Dead Zero (11 page)

“One hundred forty-five,” Bob had said.

“Much higher than mine. But to have that kind of IQ and understand that it was all a kind of bullshit and yet still believe in it and still go out, day after day, that was something.”

Sergeant Schuman: “Ray was, you know,
Oriental
in his ways. He was kind of zen, you know? Never got excited, never raised his voice, never had to, because he never made a mistake. Everybody knew he knew a better way, a faster way. Even under fire, never any panic in his voice, never a wrong move, and if you got hit, he’d stay with you until evac. Ray would never leave anybody behind. If we’d had a mascot, Ray would have stayed behind with the pooch, putting down hadjis to the end.”

Lance Corporal Krahl: “Billy hated the corps but he loved Ray Cruz. He’d never let Cruz down. Cruz was the mythical sergeant. He seemed like he was out of the movies or something. In the end, I wish he’d loved Ray less because he wouldn’t have worked so hard to
impress him and to become Ray’s spotter. Loving Ray got him killed. I hate to say it, but that mission was a major fuck-up from the start, sending guys way out in bandit country with no air, nothing but fucking
goats
as cover, help two hours away. But if anyone could do it, it would have been Cruz, and if Cruz was going, Billy had to go. God, I miss Billy. Such a good kid, deserved so much more than a facedown in some shit hole full of people with funny hats.”

Swagger’d also watched videotape of the ambush over and over, this under the guidance of the S-2.

It took a while to make out, the angles so grave, the visual information so sparse: the men were, viewed from the top down, just glowing jiggles of light against the multihued dark of the landforms beneath them, the goats faster moving, longer. Still, in time, it became clear. You could watch the ambush team setting up. You could see them checking maps, and whoever was in charge put his security people exactly where any experienced soldier in any army in the world would have put them. He set up his big gun, squirmed behind it. Next to him had to be his own spotter. They held to good ambush discipline, no fucking around, utter stone stillness, no excess motion, men hunting hard and well.

“The colonel wanted to put a Hellfire into them. Would have blown the mission, I think, but would have saved our guys. But there was no way we could get an Apache in close enough in the time frame. We just had to watch and hope the bad guys didn’t shoot, but they did. It was horrible in the bunker, watching it all happen, not being able to do anything about it.”

The major froze the video image of the ambush team setup and still, the targets moving in along their goddamned goat track a distance calculated to be 841 meters out, completely blind to anything except the bleating of the goats.

“Did you request Reaper coverage from the Agency?” asked Bob.

“No, sir. It involves going through a lot of protocols, and no one really trusted that the info would stay private. It’s one thing when a big unit moves out—everybody already knows everything—and another
when an outfit is under fire and you can bring Reapers in fast, so there’s not an issue of security. Here we wanted to run as tight and quiet a ship as possible.”

“Major, how do you figure these guys knew where Ray and Skelton were, and set up so perfectly? I mean, if I had to textbook an ambush, I’d use this tape.”

“I don’t know. A leak? Maybe. More likely these hadjis were on some mission and they saw targets. They had a new toy, a .50 Barrett they’d recovered somewhere. They’re not the most mature individuals, are they? So they set up to take the goatherders down, to test the weapon, to spread the word, maybe to blame the Americans. Only, one goatherder gets away, so they follow him, because he’s no longer a random victim, now he’s a witness and maybe if he makes it out, he gets them in trouble with their own command. I don’t really get how their minds work. I don’t know how they can kill so much and think it’s moral. It’s baffling to me.”

The food came, jarring Swagger back to the real world. He shoved his notepads to one side, ate sparingly, not really paying attention, trying in his mind to find something that would tell him any little thing. Was there a Ray Cruz explainer in there? A little anecdote that revealed an insight, if indeed it was Ray Cruz on the other end of that radio message? The one thing that stood out had come from the sniper Kelly, when Bob asked him, “Tell me about his shooting. He was, for sure, an excellent shot. But was there anything peculiar or unique about his shooting?”

Kelly thought awhile. Then he said, “There wasn’t a shot Ray couldn’t hit and a position he couldn’t hit from. He was like a machine, mechanical, unhurried, classic by the book. But, this is strange, we never shoot standing in battle. No one stands up in a battlefield. Good way to get your head chopped.”

