Dead Zero (4 page)

WHISKEY 2-2

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0619 HOURS

Ray was awakened that morning by a tongue. Too bad it belonged to a goat and not a beautiful woman.

He’d run hard through the arroyos in the dark, falling several times and remembering not to curse when he hit the ground. No moon made the trip an ordeal. But he had to keep moving and knew that if he didn’t, the leg would stiffen up on him and make the going even more torturous. He had to get as much out of himself as he could. But the arroyos weren’t a subway line; none of them led directly to Qalat, so he was always following one until it veered in an inappropriate direction, then scrambling up its rough walls mostly by hoisting himself upward with his staff, reaching the crest, slithering over the crest, and sliding down into another one that more or less seemed to be heading where he wanted to go. He knew he wasn’t making the best speed, but if he committed to the crests, his silhouette would be available to any hadji with stolen American night vision, or he might bump into a Taliban unit or opium smuggler or some Pashtun revengers, all of them richly festooned in AKs and RPGs. It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where you wanted to bump into folks.

Near dawn, he’d had it. He’d been running hard since the hit. His body could take more than most of the bodies in the world, but it had reached its limit. He found a relatively smooth area and nestled behind a rock; sleep overtook him quickly, a black blanket of dreamless escape.

The goat’s tongue smelled of shit, like everything in the ’Stan. Ray bolted up, felt the pain in his black-blue-green leg jack through him and squelched a cry. The fucking goats had found him. What goat-brain skill enabled them to stay with him in the dark? Sure, they could scamper over the landscape as if it were the surface of a billiard table, but
was it smell, his lingering presence in the wind, that led them through the dark on a beeline to him? Another nuzzled up and licked his face and showed something like dumb-beast love in its moist and sentimental eyes. It bleated and shivered, shat of course, and then nuzzled him for affection again.

“You skaggy bastard,” he said, but still awarded the goat a neck rub in payment for his loyalty.

Breakfast: rice balls, dates, and some warm water from the goatskin water bag strapped to him. Fed and hydrated, he shot an azimuth with a much-abused Boy Scout brass compass originally manufactured in England in 1925, found a landmark for orientation, and began the trek anew.

It was the day after the ambush. The pain was constant, but consciousness inconsistent. It seemed he passed out several times while walking. The goats nestled against him or ran off on adventures and he enacted what goat discipline he could. Around him, the land was definitely not changing; it was still the endless sea of rough ridges, small hills, scrub vegetation, dust everywhere. He had to move faster because tomorrow would be Sunday and he had to make Qalat by nightfall so he could infiltrate on Monday, recon, and set up the shot for Tuesday afternoon; it was Tuesday afternoon or nothing, because he couldn’t last a week in the city—surely sooner or later someone would notice that he spoke no Pashto or Dari or any of a thousand other tells that would give him away. In fast, out fast—or no game at all.

He reached a crest, scurried over it, the goats bleating and yapping all around him, taking shit breaks or lunch breaks on the waxy vegetation. He got over the ridge, then slipped, put stress on the leg, felt a specific pain rise out of the general pain and hit him hard, almost enough to bring him down.

Water? No. He wouldn’t have enough for tomorrow if he started sipping every time he felt like it. But the leg hurt so goddamned bad.

Okay,
he told himself,
take a little rest. You’ve got another two hours of daylight, you can punch through the night with greatly reduced efficiency,
you can grab a couple of hours of snooze time until a goat alarm clock sings “I’ve Got You, Babe” in your ear.

He awarded himself a little break.

He hunkered down, keeping his leg straight, squirmed until he’d found something near comfort as it might be defined in combat in Afghanistan, and set about paying off his oxygen debt. In a few minutes, he felt somewhat refreshed, no Semper Fi! or Gung Ho! bullshit, but some slight blurring of the generalized fatigue.

Time to go.

