Dead Zero (15 page)

“Nobody’s been where I am now. And nobody can get me out but me.”

What was it? Who was he?
The information was rushing in on Swagger so hard he had trouble staying with it. He was talking to a ghost. Bill Go, all those years dead in that anonymous little ’ville? Maybe. Maybe not. It wasn’t an aura, a vibration, a tingle in the blood, but something was leaving tracks in the snow and Swagger knew he wasn’t smart enough to read them. What?
What?

“Cruz, I don’t know what game you’re up to, but you have a whole lot of important people upset. They’ll stop you to the point of killing you. That would be so fucking wrong, Sergeant. We can end this
tonight and get you back on duty next week if that’s what you want.”

“You were the best. You were a god to all of us. But you don’t get it, Gunny,” said Cruz. “If I go in and we all kiss and make up, in a day or maybe a week, I’m dead. They won’t stop now. And whatever it is they’re up to, it goes on and it finally happens.”

“Cruz, you—”

“I saw a very good kid named Billy Skelton torn in two by some motherfucker on a Barrett. A hadji? Uh-uh, that would have been war. No, I hunkered down for a look and the guy with the big gun and his buddies were white. Contractors. I’ve seen enough of ’em in the zones to know. These guys were sent to hit Two-Two. It wasn’t war, it was murder.”

“Maybe Russian mercs. Maybe Iranian advisers. Maybe Chechen volunteers. It’s only skin.”

“These were American party animals. I could tell.”

“I’m not convincing you, I see. But I am on contract to the FBI. You say the word and I go to my cell phone here and in two hours, maybe less, you are under protective custody. Whatever you charge, it will get a fair hearing. I’m working for a very good guy who’s an assistant director, and I’ve known him a long, long time. I can guarantee you safety, that fair hearing, and a follow-up on your charges. It’s the best way and this is the best offer you’ll ever get.”

“Everyone says you’re the best, Gunny. Love to trust you, but I only trust the colonel because he’s completely outside the system. You may not even know who’s pulling your wires. So I will—”

In the hundredth or so of a second before he lost consciousness, Swagger was aware of the wall exploding inward in a great demonstration of the physics of high velocity and, insanely, the big steel desk behind which sat the silent colonel leaped off the deck as if it weighed an ounce and its leading edge hurled at Swagger, striking him so hard it knocked him into instant oblivion.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

SUV

OUTSIDE STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY

DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

0305 HOURS

Oh, this is going to be so fucking cool,” said Crackers.

Z drove, turned the corner, headed down the two-lane; the building, low and unprepossessing, was a few hundred feet ahead.

Mick, curled on the backseat, was on the big gun, which was supported on the window ledge with a combat jacket scrunched under it for padding. The weapon was an oar, a wheelbarrow, a ton of fun—close to twenty pounds of semiauto rifle, unwieldy in any but the strongest of hands and arms, looking like some kind of steroid-engorged M16. He crushed its butt plate into his meaty shoulder and with his strong right hand tense on the grip and his strong left hand tense on the comb, guided the thing deftly, as if it were a child’s .22. He was magic on the rifle. He squirmed to locate the right eye relief to the $4,000-worth of U.S. Optics scope on top of it, then cranked down to 4 power for the short-distance shots to come. He hard-tapped the magazine to make sure it was well seated. That thing alone weighed about six pounds, stuffed with the missilelike 750-grain cartridges, immensely heavy for their size.

“Hey,” yelled Tony Z, because everybody was wearing earmuffs, “you’re shooting without the bipod, just like the guru said. He’ll be so pleased.”

“We like to leave ’em happy,” said Mick.

The car slowed, then halted. The black wall of the building was less than thirty yards away, one window blazing but, because of the upward
angle from the vehicle, showing only ceiling.

Crackers the Clown squirmed into position from the seat well behind Z, next to the heavy forearm, ventilated for cooling. He put the NV monocular to his eye. He was already in thermal.

“Much better,” said Crackers, “big as life. Okay, I got one guy separated from the two other guys by about five feet. All are seated. I’m guessing the guy out of the group is the guru guy, behind some sort of desk, because I’m not getting a full-body signature on him. The other two guys are directly facing each other.”