Bob nodded. It was true.

“Ray decided he needed that shot. I thought it was a waste of time and ammo, but he didn’t even bother arguing the point. He just put hours in on the range on his legs, used up crates of Match 7.62, until
he could put three in an inch offhand from a hundred yards. He was slim, but very strong, very tough, much stronger than you’d think for a guy like that.”

“Offhand?” Bob wrote.

“I don’t know if he ever had a use for it. He just didn’t want no holes in his game, no matter how small.”

He saved the picture for last. It was an official Marine Corps promotion shot, on the occasion of the last stripe, couple years back. He didn’t want to stare at it, let it become a blur of dots and shadows. It lost its voodoo with overconcentration.

Bob just stole a glimpse, trying not to bore too hard into it. It seemed so straightforward: white sidewalls, the face smooth, the eyes with that slight Asian cast, the cheekbones prominent, the lips thin, maybe Cruz’s father’s Portuguese aquilinity to the thin nose; Swagger also picked up on the sniper’s wariness, his quickness and depth of vision. Or maybe he didn’t, maybe he was dreaming things. After all, it was just a picture of a marine NCO on what was nominally a good day professionally, a souvenir utterly banal in its lack of meaning.

He put it back in the file, wondering about only one thing: why was the sensation it generated so connected with the idea of loss?
Losslossloss.
Why did it cause an ache so deep and inconsolable?

He thought maybe in Cruz’s face there was a trace of a first lieutenant named Bill Go, Japanese-American, his first officer in Vietnam, 1965. Great guy: smart, fair, calm, steady as a boulder in combat, judgment superior, a real superstar. Bill didn’t make it beyond month six. Some meaningless firefight, some worthless jungle ’ville, over in a second, a spatter of shots from them, a spatter in response from us, and only Bill Go didn’t get up because he’d been shot just under the lip of the helmet in the right eye. So much loss, so much grief. It fell to Buck Sergeant Swagger to get the boys back humping, to finish the job, to make it back to the compound. His first “command,” as it were, and he got through it by going into hard NCO mode so no one could imagine how much he felt the loss of Bill.

Or was it Bill? There was another, an Army master sergeant with
SOG, second tour, Russell Blas, a Guamese, great guy, pure guts in a fight, captured on one of the hatchet missions he so loved to lead, and never heard of or seen again. Poor Russell, probably dying of malnutrition in some shit hole . . .

He didn’t want to go there anymore. That’s what had eaten a decade of his life away in a wash of bourbon and rage and self-hatred. He told himself that the picture had no connection with anything.
It’s just a new marine. It has nothing to do with Bill Go or Russell Blas or Vietnam.
Those memories were too hurtful and could not be entertained cavalierly, in schlock restaurants on jobs set in the real, the new, the only world that counted.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

DOLLAR STORE PARKING LOT ACROSS FROM TGIF

914 BRAVERMAN AVENUE

JACKSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

2035 HOURS

It’s gotta be him,” said Crackers the Clown. “Check it out. Right age, thin, rangy, sniperlike, discipline, dignity, seems to have a limp, he’s looking at data, he’s on the wagon.”

The three of them sat in a nice black Ford Explorer. They looked at Bob through the window, each with a pair of high-end European binocs.

“Plus,” said Crackers, the unit intellectual, called “Crackers the Clown” because he had the demeanor of an Iowa mortician, “the time matches up. We caught him out of the main gate at 1950, he’d been there all day talking to folks, now he’s tired out, he’s reviewing his shit, he’s eating a little, and he’s going to go back to the hotel, send out e-mails, call the wife, and go to bed. Tomorrow, the same thing again.”

“On the other hand,” said Tony Z, the cynic, “he could be the guy trying to sell Lejeune on a new brand of trash masher for the enlisted dining areas. He’s here trying to make a fucking pitch. He works for Grinders-R-Us dot com, out of Gomerville, Indiana.”

There were no pictures of this Swagger, that was the problem. Everything was theoretical and judgmental and the theoretical and the judgmental were slightly beyond Bogier’s areas of competence.

