Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “Nothing’s going to happen, Mick. We pop him, the fuckhead cops wonder what the hell that sonic boom is, we drive to the airport, we leave a timer in the car so it goes bang tomorrow at noon, we fly away. The gardener finds him stuffed between the fence and the wall a few weeks from now. What the hell is that? everybody wonders. Who did Ray Cruz? Meanwhile, you and me, it’s twenty-four/seven pussy, dope, and gin for a year or so. And here’s the best part: the fucking universe was falling apart, the struts that hold it all together were cracking, we did our job, we lived up to our calling. What else is there? It sure beats teaching high school English or selling software programs.”

  “It does. Just so you know, you and Carl, you guys are the best I ever worked with. Too bad about him, but I’ll be on your six o’clock any time you need it, bro.”

  “Same here, Adonis.”

  “Now let’s do this sucker.”

  They slid back to the rear of the SUV. The spotting scope and the .338 Lapua Magnum, a Sako TRG-42 with a big-ass chunk of Nightforce glass up top, were already in place. They squirmed into position, and Tony Z worked himself to the scope, fiddled with it, while Mick set to rifle business.

  “Wait,” said Bogier. “Run a check on the BlackBerry on Swagger. See where he is. That might come in handy.”

  “You got it,” said Tony. He rolled to his back, pulled the BlackBerry out of the pocket of his tactical vest, then squirmed back over and turned it on. Magically, a grid of the streets where they were operating opened up, and in a few seconds, the small, beeping light that always announced the satellite’s astronomical opinion on the presence of Planet Swagger came to life.

  “Yeah, he’s on-site. He’s at the library. That must be their command HQ.”

  “Good,” said Bogier. “If they were on to anything, he’d be down here in this area. We got it locked. I am filled with confidence. The mission is a big go.”

  “Okay, Swagger’s moving, not much, but there’s motion.” Tony looked at his watch. “Good, that means the speech is over, now Swagger knows it’s the moment of maximum danger, and he’s moving close to Zarzi.”

  “Go to scope, bro.”

  Tony put his eye back to the spotter. He saw the stone wall, an upslope of grass to it, the perpendicular wrought-iron fence, a sidewalk into the campus, another outpost of fence, then the driveway that presumably led to parking lots. Two cops stood together, talking casually, about thirty yards down 37th, their backs to the driveway and gate. It was six hundred yards out, and by now, it had darkened considerably. The range was too far for night vision, but the optics gave excellent resolution and there was enough ambient light from the campus lights and the buildings across 37th Street to illuminate the scene for him.

  “I’ve got a good visual.”

  “Me too,” said Bogier.

  The rifle was a phantasmagoria of modern accuracy tricks, with a free-floating barrel, its action bedded and sunk into a green plastic stock that had accuracy enhancements 1 through 233, including a rigid pistol grip, a bolt grip the size of a golf ball, and infinitely adjustable potential, whole pieces and sides and hemispheres that could be adjusted inward and outward just so. It looked like a piece of plastic plumbing put together by a drunken committee of clowns, but it fit like a glove, and riding its bipod, Mick brought it readily to hand, eye, supporting elbow. The muzzle of the suppressor projected just slightly from the rear opening and the windows of the vehicle were so blackened that you’d suspect a sniper only if you were looking for a sniper.

  Through the scope, which was set at a modest 6 power, Mick could see exactly what Tony saw, only smaller. But there was no jiggle, no wobble, no irritating tremble matched to his breathing, which is the great advantage of the lower magnification.

  “I am so locked on,” said Mick. “I can feel my heartbeats, I can feel my atoms shifting. Man, I am in a zen wave you would not believe.”

  “Me too, brother. Yes.”

  “Any second now,” Mick said, and both understood the time for chatter was over.

  They waited. It sucked. They waited. It sucked. They waited. It sucked.

  “Uh!” said Tony, a little peep to his voice. “I have him. Jesus Christ, he just leaned out from around the iron fence at the entrance to the parking lot. You read it so right, Mick! He’s twenty feet from his shooting position.”

  “Cops, do you see cops?”

