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Authors: Stephen Hunter

BOOK: Dead Zero
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“When we get videotape, I’m betting you’ll see that Zarzi was clear. He held when he could have wasted the guy. I know it.”

“There’s no evidence,” someone said. “It’s fine to just
say,
but there’s no evidence, so why even bring it up?”

Bob ignored the comment. “I don’t see no theory by which he don’t shoot. He’s fast, that’s what’s different. On target in a split second, perfect
trigger control, it’s over in less than a second. Yet he had three, and never pulled. Very hard to figure.”

“You raise provocative points,” Nick said. “But maybe you have a natural empathy for the sniper. You want him to be running some game on us, as opposed to simply trying to kill his target out of some twisted sense of vengeance for Whiskey Two-Two, which he thinks was betrayed and targeted. I have to play your insights off against what the evidence says.”

Bob shook his head. He was blurred too, his thinking fuzzy, his reflexes gummy, his tongue tied up in his mouth.

“Okay,” Nick said, “I’m calling it. Get some sleep, everybody. Let the investigators continue to gather info, and the cops to look for Ray, fat chance. I want everybody on duty by 0630 tomorrow, we’ll go over this stuff and get it into a presentational order, I’m under great pressure from DC to hold a presser, so that’s scheduled at ten. Maybe something will break. Maybe Ray will turn himself in.”

The laughter was desultory.

“Nick, we’ve got solid IDs from the garbage crew guys. Are we going to go wide with the Cruz photo tomorrow?”

“I haven’t decided yet. If we do, then we have a thousand reporters digging into Ray Cruz and all that info just floods everything, it’s more bullshit between us and what we have to do. We don’t talk to anybody who hasn’t already been on
60 Minutes.
We make him the most famous man in America and what do we get out of it? I don’t think it helps us find him, because he’s too clever. And it dumps a huge screen of smoke on everything. Let me run it by the Agency, see what their cool, giant, Martian intellects think of it. We may want to keep it quiet, hope we can make it go away without much more disclosure.”

The agents stood, began to file out.

Bob leaned close. “Sorry, I’m tired. Do you want me to can it with my doubts? I see it ain’t helping you much.”

“Nah, everybody knows you’re crazy. Plus, you’re the big hero.
You get to do what you want. What you’re doing, questioning, prodding, bringing your unique skill set and IQ on to this stuff is very helpful, believe it or not. The kids on the team love you, so it keeps them working hard without complaining. It’s a win-win, but just don’t go mouthing off to any reporters.”

“I hate those bastards.”

“Get some sleep. You’re not Superman anymore.”

“Don’t tell no one, but I never was.”

TIMONIUM HOLIDAY INN

ROOM 233

JUST NORTH OF BALTIMORE

0430 HOURS

He slept the dark sleep of the dead, dreamless and heavy, gone far away from the world. Then a dream began to nudge him. It seemed that one of his hands was bound, he couldn’t move it, it stymied him and he twisted against it, beginning to come up through the various levels of consciousness and REM until he arrived hard at the insight that his hand
was
bound to the bed head-board and it then occurred to him that he was in fact awake and that he wasn’t alone.

“I’m in night vision,” a voice said softly. “I can see everything you do. Take the other hand out from under the covers and lay it out in front of you, wide open. Keep it there. Otherwise don’t move. I have a gun on you, but I don’t want to kill you. The bullet would probably bounce off, anyhow.”

Swagger knew the voice. It pulled him to full alertness.

“Cruz! How the hell did you—”

“I can get into and out of anyplace. I’m a Ninja assassin from the planet Pandora. I am the trees, the wind, the planet itself, white man. My face is blue.”

He laughed a bit, dryly, at his own twisted sense of humor.

“And I’ll ask the questions.”

“Man, you are crazy coming in here like this.”

“Just answer. What was with all those poor Filipinos who got wasted last night? Does that have a connect to this sordid little game?”

Bob said nothing.

“Come on, Gunny, I don’t have all night. Don’t make me use the blowtorch on you.”

“It was my fuck-up,” said Swagger, then explained briefly how it had happened.

“And the Bureau doesn’t see any tie-in?” Cruz asked.

“They’re not saying that. They’re saying no evidence.”