He thought also that it would be a good idea to take a fast recon of the area, just in case. He shimmied up to the crest of the ridge and in the low prone peered across the landscape he had just traversed. It looked a lot like the landscape he was just about to traverse. He saw the serrations of a hundred bayonets lined up, so the world was nothing but serrations—jagged rises and falls, edge beyond edge of them, endless, in that colorless color of the Afghan high desert, dun, dust, pale pink, mocha brown, whatever, even the plants were brown. High clouds piled up above, cumulus thunder bringers, the only clean, bright thing in the world, marble or alabaster. To the east, the mountains of Pakistan, much higher. He knew if he turned, he’d see the shadows of the Hindu Kush one hundred miles away. You could see the biggest mountains in the world from a long way out.

He was almost ready to pack it in when he saw them.

Oh fuck,
he thought.

He slipped back, diddled with his caftan, performed the complicated negotiations necessary to free up the SVD strapped to his back, and came back to the ridgeline.

It took a while to relocate. The original indicator had been a jiggle of movement on a crest line way off, where movement shouldn’t have been. Sliding the rifle to his shoulder, popping the lens caps, he settled into a steady prone as he cantilevered over the hump of the crest line, poking the rifle barrel through some vegetation for clearer vision. He found his spotweld, which yielded his perfect eye relief, and his fingers flew to the focus ring of the crude Chinese tube. He checked to make
sure the sun had no angle to bounce off his lens in give-away reflection, played with the focus, twisting this way and that, wishing he had Marine Corps–issue 10× magnification instead of ChiCom 4×, cursed the elaborate reticle with its goofy ranging system that blocked out too many details, and reoriented on the suspect area, letting the substandard lens of the Chinese optics resolve into finite detail all that could be resolved.

Nothing.

I know I saw something.

He decided to give it a few seconds.
I would have seen them on a crest. Now they’re behind the crest. They’ll be on top of another crest and—

He watched them come over, emerging headfirst, then disappearing as they scattered down the slope of the rill they’d just crossed. Khaki clad, bloused boots, burnooses obscuring their features, bearded men with necks wrapped in shemaghs in the green-black pattern so beloved by many. Bandoliers loaded with mags crisscrossed on their chests. Wait, one guy wore a baseball cap, khaki or sage, and he was the one with the heavy .50 Barrett, that monster rifle just at the limits of luggability, a twenty-five-pound ordeal as awkward as an iron cash register, and good for one thing only, nailing Johnny Pashtun at a long way out. The others were AK-ed up, standard for this part of the world, and one had a couple of RPGs over his back.

It was the guy in the ball cap who gave it away, even to the 4× of the Chinese scope. Yes, he was bearded, yes, he was nut brown from the cruel Afghan sun, yes, he moved with the wiry, wary grace of the Pathan warrior who’d haunted these climes for a thousand years, mixing it up with Alexander’s spear chuckers, assorted Hindu invaders, and then troops from a Victoria, a Mikhail, a George W., and now a Barack. Yes to all that, and yes to one other thing as well: he was white.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

2035 HOURS

We don’t have much light left, Mick,” said Tony Z.

“Hey, I don’t want to hear that. What I want to hear is, Mick, let’s push harder, goddamnit.”

“Mick, let’s push harder, goddamnit,” said Crackers the Clown.

“Not funny, Crackers.”

The team saw just hills, hills, hills before them in the fading light. At last report the guy was less than half a mile away, and they were closing. But the shot at a daylight takedown, much hoped for, was rapidly disappearing. Mick didn’t want to do a night thing. Guys shooting, flashes, bad vision, only one set of night vision goggles between them, no long shots, no, you couldn’t tell what might go wrong and very little ever went right at night.

On the other hand, if the guy saw them, he might set up and start picking them off from far out with his long gun. Then, assuming he wasn’t the first to go, Mick might have a chance at taking him down with the motherfuckingseventonsofagonybullshit .50 Barrett he carried with him. You could do a guy at a mile with the thing, and Mick had done enough of it to know.

Which set him off again: Aghh! He had the sniper team cold-bore dead zeroed and yet he missed, maybe a little puff of breeze edged the first 750-grainer that way or this and only blew goats into the air; the second freight train missed too, goddamnit, and then he found the stroke and blew one guy thirty feet in the air, cranked to the other as he was disappearing and blew him aloft like a Frisbee sailing across a college lawn. Then he worked the beaten zone with the rest of the mag,
blowing more goats to barbecue heaven and hitting the one visible body a second time so hard it landed in two pieces.