  “They’re looking the wrong way, assholes. He’s trying to decide whether to conk them, then go to the wall gap, or just go anyway, hoping they don’t turn.”

  “I got him, damnit, he keeps pulling out and back in, I don’t have enough of him long enough to shoot.”

  “You cool?”

  “Like the hand of death, man. Just let him move, stay stable, and bingo, we got him.”

  Then the sniper emerged. He dipped across the entryway to the driveway, huddled at the foot of the separation between it and the walkway.

  “He’s going along the fence. Then he’ll curve back into the gap. I’ll take him when he’s in place. I don’t want to shoot through the fence.”

  “You cool?”

  “I’m coolly cool, boy. High times ahead.”

  They could both see the sniper ease forward, but the problem was the wrought iron. From this extreme angle, the gaps between the metal would be tiny, and to risk a shot through them foolish. Let him slide along, get into position, and then whack him.

  “He’s almost—”

  The lights cut into the scene like a madman’s stab. The beams leapt from nothingness from the near building roof, three, four of them, crucifying the crawling sniper next to the wrought-iron fence. From nowhere it seemed, men rose from bush and from ground and closed the distance in split seconds. They had shotguns leveled and someone was screaming, if indistinctly, from this far out.

  “Goddamnit! It was a fucking trap! Swagger must have set it up! Goddamnit!” screamed the angry Tony. “Oh fuck fuck fuck fuck fu—”

  “Stay on the scope. Maybe when they move him, I’ll get the shot. Be cool, goddamnit, be cool.”

  “They’ve got him now. Six of them. They’re on him. Shit.”

  One of the cops broke away from the struggle and was talking on a hand unit. In seconds, a squad car, its lights beaming red-white pulses into the night, pulled around a corner a block down, and raced to the scene. It halted, and two cops got out.

  “Okay, he goes in the car. Stay on him,” said Mick. “I’m orienting on the car. Talk to me, talk to me.”

  “They’ve got him, man, he’s fighting hard, oops, they knocked him down, he’s cuffed, oh yeah, now they’re dragging his ass to the car, I can’t even see him there are so many cops on him, okay, they’ve got him there, pushing his head down, opening door, in he goes—”

  “Dead zero,” said Mick.

  He had him. Cruz’s head was silhouetted perfectly in the rear car window, the scene well lit by the pulse of the police lights. Mick more or less oozed through a slight correction, placing the exact and motionless intersection of the crosshairs onto the center of the head, knowing the .338 would not deviate an inch as it plowed through the glass so much more powerfully than a .308, and when it hit it would splatter whatever organic lay at the end of its long journey and in that moment of perfect truth and clarity, his finger independently squeezed gently into the trigger and he fired.

  LAUINGER LIBRARY

  GRESHAM AUDITORIUM

  GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

  WASHINGTON, DC

  2115 HOURS

  He had them. Of course. They were eager to be had. They believed so urgently, so earnestly, so passionately.

  “Finally,” Ibrahim Zarzi said, “finally, I speak of honor. It is not much spoken of these days. It is an old-fashioned virtue that belongs, it is said, in books about Camelot or Baghdad during the great years of the caliphate. It is the bond between men of good faith, goodwill, and lion hearts that supercedes creeds, religions, sects, units, parties, any artificial human grouping you can name. It i
s not between groups, it is between men.

  “Thus, standing up here in the blaze of lights, I do not see a group called ‘American diplomats’ and ‘policy intellectuals.’ I do not see uniforms, clothes, hair styles, skin colors. I do not see sexes. I see other men, and you will forgive an old fellow for not, briefly, indulging in the politically correct gender blur. The women in this room are men also, in that they are fierce warriors committed in the end to a world at peace, where the letters IED do not stand for improvised explosive device but for ice educational development, and those employing it work hard to improve the world’s figure skating until even we Muslims can do a triple axel!”

  He waited for the laughter to subside, luxuriating in the waves of love that washed upon him.