“Index me off the left line of the window,” said Mick.

“I’m estimating five feet; I think you should hold a little low on center of mass because you’re shooting upward. You do the first guy, rotate maybe six inches farther right, and do the second guy. Then come back and do the colonel.”

“I’m two feet low of the window left line,” said Mick, rotating the heavy rifle to the right a bit as he held a solid cheek weld and a solid eye relief to the scope lens, “and I’m coming right, damnit, Tony, give me another foot or so.”

Tony took the foot off the brake, and, easily, the vehicle slid forward.

“Good, good, good, okay, I’m going to shoot, tighten up, three, two, and—” He felt the trigger break and then it was as if a comet had smashed into Earth, a flaming ball of destruction to suck up the oxygen and flatten the vegetation and scorch the earth in the exact moment that something hydraulic unleashed full force against his heavily muscled shoulder.

The rifle rose in recoil, having sent a nuclear flash into the air along with its 750 grains of pure mayhem and a sonic boom, then settled, and Mick rotated just a bit, cheek and eye relief still perfect, fired again, producing the same assault upon the senses by flash and bang, sending another hot spent casing flying from the breach, which itself was in the process of ratcheting and clacking in the bolt blowback sequence.

He waited for recovery, rotated back left, and fired at what should have been the colonel. Three shots, in under two seconds. Took a good, trained man to do that on a Barrett.

“Rock and roll!” he shouted, while up front Tony Z was going, “Whooooooaaaaahh, mother
fucker
!”

Reindexing on the zone of his initial targets—he could see two craters spewing pure illumination where the big slugs had bludgeoned through the aluminum and wallboard—he really put the pedal to the metal. He fired six more times, trying to hold his strikes within the parameters of the first two penetrations, and with each arrival a blast of fragmenting metal and spewing dust and streaks of flaming debris snapped off the wall in supertime.

“Fucking A,” said Crackers—he’d ducked to the floor during the shooting, to save his eardrums and his night vision—“look at that!”

The burst of .50s had literally ripped a slash in the wall next to and a little beneath the building. It looked like the hull of a ship that had caught a torpedo full on, a twisted mass of metal, bent struts, sheaves of tormented wallboard, all in a haze of dust and smoke.

“Ma, we won the war,” said Tony.

Mick pulled the big rifle back into the truck, awkwardly got it into the back space over the edge of the seat, and said, “Okay, punch out. No, punch out slow, no howling. No more than fifty-five. Just drive, son, drive into the dawn.”

“Fuck,” said Crackers. “I didn’t get to see any of the hits.”

“It looked like a fucking movie. Man, did those suckers kick ass.”

“It would have been cooler,” said Mick, connoisseur of destruction, “if we’d had tracers.”

“Oh shit yeah,” said Tony Z. “Man, what a fucking show that would have been.”

“Should we go and check—”

“Yeah, and run into Barney F with his double barrel who happened to be pissing behind the gas station? Punch it.”

They got so far so fast they never even heard any sirens.

STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY

DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

0306 HOURS

Ray didn’t know his reflexes worked in that science fiction time zone. He was on the ground before the desk, lofted mightily into the air by the first shot, crushed Swagger hard in the head, putting him over backward in his chair. Ray squirmed into the fetal as another big hammer punched through, and hit his own chair—the one he’d just vacated—and sent it spinning crazily through the air as well. Nothing stood against these heavy hitters and he knew without putting it into words that it had to be Ma Barrett and her half-inch, 750-grain progeny, atomizing all that lay in their way.

The next shot hit flesh and it could only be the colonel’s. The sound of bullet on meat is instantly knowable and completely unforgettable to those who’ve heard it: a kind of
whap!
of vibration being quieted by the density of flesh, a sickening wetness implied under the abruptness of the noise. Either in that second or the next, the back of Ray’s neck felt a shower of warm droplets and mist.

He got his eyes opened for the next six big hits. Whoever was shooting was damned good. He kept the recoil in check and put the six in a neat pattern, almost a group, between the first two holes with but half a second between, and each, hitting the wall, blew it asunder in a cascade of vibration that lifted Ray from the floor and sent shards of supersonic metal spraying into the atmosphere but, following the laws of physics, on a slight upward direction and thus mostly missing him.