Then, when they got to the kill zone an hour later, after a slow, tactical approach, no fucking second body.

“You see blood?”

“A few spots down here, Mick. But clearly, not a big, huge gut wound; he won’t be bleeding out.”

“I saw him go bye-bye from midair,” said Tony.

“Even a glancer from a motherfucker like this will send a guy off like a V-2. I hit a guy in Bagra once at just the right angle and it actually blew him out of the windshield of his car and about thirty feet down the road. Man, that was one surprised dude.” It was a nice warm memory and Mick cherished it.

Thus the conclusion: one of the marines had gotten away.

“It’s time to cut to the chase,” said Crackers.

“Wait a minute,” said Tony Z. “See, we’re already
on
the chase. This
is
the chase. So how can you cut
to
the chase
from
the chase?”

“Fuck you,” said Crackers.

“Knock it off,” Mick said. “We got a pursuit on our hands. Guy has to have been hit, he can’t move fast. He’ll probably lay up in a cave. We have to track him and take him out.”

“Mick, I didn’t sign up for an adventure movie. I’m just here for the hit and the grins.” That was crazy Crackers, like Mick, once a soldier, and young.

“We are getting top dollar to deliver two heads. We will deliver two heads. Crackers, with your forces background, you’re the jock, why don’t you run the man down for us.”

“I left my track shoes at the motel,” said Crackers.

Now, nearly a day later, at nightfall, they knew they had to be close.

But Tony Z said, “I’m thinking we ought to deviate, go around him, and let him come to us. He’s been pushing hard and I saw him fly, so I know he’s hurting beaucoup from a glancer. He’ll have to hunker down. He’s only a marine. He ain’t Superman.”

Mick wasn’t ready to commit.

“Let’s think about this a little while. I want this thing done up right.”

One of the hadjis—he had three, Taliban boys whom on other days Mick might have blown away without a thought, but his passport to safety in the tribal areas depended on this one—spoke his gibberish and Tony Z, who understood it, told Mick, “Mahoud says there’s a path low around this set of hills, mostly flatland. We could probably get ahead of him that way.”

So tempting. No more chase shit. No more waiting for Marine Hero to get the first shot off and go for him, he-man with Barrett. Mick was a soldier, as he’d been a football hero, because he was so big. He’d known from childhood that he had the strength to make people obey, and he didn’t mind, rather enjoyed it, ultimately becoming addicted to hitting people to get their attention. Alas, it was a hard habit to break, which is why each of the various colorful entities that had paid him to do violence on their behalf had grown tired of his disciplinary problems, his thief’s axiomatic greed, and the way he subverted every team he ever joined to his own ends. He was finally even cashiered out of Graywolf for shooting a surrendering hadji on CNN, a bad career move if ever there was one; now he had another client, less picky about certain moral distinctions.

He checked his big gizmo Suunto watch, that Finnish bubble of high tech that could almost predict the future it was so complex, and saw he had just a few minutes until he could get a position fix.

“We’ll wait here till I call MacGyver. We’ll see where he is.”

The dark advanced shadows across the raw land, and a little night breeze kicked up dust or sand. One of the hadjis began to chew some suspicious weed or other, maybe for night vision, maybe for martyr’s frenzy. Tony Z hung next to Mick, crouching, lovingly fingering his AK. Tony was a gun guy; he had a Wilson custom .45 in a shoulder holster and a Ruger .380 plastic pocket pistol with a laser sight floating around in his cargo pants pocket.

Mick, happy to be shed of the weight of the Barrett for a few minutes, slipped off his backpack, unlashed its flap, and withdrew a chunk of silicon technology called a Thuraya SG-2520 encrypted satellite
phone. It was what held this whole mad little trip together. It looked like any other cell of the usual dimensions, 5.5 by 2.1 by 0.8 inches, but its distinguishing feature was a kind of plastic tube on top, which, when pulled, yielded a good five inches of stout antenna that enabled it to use the Thuraya constellation of forty-eight low earth–orbiting satellites if the GSM satellite coverage was not available. Other than that, it had the usual phone shit, a screen, a keyboard, all in gray Jet-sons plastic. It was preconfigured to one number. He pushed call.