“I hate this shit.” He stewed. “I’m an operator. I break things and kill people. Now I’m supposed to be some kind of James Bond super-agent bullshit performer. Man, I hate this shit.”

Crackers was pro IDing the john as Swagger; Tony Z, despite his cynicism, was leaning toward pro, but still a little unable to commit.

“It should be him, it has to be him, nothing else makes any sense,
but when you make an assumption, it always bites you in the ass.”

“Is there any way you could test? Maybe call the restaurant, ask for a Mr. Swagger, see if he gets up?”

“I think this guy would see through it,” said Bogier. “I don’t even like eyeballing him from here; guys like him, they have radar, they can sometimes feel it when they’re being watched.”

The binoculars went down.

“So do you want to move, Mick?” said Crackers the Clown. “We may never get another chance like this.”

“But we’ve only got one card,” said Tony. “If we do get it planted and it’s planted on the wrong guy, then we’ve got to get it back and still find the right guy and plant it again.”

“Agh,” said Mick.

The card was the latest in high-tech bullshit James Bond spy craft. It was a red BankAmericard made out to Bob Lee Swagger. The idea was somehow to sneak it into Swagger’s wallet under the theory that few men examined their wallets carefully and would notice the addition of a new credit card. Except it wasn’t a credit card. It was actually a miniature transponder called an “active RFID” for radio frequency identification device. It gave off a return signal when it received a recognized interrogation signal. It used 16 nanometer technology, a unique dual-layered nano lithium-cadmium battery that was actually part of the card itself, along with the molded-in single strand of antenna wire. It responded to an inquiry signal sent from a classified Aegon satellite that had the highest sensitivity and best signal-to-noise ratio of anything placed in space. When the satellite sent the inquiry, huge umbrellalike antennas began to look for the specific frequency and tone of the encoded response, which, diminutive as it is, still can be counted on to register. Of all this, Bogier, Crackers, and Tony Z knew exactly nothing.

The second part of the deal was a BlackBerry with software that could find the appropriate Google map and then would receive the satellite information and track the card on the map. Mick and his pals could easily track the bearer of the card from any distance, even
over the horizon. There’d be no hassle over staying close in traffic or through sudden turns or accelerations. They could always stay in contact, until the moment Swagger recognized an extra credit card in his wallet, which would probably be never.

“Okay,” said Mick, finally. “Let’s do it. If it ain’t him, we can get it back in a more direct way than we have to plant it.”

“Ooh, cool,” said Tony Z. “I like that part.”

TGIF PARKING LOT

915 BRAVERMAN AVENUE

JACKSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

2115 HOURS

Swagger finished the meal, sat back, tried to relax a bit, yearned for booze, daughters, wife, a simple life, and an endless amount of time to sleep, and lied to himself harmlessly about a deep and rewarding platonic friendship with Susan Okada as well. Why not dream about having it all? But none of that was apparently in the offing. Worse, this late, his hip sometimes ached a bit. It seemed to have gotten better in the past few months, but if he put a lot of weight on it over a long day, it could become inflamed and begin to declare an unhappy memory. Now, it felt restive, as though in the pre-pain stage.

He signaled the girl, gave her a twenty, waited for change, left too big a tip, grabbed the receipt, dumped it into the briefcase, and stood, favoring the good leg. A wave of stiffness came but he shrugged it off, went out the front doors and looked for his car in the lot. Hmm, a rental, what was it again, oh yeah, a Ford Taurus on government contract from Hertz. He spotted it, and walked toward it down the half-full aisles, behind a screen of low bushes that marked the roadway, the whole thing red-gold in the neon of the big TGIF sign up on top. He reached his lane, and turned down it to the car.

When the guy hit him, he hit him hard, crushing him against the car rear, not hurting him so much as completely de-coordinating him.

“What the—!” Swagger felt himself blurt out as the muscular energy of his assailant nailed him hard against the trunk and he slid down. Flashbulbs, pinwheels, Roman candles ignited behind his eyes at the impact as his optic nerves shot off, but then he came back—an instant too late. A heavy knee went on his back, another on his neck, and between them they bore the weight of a big man.

“Keep your fucking mouth shut, mister, or I’ll crack you good.”