Dead Zero (38 page)

“Ha, ha,” said Nick.

“When I get in . . .” And he continued with Nick’s plan, chapter and verse, crossing all the
t
’s and dotting all the
i
’s and Swagger more or less blanked out, having heard it so many times already.

“It’s a good plan, I think,” said Nick. “But then I thought it up, so I would think it’s good. Sergeant Swagger, do you have any comments?”

“Sergeant Cruz, don’t get cute out there. You are never standing still, you are never not moving erratically. You give the motherfucker a whisper of a chance, he’ll put one right through you. And if he’s shooting a .50 or anything heavy, the body armor don’t mean a thing.”

“I get it,” said Cruz.

“You better get it. I’ll kick your ass if you don’t.”

“My ass will be dead if I don’t.”

“Don’t matter. I’ll kick it anyway.”

Cruz just shook his head at the man’s intransigence. Once a sergeant, always a sergeant, no matter what.

“I know you’d feel better if you had your rifle, Cruz,” Nick finally said. “But you know we can’t play it like that.”

“Sure,” said Cruz. “I’ll play your little game, even if it sucks. Me, I’d just call in a Pred and order up a Paveway Two crater. But your game is the only game in town.”

INFILTRATION ROUTE

RESERVOIR ROAD TO P STREET

GEORGETOWN

WASHINGTON, DC

1600 HOURS

The van pulled to the extreme southern edge of the woodland behind the Georgetown University Hospital parking lot. It halted for just a second, and Ray slipped out, crossed a walkway, launched himself over a low brick wall, and found himself on a wooded downslope that ultimately would bring him to the intersection of P and 37th with its interesting geometry of walls, trees, open shots across the green to the library entrance, the FBI trap, and a meet with Mick Bogier on the wrong end of a rifle.

Though encumbered by his ghillie suit and Kevlar body armor, he was unarmed, as per agreement. Through the trees ahead, he could catch glimpses of the twin Gothic spires that were the university’s contributions to the skyline. He oriented on them, followed the incline, listening intently for human sounds, reasonably sure that in this twilight his slow movement and camouflage kept him invisible to whoever would be out here in this inaccessible parcel of undeveloped slope.

As he moved, he could not help but consider.

The story was simple. Swagger said it came from late-arriving NIS witness accounts. Someone in the Navy’s investigative service, prodded by the FBI, had finally tracked down an elderly couple who knew Tomas and Urlinda Cruz on Subic Bay Naval Station in the late sixties and early seventies. The same investigator also found two other couples who had corroborated the story.

The story: Tomas and Urlinda had widely lamented their childlessness, particularly now that Tomas had retired and wouldn’t be at sea anymore, and was running the Navy’s Special Services department at a salary that by Philippine standards was quite generous. He grew restive;
he could play golf, go to Europe, visit with his wife’s relatives for only so long. They began to actively look into adoption.

But after Tet, with the upheaval in Saigon, he and Urlinda disappeared for a month. When they came back, they had a three-month-old baby, and the story they told, lame as it was, was widely accepted: Urlinda had taken some fertility drugs, the two had gone to Australia for medical care, the child was born prematurely, and now they were back home. An Australian birth certificate validated the process, and so Reyes Fidencio Cruz was accepted as the natural son of Tomas and Urlinda Cruz, of such and such an address in the rather nice residential section of the vast naval installation, really a small American city in the islands.

But State Department records had no mention of a trip to Australia. Instead, as an intrepid investigator found out, the Cruzes had gone to Saigon in the immediate aftermath of Tet. There, the inference was, they had been able to locate a black market mixed-race white-Asian baby for sale. They asked no questions, and even if they had, there would have been no answers. Presumably the aftermath of a major battle with massive civilian casualties would produce a bumper crop of babies for sale. The birth certificate, its fraudulence easily penetrated by the NIS investigators, must have been part of the deal, and in those days, who really cared? The Cruzes were happy, and the boy Ray grew up smart and lithe and quick, taking instantly to his dual heritage of American and Filipino, perhaps representing the best of both countries.

And that was the story Ray himself believed in until the man who called himself Ray’s biological father told him another.

