Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “Cowpony 3-0-3, this is Ragweed Zulu, I have a possible target deviation.”

  “Copy that, Ragweed,” said Jameson into her throat mike, “let me get a visual confirm.”

  She oriented 107 in midair, took a quick glance at the ragged crest line between herself and the target, saw an upcoming gap. She eased back on the stick while giving the big bird a little more turbo, and inclined upward seven degrees. Without giving it a second or even a first thought, she toggled from the nose cam to left/lateral, and just as the lens broke free of the interfering rock mass, she brought up the magnification, waited for the self-focus, and brought the vehicle up so vividly on-screen it seemed just a few hundred feet away. Meanwhile, the compass readout above the image drifted around, quavered, and finally settled on a heading.

  “Ragweed Zulu, this is Cowpony, I have a deviation, he’s shifted from 123 north to about 204 west and I’m getting a slightly higher speed read, I’m putting him at close to thirty mph.”

  “Copy that, Cowpony.”

  “Ragweed, I am requesting a map indexing, can you handle, over?”

  “Cowpony 3-0-3, I copy that, over, be advised to give me a minute, please, over.”

  Ragweed got busy with his maps while Jameson went back to the issue of feet. She always kept hers as pretty as possible. She was not one of those thin things with hardly an extra ounce anywhere, but if solidly constructed, she was still stunning, a blond, blue-eyed all-American girl, seventh in her class at the academy, the big gun on her shift, and, everybody said, every bit as good as the legendary Dombrowski.

  “Cowpony 3-0-3, this is Ragweed Zulu, over.”

  “Go ahead, Ragweed Zulu.”

  “Cowpony, I have a village called Pesh el-Aware a couple of clicks ahead. We ran a 114L gig there two years ago, so it has been an active Taliban and Al-Q site but there was a collateral issue, I am advised. Do you want to shoot him now before he gets into it? We’d cut down on the collateral.”

  “Ragweed Zulu, I’ll take that under advisement. But maybe these guys will send someone out to meet him, and we’ll get a twofer. That’s my play, Ragweed, over.”

  “Cowpony, this is Ragweed, I support that call, you stay low and off, over.”

  “Copy that, Ragweed.”

  PASHMIN MOUNTAINS

  EASTERN PAKISTAN

  0850 HOURS PAKISTANI TIME

  The journey had been so long, and he was tired. He was scared too, and had a major melancholy going on, a case of buyer’s regret. He tried not to think of the things he’d never sample again or the moment of horror when he’d cut the woman’s throat. The weapon was X-ray proof, an intensely sharp plastic blade nestled in the lapel of his tweed sports jacket. He took no pleasure in using it. That’s not me. I had to do it. But the look when he slashed her, and the amount of blood, so unexpected, and the ease with which it transpired, all of it, so vivid, so awful, yet also somehow satisfying.

  On either side: nothing, as if out of a Beckett play. A denuded rural landscape of high desert, rock scut, leathery vegetation without flower or color, mud, dirt, stones, and sky. In the distance, the Hindu Kush showed its snowy magnificence but it was a sight one grew used to quickly. He thought instead about the nothingness he saw now, and how out of that nothingness, inspired by the desert’s emptiness, a man had created a vision and it was, after all was said and done, the moral vision. He had committed to it. He was a moral man. He clutched his briefcase to his chest.

  “Not much farther, I think,” said his bodyguard from the front seat, “the village just ahead, and we are there.”

  Except of course there was no there there just as there was no here here.

  “That is good,” he said.

  “You must be a very great man,” said the guard, holding his rifle close. “They value you a great deal and honor you. Your comfort will be my duty. I cannot give you New York and bright lights, but I do bring you the clarity and the beauty and the serenity of the high desert.”

  “That is all I want,” he said. “I have seen enough of those cities. I have tasted their wickedness to my content. It is now time to dedicate myself to further learning and meditation and to prepare myself to be of use in the next great development.”

  “Oh look,” said the bodyguard. “They sent a delegation. Oh my goodness, look who it is! A very high commander! Oh, I am so impressed.”

  The Land Rover closed the distance with them, and came to a halt. Five fighters tumbled from it, and then a distinguished man hung with bandoliers of magazines, a smile on his bearded face.

  “My friend!” he called. “My brother!”

  Hollister climbed from the Jeep, felt stiffness crank through his old legs but did not want to acknowledge it at this high spiritual moment, and opened his arms to embrace his new leader.

  “My brother!” he said. “God is great.”

  At that moment, a screaming came across the sky.

