure a lot of these guys are straight-on professionals, doing a very hard job in a crappy piece of the world. But the guys capable of that sort of thing over the long term, the guys who enjoy the action, who love to carry the black rifles and wear the watch caps low over their heads, the tactical freaks addicted to the rush of pulling the trigger—there’s got to be a kind of pool of them available for various odd, dirty jobs in those towns. The washouts, the screwups, the just fired, the embittered. Those are the guys I’m looking for, and I’m real curious to see if any Tommy Tactical heavy hitters have come back recently.”

  “I’ll get right on it, sir,” she said.

  “And this is just between you, me, and the bull dyke who stole your wife.”

  HIGH DESERT

  95 SOUTHBOUND TO VEGAS

  1040 HOURS

  THE NEXT DAY

  She drove listlessly if proficiently. The desert slipped by, unremarkable in its repetitiveness as the rental ate up the miles between Creech and Vegas and the hotel beds that would give them a few hours’ rest after an all-nighter talking about and watching missiles blow up vehicles mainly, the odd mud shanty, now and then an unidentifiable gun position, a spot on a ridge, a copse of trees, a wall off the road.r />
  It was the same. The missile hit too hard and fast for even the highest res camera and the slowest slo-mo to catch it. What one saw was only the release of an energy bolt in the severe constraints of the black-and-white camera work, first a blinding smear of illumination, then unleashed, boiling coils of smoke lit from within, tumbling tumultuously, almost with anger and vengeance as their propulsion, while at the margins waves of dust whipped outward in supertime and anything unobscured by the blast wave rippled against the sudden pressure spike, people, furniture, junk of any sort, all of it airborne and deposited elsewhere in a second.

  And the shooters. The same. Earnest techies, some civvie, some young Air Force officers, all polite and to the point, like a Boy Scout patrol dead set on a high merit-badge count. They were so decent you couldn’t really play them, somehow, so eager, having been clearly instructed by command to give it up to the feebs, all with bleached-white teeth. Maybe the civvies were a little more loosey-goosey, but not much, and in all their eyes Swagger read only commitment to duty, pride in warrior skills, the lack of self-consciousness of the best fighters (no intellectuals, no ironists, no wise guys among them). They were a one-way street.

  The drive rolled onward, low energy and without seeming purpose except getting there and getting to bed. At a certain point, Bob checked the messages on his cell, then settled back into the silence that pretty much defined his relationship with Starling when they weren’t trying to nudge a young officer into explicating more precisely on the nature of this or that hit and the protocols that determined it. It had been exhausting, and only the work ethic of Spartans had gotten them through it despite jet lag and the need to return to DC and the actual mission at hand as soon as possible.

  It wasn’t until the comical cityscape of the strip, that mile or so of fantasy money-trap architecture that comprised tourist Vegas, revealed itself that she spoke.

  “Not much, I’m afraid.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “So I’m going to e-mail HQ a prelim. I’ll account for our time, enumerate our IVs, and report our conclusions, which would be, correct me if I’m wrong, zilch, zappo, zip, nada, rien, and, of course, nothing. Do you disagree?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Bob. “Nothing we didn’t know before.”

  “I’m going to ask to fly back tonight, tomorrow earliest. What day is it, again? All that time underground, you lose a sense of time.”

  “It’s Sunday, it would be one-forty in the East.”

  “Okay, give me a minute.”

  She flipped her phone open one-handed, punched in a preset number, waited for the answer, and spoke quickly, listening more. Then she snapped it shut.

  “He’s been to the Sunday talkers under that heavy security, no difficulties, no emergencies, so Cruz has gone to ground for the time being and I think we’re okay. I do want to be back before the next outing, that speech in Georgetown.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Anything to say? Any disagreement with my conclusion? For the record, I was impressed. You handled yourself very well and you slipstreamed nicely with my lead on the interrogations. Hard to believe you aren’t a trained agent.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Just trying to be helpful.”

  More silence.

  Then she said, “What did you mean?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said, ‘Nothing we didn’t know before.’ But we didn’t know anything before. We still know nothing, or am I missing something?”

  “Well, I would say we learned that a) there is a secret CIA program, and that b) we know what it does and how it’s structured and who mans it and what its task is, and c) that Dombrowski took the shot on the day in question, though it wasn’t a Hellfire, it was more likely one of the big boys, a Paveway Two.”

  Starling was silent for a while, then she guided the car to the shoulder. Cars buzzed by loaded up with prospectors, hungry to reach the promised land just ahead and, as promised, lose all their money. The comical town with its pyramids and space towers and Renaissance castles set against a crusty rim of low mountains lay bleaching in the sun. It looked like an idiot child’s creation.

  “All right, Swagger. What are you seeing that poor dumb Chandler isn’t? What does the cowpoke Svengali have up his sleeve?”

  “Yes, ma’am. First, the milieu. Hey, ain’t that a fancy word? Can’t believe I used it. I must have read it in some book or something.”

  “No attitude, please.”

  “I’m just funning you, Agent Chandler.”

