Dead Zero (14 page)

“When I heard he was dead, it broke my heart. So many good men gone in a war half the population doesn’t even know we’re fighting and the other half hates. So wrong. But don’t get me started.”

“What I’ve said about Ray going his own way. That’s the Ray you knew?”

“Ray had his own ideas, certainly. He was one for doing the right thing. But it was quiet, not loud. He wasn’t a yeller or a crusader. He was a doer. And he just didn’t stop coming.”

The colonel told a story about Ray working an early version of the then-unadopted Stoner SR-25. He’d worked it all night in the shop, taking it apart, piece by piece, putting it together, trying somehow to divine the religious essence of it. Wanted to know the zen of every last screw and spring. Just wouldn’t stop coming.

“Maybe it’s the Filipino in him,” Chambers added. “We had to
invent the .45 ACP to stop the Filipinos, you know. They didn’t stop if they’d set their minds to do something until we invented a big, fat bullet for them, did you know that?”

“I think so, sir. Sir, I came across your connection to Ray Cruz about two hours ago. As far as I know, it’s completely new information, as no one else understood the significance. But tomorrow I am formally obligated by contract and duty to notify the people I work with. I ain’t got no choice on that. By noon, an FBI task force will be here, with forensic investigators, assistant attorney generals, subpoenas, and search warrants. They will take this place and you apart in their hunt for Ray. Your files, your phone records, your credit records, your accounting, your business dealings, it’ll all be gone through. So I’m here unofficially ahead of that tidal wave. Probably shouldn’t be, may get yelled at on account of it or some such. That ain’t important. I felt I owed you something for your service to us grass crawlers and long-shot takers. So I’m begging you: if you have any knowledge of Ray, of his plans, of his survival, you’d best give it to me now and go into the records as a cooperating witness. These federal people have a job to do and they mean to do it, and if you get in the way, it don’t matter to them, they’ll crush you.”

“I appreciate the warning, Gunnery Sergeant,” said the colonel, his voice going official marine. Then he said, “Do you mind if I pour myself a glass of bourbon?”

“Please do,” said Bob.

The colonel opened a drawer, pulled out a half-full fifth of Knob Creek, dispensed a shot into a small glass, and downed it in one swig.

“If Ray was back,” Bob said, “and he was in fact going to try to hit a certain fellow available in Washington starting next week, he’d have to mount a mission out of some logistical base. Our working theory was that he’d use old marine contacts, maybe at Two-Two Recon. I was down here to look at that. But he could just as easily do it out of your shop, using one of your custom builts, your ammo, scope, laser ranger, the works. It would be logical, and I bet you think so highly of Ray, you’d pull in with him without much rigorous thinking. If he’d
have come to me, hell, I might have. You just have to know—well, if you’re involved—you’re playing with very hot fire that can burn down everything you’ve built in just a few days. It ain’t worth it, sir. And it would be a real hard tragedy, the saddest, in my book, if Ray thought he was doing something noble and right and he was just setting himself up for the rest of his life in some shit-hole pen. That would be such an injustice.”

“On the other hand,” someone said, “maybe Cruz is playing the only card he’s got the only way he’s got and he thinks he’s doing it
for
the corps, not in spite of it.”

Swagger turned to face Ray Cruz.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

OUTSIDE STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY

DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

0305 HOURS

Mick was now an up-to-speed expert on Steel Brigade Armory and the life and times of its founder and presiding genius, Colonel Norman Chambers.

“So,” he explained to Tony Z, putting down the phone after his callback from MacGyver, “this guy’s some kind of sniper guru.”

“I think I read a piece he wrote in
Precision Shooting.
He’s not a bipod guy. He doesn’t think sniper rifles ought to have bipods. Cause more trouble than they’re worth.”

“Try shooting a Barrett without a bipod,” said Mick. “See how far into the next state it gets you. Anyway, Swagger may have somehow come across something suggesting that Cruz the sniper at one time knew Chambers the guru. So Swagger decides to come hell for leather across South Carolina in order to have a chat with Chambers.”

“At three in the morning?”

“Swagger’s an action hero. He can’t sleep on a twitch. He’s got to go check it out.”

“He thinks Chambers can lead him to Cruz,” said Z. “God, I wish we had a mike in that room.”

