Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“I think I read a piece he wrote in Precision Shooting. He’s not a bipod guy. He doesn’t think sniper rifles ought to have bipods. Cause more trouble than they’re worth.”

“Try shooting a Barrett without a bipod,” said Mick. “See how far into the next state it gets you. Anyway, Swagger may have somehow come across something suggesting that Cruz the sniper at one time knew Chambers the guru. So Swagger decides to come hell for leather across South Carolina in order to have a chat with Chambers.”

“At three in the morning?”

“Swagger’s an action hero. He can’t sleep on a twitch. He’s got to go check it out.”

“He thinks Chambers can lead him to Cruz,” said Z. “God, I wish we had a mike in that room.”

“Now, when Swagger leaves, what the fuck do we do? Do we stay with him? I guess so. I mean, we got the plant on him, right? We went to all that trouble. But if we switch to Chambers, maybe he’s the magic ticket to Cruz. Maybe he goes to Cruz tomorrow, to tell him about Swagger, and we can put the Barrett on him, blow him out of his boots, and go back to the pool much richer than we are.”

“Mick, it’s tempting, but it ain’t orderly. As you say, we have Swagger in our pocket. We can stay on him out of sight, no rush-”

“Hey hey hey-” came the sudden crackle of Crackers the Clown through their earphones, “hey, I got another guy in the room.”

“What?”

“I just discovered it. This thing, this optic, you can go ambient light, you can go thermal, you can go combined ambient/thermal, which is where I’ve been, but I just went all thermal.”

Mick wanted to strangle the guy. He didn’t care about this shit. Who was the third man?

“So I flick on thermal, reads heat, you know, cool night, that building’s pretty much an aluminum eggshell, plus they’re in an outside room with only one wall, and goddamn I got three body heat signatures. Three. I don’t know where the other guy came from. He wasn’t there when they went into the room.”

“Was he hiding?”

“Maybe there’s a dead zone, a strong room, another entrance, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I see.”

“Jesus,” said Mick.

“If it’s Ray,” said Tony Z, next to him, “we could maybe go for the kill tonight. Now. In the next ten minutes.”

“ If it’s Ray,” said Mick, thinking.

“How can we find out?”

“We can’t,” said Mick.

He was right. Without some visual or at least aural penetration of the room, there was no way of knowing from outside if indeed the third man was Ray Cruz.

What to do now?

Bogier’s mind ratcheted through possibilities.

1. Nothing. Maybe Swagger’d convince Ray to leave with him, they could ID him in the car, and do a drive-by on the two of them, spray-paint Swagger’s car with 5.56, get two, good, confirmed kills.

2. Nothing also. If Swagger had led them to Cruz this time, he’d do it again. If he leaves alone, we stay with him. We can’t stake out in this little town in daylight, because by 7:30 A.M. everybody’s going to wonder who’s in the black SUV parked on the roadside. That’s the way small towns are. That gives Ray Cruz, if he’s there, plenty of time to make a good E & E and they might never get him again.

3. Nothing a third time. The mysterious third man is Colonel Chambers’s son or an employee, his wife, his ho, whatever, and came in to join the conversation. It means nothing, and tomorrow they’d be hard on Bob again and maybe he’d strike pay dirt then. Maybe that would be the smart thing, though of course it went against Bogier’s nature, and as he considered that nature, he came upon-

4. Go in hard now. Blow the door, hit the steps, kick in the office, dynamic entry SWAT style. Could probably make it up there in twenty seconds. If it’s Ray, blow him away and the witnesses as well. If it’s not, kick the shit out of them, rip out the phones, steal some rifles and what cash is on hand, and then disappear and try and disguise it as a gun robbery. Or maybe kill them anyway, what did it matter? Well, it mattered in that it informed whomever that another team was on the field and that would cause a stir, raise questions, start investigations that couldn’t be controlled, lead to all kinds of unforseen questions. Agh.

And that led to another possible outcome of 4. That Swagger, the colonel, and the third man were just as much spec op superstars as Mick and his guys were, and in the twenty seconds after they blew the door and began the big rush, the targets got all gunned up and went to total war and instead of, like moron citizens, being behind the action curve were actually in front of it, and so Mick, Tony Z, and Crackers the Clown found themselves on the wrong end of a 5.56 shitstorm and bled out eight seconds after they hit the ground.

And then there was 5.

5. Hmm.

5. Oh yeah, number 5.

5. Oh, he liked it.

Mick toyed with it, savored it, tried to look at it from a batch of directions to find a flaw and found none.

“Phone,” he said.

“Mick, I see a tiny gleam of piglike intelligence in your eyes. Are you cooking with gas?” said Tony Z.

“Just listen to daddy, little amoeba, and learn something about how we adults go around blowing up shit and killing people, but not in a bad way.”

He punched the button. MacGyver was quick to answer.

“Well?”

“We have a situation,” said Mick, and laid out the scenario.

“But you are not sure it’s Cruz?” said MacGyver.

“No, sir. But who else could it be?”

“A tinker, a tailor, a candlestick maker. The man in the moon. Barack Obama, Michael Jordan, Ernest Borgnine, David Nix-”

“And suppose someone mysteriously kills David Nixon? Actually, I think you mean David Eisenhower. Suppose someone kills David Eisenhower? We took a risk, we didn’t get a payoff, but are we any worse off than if we let David Eisenhower live?”

“Yes,” said MacGyver. “Because you’ve informed the world that you exist.”

“But nothing would connect the bodies with Ray Cruz and an Afghan politico. The forensics here are still in the Stone Age. It would just be some local crazed trailer-camp murder spree. And down here all’s you got is Barney Fifes on the case and no evidence. We’re out clean.”

MacGyver’s silence told Mick he’d gotten the control’s attention. So he laid on the rest.

Unlimber the Barrett and rest it on the window ledge of the SUV, just like a Chicago gangster’s tommy gun in 1927. Full ten-round magazine of 750-grain warheads moving out at about 3,000 feet per second. Mick’s on the big gun, crouched next to him in the seat well is Crackers the Clown with his thermal imaging instrument, and Tony Z is driving. Pull around corner, take road to Steel Brigade Armory in its flimsy tinfoil building. Halt when distance to the building was shortest and the angles flattest, about thirty yards from the roadway. Crackers goes to thermal, which would be even stronger at the closer range, and gets a fix on the three living bodies behind the aluminum walls. He indexes Mick on the body locations using the window as the baseline, as in “two are clustered in same line about three feet to the right of the right line of the window, and one is two feet farther right.” Hell, maybe he’s able to throw a SureFire circle of light at the wall position.

Mick fires ten times in four seconds. He’s that good, he can be depressing the trigger even as the beast is setting down from its recoil impulse. The bullets shear through the metal, almost without deviation, and they whack the citizens so hard they are fluffy puffs, gossamer unravelings, oozy twists of pink mist before they know it.

The car pulls off into the night. And though the gunfire racket is terrific, it takes a good forty-five minutes before any serious cops can get there. Best part: the Barrett ejects its spent casings into the SUV, leaving no evidence at all.