Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

Perhaps it was that Ray saw the future; clearly, he’d wanted to study and learn at the feet of the master, following the smaller, more aggressive SEALs committed to the SASS/SR-25. He’d taken sabbaticals to study with Chambers and to master the intricacies of the weapon, when on his first three tours he’d been strictly the bolt gun guy. Such an agnostic’s move would certainly be something to hide from the corps’ Jesuits.

So that intellectual connection between the apostate Chambers and the pure sniper Cruz was extremely provocative to Swagger. The more he thought of it, the more it seemed to suggest possibilities. If Cruz was back, and serious about the mission he’d set up, he’d need to mount it from someplace. Initial FBI thought was that he’d draw on his connection to the marines or possibly to ex-marines, but no one had made the link to Chambers before.

Swagger had seen that the “Steel Brigade Armory,” out of which Chambers ran his little sniper think tank and mail-order empire (high-end tactical goods, such as Badger Ordnance rings, Nightforce scopes, reinforced recoil lugs, sniper data books, and so forth), was in rural South Carolina, within forty miles of Jacksonville, just across the state line. He guessed it might be an informal marine sniper hangout where the guys could cluster off duty and tell war stories and theorize about possible futures (for example, the latest info was that Chambers was running an exhaustive R & D program on the new.416 Barrett to see how it matched up against the.308 of fifty years’ service duration, and the big.50 boomer now used for those very long engagements so common in Afghanistan). Before he knew it, he was in his car, roaring through the dark down these country roads, aiming for the Steel Brigade Armory complex.

Was he going to sneak in? No, but he had to see it, make an initial recon, see who hung out there, what the milieu was. He had to figure out how to approach it: as an anonymous FBI investigator requesting answers, or as the Great Bob Lee Swagger, hero and celeb in this little-bitty world, expecting the royal treatment but also aware that if he wasn’t honest about his Bureau affiliation, he was somehow dishonoring the bond between long-range life takers.

Thus, well after midnight, he pulled through a tiny rural burg called Danielstown, turned right down Sherman at Main, and just when it looked as though he would run out of town, came across a surprisingly unimpressive recent building, aluminum siding under a flat roof, with two or three garage doors at one end, minimal landscaping, unfenced, and with a gravel parking lot out in front. It might have housed an infirmary, a battery warehouse, a software firm, but instead wore the nondescript sign STEEL BRIGADE ARMORY.

A light in one window was on.

OUTSIDE DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

0238 HOURS

They pulled off the road out of town and, looking at the Google map of Danielstown, calculated where under the nest of trees and buildings, at the crossroads just ahead, Swagger must have stopped and now sat in his car, unaware that the tiny transponder in his wallet was broadcasting his position.

“Okay,” Mick said, pointing to Crackers, “you cut through backyards and you get a night vision look-see on him. Tell me where he is, what he’s doing. You do not scare the neighbors, arouse the dogs, watch the widow lady jacking off nude in her shower or Jimmy Dick fucking Sally Pussy on the couch of the Pussy mansion. Remember, you are secret agent man.”

Too bad Crackers had no sense of humor. He didn’t even fake a grin. He adjusted his see-in-the-dark apparatus-a head harness that supported a single battery-controlled optic called a dual-spectrum night vision goggle, new to the inventory, fresh out of a box-fiddled with it to bring the world into the greenish focus of intensified ambient light, then slipped out, silently. He was a pretty good operator, after all. Soon he was gone.

In seven or eight minutes, the radio crackled, and both Mick and Tony Z stirred and picked up their handsets. Through a gravy of static, Crackers’s voice came in, sans radio protocol ID games, as it was a small net and only the three of them were on it.

“This thing is really cool,” said Crackers, noted gearhead. “You can switch between intensified ambient and thermal, or you can combine ’em and get a real good picture show.”

“Save it for your column in Soldier of Fortune, ” said Mick. “What have you got on, you know, what’s it called? Oh yeah, our mission.”

“Okay, I’m prone in the bushes of a house about two hundred yards out. He’s sort of waiting or something in the parking lot of some kind of low cottage-industry-type building, you know, like where an air-conditioning supply house would be-”

Both men knew instantly the kind of building.

“Can you ID it? Does it have a name or anything?”

“Yeah, bright as day on the NV. It’s called Steel Brigade Armory. It doesn’t look like an armory though.”

“Okay,” said Mick. “How’s your secure?”

“Total. I was invisible and I low-crawled the last hundred yards through some lady’s garden. No bowwows, nothing.”

“What’s Swagger doing?”

“That’s the funny thing. Nothing. He’s pulled off the road but not quite into the parking lot. He’s just sitting there.”

“Is he on a phone?”

“Not from his profile. I think he’s just trying to figure out what to do next. There’s one light on in the building and there’s an SUV parked in the lot, so I’m guessing someone’s at home.”

“Okay, stay in position, give me any changes ASAP.”

“Got it.”

Even as he set down the unit, Tony Z handed over the Thuraya satellite phone. Bogier pushed the preset button and in a few seconds, a voice spluttered on.

“What the fuck? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“This is a twenty-four/seven gig,” Mick said, glad, for once, to have a little leverage on the normally unflappable MacGyver.

“Don’t lecture me, Bogier. I know a little about this business.”

“Okay, okay. I have Swagger at some place in a town called Danielstown, South Carolina, maybe twenty miles southwest of Henderson. He’s pulled up at a nondescript low-threshold industrial facility that seems to call itself Steel Brigade Armory. We need a quick read on it.”

“I’ll call back,” said MacGyver.

The two men sat in the quiet car, listening to the southern night wind around them. Bogier looked at his Suunto and saw that it was getting on to 0300. What the fuck was this guy doing out here at this hour?

The radio crackled.

“Okay,” said Crackers. “He’s going in. He went to the door and knocked.”

DANIELSTOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA

0305 HOURS

Nothing. He knocked again, louder, heard some kind of stirring inside, the sound of someone on metal steps.

“Get the hell out of here,” a voice said through the steel door.

“Colonel Chambers?”

“I said, get the hell out of here. Come back tomorrow. I’ll be here from eleven on, friend.”

“I have to talk to you.”

Even through the door, there was no mistaking the heavy clack of a shotgun slide racking.

“Don’t push it, friend. You don’t want to come through that door. You’ll be a sorry pup. Come back tomorrow, goddamnit.”

“Sir, I’m going to push my driver’s license through the mail slot. Then I will back off a few feet while you decide whether to see me.”

“Goddamnit, I said-”

But Bob peeled his license out of his wallet, slid it through, and backed off.

No noise came from the building.

Finally, a door opened, to reveal what you’d expect a marine infantry colonel (Ret.) to look like: burly, crew cut, lots of weight training under the plaid shirt, late forties/early fifties, shotgun in hand, glasses on square face.