“Now, when Swagger leaves, what the fuck do we do? Do we stay with him? I guess so. I mean, we got the plant on him, right? We went to all that trouble. But if we switch to Chambers, maybe he’s the magic ticket to Cruz. Maybe he goes to Cruz tomorrow, to tell him about Swagger, and we can put the Barrett on him, blow him out of his boots, and go back to the pool much richer than we are.”

“Mick, it’s tempting, but it ain’t orderly. As you say, we have Swagger
in our pocket. We can stay on him out of sight, no rush—”

“Hey hey hey—” came the sudden crackle of Crackers the Clown through their earphones, “hey, I got another guy in the room.”

“What?”

“I just discovered it. This thing, this optic, you can go ambient light, you can go thermal, you can go combined ambient/thermal, which is where I’ve been, but I just went all thermal.”

Mick wanted to strangle the guy. He didn’t care about this shit. Who was the third man?

“So I flick on thermal, reads heat, you know, cool night, that building’s pretty much an aluminum eggshell, plus they’re in an outside room with only one wall, and goddamn I got
three
body heat signatures. Three. I don’t know where the other guy came from. He wasn’t there when they went into the room.”

“Was he hiding?”

“Maybe there’s a dead zone, a strong room, another entrance, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I see.”

“Jesus,” said Mick.

“If it’s Ray,” said Tony Z, next to him, “we could maybe go for the kill tonight. Now. In the next ten minutes.”

“
If
it’s Ray,” said Mick, thinking.

“How can we find out?”

“We can’t,” said Mick.

He was right. Without some visual or at least aural penetration of the room, there was no way of knowing from outside if indeed the third man was Ray Cruz.

What to do now?

Bogier’s mind ratcheted through possibilities.

1. Nothing. Maybe Swagger’d convince Ray to leave with him, they could ID him in the car, and do a drive-by on the two of them, spray-paint Swagger’s car with 5.56, get two, good, confirmed kills.

2. Nothing also. If Swagger had led them to Cruz this time, he’d do it again. If he leaves alone, we stay with him. We can’t stake out in this little town in daylight, because by 7:30
A.M
. everybody’s going to
wonder who’s in the black SUV parked on the roadside. That’s the way small towns are. That gives Ray Cruz, if he’s there, plenty of time to make a good E & E and they might never get him again.

3. Nothing a third time. The mysterious third man is Colonel Chambers’s son or an employee, his wife, his ho, whatever, and came in to join the conversation. It means nothing, and tomorrow they’d be hard on Bob again and maybe he’d strike pay dirt then. Maybe that would be the smart thing, though of course it went against Bogier’s nature, and as he considered that nature, he came upon—

4. Go in hard now. Blow the door, hit the steps, kick in the office, dynamic entry SWAT style. Could probably make it up there in twenty seconds. If it’s Ray, blow him away and the witnesses as well. If it’s not, kick the shit out of them, rip out the phones, steal some rifles and what cash is on hand, and then disappear and try and disguise it as a gun robbery. Or maybe kill them anyway, what did it matter? Well, it mattered in that it informed whomever that another team was on the field and that would cause a stir, raise questions, start investigations that couldn’t be controlled, lead to all kinds of unforseen questions. Agh.

And that led to another possible outcome of 4. That Swagger, the colonel, and the third man were just as much spec op superstars as Mick and his guys were, and in the twenty seconds after they blew the door and began the big rush, the targets got all gunned up and went to total war and instead of, like moron citizens, being behind the action curve were actually in front of it, and so Mick, Tony Z, and Crackers the Clown found themselves on the wrong end of a 5.56 shitstorm and bled out eight seconds after they hit the ground.

And then there was 5.

5. Hmm.

5. Oh yeah, number 5.

5. Oh, he liked it.

Mick toyed with it, savored it, tried to look at it from a batch of directions to find a flaw and found none.

“Phone,” he said.

“Mick, I see a tiny gleam of piglike intelligence in your eyes. Are
you cooking with gas?” said Tony Z.

“Just listen to daddy, little amoeba, and learn something about how we adults go around blowing up shit and killing people, but not in a bad way.”

He punched the button. MacGyver was quick to answer.

“Well?”

“We have a situation,” said Mick, and laid out the scenario.

