Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

BETWEEN VEGAS AND INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

1330 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

Which was stonier, the desert landscape or Agent Chandler’s remote personality? The desert was desolate, rocky, filled with crusted hills, ugly spiny things that appeared to be vegetable in origin, lit by a merciless sun and drifting off to a horizon that was a forever away. She was extremely attractive, eyes beaming with intelligence, but face held in disciplined dullness and disinterest. She drove. She was the special agent. He was a consultant with the rank of brevet investigator. She called the shots. She commanded, in silence and concentration on the road. He sat there, in his off-the-rack suit, hoping for something a little more cooperative, but finding it not forthcoming. He knew she was a Nick mentee, one of the talented young ones Nick liked to work under him, that she was married to a CIA guy, that she had a reputation for “creativity,” whatever that was, and that she’d been a big player and winner in the Tom Constable dust-up of a few years back. He knew her nickname was “Starling” because she reminded people of a movie star who’d played a memorable FBI agent.

They’d eaten lunch separately and were headed out for a two o’clock with Colonel Christopher Nelson, USAF, CO of the 143rd Expeditionary Air Wing (UAV), which is to say the Air Force CIA headhunter outfit at a desert air base called Creech, whose ugly name foretold the ugliness of the installation.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Talk to me. I’m open for business.”

“Ma’am, I follow your lead. You just tell me what you want to know and I’ll answer straight up.”

“I know you’re a gunfighter, an action guy. I know you dusted some very bad people in your time. I like that, I get that. But this is different. It’s interrogation. It demands suppleness, intellectual agility, concentration, patience, a deeply fraudulent charm. Can someone as direct as you work at indirection?”

“Don’t know about indirection, but I do know about fraud. Ma’am, I am a completely fraudulent individual. Too many people think I’m a hero when I’m a total coward. All the brave men died in the war, only us lucky yellow rats made it out alive.”

“Utter bullshit from a man who took down a pro hitter with a subgun at close range, time of engagement three seconds.”

“More like four. He wasn’t as pro as he thought.”

“I guess not. Okay, I will take the lead. We agree on cover up- front. You are looking for signs of weakness, for twitches that indicate untruthfulness, for signs of prevarication and mendacity. Do you know what they are?”

“Eyes mainly. He’ll look up or away if he’s lying, because he’s reading a script in his head. He’ll swallow a bit hard if he’s lying. His lips will dry. He’s foursquare military, he ain’t used to lying because their system is about no bullshit. If he’s got this big command, he must be an up-and-coming guy in the new robot Air Force. He’ll be nervous because the last thing he wants is to screw up his career chances. He’ll pause before answering. He knows the best lie is only a few degrees from the truth.”

“You cannot do anything extralegal. You cannot peek, disappear, misrepresent. All the time you have to be thinking and noticing. Are you capable of that?”

“I’ll sure try,” he said.

“Cool,” she said. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”

“I do look dumb, don’t I?”

“My dad was head of the state police in Arizona. You look like any oldish, unpromotable trooper sergeant, tough as hell, good man in a gunfight, steady, and hopelessly obsolete. My poor dad had to get rid of a bunch of those guys, though he loved them all.”

“Never said I wasn’t no dinosaur,” said Bob. “And I thank you for indulging me against your better instincts.”

They reached Indian Springs, not that they really noticed. It was a trailer park, a convenience store/gas station, and a one-room casino in a glade of barely green scrub trees. The town abutted the base, which looked more like a prison complex than an airfield. A motley collection of brown corrugated-metal buildings, it spread across a desert basin, the same color of dry heat as everything else the sun bleached. It lay behind a barbwire fence and the two security gates were like Cold War border crossings. It was large and flat, disappearing over a ridge at least a mile or so out. In the far distance, on one of the short runways, some kind of white aircraft could be seen, something of a cross between a Piper Cub and a kite, and Bob realized that it was either the Predator itself or its killer progeny, the Reaper, which patrolled the skies of Afghanistan, looking for something to kill.

COLONEL NELSON’S OFFICE

HQ 143RD AIR EXPEDITIONARY WING (UAV)

INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

1430 HOURS

I’ve directed my people to cooperate fully,” said the colonel, a solid linebacker guy with one of those square jaws and short, all-biz haircuts the upper-field grades favored. “And I will open any documents or records you require. I just have to tell you up front that a) we are very busy here fighting a war, and b) this matter was previously investigated by an Agency officer and she found no traces of anything handled incorrectly. But you say it’s a criminal matter, not a national security matter.”

The three, plus the Wing Executive Officer and a secretary, were sitting in the commanding officer’s office, a well-lit room decorated with pictures of himself in various stages of his career, standing proudly before beautiful pieces of stainless steel sculpture that also happened to be supersonic jet fighters, all F-somethings, sleek and dangerous looking, like machined raptors hungry for a kill. In a few, as armored as a medieval knight, he sat in a cockpit under a raised plastic bubble with a winner’s wide grin while holding up a thumb as if to say “Mission accomplished” or even “Bogie downed.”

“No, sir,” said Chandler, “we are not alleging criminal misconduct. We only say that it’s a possible criminal matter and that as a neutral agency, we have been asked to look at the data points again. You know the basics. On a certain date seven months ago, a hotel in Afghanistan was obliterated, possibly, but not certainly, by a missile. We have no forensics on the case because it was in tribal territory at the time, meaning an area full of bad guys. Subsequently, the site has been razed. There was a cursory investigation by Dutch security forces repping the UN, mainly photos. It tells us almost nothing except that something made a big hole in the earth. The reason we are here is that of the thirty-one Afghani nationals killed, one was an informant for the DEA. His loss set back one of their infiltration programs a great deal and that is a heavy poppy-growth area, and it ships product that shows up on the streets of, well, Indian Springs, for one, and Vegas, where I’m sure most of your staff and pilots live, for another. DEA says that other informants in the area claim the hotel was detonated by a missile. These reports are persistent, and it’s only a matter of time before they show up in an American newspaper. It would be a black eye if someone accidentally whacked a civilian structure, though of course it happens, and it would be an even bigger black eye if a DEA informant was among the killed, and the worst thing of all-I make no accusations here, but simply state fact-if it turned out a cover-up tried to obscure some second lieutenant’s honest mistake in the heat of battle. We have to be ahead on this one, not behind it, sir. And that is why we are here.”

“Fine. By the way, does the guy who looks like Clint Eastwood ever talk?”