  “Since you seem dead set on destroying my entire interpretation of the last sixteen hours, why don’t you call me Jean. Or, I suppose, ‘Starling,’ since everybody else does.”

  “The milieu. If you looked carefully—”

  “I suppose I didn’t.”

  “You saw a lot of tape strips. Meaning there were a lot of banners taped up in that op center that they took down. It had been sanitized, you know, like a toilet in a motel with a paper ribbon around it. I’m betting the banners said things like ‘Kill Towelheads!’ and ‘Go Git ’Em, Tigers.’ All that fighter pilot macho kill-the-bastards stuff. See, that’s that colonel. He’s a fighter jock, he brings fighter jock mentality to the job, his thing is get in close and blow the bastards away. That’s the spirit of the room, not the hum of techies. All those kids, they was suppressing, they was holding it in. They’re young killers and they’re proud of it. And they compete. That’s why they have nicknames like New-D and Old-D and I bet the rest have ’em too, like Saxon Dog and Red Hawk and Bravo and Lion-heart. They don’t want us to see that but that’s how people who kill operate, because they have to stay close to their high so they’re together when the shit is in the air. I know. Three tours, ’Nam, one as a sniper.”

  “I know you’ve done some killing.”

  “Way too much.”

  “So what does that tell us? That’s not—”

  “No, but it sets up the climate of the place and it tells us it ain’t as ‘professional’ as it seems and in that kind of a joint, things are sloppier, wilder, crazier. The stars have latitude, the bossman wants his kids to perform, he doesn’t want to override them with ridiculous rules and bullshit, so he relaxes the regs. But he tightens it up for us and Jameson almost got with the program, but she couldn’t say no to her comfy flip-flops today and go with the short little heels the women officers wear with that duty uniform. She probably normally hunts in jeans and a T-shirt or a tank top, and she loves it and they love her for it, because right now she is at the top of her game. But what that tells me is: there’s room for something to slide by the Air Force monitors.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Second thing: her battlefield manager, Captain Peoples. Remember him?”

  “He was the dullest of the dull.”

  “He did seem like an IRS agent, didn’t he? He is the key guy. He had to be in on it, and he probably reports directly to the Agency in certain circumstances. His console is so complex he could have all kinds of communications circuits the brass know nothing about.”

  “That doesn’t prove—”

  “I watched him extra hard. Remember when you asked him, ‘And there’s no other category of permissibility except Tango, Oscar, and Sierra?’ And he said, ‘No, ma’am, absolutely not’?”

  “Sort of. I think I asked Colonel Nelson that.”

  “You asked everyone that. But only Captain Peoples was interesting when he answered. You know why?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Because unlike Colonel Nelson or any of the others, Captain Peoples leaned forward in his chair, fixed his eyes on yours, and did not blink. They all blinked, all through their chats, it’s human to blink. You don’t blink if you’re concentrating on controlling your eyes because you don’t want to give up the lying tell signs, the sideways or upper look to the script you’re trying to remember. He had been professionally coached on how to get through an interrogation, how to lie without no tells. They
trained him too good and he overdid it.”

  “Okay,” said Starling. “I missed that. You didn’t. Good work. It’s thin but it’s not without its compelling element. But you said you know what this program does.”

  “Think about what Tango, Oscar, and Sierra don’t do. Think about the possibility they don’t cover.”

  “Just tell me. I’m too tired to play games.”

  “Tango is urgent, tactical. Oscar is longer in duration, involves hunting, obtaining permission, checking with legal. Sierra is longest in duration, requiring preengagement permission requests and acceptances. But suppose . . . suppose they get a big guy in their sights and they have to make up their minds fast. In minutes?”

  “All right. I’m supposing.”

  “They don’t have time to go through committees and permission protocols or to haul a junior partner in from legal. So there’s got to be an ultra-override program where somebody of senior judgment and experience can make a fast read on intel and authorize an immediate shot. You get a good ground Joe who reliably sights Osama in a tent in some province. He calls it in to his Agency case officer, and that officer trusts him, sees the shot, and he calls Langley to get a fast, fast-shoot permission. It’s built on speed, no time for arguments, assessments, ramification surveys, tallying the yeps and the nopes, nothing like that. He goes to a big guy. This guy, whoever he is, he gets to say shoot or don’t shoot. He says it, the code word is sent to Creech, not to Colonel Nelson or the XO or whoever, but directly to the battle manager who goes to his best shooter and speaks the code word, delivers up the grid location, and she puts a big, smart bomb on it ASAP. From first sighting to delivery of ordnance, probably less than three minutes. And who knows? The shooter, for one. The battle manager, who immediately erases the tape and makes no document entry, for another. And then some Air Force crew at the fly-off base in Afghanistan who maybe notice Bird Twelve done come back shy one of its two Paveways. It don’t go no further, because the point is, in certain instances they will miss and they don’t want to answer no questions in case they take out that school or a hotel with thirty-one traveling salesmen in the bar. It’s self-sealing. It’s deniable. In the instant it happens it ceases to exist.”