“They don’t want evidence. They don’t want to go into some cesspool of national security bullshit where a faction of CIA is trying to take out an American sniper team to save an Afghan scumbag from the headshot he so richly deserves, and the whole thing spins out of control in some kind of sick mission-creep phenomenon.”

“They say the guy is clean. They’ve gone over him a dozen times—”

“If he rises, they rise. That’s how it works. It’s politics and ambition, there, here, everywhere.”

“Cruz, maybe you’re overplaying it in your mind. The weight of combat operations, all them tours, the kills—”

“I saw a building in Qalat I’d just exited turned into a crater and thirty-one people thermobarically toasted. I saw Billy Skelton torn in two by some motherfucker on a Barrett .50. I saw Norm Chambers with a hole in him the size of a football.”

“You have too many people working against you.”

“As long as I’m on the loose, as long as you think I’m going to cash out the Beheader, you guys have to ask questions. The more questions you ask, the harder you look, the more likely it is to become unraveled. That’s my game. You want to stop me? Figure out what they’re pulling off with this guy Zarzi—”

“Everything you say sounds like you’re psycho about the Agency. You’re implying the Agency is after you. You should know, the Agency is cooperating with the Bureau. I’m working for an Agency officer I’ve known for years, and she’s smart, tough, fair, and decent. She wouldn’t be party to some scam that targeted our own people.”

He was totally aware that he had become Nick. Now he was the guy saying “no evidence” and “stuff like that doesn’t happen” and “it’s all subjective.” Yet the theater of the moment forced him into his supervisor’s shoes, because if he just dumbly agreed with Ray Cruz, where did that leave him? Not on this side of the law.

“Think about it,” Cruz responded. “At our level, we take out a double-0 license on a warlord. Off Two-Two goes. Halfway there we’re
intercepted by contractors who classic-ambush our sorry asses. I discover they’ve been tracking me by satellite transmitter implanted in my SVD. I pull a switch on them and get away. I make it to Qalat, tell my people I’m setting up the shot as planned. I enter the building, then I depart the building, because I know somebody in the system is talking. And they
knew
which building. A fucking missile totals the building. Much more than a Hellfire.”

Now he became Susan, speaking for the Agency of mystery and endless games, with objectives so shrouded no man could view them. Again, a feeling of rootlessness hit him: if you could change perspectives so quickly, then who, really, were you?

“You don’t know it was a missile. Lots of things blow up in that part of the world. And if they wanted you to abort the mission, they could have simply ordered your battalion CO to issue the withdraw. The Agency has that kind of power. It’s a phone call, that’s all. You’re saying they hired contractors, ran an ambush in tribal territories, finally called in a missile shot, when they could have reached the same ending with a phone call. Sergeant, it doesn’t track.”

“Think harder, Swagger. That’s all I’ve been doing for six months. If they go through channels, through the leaky, penetrated, cheesy-security chain of command, then everybody in country knows the Agency’s got game with Zarzi, and pretty soon everybody everywhere knows. Maybe his own ex-friends behead him. Maybe the newspapers blow it all over the front page and his political future is shot. Langley couldn’t have that. To protect their boy, they had to double-tap Two-Two, and once it started, they couldn’t stop it. So whatever they’re doing, it involves Zarzi. Zarzi’s the key. That’s the end of the—”

He seemed to run out of gas. He, clearly, was exhausted as well.

Finally he said, “Either you stop him or I will.”

“Sergeant Cruz,” Swagger said, “I’ll make you a deal. You go underground. You don’t try no more attempts on Zarzi; I will see what I can see and learn what I can learn. I will get people to help and to talk. I’m their big hero now, I’ve got a tiny amount of juice. You check
back with me, and I will have something for you. Just trust me a little. If I discover what you say is true, we will go in together, sniper all the way. Fair enough?”

Again he was aware, painfully, that the deal he offered Cruz he was basically offering himself as well.
I will consider it. I will put it on the table and look into it, because in its way, it coincides with my own doubts as well.

The pause told him Cruz was listening.

“You have a few days,” said Cruz.

Bob felt a tug on his wrist and the flex-cuff was cut.

Then the sniper was gone.