  CREECH AFB

  OPERATIONS CENTER

  INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

  2152 HOURS

  Nude Crushed Coral! It had to be! The other had too much orange in it and with the dress she planned to wear might be too matchy-matchy, because the dress had an orange tone to it that somehow, with the tan, made her teeth look very white. Randy liked that too.

  “Cowpony 3-0-3, this is Ragweed, do you read?”

  “Ragweed Zulu, this is Cowpony 3-0-3, I copy, over.”

  “Cowpony, the big bird is picking up a heat-emission signature, possibly another vehicle, maybe the greet you figured on, over.”

  “Ragweed, this is Cowpony, I will take a recon and advise, over.”

  “Go ahead, Cowpony.”

  She vectored 107 left, and went high, high, high, so the bird, though a Reaper was as big as a B-25 bomber on the ground, would be at twenty thousand feet nothing but a white speck, its roar lost in the tides and surges of the atmosphere. Look at me way up high, suddenly here am I, I’m flying! She loved this part. Breaking the surly bonds of earth. Too bad it wasn’t an F-15, but a Reaper was still a good ride and it did what had to be done.

  From twenty, she put the white cruciform on the small blot of illumination that signified the RFID data-stream source, brought up the magnification on her primary screen, and again watched as the tiny objects leapt to recognizability. She saw the Jeep, a new Land Rover, and a crowd of men engaged in hugging and congratulating one another. Many had weapons.

  “Ragweed, this is Cowpony, I read armed targets, request permission to engage.”

  “Cowpony, this is Ragweed Zulu, I am acknowledging request, confirming weapons, waiting for any comment from the Six, getting none, assuming shot clearance in place, entering it in the logbook. Go to weapons, Cowpony, and engage when ready, over.”

  “Ragweed, this is Cowpony, acknowledging permission.”

  She snapped a button and a computer icon of her weapons choices came up on the screen; given the altitude and the high value of the targets, she designated Paveway II, with the thermobaric 500-pound warhead.

  “Ragweed, I have designated left inboard Paveway Two, am now arming weapon, and switching screen to secondary feed.”

  “Copy that, Cowpony, over.”

  She lifted one wing while dropping the other, circled majestically, bird of prey, soaring eagle, riding the invisible superhighways of rushing wind, held the group of men and their two cars stable under the cruciform, seemed to take an involuntary breath.

  “Ragweed Zulu, I am engaging.”

  She pushed a button, then watched from the nose camera as the bomb took its long, last ride to earth, as internally the CPU sent minor corrections to the vehicle’s vanes, tweaking this way and that as it sought its destiny under the white cruciform imposed from on high, nothing radical, just turning a good trajectory into a perfect trajectory, and the earth and its bounty of men and vehicles and justice rushed ever so fast toward her until it resolved into a complete blur. She switched the secondary readout to the long shot from 20,000 and saw the scree
n blank out and then return to quasiclarity. The center ruptured in a spew of radiance, an outgoing circular wave of pure energy registering as an incandescence that overwhelmed the screen.

  A cheer rose in the room, and somewhere close by, a couple of operators jumped up to slap out some high fives.

  “Hoochie mama,” someone called.

  “He didn’t like that,” came another.

  “Welcome to hell, pilgrim.”

  “Dead zero,” said Swagger.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began in 1977 with the best idea I never had. The man who had it was a British thriller writer named Patrick Alexander. In that year he published a novel entitled Death of a Thin-skinned Animal. It crossed my desk—I was the book review editor of the Sunday Sun, of Baltimore—and immediately attracted my attention.

  I had written two unpublishable thrillers and was about to take my last swing. I had decided, from hard experience in failure, that the next book must extend from a tight premise with a limited set of characters in a small geographical area over a specific time frame and should be about a sniper. Death of a Thin-skinned Animal, at least from the flap copy, offered all that. I immediately placed it on my must-never-read list. I was afraid of my larcenous tendencies.

  Death of a Thin-skinned Animal reflected Britain’s obsession in the seventies with the bad-boy dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin; I’m guessing it had a whisper of le Carré to it as well, as he was the colossus who bestrode the thriller-writing world in those days.

  As Alexander had it, British intelligence decides a crackpot African dictator cannot be dealt with in his leftward slide, and must therefore be terminated. A British army sniper is sent on the job, but after he’s in country, the politics change. Now, the dictator is a friend, and must be protected at all costs. As the sniper is beyond recall, he is coldly betrayed and disappears. Five years later the dictator arrives in London for a celebration but is preceded by a radio message, in a code five years out of date. It states that the sniper will complete his mission in London.

