Stephen Hunter: Dead Zero

“I want this guy dead’r ’n shit,” said the colonel. “I had to fight command and the Agency to get a kill authorized. Ray, I’d love to push the button and watch the computer kids whack him, but it’s not going to happen. You’ve got to walk in, drop him with a rifle shot, and walk out.”

“Got it,” said Ray.

The shooting site had to be the roof of the Many Pleasures Hotel, across the street from the Beheader’s compound. Once a week, the man was predictable. At twilight on Tuesday-it was always Tuesday-he left the compound by armored Humvee and went into the Houri district, where he visited a nice young prostitute named Mindi, with eyes like almonds, hair the color of night, and ways and means beyond the imagination. And why didn’t he just move her in? Well, concubine politics. He had three wives and twenty-one kids, and already wives number one and three hated each other; his second concubine was plotting against his first concubine; all the women were lobbying incessantly for a trip to Beverly Hills; and what little domestic tranquility that could be had would be shattered by adding Mindi to the mix. Thus it was felt that not only her sexual skills but the fact that she was deaf and dumb gave the Great Man a peace and serenity unavailable in his own hectic home.

In any event, Tuesday at twilight, he predictably strode from his house to the vehicle, a distance of some ten yards. It was then and only then that he was vulnerable to a shot. Shooting suppressed from a little over 200 yards out, with just enough angle to clear the wall but still access the target, Ray could easily put a Chinese sniper bullet into the Beheader in his five-second window of opportunity. Chaos would ensue, and the militiamen in the bodyguard squad would have no idea where the shot had come from and would certainly begin firing wildly, driving people to cover. Ray and his spotter would fall back from the Many Pleasures Hotel, rappelling off the roof and making their way into the crowded Houri district, just a few blocks away, where they would go to ground. They’d just be two more faceless, bearded Izzies in a city full to bursting with them. The next night, they’d exfiltrate the city, make it to a certain hill about five miles to the south, and wait for the Night Stalker to come pick them up.

“It sounds easy,” said S-2. “It won’t be.”

On the first day, he and Skelton had passed a couple of Taliban patrols on the high track but attracted no interest from those wary fighters, whose gimlet eyes were used to piercing the distance for the sand-and-spinach digital camo of marine war fighters. The Tallys saw goatherders all the time, and if these two were a little more raggedy ass than most they saw, it didn’t register. They moved at goat pace, without urgency, without apparent direction, letting the wiry little animals eat, shit, and fuck as their goat brains saw fit, but generally moseying in the direction of the big market at Qalat where their thirty-five treasures could be sold for slaughter.

As part of their security procedure, Whiskey 2-2 avoided villages, slept without campfires, ate rice balls and unleavened sheaves of dry bread, and wiped their hands on their pants and shat without toilet paper.

“It’s just like the Sigma Chi house,” said Lance Corporal Skelton as they came to the top of a rise and found a tricky path down the other side.

“Except you don’t jack off as much,” said Ray.

“I don’t know about you, Ray, but I don’t need to jack off much. I had a real nice time with that blond goat last night. She’s a princess.”

“Next time, keep it down. May be bad guys in the vicinity.”

“She sure does moan, doesn’t she? Boy, do I know how to please a gal or what?”

The two men laughed. Lance Corporal Skelton didn’t have a Chinese sniper rifle under his robes and vests, but he did have ten pounds of HF-90M Ultralight radio, an M4 with ACOG, ten magazines, and a case containing a Schmidt & Bender 35× spotting scope. All that shit: he moved like an old lady.

They were in high plains country, trending north. The Paki mountains rose ahead, over the unseen border, mantled in snow and sometimes fog, more tribal territory where Americans couldn’t go for fear of execution upon apprehension. The land they negotiated was rocky and hardscrabble, clotted with waxy, tough, gray vegetation. Rocks lay everywhere, and each hill revealed a new landscape of secret inclines and defilades, and it was all brown-gray, coated with dust or grit. They were right on the border between the rising plains and the actual foothills, and out here it was desolate. Except of course they knew they were being watched and always assumed some Taliban was gazing their way through the scope of a Dragunov or a nice pair of Russian binoculars. So no American-jock crap as young athletic fellows are wont to do, no air jump shots or long, deep fantasy passes; no scooping up the hot grounder and firing to first. No middle fingers, no mock-comic “Fuck yous,” no hyperattention to hygiene, no acknowledgment that such things as germs existed or that Allah was less than supreme. Prayer mats, five times a day on the knees to Mecca; you never knew who was watching.

And, of course, somewhere up above lurked either a satellite or more likely a Predator drone configured for recon and riding the breezes back and forth behind a tiny turbocharged engine, so they were probably on monitors in living color in every intelligence agency in the free world. It was like being on Jay Leno, except for the Afghanistan part. So another sniper discipline was: don’t look up. Don’t look at the sky, as if to acknowledge that somebody was up there to watch over them.

FOB WINCHESTER

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1556 HOURS

A FEW DAYS EARLIER

I didn’t think it would take all this time,” said the colonel.

“Sir,” said his exec, “that’s rough land. That’s really rough land. And the goats. They seem to be having trouble with the goats. Maybe the goats were a mistake.”

“S-Two, are they on schedule?”

“More or less,” said the intelligence officer. “That goat market has been there for three thousand years and I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon.”

The colonel rolled his eyes to his exec. What was it with intelligence people? They always had a little bit of the I-wouldn’t-be-in-intelligence-if-I-weren’t-intelligent deal going on. This one, even worse, was an Annapolis grad and convinced he was on a straight run to become the next commandant.

“It’s not the market, S-Two. It’s the Tuesday shot. If they miss that, they have to hang out there in goat city undercover for another full week. They’ll make a mistake and get nabbed and the Beheader will get to practice his specialty.”

“Yes, sir,” said S-2, “I only meant-”

“I know, S-Two. I’m just ragging on you because if I don’t pick on somebody I’ll have an anxiety attack.”

Colonel Laidlaw stood in the S-2 bunker behind the base’s many miles of concertina wire and sandbags. He had three patrols out, and word was brewing that the whole battalion was up for a major assault sometime in the next month and he had too many men down with malaria, too many in psych wards, and too many on leave. Battalion strength was about 60 percent, and recon battalions were smaller than rifle battalions to begin with. Nothing worked, one of his officers was showing disturbing signs of depression and replacing him would be a political nightmare, the intel that came through the Agency was always late and bad, and now he had two of his best guys way, way out on a limb. In other words, things were just about normal for combat operations.

He lit up what felt like cigarette number 315. It tasted just as shitty as cigs 233 through 314. He looked at what was before him on the monitor screen. It was Whiskey 2-2, from an altitude of about 2,000 feet, except that altitude was a magnification. Actually the bird was close to 22 miles up in the sky, rotating in a slow low-earth orbit, under the control of the geniuses at Langley, and it had cameras with lenses capable of resolutions nearly unbelievable only a few years before. They could probably tell if the Beheader had his eggs over easy or poached, if they wanted.