Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“I’m sure he feels the same way about you. Can you reassemble your team?”

“Tony’s with me, Crackers went home to his wife and kids in Fayetteville. I can get him back, no problem. What’s the play?”

“This time, not only are you hunting this character, but so are the FBI and the CIA and just about everybody else. So you’ve got some competition. But to make it harder, they just want to stop the guy. You have to kill him, Mr. Mission Impossible.”

“That’s what I do.”

“Little evidence of that yet, friend, though I understand you’re hell on goats. He’s trying to finish the mission you stopped him from completing. He wants to put a bullet in Ibrahim Zarzi, the Afghan politician, who arrives in Washington for a high-profile visit in two weeks. This time, you stop him, permanently. He is under no circumstances to whack Zarzi or fall into police hands and go all Chatty Cathy on us.”

“Leads, you have leads?”

“The Bureau-Agency team handling this has gone to an old guy named Swagger, a former marine sniper with a lot of experience in these games. He’s you with brains, talent, imagination, stamina, and guts. I’ve seen the file.”

“The Nailer. A classic oldie. I’ve heard of the guy.”

“I’ll bet you have. He makes Ray Cruz look like a kindergartener. Swagger has the best chance of nailing Cruz, so you’ll be given all sorts of little gadgets to make tracking Swagger something within your Neanderthalic reach.”

“If I get ’em together, I have the okay to dust ’em both? I don’t like the idea of pulling down on a knight of the round table, but there may not be another way.”

“Bogier, don’t go soft on me and start humming ‘Halls of Montezuma.’ Collateral’s part of the business. This one is about getting the job done by any means possible. Don’t fuck this up.”

“Get over it. I didn’t fuck up the last one. I delivered. Your thermobaric nuke didn’t quite do the job.”

“Bogier, this is unbelievably crucial. At your level you can’t possibly understand what’s at stake. But trust me: you must come through on this. No pussy, no blow, no uppers or downers, no new tattoos, no three hours in the gym every day. You get it done.”

“I have it.”

“We don’t like to use coyotes. But we have no choice. Show us we haven’t misjudged.”

“Roger, wilco.”

“And one more thing: no witnesses.”

32 MILES EAST OF BOISE

1635 HOURS

He told you?” Bob asked.

Nick reached into his briefcase and pulled out a file, reached into the file and pulled out a decrumpled piece of yellow paper now preserved in cellophane. It was a Marine Corps incoming radio communication form. Nick handed it over.

Bob saw the operator’s name, the unit designation “2-2 Recon” and the date, sometime last week, and the time, 0455. He read the message:

“‘Whiskey Six, this is Whiskey Two-Two. Authentification Olympic downhill. I say again, Olympic downhill.” There was an asterisk scribbled in pencil next to the transmission, and at the bottom, after the footnote style, next to the parallel asterisk the operator had written, “No record of ‘Olympic downhill’ as verifier.”

Unrecorded was the radio operator’s response, which must have been something like, “Codes and verifier invalid, who are you, Two-Two, over, what is your situation, why are you in communication with this unit?”

Ray just bulled ahead, and the young man had written down:

“Whiskey Two-Two is on-site and will proceed with operation as planned. Target will be destroyed sometime next two to four weeks. Hunting is good, morale is high. Semper Fi. Out.”

“The kid thought it was some kind of joke, but it went into the log and the next day, the CO’s looking at the log. He used to be the exec and he remembered Two-Two. He got on the phone to division and on to marine headquarters at Henderson and then to us.”

“So the thinking is,” Bob said, “Cruz survived the blast and didn’t limp back to his FOB but instead went AWOL big time as a way of going rogue. Somehow, he got out of Afghanistan and found a way back. Now he’s pissed at what he has decided is some kind of betrayal that killed his spotter and thirty-one Afghans. Maybe he’s a little nuts. So he’s going to whack this politician anyway, just out of spite.”

“Something like that.”

“Come on. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Especially now that the Afghan is on our side, publicly and loudly. So Ray is now betraying his country and his service. It’s like he’s working for them . He couldn’t have been captured and turned?”

“Seems unlikely, but there are cases like it.”

“That’s not Ray,” said Swagger, who now believed he knew Ray or at least could feel the way his mind operated. “No, he’s got some other, deeper game in play. He’s got another objective, and we’re not smart enough to see it yet.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t worry about motive at this point,” said Susan. “Maybe we should just deal with what we have and figure out how to stop it.”

“So my part in this is to be your sniper consultant,” Swagger said, looking as if each of his sixty-four years had cost him a thousand dollars’ worth of grief.

“You’re with us every step of the way. We want you to eyeball the possible shooting sites and tell us where he’d shoot from, what he’d see that we wouldn’t. We want you to analyze his ingress and escape routes, his fallbacks, his hides, all the things that even our best experts might miss. We want you to be him when we game out possibilities or permutations. We need your intuitive access to his heart and mind over the next few weeks.”

“So you can kill him.”

“If it comes to that,” said Susan, whose specialty, now as then, was delivering the hard truth. “Nobody wants it, but there are other issues at stake. We have to stop him, Bob. Do you have any idea how humiliating it would be to this country internationally if an Afghan politician under our sponsorship was publicly assassinated by a marine sniper?”

Nick outlined the deal. Bob would actually carry an FBI badge and be legally entitled to represent himself as an “FBI investigator,” though not an “agent” or a “special agent.” The consultancy fee would be substantial, not that it was about money. Under certain circumstances, with written authorization, he would be permitted to carry a firearm and make arrests. He would be granted all authority and respect within the federal system and the military in accordance with his police powers. He would report directly to Nick and Susan. He would have an unlimited travel budget.

“My heart is with the sniper,” he said. “You have to know that going in. I want to get him out of this fix, get it straightened out. I don’t want to kill him.”

“We know that. We need that. We’re buying that.”

“Then my first move is to Camp Lejeune. I want to talk to his CO, his peers, and get a sense of him.”

“We’ll make the phone calls,” said Nick. “Oh, and raise your right hand.”

Bob complied, mumbled the appropriate yeses, and, cranky and old and ever so tired, realized he was back to taking the king’s gold, which meant he might have to do the king’s killing.

27 MILES WEST OF NOGALES, ARIZONA

0356 HOURS

THE NEXT MORNING

The van was dirty and spotted and squalid, a ’92 Ford Econoline with Arizona plates. It smelled of unwashed bodies, long nights, junk food, and urine. But its suspension was sound and its engine tuned. It looked like any van from a coyote outfit, and it looked like it had made many journeys to and from el Norte.