Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

Just as important, the three Washington sites were terra firma for security people, who knew every nook, cranny, crack, and fissure in the zone. It would be extremely hard to penetrate without an elaborate set of false documents that were almost certainly outside the reach of lone gunman Ray Cruz, who was a singleton, without elaborate intelligence professionals backing him up. The cordons in all three cases would be tight with choke points everywhere in a city that was used to and unfazed by choke points and presidential security.

That left Baltimore, and a neighborhood of aspiration called Mount Vernon, after the square that dominated it. The site centered on a civilian restaurant on a main thoroughfare, plenty of ingress and egress, hundreds of windows. Baltimore was terra incognito, open ground, untested, just as new to the Secret Service as it was to Ray Cruz. It so happened that Ibrahim Zarzi’s brother Asa owned an extremely successful restaurant much favored by the city’s many academics and medical personnel, where lamb kabobs, rice, red wine, and squares of unleavened bread were served; colorful knit garments hung on the walls; and the photos of wily, craggy Pashtun faces gave the place a touch of the Hindu Kush without the danger of an IED, which was for marine L/CPLs to face on MREs in unarmored Humvees. So if Cruz was going to take the fatal shot and send Zarzi to his next destination, it would have to be somewhere along Charles Street, two or three blocks each way from the restaurant, as the Great Man was hustled into or out of the building.

Bob walked the street with two Secret Service snipers, their supervisor, the Baltimore police SWAT commander, and Nick. The swelling blowing up the left side of his face had subsided and left a dappling of pinkish-red-yellowish bruise, and a jagged strip of bandage tracing the severing of his flesh on top of the cheekbone. Enough, already, with the “You should see the other guy” line of patter from the guys, though he took it in good spirit, and settled on the comeback, “That was no lady, she was two hundred pounds of steel desk.” Ha, ha, and ha. But all that ended with the initial discussions at the Baltimore FBI offices in a nondescript building just outside the beltway. Now, by caravan, they had reached the prime zone.

It was one of those new urban American paradises, a reborn street in a once crummy zone that had found life hoping to mimic the European model, with low old buildings of stone turrets or copper wainscoting, each with a shiny set of retail opportunities at street level, trees in full leaf, sidewalk cafes, restaurants in various ethnic flavors besides Afghan, including Mexican, Chinese, gay, Indian, sushi, and snarky boho. It was very la-di-da, maybe even a little tra-la-la; it looked a lot like Paris, if you’d never been to Paris. At one end, a block from the Zabol’s facade, was Mount Vernon itself, a cruciform city park with trees. Each of the arms of the cross shape extended a block and offered a meadow, a line of trees, walkways, and benches. At the center of the cross rose a 200-foot-tall marble pedestal, and on top of it a man, also of marble, stood and looked the other way.

“Who’s the general?” asked Bob, noting the marble figure’s tri-corn hat.

“Washington,” said the SWAT commander. “This was the first monument to him, 1820 or something. The joke is, he’s extending his arm, and from a certain angle, if you look up, he’s got the biggest dick in the world. Father of his country.”

All the security pros laughed.

“Great shooting spot,” said the Secret Service sniper, “but I’m guessing we’ll seal it up real tight on game day.”

“Nobody goes near it.”

“So the normal drill,” Bob said, “is control over street and vehicle traffic, countersnipers on rooftops, all windows sealed, airborne surveillance, all tied together on one channel?”

“That’s it, Gunny,” said the Secret Service supervisor. “Do you want to see the maps or read the mission plan?”

“No.”

“This guy is really good, huh?”

“He can shoot a bit.”

“What’s your take?”

“He’s got something you’ve never been up against and he’ll use it against you.”

“And that is?” asked the supervisor.

“He’s got a great standing offhand. Not many do. What that means is that unlike anyone you ever heard of, he don’t need a ‘lair,’ a ‘hide.’ He don’t need a long look at the target, a ranging laser, ballistics tables, wind gauges, and the time to compute all the dope, followed by quiet to gather, concentrate, and deliver, as every sniper everywhere in the world does. Even with a top-of-the-line iSniper911 he’d be slower than with his offhand. He don’t need a calm zone. Nope, not him. He don’t need to be at a bench or prone on bipod. He’s much more flexible and unpredictable. His main thing is concealing the weapon, and he might even go to a short barrel, I mean abnormally short-”

“What about a scoped handgun?” asked the Baltimore commander.

“I’m sure he’s damn good with a handgun,” said Bob, “but he spent last summer working hard on his standing. He can probably set himself, go to rifle, fire, slide the rifle back undercover, and make any shot out to two hundred yards, all in one second. Any one of these folks could be the shooter.” The streets were not crowded but were steadily negotiated by people of all ages, shapes, costumes, and inclinations, and it didn’t take too much imagination to see an old man, say 150 yards down Charles, as a guy able to whip out that short-barreled rifle, put the one shot into Zarzi as his guards hustled him out, full of lamb and wine, to the armored limo. It would be a near impossible shot for even the most trained sniper, but Ray’s extra abilities, his hard operational background, his intensity, made anything possible.

“Is he a suicide guy?” one of the Secret Service snipers asked.

“Nothing would indicate that,” said Bob. “He’s a sniper, marine style, trained to execute, yes, but to survive too. We don’t train our people to give it up for the kill. The point is to kill the other guy.”

“Yet what would he get out of survival? We know who he is and even if he makes the shot and all of us lose our jobs”-they laughed-“and he escapes, what has he got? A few days before he’s run down, then either the rest of his life in jail or some legendary last-stand gunfight that gets him in the history books, but also the ground. He might see that as a glory ride.”

“He’s not a glory boy. He ain’t looking to get his name in the papers, like some mall psycho,” said Bob. “He’s raised a good Catholic boy by good Catholic parents, on an American naval base in the Philippines, and to him suicide, like betrayal and murder, is a sin. He’s not no Moro, he ain’t high on hemp, he’s not no run-amok guy with a machete; everything he does is controlled, calm, graceful, quiet. He’s still following orders. You don’t notice him until it’s too late. The kill would be enough, and in his mind, he’s executing the perfect counterterrorism operation, he’s a hero preventing something else much worse from happening. He’d shoot, then surrender. Then he makes his case in court. He goes into everything he believes about his team being betrayed, he gets a high-profile attorney who’d lay subpoenas on the Agency and the National Security adviser’s office. He’s probably already made his notes and contacted his big-deal lawyer.”

“What all this suggests,” Nick said, “is that if he makes it to Charles Street, we’ve already lost. We have to find him before he deploys that day. We have to find him where he’s gone to ground.”

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