  “As I say, this can only happen if men have honor among themselves. I look, I see men of honor. I see my new friend Jackson Collins who oversees his Agency’s efforts in my country; I see my new friend Theodore Hollister who supervises all, I see Arthur Rossiter, sublime of countenance, yet as fierce a warrior as there is. And finally I see Walter Troy, who makes sure that what must happen happens. These are men I love and respect. They believe in my country and in its future. They understand that our two nations and our two cultures must embrace and entwine and learn from each other. They understand that the trust between men is what holds us together and enables us to reach out and overcome our tiny, negligible differences, and in the words of your great moral reformer, overcome. One day we shall overcome, I swear it, my friends, my honorable friends, I swear it on my honor.”

  His eyes brimmed with a fervor that took the shape of tears, and the tears drained sweetly down his face.

  “And thus it is my pleasure, my duty, my responsibility, but above all required by my honor that I declare myself a candidate for the presidency of my country and I will return on Sunday to begin to run to capture the hearts, the souls, the minds, and the love of my countrymen. Thank you, Americans, for showing me, a much fallen sinner, the path back to honor!”

  The diplomats, normally staid men with dry eyes and the demeanor of undertakers, rose in unison to clap thunderously.

  UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

  CORNER, P STREET AND WISCONSIN

  GEORGETOWN

  WASHINGTON, DC

  2119 HOURS

  Dead center,” said Tony. “Bing-fucking-go! Home run, three-pointer, goaallllll! Now let’s—”

  “Shit,” said Mick. “I hit a fucking TV. I saw it shatter. It’s a fucking trap.”

  His bullet had struck the center of what was supposed to be Cruz’s head, but wasn’t. He realized, from the momentarily unperturbed image of Cruz sitting immobile after the hit, which a second later disappeared in a shattering collapse of transparent plastic and the sparks of electrical damage, that he’d drilled some kind of screen displaying a prerecorded image of Cruz sliding into the car and taking a seat.

  From side streets along the five blocks of P to the target zone, heavy SUVs gunned into view, cranked east hard, and ramrodded at them.

  It seemed that a fucking convention of special operators also began to spill out of bushes left and right with all the world’s collection of submachine guns and black rifles, and spotlights came on them, as an amplified voice rose from an indeterminate point and said, “In the SUV, show us your hands, you are surrounded, this is the FBI.” Choppers whirled in low overhead, sending their own beams of illumination down to penetrate through the elms above. The world had instantly gone to war.

  Mick slapped Tony hard on the shoulder.

  “Okay, son,” he said. “Let’s show these motherfuckers a thing or two.”

  “Hoochie mama,” said Tony. “It’s the big rodeo!”

  Mick picked up his MP5, lying next to the big Sako sniper rifle, thrust its snout out the open rear window, and with one strong hand emptied a long burst into the darkness at the nearest men, watched them fly or drop. He heard Tony Z’s M4 empty itself of thirty .223s in less than two seconds and saw the lead SUV vibrate in tune to his multiple hits as it veered left, hit something hard, veered right, and totaled itself and the car it creamed, blocking P street.

  “Great shooting!” yelled Mick.

  The night became magical with havoc. Their own vehicle began to shiver as bullets hit it, metallic clangs ringing in protest at each penetration. It sank on quickly flattened tires. The windows smeared with a spidery webbing of fissure and crack as the bullets sheared through them, holding for a bit, but as more came, one, then another atomized into a spray of shiny sparkles.

  Mick got out first, left-hand side, curbside, as bullets plowed into the grass around him, kicking up superheated puffs of vegetable protein. He squeezed close to the car, seeking what little cover was available in its lee, as Z squirmed out next, fast and awkward. Mick saw targets, he gunned targets. He saw another SUV having squirmed around the wreckage and come down the sidewalk, he put his sight on it and lit it up, watched it waver as junk and shit flew off it, and then it collided with a tree and came to rest on its side. More lights came on, but Mick and Tony firing in a stack, one on top of the other in classic SWAT formation, each emptying a magazine at fast movers and vehicles with signs of motion in them, which seemed to drive back the agents. None of the badges wanted to be the only guy to die.

