Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re looking for a man with a rifle under his robes. You think he’s hit? So wouldn’t he be moving tentatively?”

“Yes, sir, and if a.50 grazed him, he’s purple from shoulder to ankle. He’ll be moving very tentatively. Would it be easier to tell the police an assassination attempt-”

“No. Because they will surround the hotel crudely and he will go away. Then he will return to his HQ and make a formal report on everything that has happened and questions we don’t want to be raised may well be raised. No, we want him in that hotel.”

“And we take him on the roof?”

“No. You make certain he’s in the hotel, then you call me with the definite, then, if I were you, I’d take cover.”

QALAT

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1850 HOURS

Soon came the call to evening prayers. Soon the sun set. Soon tea would be drunk, food would be eaten, life in all its manifold pleasures would be experienced by the rich and all its manifold pains by the poor. The city would go silent.

In that falling dusk, the man known as the Beheader would leave his large house and walk to his jet black armored Humvee for a fuck with a woman without a voice. He would not make it. A bullet the size of a pencil tip would enter his body at well over 2,300 feet per second from a cartridge of the equivalent of an American.30-06 and would blow out several of his blood-bearing organs, most notably his heart. He would be dead before he fractured his expensive Dallas cosmetic-dentistry whitened and straightened teeth on the cobblestones.

Or something like that.

Ray looked up and down the street. No sign of any police or militia presence. An orange personnel carrier, bearing the emblem of the Royal Dutch Marines, had ground down the street once at around two, but since then all was normal, as lorries, bikes, scooters, to say nothing of hundreds of merchants and citizens and donkeys, even the occasional fleet of goats, filled the busy street that housed the hotel, directly across from the gated compound of Ibrahim Zarzi, warlord, politician, and best-dressed man of 1934.

His leg pain was muted somewhat by a morning of rest in a fleabag near the railway station, and a couple of kabobs for nourishment from a street-side vendor outside and half a bottle of aspirin from what passed as a “drugstore” in Afghanistan. He could have had keefe or bennies or dex or red who’s-your-mamas? or rolling chocolate death or whatever, but stayed with the regular stuff. He’d also had about a gallon of the sugary tea.

Now, amid the hundreds, virtually indiscernible from them, he hobbled down the street, face down, his bad leg aching, the rifle suspended by the strap around his shoulder and threaded down his pants leg. It might print if he wore it across his back, or someone in a crowd might jostle against him and feel the presence of steel. It dangled, the butt of its stock directly in the armpit, the long skeleton of wooden stock extending its length ridiculously, the receiver group against his hip, the fore end and barrel down the side of his leg. He’d taped the magazine under the wooden fore grip, to keep the thickness of the thing, with its Chinese scope clamped up on top in some sort of steel frame, at a minimum. It meant that when he came to shoot, he’d have to take a second to rip the mag from its bonds of tape, quickly peel any filaments of tape away, slam it into the mag well, then pull and release the bolt as he rose and put himself in the offhand shooting position.

He didn’t need to tell himself, but he always did anyway, a kind of mantra: breathe, relax, let sight settle, focus on crosshairs not target, press not pull, follow through, pin trigger. He’d done it a hundred thousand times.

He entered the hotel. It was ancient, somewhat Anglified in its shabby dignity and brass fixtures, and in pre-Soviet invasion days had been a haven for the hippies who came to rural Afghanistan to enjoy the local crops unmonitored by police agencies. The Reds had turned it into a troop barracks, and when the Taliban kicked them out it had languished, as under those stern boys not a lot of traveling had been done in the country. Since, er, “liberation,” it had enjoyed substantially more prosperity, and now and then a particularly adventurous journalist or TV crew would stay there, in for an interview with the Beheader, who sometimes kept his appointments and sometimes didn’t.

Ray slid up to a desk and was greeted by the suspicious eyes of a clerk and he abated that suspicion by sliding over a 250-rupee note and his beautifully forged Afghan identity card, which had him down as Farzan Babur.

No words were necessary, nor were signatures. The fellow took the note and returned thirty-five rupees in change, and pushed over a key, which wore a brass tag with the number 232 on it. Ray bowed humbly, took the key and the dough, and sloughed to the stairway.

“Got him,” said Tony Z-for-Zemke, a forces washout who’d done nine years for Graywolf Security before being cashiered out on the same surrendering-pilgrim gig that had gotten Bogier fired. Since there were no radios, Tony Z had come running across the street, dodging bikes and donkeys. “Mick, I got him. Definite. A ‘limp,’ some kind of awkward thing under his robes if you looked. Clearly had a load on under all the Izzie shit he was wearing.”

“See his face? White guy, marine?”

“Scruffy black beard, face held low, maybe a little browner than you’d expect. Maybe he’s Asian or Mexican or some weird shit like that. You know, diversity’s the thing these days. Not a native, his skin wasn’t rough enough.”

“Okay,” said Mick, “get the other guys and fall back to that cafe. I’ll make the call.”

Mick slipped back, tried to find some privacy on the busy roadway, couldn’t, slipped into a street that led nowhere except to stalls of Afghan wares-the kind of crap these people sold-felt good when one of his Izzies came up to offer screening, and got the phone out, unlimbered the antenna.

“Yes, yes?” MacGyver demanded.

“We got him.”

“You’re positive?”

“You didn’t give us a pic. What I have is a non-Afghani in tribal garb and turban with apparently a bad leg heading into the hotel, just as predicted. He had some kind of shit under his robes, obviously the rifle. My guy couldn’t get a close-up look-see, but all the indicators are there.”

“A white man? American white?”

“Ahhh-” Mick’s doubts came out.

“Well?”

“My guy said maybe he was a bit brown. Could have been Hispanic or maybe even Asian. He-”

“Bingo,” said Mr. MacGyver. “Now get undercover.”

FOB WINCHESTER

S-2 BUNKER

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1904 Hours

Heeere’s Johnny,” said Exec.

“I am goddamned,” said Colonel Laidlaw. “I am getting that sergeant a medal.”

The cruciform locator on the screen centered on downtown Qalat, exactly at the site-authenticated breathlessly from maps by a triumphant S-2 who’d gotten Agency coop by calling in every favor he was owed, plus offering his firstborn if necessary to three separate officers-of the Many Pleasures Hotel across from the Beheader’s complex, as seen from a discreetly cruising Predator drone a few thousand feet overhead. Ray’s GPS was talking to its friends in the sky and by magical technical shit beyond the imagination of the colonel the chatter was being intercepted and used to pinpoint the GPS’s location, and the camera in the Predator laid out everything perfectly, despite the readouts all over the screen, the other small screens from other feeds, the gray-green-black color scheme.