  Great setup and I suspect it’s a fine book. I still haven’t read it (though now I own it). In the end, I let it go, and instead of stealing from Mr. Alexander stole from Mr. Pynchon. I managed to publish The Master Sniper in 1980. Sometime thereafter I realized that The Master Sniper was really Pynchon’s great Gravity’s Rainbow reimagined through the prism of a more concrete, less gifted mind.

  I continued, stealing left and right. The Spanish Gambit was Homage to Catalonia combined with For Whom the Bell Tolls and with a dash of Brideshead Revisited thrown in, even though I had not then and have not now read Brideshead Revisited. (I saw a little of the TV movie.) Most flagrantly, The Day Before Midnight appears to be Dr. Strangelove, beat by beat, scene by scene, and revelation by revelation, though told from Colonel Bat Guano’s point of view. If I had noticed it then, would I have changed it? Probably not. Dirty White Boys was anything by Jim Thompson, although again, I had never read anything by Jim Thompson. On and on it goes: Pale Horse Coming was Aeschylus, Faulkner, and Charles Askins. The 47th Samurai was a movie, not a novel, as directed (in my head) by Hideo Gosha in 1978. For crying out loud, I stole Bob Lee Swagger from Carlos Hathcock.

  Cut to 2009 when I’m looking for a plot, and what should drift before my nostrils but whiffs of Death of a Thin-skinned Animal. It was not the second time I considered the premise but the third, as evidently I almost wrote a book like this in 1993 instead of Point of Impact. But this time, I couldn’t resist. It’s a great premise, and I saw how it could be updated to the war in Afghanistan and the high-tech milieu that sniping and other forms of state-sanctioned killing have become, as well as provide an opportunity to crank the Swagger family history in another direction and express my contempt for the leftward drift of the American press over the past decade or so. Plus I got to write love poems to Susan Okada. I had great fun. So thank you, Mr. Alexander—he died in 2003—for being there when I needed you. I hope this plug sells a billion more of your books.

  The question remains: is this theft or inspiration? Or where does the inspiration end and the theft begin? If you didn’t know of the origin of Dead Zero and you read it and Death of a Thin-skinned Animal, would you see the connection? I’m not sure but I hope Mr. Alexander wouldn’t be too put out at my light fingers—it’s a tribute to his imagination, after all—in our mutual quest to keep readers awake all night and give them a nice vacation from their actual lives.

  In more mundane matters, much thanks, once again, is due Gary Goldberg who has become my technical intelligence adviser. He’s the one who understands transponders and RFIDs and Thuraya satellite phones and that sort of stuff. He also helps me send pages to New York via e-mail, a task that will remain permanently beyond my pay grade. (Alan Doelp pitched in when Gary was on vacation.)

  Gary and I also went to Vegas for a look at Creech and while out there we took a course in Suppressor Theory and Practice from Long Mountain Outfitters and there met Dan Shea, president of LMO and one of the most knowledgeable guys in the world on certain subjects. Dan, editor and publisher of Small Arms Review, was far more helpful than the U.S. Air Force in understanding the intricacies of Hellfire ACM-114, though at Dan’s suggestion, I have blurred and faked a lot of the technical stuff to keep mischief makers in the dark.

  Jeremy Woody, a marine combat veteran of the war in Iraq, loaned me his official Marine Corps manuals, by which I tried to solve the organizational, communications, tactical, and equipmental mysteries of that great organization, though mistakes are mine, not his. Good friend and co-author (of American Gunfight) John Bainbridge turned his steady eye to proofreading for me.

  On a sad note, it hurts to report that Weyman Swagger, former photo editor of The Sun, Bob’s namesake and my original mentor in gun culture way back when dinosaurs roamed the planet, succumbed in the spring to lung cancer. He was, in the best Swagger tradition, cool, funny, and calm through the end. I hope I go out half as well.

  My steady readers Lenne Miller, Jeff Weber, Jay Carr, and Gary, of course, were supremely helpful. The great aviation writer Barrett Tillman pitched in with info on military radiospeak, a poetic subdialect I happen to love. Through Gary, I met two retired FBI Special Agents, Bernie Murphy and Peter Ahearn, who talked to me about various security issues. At S & S, my new editor, Sarah Knight, was aces; at ICM, my agent Esther Newberg was her usual stalwart self throughout; and every morning as I headed upstairs into the slovenly pit where I put these things together, a thermos of hot coffee awaited me, courtesy of my wife, Jean Marbella. Without the coffee, I fear, most of these pages would have remained blank.