According to Swagger, he was back in country on combat tour number two. Already a superstar marine NCO with one spectacular tour behind him, he had returned as a loaner to the Central Intelligence Agency’s SOG operation, the OSS of Vietnam, as it were, staffed by the best and the brightest and the bravest American NCOs and junior officers, most from Special Forces, some from the marines, some from the SEALs. Swagger made it sound like a KP detail, scrubbing pots away into the night. But Ray knew that SOG operators were incredibly brave
men; they were the commando elite, going on long missions into Laos; they ambushed supply trains, they dared the VC to come out and fight; they did their share and much more. But on one mission, Sergeant Swagger had been wounded, and sent to Saigon for recuperation.

There he met and fell in love with one Tien Dang, the eldest daughter of Colonel Nguyen Thanh Dang, of the 13th Airborne Rangers, ARVN. It wasn’t your wartime hayroll at all. He met her parents, he explained his prospects, he formally proposed and married her. He went to great lengths to arrange a visa so she could accompany him to the States when his tour was over; but the paperwork proved difficult, so he extended his tour and made arrangements for her to give birth in the naval hospital.

It all fell apart at Tet. Swagger was in Laos, leading what was called a hatchet platoon, whose mission was to serve as a blocking force into which other units would drive main force VC and North Vietnamese formations for heavy engagement. It was dangerous, productive work, and many believed that SOG showed how the war should have been fought and how it could have been won. But Swagger wasn’t able to get back to Saigon for a month and when he did, the Dang neighborhood had been occupied by VC regulars and bombed out. Few survivors. No records. He never knew if she had the child or not before the war came and crushed everything.

The rest was unsaid, reconstructed by Ray as he slid through the darkening woods on his way to the wall at P. He inferred that Swagger lost his wife and child in Vietnam, and tried to imagine the anger and the bitterness and the sense of loss it would create. And maybe that’s why he’d trained so hard to come back as a sniper and why he pushed himself so hard up in Indian country, and why he made war upon the enemy like few in the whole decade’s doomed venture; and maybe that explained the twenty years of drunken, bitter solitude that followed before the man reinvented himself and somehow, some way, found a path back into the world, DEROS at last.

Swagger had insisted on a DNA test, but knew it to be so: he said, in certain lights, with a certain hard set of his features as viewed from
a certain angle, Ray looked so much like his own father, Earl, it was a little startling. The way he carried his head, his hands, the way he squinted when he thought, his refusal to show anger, excitement, elation, anything at all with anything other than a dry chuckle and a wisecrack. All Earl, as Earl as any man could be, far more Earl than Bob.

Fine for him,
Ray thought.
But what about me? Who am I? Am I American, Bob’s son, Earl’s grandson, am I Filipino, Tomas’s son, or am I, all of a sudden, Vietnamese?

Then he realized who he was: he was, taking after his father, sniper all the way through.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

P STREET, JUST ABOVE WISCONSIN

GEORGETOWN

WASHINGTON, DC

2030 HOURS

They’d seen a movie. It sucked. They went to a massage parlor. It sucked. They had a nice dinner. It sucked. They’d taken a cab back to Georgetown. It sucked. They were nervous. It sucked. Now, crouched in the darkened car on the quiet street, two blocks east of the police barricade that cut off P as it headed to the bend in the road that turned it to 37th, they pulled on body armor over black tactical pants and shirts. They pulled on watch caps tight, covering the ears.

“Almost fucking done,” said Tony Z.

“Z, listen up. If I’m hit, don’t do anything stupid like coming back for me, or hanging around to give cover fire. Once we put this asshole down, it’s ejection time and if you have to go one way while I go another, that’s fine. If you make it and I don’t, that’s fine. We’ll link in Miami.”

“Nothing’s going to happen, Mick. We pop him, the fuckhead cops wonder what the hell that sonic boom is, we drive to the airport, we leave a timer in the car so it goes bang tomorrow at noon, we fly away. The gardener finds him stuffed between the fence and the wall a few weeks from now. What the hell is that? everybody wonders. Who did Ray Cruz? Meanwhile, you and me, it’s twenty-four/seven pussy, dope, and gin for a year or so. And here’s the best part: the fucking universe was falling apart, the struts that hold it all together were cracking, we did our job, we lived up to our calling. What else is there? It sure beats teaching high school English or selling software programs.”

