Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

So when they hit Roanoke, it was nappy-nap time. A Holiday Inn just off the interstate would do fine. He hit the sack, and drifted into thick, dreamless sleep. Now, he was awake, hardly feeling perky. Agh.

After a while, he got up groggily, took a shower. The Suunto showed him it was close to six. What to do, what to do? When would that bastard call? Was it over? Had they-

The satellite didn’t ring, it buzzed. He picked it up, and hit the button.

“So?”

“So you didn’t get him.”

“Shit,” said Bogier, feeling disappointment bite deep and hard. He knew what would come next. Asshole MacGyver would ream him hard and he’d have to sit there and take it like a schmuck.

“He was there all right. You got that part right. His prints were all over the place.”

“Christ,” said Bogier.

“That’s the bad news. The good news: you also didn’t get Swagger. You conked him hard on the head, and he’s out like a light in some hick hospital, but expected to recover. You did, however, blow a hole the size of a football through Colonel Norman Chambers, USMC, retired. Congratulations: you managed to kill the one man in the room who had nothing to do with this shit.”

“Fuck him if he can’t take a joke,” said Bogier. “Collateral damage.”

“Yeah, well, be careful you don’t ‘collateral damage’ your way into the gas chamber, sparky.”

“It’s war. It happens. Nothing personal. You go for an objective and a shell lands in downtown Shitbrick City, population, people seventy-five, chickens two hundred forty. Sorry little brown people, but important personages put our nation’s values over Shitbrick City.”

“I forgot. You’re a patriot.”

“You forgot. You okayed the hit. You’re pretending like I went rogue.”

“Bogier, your job isn’t to outsmart me in debate. Remember, you never got higher than master sergeant. I’m the guy in the officer’s tuxedo eating pheasant at the post club. If I want, I can arrange a nice duty detail for you-stables to be mucked out, garbage cans to be scrubbed, grout on latrine floors to be scraped out with toothbrushes. Your job is to outsmart Cruz, another sergeant. You’re both mud crawlers, sentry knifers, bridge blowers, laser painters, macho action jocks, so you ought to be up to that, or at least I’m betting you think you are. So let’s concentrate on what’s what.”

In Bogier’s mind: an image of this ponce, with a goatee and a cigarette holder, wire-frame glasses, an ascot, as he crushed his head in his bare hands, spurting gray matter out of the ears and nose before the eyes popped like Ping-Pong balls from a toy gun.

“Good idea,” said Mick, grinding his teeth.

“Okay, what we have to worry about now is whether they shit-can Swagger.”

“Why would they?”

“Duh, went in without backup or informing HQ. If he were a special agent, his ass would be grass. Maybe they let him slide but keep him on a tight leash because he’s fundamentally an amateur who happens to know a lot about the bang bang.”

“Don’t forget, that ‘amateur’ found Cruz in twelve hours his first day on the case while everyone else was jerking off.”

“He’s a smart guy, no lie. That’s why we have to hope they keep him aboard. Assuming he hasn’t found the magic credit card in his back pocket. So let’s assume next they still want to use his brain in scoping out the sniper. So they move him to DC, does that make sense?”

“We’re on our way.”

“My guess is, you’ll pick up that RFID response at the FBI building on Pennsylvania. You stay on it. He’ll figure out where Cruz is sooner or later. Maybe you can get a hit on Cruz that saves Zarzi’s life and be a big hero. Mick Bogier, the new Bob Lee Swagger. Then you and your new best friend Bobby Lee can go on dry-drunk rages together.”

MacGyver insulted Mick for another few minutes and then let him go. Mick checked the Suunto and headed toward the bar to drive out the image of MacGyver roasting in flames to the laughter of all the fellows in the grog-and-wench shop called Sergeants’ Valhalla. Tonight would be a big night for getting drunk. Tomorrow: Washington, D fucking C.

BRIGHTON COUNTY GENERAL HOSPITAL

HOPKINS, SOUTH CAROLINA

1642 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

The first time he awoke was when some doctor was pulling up his eyelids and shining a flashlight into his eyeballs. That hurt. The second time, someone had given him a shot. That hurt. The third time it was Nick Memphis, poking him. That really hurt.

His eyes came open. It felt as though a camel had been licking his face for a month. His limbs were dead, his fingers dead, his legs and feet dead. Consciousness was a thick sludge, and he fought his way through it, struggling for focus and breath.

“Oh, shit,” he said, his voice evidently not dead.

“He’s coming out of it,” Nick said, and the next person who leaned in was Susan Okada, beautiful and untouchable-why had she come back, damnit?-and looking at him as, say, the shogun’s executioner might look at someone whose neck he would in the next second split.

“Hello,” she said uncheerily, “anybody home?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied and found that his body did move, he wasn’t quadded out. He had a headache that only a dozen Jacks in an hour would justify, and the right half of his face was swaddled in bandages, the eye occluded by pouches of something-his swelling, he guessed-pressing against it from all sides.

“Water, please,” he said.

She poured it for him from a bottle.

“Our hero returns from vacation,” she said.

“How do you feel?” Nick said.

“Like shit.”

“Funny, that’s what you look like,” said Susan.

“Oh, Christ, what happened?”

“You were smashed in the head by a flying desk. You have a concussion. Your cheekbone for some reason refused to break, but it took thirty-one stitches to close up the slice beneath your eye. The swelling will go down in November. You look like an abused grapefruit.”

“Agh,” he coughed. “And what about, um, that colonel, and Cruz.”

“The colonel’s dead, Cruz is gone. Total catastrophe.”

Bob swallowed the water. Goddamn, his head hurt. The news about the colonel hit him hard. The guy was just-

But what was the point?

“Tell me what happened.”

“Sure. Then you tell us what happened.”

Nick explained: ten.50-caliber slugs through the wall of Steel Brigade Armory, a fluke of ballistics that the first one hit and spun the desk through midair instead of blasting Bob into particles, another one zeroing in on Colonel Chambers-“You don’t want to see the crime scene pictures”-and the others generally ripping the hell out of the place. Cruz’s prints were all over, but the lack of blood samples suggested he’d gotten to the floor in time to just miss getting jellified, then slipped out the back after the shooters pulled away. There were no forensics on the shooters except a partial tire track near the edge of the road that pointed the way to sixteen million Goodyear Wrangler P245 tires.

“Oh, hell,” said Bob.

“Now, your turn. Excuse me for asking the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, but what the hell were you doing in a conversation with the object of a federal manhunt and why oh why oh why didn’t you call for backup, for guidance, for anything?”

“Oh, that,” said Bob, and he searched feebly for a joke, almost saying, “Backup is for pussies.” But he didn’t. Nobody seemed much interested in his sense of humor.

He told it as simply as he could. He explained it, then justified it.

“I just went out there to get the lay of the land. I knew I’d be back the next day, I didn’t want to go in cold. A recon, that’s all. When I seen, excuse me, saw the light on, I figured, what the hell? I thought it was going to be another old geezer who probably knew who I was and I could get more out of him on my own, man to man, than if I was part of a goddamned invasion force. I didn’t know Cruz was there. I had no idea someone was going to start blasting with a fifty. I didn’t plan on taking a ten-thousand-caliber desk in the head.”