  The shooting was fabulous, all you could want in the mad psycho surge of the moment, it was Heat, The Wild Bunch, The Dogs of War, the North Hollywood bank robbery, Babyface going hard at the FBI gunners, his tommy gun blazing, all of them, all at once, a world gone spastically into chaos and mayhem. Flashes danced at muzzles, the smokeless powder spurted its intoxicant, a devil’s cologne so potent that the hair inside the nose became erect with pleasure, while the spent shells flew in a blur, like insects spiraling from the hive, the recoil was satisfyingly stern but not stout, and over that drama another one played out, the drama of men falling, windows shattering, cars veering, dust flying, things breaking, the fan exploding as the shit hit it by the ton.

  Mick rushed through a mag change.

  “You guys want a little war?” he screamed. “Okay, motherfuckers, we’re gonna have us a little war, and guess what, we like war!”

  Tony laughed. It was, really, mercenary heaven. It was all that mercs dreamed about, when they were honest with themselves. It was the final big ride with the devil, firepower, destruction, a great deal of ammo, an enemy who expected you to fold and was not at all anticipating World War Three here in sedate Georgetown.

  “You good?” asked Mick, completing his reload.

  Tony got a new mag into the carbine.

  “I am so good,” he said. “Man, am I good. I just wish Crackers was here.”

  Mick reached into his pocket, pulled out a handful of Dexies, and swallowed them dry. They banged off in his head like illumination rounds hitting stainless steel. Man, was he jacked. Fucking A, he was crazed with war lust.

  He saw Tony swallow his share of the magic pills, and each flashed the other a cocky fuck-the-world grin, all macho death wish and lust, maybe the last look that passed between Matix and Platt behind the Suniland shopping center in Dade County, 1986, or maybe the Delta snipers Shughart and Gordon at Black Hawk UH-60’s crash site in Mogadishu in 1993.

  “Let’s kill some assholes,” said Tony.

  Both rose, firing. Their rounds, splaying out in the night, plowed up debris, stucco, splinters, atomized glass, steel shrapnel, turning the weather to a 100 percent chance of death. They ran across somebody’s front yard, while incoming rounds pulled up turf geysers all around them. A bullet smacked Tony down, but it was stopped by his armor, and he was up in a second, laughing at the wit of it all.

  “Fucking guy thought he had me!” he said. “What a loser.”

  They got between houses.

  Mick, changing magazine again, blinking to wipe the sweat from his eyes, looked up to see a little girl peering down on him through a window.

  “Down, down, honey,” he gestured wildly.

  She
smiled.

  He smiled back, winked, and made the “get down” signal once again, and this time she obeyed.

  “Good to go?” asked Z.

  “Cocked, locked, hung like a stud horse, ready to rock, roll, and die proud and loud.”

  “I am so psyched,” said Tony Z. “Man, this is so Heat!”

  “It’s the Auburn game all over again,” laughed Mick. “Roll, Tide! Okay, on my lead, I’m reckoning we’ll head to Wisconsin where we can really do some damage.”

  “Go on, you lazy bastard,” said Tony.

  They ran between houses, one with the MP5, the other with his M4, two armored, hulking terminators crazed on drugs and destruction, sweaty and doomed and loving every motherfucking second of it.

  FBI INCIDENT COMMAND HQ

  O’BRIAN CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT CENTER

  CORNER, 37TH AND P STREET

  GEORGETOWN

  WASHINGTON, DC

  2142 HOURS

  Nick had gone to the scene, in full body armor.

  All around, people talked on commo, coordinating incoming SWAT units, the air traffic overhead, the pileup of emergency vehicles, all of it made crazier by the Secret Service need to get its high-value target securely out of the way fast.

  “I told him these guys wouldn’t go easy,” said Swagger.

  “Jesus, get me a rifle, I need to get there,” said Cruz.

  “You stay put, Cruz. You’re going nowhere,” said Swagger in a voice that meant exactly what it said.

  They could hear: “Suspects crossing Wisconsin, firing both directions. They are shooting up storefronts, they shot the windows out of a bus, there are people down everywhere, we need maximum medical personnel—” And then Nick’s voice coming in, “This is Incident Commander, no, repeat no, negative medical personnel to move to site until suspects are apprehended, I will convey that information.”

  “This is DC SWAT commander, I have ten armed men good to go at the corner of Wisconsin and N, I need permission to deploy. Incident Commander, may I—”