Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Sir, I-”

Rodriguez struck him hard in the face.

“Money, then treasure, monkey asshole.”

“Yes, of course, sir.”

Professor Khalid called, “What is happening, Bilal? Why did he strike you? Who are these men?”

“Tell the old one to shut his yap,” said Rodriguez, “or Pedro, I’m afraid, will kick in his teeth.”

“Professor, it is not a problem. Just another few minutes and we will be on our way.”

“Indeed,” said Rodriguez, “now tell me where-”

Bilal hit him with five bunched fingers in the center of the throat, crushing the larynx. He began to make unpleasant sounds and quickly lost interest in his firearm. Bilal pivoted, way behind the two AKs coming up, but he had hands faster than Allah’s, it was said in the training camps. He got the.380 Ruger LCP taped inside his left wrist into his right hand and in the next second it became evident that the nasty boys Pedro and friend had yet to cock their AKs before firing, an amateur’s mistake that Bilal or any of his cohorts would not have made, and each bolt was at the halfway point when Bilal fired the tiny pistol twice, putting a.380 into each head. He was a superb shot, even with so small a gun having all but nonexistent sights. The bullets were so tiny they didn’t deliver much impact, that is, other than the instant animal death they generated by pulping the deep central brain, and one of the men began to walk around strangely, blood pouring down his face, as if he were trying to remember how a chicken dances. He disappeared into the blackness, clucking. The other merely sat down disappointedly and sagged off into an eternal nap.

Rodriguez sat against the wheel of the van. He was coughing blood as well as expelling it copiously from his nostrils, holding his ruptured throat as his lungs and all other available vessels filled with liquid, drowning him. Bilal had not been trained to recognize any kind of mercy, as the camps were not an environment that emphasized mercy as a value, but the look of pain was so extreme that without willing it, he shot the man in the temple.

Professor Khalid came racing over.

“I have to get away from him! If he tells me he read the myth of Prometheus in the original Greek one more time, I will strangle him, and then where will we be?”

Dr. Faisal was not far behind.

“What can you do with the uneducated? The fool knows nothing. He is all hot air and opinions without a single reliable fact. I cannot continue this trip with such a fool!”

Somehow, Bilal got them into the truck and on their way.

915 BRAVERMAN AVENUE

JACKSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

2030 HOURS

Anything would do. Did they still sell breakfast at this time of night? Maybe eggs and bacon. But eggs and bacon wouldn’t work without coffee, and he couldn’t drink the decaf and he couldn’t afford a sleepless night in the motel, even if, on the FBI per diem, the Hilton was an upgrade from many of the places he’d stayed.

Swagger had a headache, the beginnings of a cold, and a serious case of exhaustion. This “investigating” was debilitating. You had to be “on” all the time, your mind alert. And even after fifteen hours of it, you got nothing.

“Have you decided?” asked the waitress.

“Double Jack neat, please, with a side of water.”

“Sir, we don’t-”

“I know, I know, my idea of a little joke, ma’am, peculiar, I know.”

She smiled. She had the look of some kind of marine wife or girlfriend here a couple of miles off the main entrance to Lejeune, and maybe her husband or boyfriend was deployed somewhere and she needed the dough, serving old coots such as himself to keep going with two kids and not enough allowances. It was sometimes harder on the ones left behind, and there were no guarantees the man wouldn’t come home in a box.

“Okay,” he said, “I guess I’ll have the Caesar salad and this grilled fish special.” No meat; that would make Julie happy.

“Anything to drink? We do have wine and beer.”

“Ma’am, water’s fine.”

She left, and he pulled his briefcase up to the table. It contained the notes he’d taken today during a full day of interviews on Camp Lejeune in 2nd Recon Battalion headquarters, a Xerox of Cruz’s career-long 201 file, and preliminary reports from field agents and NIS canvassing of previous duty stations for information and background, still woefully incomplete.

He got his yellow notepads out from today, recording his conversations with Colonel Laidlaw; Lieutenant Colonel Simpson, his successor as 2nd Recon commander; Major Morton, former S-2 of 2-2, now at Division S-2 while he waited to get out and head off to law school; Sergeants Kelly and Schuman, both snipers who’d served in Sniper Platoon with Ray Cruz; and Lance Corporals Sigmond and Krahl, who’d been friends with Lance Corporal Billy Skelton.

It was pretty much the same all the way through. You couldn’t find a bad word about Ray Cruz on this planet, much less the South Carolina sector of it.

Colonel Laidlaw: “I didn’t know Cruz except by report and reputation. I’m not one of those meet and greet leaders. I just can’t stand it when the boys get hurt or killed: I keep my distance so I can do my job. I’m way too old for combat, I know. Anyhow, I found him to be a quiet, intense professional. I was aware of the many times he’d been offered commissions and his opportunities outside the corps but I understood his commitment to his job. He was one of, hell, maybe he was, the best.”

Lieutenant Colonel Simpson: “At any time, he could have written a ticket out of there. He didn’t have to keep going on the missions. I said to him, ‘Look, Sergeant Cruz, I’m getting tired of writing commendations and listening to you call me sir when I should be calling you sir. Will you go be the next commandant or something?’ He’d smile, and say he was fine with it the way it was. He liked saving people. He believed that’s what a sniper does. If some unit got in a firefight, Ray was the first one on the track to get out there; he’d work his way around, taking incredible chances, and bring fire on the hadjis, and after he dropped two or three, they’d be gone. It must have happened a thousand times. A sniper dings a kid and Sergeant Cruz saddles up and slithers out. A few minutes later we hear a shot and a few minutes later, Cruz is back, checking on the kid. And note: we didn’t have to go to Hellfire and blow up a house or go to Apache and blow up a neighborhood or go to F-16 and blow up a town. One shot, one kill. Everybody’s happy.”

Morton, the intelligence whiz: “Look, I’ll be frank with you. When you brief or debrief these guys, you do become aware of the limits of their minds. Some aren’t what we’d call ‘smart’ in an intellectual way, but their strength is doing exactly what they’re told and then reporting back exactly what happened. Not Cruz. He was smart smart, if you know what I mean. He got it. He’d seen through all the follies of the corps, he knew Simpson was sucking up like a whore to Colonel Laidlaw to get the battalion, he knew that Kelly was smarter than Schuman but that Schuman was more reliable under fire, he knew that Skelton was one of those college guys in the marines who hide from some issue in civilian life but was still the smartest and the best of the spotters. Cruz knew what was bullshit and what was real. Yet still: he risked. He risked so much, even knowing that in the end it would all be decided by assholes in suits sitting at tables. To me, to have that kind of IQ-what was it?”

“One hundred forty-five,” Bob had said.

“Much higher than mine. But to have that kind of IQ and understand that it was all a kind of bullshit and yet still believe in it and still go out, day after day, that was something.”