Dust jetted everywhere, as did debris of mysterious origin, flaming chips of wallboard, chunks of metal from the struts of the structure, all of it illuminated in the fluorescent light up above: it was an image of a turbulent universe. Would they reload and fire another mag? Would they now rush? He had the Beretta and knew he’d go down hard, taking many along on the trip.

But it stayed quiet, even though his ears rang like alarms. It was through an actual hole in the wall that he spied a flash of motion that told him the shooters had been in a vehicle and had now taken off.

Shakily, he stood, turned to see the colonel against the far wall, the impact of the huge bullet unkind. Metal does things to flesh, as no one knew better than Ray, and he deduced in a second that no first aid was capable of fixing the colonel. He felt a stab of pain: old friend, good guy, sound advice giver, supporter in time of need, really a true believer in the Church of Ray. And for that he’d been taken down hard by assholes on a .50. That goes in the book, he thought. Ray will deal with that when the time is right.

He then turned to the old sniper. Swagger, a dry stick of a man, all ribs and bones and sinewy grace, under a butch-waxed moss of gray, was either dead or unconscious. The edge of the flying desk had opened a bad, deep cut along his cheekbone, and it was oozing blood, though the lack of squirt action suggested no arteries had been cut. It ran down his still cheek, caught in his nostrils, then sluiced to the floor, forming a lake. Ray touched him, felt a heartbeat. Quickly he lifted the desk off the bottom half of the fallen man and dragged him to the wall. Had to get him upright so he wouldn’t drown in his own blood.

Ray peeled off his hoodie, wrapped it around the broken head, and secured it with his Wilderness belt. Maybe that would keep the crotchety old bastard alive until the medics arrived.

Having done what he could do, Ray turned and zipped out into the hallway. Knowing the building well, he got to a rear door, unlocked it, and slipped out, and set out across farm fields and backyards, even as sirens were finally beginning to sound, as firemen and officers tumbled out of bed. Ray knew exactly where he was going; he was far from unprepared.

He’d loaded his equipment in the trunk of a clean, legally purchased, and unstolen Dodge Charger, parked behind the Piggly Wiggly in town. He popped the lock, got in, and quietly started up, turned left and headed out. As far as he could tell, no one had seen a thin, athletic man in jeans and a UCLA T-shirt with a Baltimore Ravens ball cap up top. He disappeared—it’s the sniper gift, after all—into the night.

HOLIDAY INN MOTEL

ROANOKE, VIRGINIA

1730 HOURS

The phone awakened Bogier. It was Tony Z in the next room; he and Crackers were up now, and were going to start drinking. Did Bogier want to come? No, Bogier did not want to come. Had Bogier heard from MacGyver? No, Bogier had not heard from MacGyver. He would wait until he did and then join them.

Bogier lay naked in the dark room, under clean, crisp sheets. His massive, beautiful body was a god’s, though he’d been a week out of the gym and yearned to get back to the discipline and purity of the heavy-iron dead lift. He could tell; the ridges that defined the tectonics of his delts were a little less precise, the knobs that represented his abs a little less jagged, the bulge of his veins a little less prominent. It was, ever so slightly, beginning to soften. He was still doing this shit.

He’d been up for forty-eight straight, the last twelve of it driving mad-assed across the mid south, monitoring radio stations for news on the incident at Danielstown, South Carolina, where it was said a deranged ex-sniper had opened fire on the offices of Norman Chambers, a former marine and some kind of sniper warfare expert, who had been killed in the incident. But no other news was forthcoming.

So when they hit Roanoke, it was nappy-nap time. A Holiday Inn just off the interstate would do fine. He hit the sack, and drifted into thick, dreamless sleep. Now, he was awake, hardly feeling perky. Agh.

After a while, he got up groggily, took a shower. The Suunto showed him it was close to six. What to do, what to do? When would that bastard call? Was it over? Had they—

The satellite didn’t ring, it buzzed. He picked it up, and hit the button.

“So?”

“So you didn’t get him.”

“Shit,” said Bogier, feeling disappointment bite deep and hard. He knew what would come next. Asshole MacGyver would ream him hard and he’d have to sit there and take it like a schmuck.