Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“No, sir,” said Bob, “not since I shot Dillinger.”

Everybody laughed, letting a little tension out.

“All right. Here’s what I’ve set up for you. In the next room, you’ll find our complete documentation of air activities for that eight-hour duty shift. You’ll find a TV monitor and all our fire missions from that shift on tape, and you can look at them. We took sixteen shots that time, at all levels of permissibility. You’ll learn what a ‘level of permissibility’ is shortly. I have my battle manager from that shift on hand, and he can go over each mission separately with you if you need to do so. I also have seven pilots, that is, seven operators who fly, and I mean literally fly, the drones from our op center here at Creech. They’re the real heroes, and I’d hate to get any of them in trouble. They took the sixteen shots among them. I have one missing, First Lieutenant Wanda Dombrowski, whose term of service expired last month and who opted to end her commitment to the Air Force. She was great and I’m sorry to see her go. Anyhow, I have her next address and phone number, and if you feel it necessary to contact her, then you’re of course free to do so.”

“All right,” said Starling. “Then let’s get to work.”

“But first, just so you understand the situation we deal with in our duties, I want to walk you through our op center. I want to take you into the heart of combat, even if you’re in an underground room in a Nevada desert. Either of you have any combat experience?”

“He’s been in a gunfight or two,” Starling said.

“He looks like it. Well, Agents Chandler and Swagger, you’re about to see how the wars of the future will be fought. You won’t have to do as much ducking, Swagger.”

Third floor “operations”

Afghan Desk bay

Langley, Virginia

1555 hours

So is it true,” asked Jared Dixson, Afghan Desk number two, handsome dog without conscience or tremor, eye-power seducer, and all around not-so-great guy, “that you were in a sword fight?”

“I was, yes,” said Susan. “I held a guy off, until someone stronger stepped in and cut the head off the guy who was about to take mine.”

“Wow. So what does it look like when a guy gets his head cut off?”

“It’s very moist.”

“They should call you ‘the Beheader,’ not Zarzi.”

“Well, if the Times is right, he’s no more a beheader than I am.”

Dixson laughed. “Well, between you and me and the woodwork, the best three words to describe Ibrahim Zarzi are ‘guilty,’ ‘guilty,’ and of course, ‘guilty.’ We call him ‘Dishonest Ib,’ but only when we’re drunk. The Times bought that phony Paki intel report hook, line, and sinker. We had great fun drawing it up. It’s Afghan Desk’s most profound moment of theater, up until the bastard gets the Freedom Award from the president next Saturday night.”

“He’s an asshole?”

“You have no idea. A watch queen with the sexual appetites of a Warren Beatty. He’d seduce the meter maid if you let him. But he’s our watch queen and that’s the point. So we’ll get him all the meter maids we can and let him cut off the odd journalist’s head if it gets us some sort of stability in Crazyland.”

Dixson was assistant to Jackson Collins, who was, in the argot of the joint, the actual Afghan Desk himself, though no one ever called him “Mr. Desk.” They called him “MacGyver,” as he was an ex-SEAL, and had actually blown up a lot of stuff in the way-back when he was operational yet had a kind of too-serious-for-the-ironists quality that rendered him faintly ridiculous and thus earned him the nickname of a fatuous TV jerk from the eighties. Even his serious creds couldn’t make the joke go away: he was an Annapolis grad, Hopkins Institute of Foreign Studies star, former Brookings Fellow, and epic drinker, and under this Administration had become the senior executive in charge of running the Agency’s missions in Afghanistan in coordination with policy goals set by the Administration through the National Security advisor’s office, if not the president himself.

“So,” she said, “are you getting along with Jack ‘MacGyver’ Collins any better now?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Dixson. “He used to call me ‘Pussyboy.’ Now I’ve been promoted to ‘Dr. Vulva.’”

“Wow, that’s progress. I had a guy like that in Tokyo. Office was like a destroyer bridge. We called it ‘the fo’c’sle.’ He was as dumb as a screwdriver. No moving parts whatsoever.”

“These Annapolis guys, what’s with them? They think if you don’t know which one is port and which one is starboard, you’re worthless. By the way, which one is port?”

She laughed. The guy was funny, just the tiniest bit upper-class swishy with a face that was too lively with emotional information. Reputedly brilliant, clearly resentful, Jared had run hard into the Agency’s ancient military cerebellum. But then she said, “Look, you know why I dropped by.”

“Of course. You’re using your appointment to the FBI liaison committee as an excuse to come visit your long-time crush object Jared Dixson. I’m glad that you’ve finally made peace with your abiding love and intense sexual longing for me. It was so wrong of you to play hard to get for all those years. Think of the motel time we could have logged.”

“Gee, another married guy who wants the cookies but doesn’t want to pay for the bowl to mix them in. Oh, that’s right, you’ll be married to-what’s her name, Buffy? Jennifer? Gigi?-forever because she’s got all the money. You can’t divorce.”

“Why, what would one do without three houses, six cars, a stable, a really big sailboat, and a very fine collection of vintage wines? Her name happens to be Bunny. No, Fluffy, no, no, now it’s coming back, Mimsy .”

“You’re such a bastard. Anyhow, I want to go through our missile and munition records for that day when the hotel blew up. One more time. Maybe I missed something.”

“I doubt you ever missed anything in your life.”

“Well, the near-kill in Baltimore has got people asking about Cruz’s motives again. I just have to make sure that base is covered, that we are in the clear. It would prove so embarrassing if Afghan Desk were taking shots at our own people to save the Watch Queen’s ass.”

“You know, that stuff’s way classified. I know you’re cleared most of the way, but how about all of the way?”

“I’m cute, it’s allowed.”

“Okay,” he said. “MacGyver’s a big-foot asshole, but he’s not that big an asshole, I guarantee you. I will get you everything,” he said, “except of course Pentameter. You understand, Pentameter can’t be compromised.”

“Sure,” she said, thinking, What the hell is Pentameter ?

OPERATIONS CENTER

INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

1600 HOURS

Here was war. In glowing screens that sent gray-blue shafts up to the ceiling of a smokeless bunker in a room that could have been full of insurance adjusters, or newsletter writers, or catalog telephone operators, the young people of the 143rd Expeditionary Wing (UAV) hunted and killed and blew shit up extremely well.

“You’ve been briefed on MQ-9 Reaper?” asked the colonel as he led them through the large, hushed room, ultra-air-conditioned, almost like a religious space occupied by intensely filled confessionals.

“More or less,” said Starling.

“Let me recap. It’s our primary hunter-killer system. It’s the Mitchell bomber of the war on terror, the do-anything, go-anywhere airborne sniper. It can hang in the air low or high for fifteen hours at a time and the kids who run it develop an almost mystical feel for its handling capabilities. They meld with it somehow, as an old fighter jock like me might say. It has superb optics and target-guidance systems. It has weapons hard points for up to twelve missiles and two guided munitions, as smart bombs are called. It’s a big thing too; you think ‘drones’ you think little buzzy kites with motors. Uh-uh. It’s the size of a Warthog, with a 950-shaft horsepower turbocharged engine. It’s nothing but wings and streamline and gizmos, and one of the reasons people assume it’s small is because it has no features, not really, to give it a sense of scale; no personality, no eccentricities, no pizzazz. It’s just white streamlined death. We think of it as ‘deadly persistence’ in the way it hangs around while it hunts. It’s got all the bells and whistles, including a Raytheon AN/AAS-52 multi-spectral targeting sensor suite which includes color and monochrome daylight TV, infrared, and image-intensified TV with laser range finder and target designator. You could broadcast a talk show from it.”