Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

They could see the walled complex, the big main house, the garages out back; they could see the incandescent scuttle of ants that were men, the glow of cooking fires on the property, a silver ribbon where a stream ran through it. Outside the walls, a human glowworm passed to and fro, this being the blur of pedestrian traffic. The white square roofs of the odd vehicles caught in this river of humanity showed clearly. It was the best movie Colonel Laidlaw had ever seen. He watched the hotel, slightly obscured under the cruciform of the locked-on locator, and saw the street scene from his memory, as on two occasions earlier on the tour he’d been a guest of the Beheader.

“Here comes the Humvee,” said S-2.

Indeed from one of the smaller buildings in Zarzi’s complex, the square roof of the armored vehicle scuttled forward, scooted between buildings, and came to rest in the driveway along one wall, perhaps thirty yards from the main building. The glowing signatures of underlings scurried this way and that. They seemed to form a security cordon right at the house itself, and it didn’t take long for the door to open-so sharp was the long-range image that the narrow slice of the door, viewed from above, was clearly resolved-and a figure stepped out.

Laidlaw remembered him: he was a tall, stately man, handsome, always well dressed and exquisitely groomed, who favored Savile Row suits under beautiful lavender pashminas and an elegant if discreet fez of some kind of highly glossy material, possibly silk or velvet, neatly encompassing his silver-gray hair. His vanity was watches. Patek Philippe, Rolex, Fortis, Breitling, always something beautiful and complex. He had deep brown, extremely empathetic eyes.

“Get ready to die, motherfucker,” said Exec.

All eyes switched to Ray’s site on the roof, 230 yards out, revealed by the cruciform.

At that moment, so hot it burned their eyes, so fast it had to be a phenomenon of explosive energy, a smear of white ruptured and radiated outward, sending waves of electronic disturbance across the screen and in another second the image itself wobbled crazily, as if a giant wave had reached and smashed into the light unmanned aircraft, disturbing its equipoise and threatening its survival.

“S-Two, what the fuck was that?”

“Detonation,” said S-2.

32 MILES EAST OF Boise

1515 HOURS

SIX MONTHS LATER

Julie came out of the office where she’d been checking the expenditures at the Missoula barn when she heard the racket, watched the horses jump and shiver in the corral. The helicopter settled slowly out of the blue western sky, and in its rude, invasive way kicked up dust and energy everywhere. It certainly was an impressive machine, a huge green hull with lots of portholes, a bubble canopy behind which sat two men in goggles looking very insectoid, landing gear, struts, insignia-USAF-under the great swirl of the blade at idle. It looked like it had emerged from CNN, on the television set.

A hatch opened and, as she expected, it was her husband’s friend, a man named Nick Memphis, now a hotshot executive with the FBI. They’d been trying to reach Swagger for some time now, but he wouldn’t talk to them. He was sick of them and, in a way, of the world, or at least the world they represented. He no longer read anything but big, fat World War II novels from the forties and fifties. Television annoyed him, he hated his cell phone and the e-mail process, and wasn’t interested in iPods or iPads or whatever they were, BlackBerries, all those little electronic things. Hated ’em. Mostly all he did was work like a bastard around the place and take his daughter Miko to junior rodeo events, which she usually won or placed high in, proving to be, at twelve, a fearless competitor in the barrel race.

But after Nick, another figure emerged, familiar and yet not immediately recognizable. She searched her memory and then it came to her. Trim, pantsuited, waves of raven-black hair, a certain elegance, Asian: yes, it was a woman named Susan Okada, a mysterious figure who had appeared from out of the blue nine or so years ago with a gift that had lightened everybody’s life and spirit-the child Miko. She knew without having been told that Susan Okada worked for that mystery entity that went by the three initials C, I, and A, and knew that if Susan were here, it meant, without being stated, that an old favor was being called in. Perhaps Susan’s presence established some principle of obligation, a call to duty, whatever. They needed him and there would be no turning them down this time.

“Hi, Julie,” called Nick as he got to the house.

“Nice ride,” she said.

She hugged him, kissed him, and did the same to Susan: you could not but love a woman who had somehow gotten you your second daughter, through some magic hocus-pocus making the bureaucracy and the waiting and the traveling and the interviewing all vanish.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said to Susan.

“I hear Miko’s turned into a rodeo champ.”

“She knows what she’s doing on a horse. Of course we pushed the rodeo, thinking the horses would keep her away from boys, and we ended up with both horses and boys.”

She drew them onto the porch and into the living room. It was a beautiful, big house, the house of a man of property and success. That was certainly Swagger. He’d become something a bit more than prosperous and now owned fourteen lay-up barns in six states, enjoyed referential relationships with the veterinary practice in those locales, the key to the whole thing, and really it was Julie, an organized and determined woman, who kept the wheels turning and the engine grinding forward into the black. The pension from the Marine Corps and the medical disability pay was only the frosting, ammunition money.

But then she turned to Nick.

“I know this is business. You didn’t come by helicopter for small talk.”

“Sorry for the melodramatics, but you can’t get his attention any other way. He’s not even opening e-mail or accepting registered letters, much less phone calls. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t think we had a real situation.”

“I’ll go get him. And I’ll pack. I’m guessing you’ll be taking him with you.”

“I’m afraid so, Julie. He knows the stuff and we need someone who knows the stuff. I know he’s sick and tired of us. I’m sick and tired of us. But still… it’s a real situation.”

“And a tragic one,” Susan Okada added.

Swagger, in jeans and a blue work shirt, sat across from them, his coffee untouched. He was sixty-four now and almost always in pain. The goddamned cut on his hip-exactly where all those years ago he’d taken the bullet that shattered the hip and almost killed him-had never really healed properly and gave him trouble every day. Yet the painkillers turned him groggy and he hated being groggy, so he just got through it. Riding horseback was a special agony, so he traveled most places these days by his three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, beneath a straw Stetson, much weathered, and a pair of sunglasses too cool, he thought, for such a worthless loafer. His hair had never turned white but stayed a kind of pewter gray, wiry like his old man’s, with a will of its own, and would only answer to butch wax; his cheeks had sunk for some reason and he thought he looked like a death’s-head, but when he saw how many men his age had turned to blobs, he supposed he ought to be grateful. He still had the face of some kind of Comanche warrior from some forgotten age; he still carried himself with regulation Marine Corps grace and posture, as some systems imprint so deep they never go away.

“You’re a hard man to reach,” said Nick.