“But you are not sure it’s Cruz?” said MacGyver.

“No, sir. But who else could it be?”

“A tinker, a tailor, a candlestick maker. The man in the moon. Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, Ernest Borgnine, David Nix—”

“And suppose someone mysteriously kills David Nixon? Actually, I think you mean David Eisenhower. Suppose someone kills David Eisenhower? We took a risk, we didn’t get a payoff, but are we any worse off than if we let David Eisenhower live?”

“Yes,” said MacGyver. “Because you’ve informed the world that you exist.”

“But nothing would connect the bodies with Ray Cruz and an Afghan politico. The forensics here are still in the Stone Age. It would just be some local crazed trailer-camp murder spree. And down here all’s you got is Barney Fifes on the case and no evidence. We’re out clean.”

MacGyver’s silence told Mick he’d gotten the control’s attention. So he laid on the rest.

Unlimber the Barrett and rest it on the window ledge of the SUV, just like a Chicago gangster’s tommy gun in 1927. Full ten-round magazine of 750-grain warheads moving out at about 3,000 feet per second. Mick’s on the big gun, crouched next to him in the seat well is Crackers the Clown with his thermal imaging instrument, and Tony Z is driving. Pull around corner, take road to Steel Brigade Armory in its flimsy tinfoil building. Halt when distance to the building was shortest and the angles flattest, about thirty yards from the roadway. Crackers goes to thermal, which would be even stronger at the closer range, and gets a fix on the three living bodies behind the aluminum walls.
He indexes Mick on the body locations using the window as the baseline, as in “two are clustered in same line about three feet to the right of the right line of the window, and one is two feet farther right.” Hell, maybe he’s able to throw a SureFire circle of light at the wall position.

Mick fires ten times in four seconds. He’s that good, he can be depressing the trigger even as the beast is setting down from its recoil impulse. The bullets shear through the metal, almost without deviation, and they whack the citizens so hard they are fluffy puffs, gossamer unravelings, oozy twists of pink mist before they know it.

The car pulls off into the night. And though the gunfire racket is terrific, it takes a good forty-five minutes before any serious cops can get there. Best part: the Barrett ejects its spent casings into the SUV, leaving no evidence at all.

Three dead for sure. No links, no tracks, no evidence, no forensics because the .50s are moving so hard that after passing through metal, flesh, and more metal they fly out into the countryside. Best of all, there’s no sense of high-tech professionals at work. It could be any gun guy with a Barrett, and in this neck of the woods, there were probably dozens of them. It was big-bore territory.

The sum of the parts: if it’s Ray Cruz, end of problem. If it’s not, it’s somebody else’s problem.

“Bogier, you are clinically insane. I had no idea how insane you were. Really, you should be studied by Harvard. Someone there would surely win a Nobel Prize in medicine.”

“Okay,” said Mick, “it’s a little
loud
. It could be called
messy
. But consider: we may never get a shot like this again. Ever. If we let it slide, we will look back on this minute and hate ourselves into eternity. I say, fuck it, it’s here, let’s do it.”

“Note to self,” said MacGyver, “do not invite Bogier and his insane crew of mongoloid sociopaths to daughter’s wedding. Okay, do it, Mick. And hope that God favors the incredibly brutal.”

“He must,” said Mick. “Look at how much fun he has with earthquakes.”

STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY OFFICE

DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

0305 HOURS

Cruz, my name is Swagger.”

“I know who you are, Gunny,” said Cruz, thin, intense, almost feral under a thatch of black crew cut. His eyes were, as promised, exotic, even Asiatic, but his face was white in its prominence of cheekbone, thinness of nose and lip. He wore jeans and a hoodie and a pair of New Balance running shoes and a purple baseball cap with a crow on it. He had a Beretta in his hand, but wasn’t pointing it at Swagger.

“Is that pistol for me?” Swagger asked.

“No,” said Cruz. “It’s for me. There’s a lot of people who want me dead. I’ll have a piece close at hand at all times, thank you very much. Nothing’s faster than a gun in the hand.”

“Cruz, you sound a little paranoid.”

“Bullets cutting your spotter in half will do that to a man.”

“I know about losing spotters, Cruz. I also know how it can fuck up your mind. I’ve been there.”