ON THE ROAD

U.S. 215 EAST

1430 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

Can we stop?” inquired Professor Khalid. “I have to go to the bathroom again.”

“Ach,” said Bilal, “you old men. You have to go to the bathroom all the time. We have a schedule.”

“But I can’t do what I must do pissed up. One does not martyr oneself with urine in the underpants.”

“Martyrdom is a week away,” said Bilal, “if this van doesn’t break down or I don’t go mad listening to you two argue all the time.”

“Do you not think,” said Dr. Faisal, “that the boys of Palestine feel a pee drop or two dampen their trousers before they detonate? Yet they detonate, nevertheless.”

“No,” said Professor Khalid. “They are too insane. They feel nothing. Besides, their penises are probably engorged at the prospects of sexual activity in the next world, just seconds away. No pee could pass. Their dicks are hard, their pants are dry, and ka-boom, imagine the surprise when the next world turns out to be a blind walk through eternal blackness, if even that. No breasts, no cunts, no oral enticement of the members, nothing.”


He cannot say that
!” screamed Dr. Faisal. “Apostate! Infidel! He must be beheaded, as the text states clearly! He cannot say such things!”

“Dr. Faisal, if I behead him, then the whole point of the trip is destroyed. You will not have your martyrdom, you will not have your many women.”

“He does not believe in the women thing,” said Professor Khalid. “He cannot let himself state it as such, but in his mind, he does not believe in anything any more than I do. He clings to his faith as a prop to get him through this last ordeal.”

“Is that Disneyland?” said Dr. Faisal suddenly.

“No,” said Bilal, “that is not Disneyland.”

“I would like to see Disneyland,” said Dr. Faisal.

“That is Las Vegas,” said Professor Khalid. “You can be forgiven for mixing up the two. It’s all the same America. Pleasure domes, games, stupid distractions, and the pursuit of ecstasy. No rigor or discipline anywhere. Spiritual torpor. Meanwhile, in his faith, it’s all memorizing bad poetry written seventeen hundred years ago by a psychotic charismatic high on drugs. That is what he thinks is revealed truth.”

“Tell the apostate,” said Dr. Faisal, “that his musings are pornographic. He denies the true faith and his afterlife will be a forever of torment and pain in flames on a spit. He should check 72:23 for a sense of what lies ahead.”

“Who would prepare such a dry, tough dish?” asked Khalid.

BALTIMORE FBI HQ

WOODLAWN

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

1135 HOURS

THE NEXT MORNING

The press conference had not gone well. The pressies seemed enraged that the man the Administration was touting as the Answer to the decade-long war in Afghanistan had almost been shot to death on a Baltimore street. Who was at fault? When it turned out to be the infamous Nick Memphis, who at one controversial point in his career had seemed to utterly foul up the investigation of the death of Joan Flanders and three other martyred sixties peace demonstrators, their anger only grew. Not even Susan Okada, who represented the CIA in this issue and was, incidentally, quite beautiful, could mollify the snide hostility in the questions, even as she expressed thanks from the Agency for the superb job the Bureau had done in protecting the principal. Even the Secret Service rep’s insistence that it was one FBI agent who had foiled the hit did little to quell the emotion. “The system worked,” he maintained. Tough sell. And when the only real news that could be announced was the bland insistence that “we have some suspects and some leads, but this appears to be a very tricky, dedicated individual,” it only pissed them off further.

By contrast, the press conference that Ibrahim Zarzi held in Washington the same day was some kind of lovefest. Declared a hero by the Administration for his refusal to yield to a murder attempt against his personage, he was magnificent: generous, brave, noble, handsome, sexy, cosmopolitan. He specifically singled out the nameless agent who had foiled the attempt, wishing that this brave man would come to visit him in Kabul and see the hospitality of the Afghan people. He expressed his admiration for both the FBI and the CIA for their dedication to his safety. He said he feared nothing, as Allah had given him
a destiny and he would fulfill it or die trying. What was death? When so many of the brave have died, what was death? Yes, he agreed that it was indeed ironic that once he had been called “the Beheader” and now his survival was the key point of statecraft of the United States. He promised more for our two great countries, a future of peace and prosperity and so forth. He really laid it on. They really ate it up.

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