“It does. Just so you know, you and Carl, you guys are the best I
ever worked with. Too bad about him, but I’ll be on your six o’clock any time you need it, bro.”

“Same here, Adonis.”

“Now let’s do this sucker.”

They slid back to the rear of the SUV. The spotting scope and the .338 Lapua Magnum, a Sako TRG-42 with a big-ass chunk of Nightforce glass up top, were already in place. They squirmed into position, and Tony Z worked himself to the scope, fiddled with it, while Mick set to rifle business.

“Wait,” said Bogier. “Run a check on the BlackBerry on Swagger. See where he is. That might come in handy.”

“You got it,” said Tony. He rolled to his back, pulled the BlackBerry out of the pocket of his tactical vest, then squirmed back over and turned it on. Magically, a grid of the streets where they were operating opened up, and in a few seconds, the small, beeping light that always announced the satellite’s astronomical opinion on the presence of Planet Swagger came to life.

“Yeah, he’s on-site. He’s at the library. That must be their command HQ.”

“Good,” said Bogier. “If they were on to anything, he’d be down here in this area. We got it locked. I am filled with confidence. The mission is a big go.”

“Okay, Swagger’s moving, not much, but there’s motion.” Tony looked at his watch. “Good, that means the speech is over, now Swagger knows it’s the moment of maximum danger, and he’s moving close to Zarzi.”

“Go to scope, bro.”

Tony put his eye back to the spotter. He saw the stone wall, an upslope of grass to it, the perpendicular wrought-iron fence, a sidewalk into the campus, another outpost of fence, then the driveway that presumably led to parking lots. Two cops stood together, talking casually, about thirty yards down 37th, their backs to the driveway and gate. It was six hundred yards out, and by now, it had darkened considerably.
The range was too far for night vision, but the optics gave excellent resolution and there was enough ambient light from the campus lights and the buildings across 37th Street to illuminate the scene for him.

“I’ve got a good visual.”

“Me too,” said Bogier.

The rifle was a phantasmagoria of modern accuracy tricks, with a free-floating barrel, its action bedded and sunk into a green plastic stock that had accuracy enhancements 1 through 233, including a rigid pistol grip, a bolt grip the size of a golf ball, and infinitely adjustable potential, whole pieces and sides and hemispheres that could be adjusted inward and outward just so. It looked like a piece of plastic plumbing put together by a drunken committee of clowns, but it fit like a glove, and riding its bipod, Mick brought it readily to hand, eye, supporting elbow. The muzzle of the suppressor projected just slightly from the rear opening and the windows of the vehicle were so blackened that you’d suspect a sniper only if you were looking for a sniper.

Through the scope, which was set at a modest 6 power, Mick could see exactly what Tony saw, only smaller. But there was no jiggle, no wobble, no irritating tremble matched to his breathing, which is the great advantage of the lower magnification.

“I am so locked on,” said Mick. “I can feel my heartbeats, I can feel my atoms shifting. Man, I am in a zen wave you would not believe.”

“Me too, brother. Yes.”

“Any second now,” Mick said, and both understood the time for chatter was over.

They waited. It sucked. They waited. It sucked. They waited. It sucked.

“Uh!” said Tony, a little peep to his voice. “I have him. Jesus Christ, he just leaned out from around the iron fence at the entrance to the parking lot. You read it so right, Mick! He’s twenty feet from his shooting position.”

“Cops, do you see cops?”

“They’re looking the wrong way, assholes. He’s trying to decide whether to conk them, then go to the wall gap, or just go anyway, hoping
they don’t turn.”

“I got him, damnit, he keeps pulling out and back in, I don’t have enough of him long enough to shoot.”

“You cool?”

“Like the hand of death, man. Just let him move, stay stable, and bingo, we got him.”

Then the sniper emerged. He dipped across the entryway to the driveway, huddled at the foot of the separation between it and the walkway.

“He’s going along the fence. Then he’ll curve back into the gap. I’ll take him when he’s in place. I don’t want to shoot through the fence.”