Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

It was the same. The missile hit too hard and fast for even the highest res camera and the slowest slo-mo to catch it. What one saw was only the release of an energy bolt in the severe constraints of the black-and-white camera work, first a blinding smear of illumination, then unleashed, boiling coils of smoke lit from within, tumbling tumultuously, almost with anger and vengeance as their propulsion, while at the margins waves of dust whipped outward in supertime and anything unobscured by the blast wave rippled against the sudden pressure spike, people, furniture, junk of any sort, all of it airborne and deposited elsewhere in a second.

And the shooters. The same. Earnest techies, some civvie, some young Air Force officers, all polite and to the point, like a Boy Scout patrol dead set on a high merit-badge count. They were so decent you couldn’t really play them, somehow, so eager, having been clearly instructed by command to give it up to the feebs, all with bleached-white teeth. Maybe the civvies were a little more loosey-goosey, but not much, and in all their eyes Swagger read only commitment to duty, pride in warrior skills, the lack of self-consciousness of the best fighters (no intellectuals, no ironists, no wise guys among them). They were a one-way street.

The drive rolled onward, low energy and without seeming purpose except getting there and getting to bed. At a certain point, Bob checked the messages on his cell, then settled back into the silence that pretty much defined his relationship with Starling when they weren’t trying to nudge a young officer into explicating more precisely on the nature of this or that hit and the protocols that determined it. It had been exhausting, and only the work ethic of Spartans had gotten them through it despite jet lag and the need to return to DC and the actual mission at hand as soon as possible.

It wasn’t until the comical cityscape of the strip, that mile or so of fantasy money-trap architecture that comprised tourist Vegas, revealed itself that she spoke.

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“No, ma’am.”

“So I’m going to e-mail HQ a prelim. I’ll account for our time, enumerate our IVs, and report our conclusions, which would be, correct me if I’m wrong, zilch, zappo, zip, nada, rien , and, of course, nothing. Do you disagree?”

“No, ma’am,” said Bob. “Nothing we didn’t know before.”

“I’m going to ask to fly back tonight, tomorrow earliest. What day is it, again? All that time underground, you lose a sense of time.”

“It’s Sunday, it would be one-forty in the East.”

“Okay, give me a minute.”

She flipped her phone open one-handed, punched in a preset number, waited for the answer, and spoke quickly, listening more. Then she snapped it shut.

“He’s been to the Sunday talkers under that heavy security, no difficulties, no emergencies, so Cruz has gone to ground for the time being and I think we’re okay. I do want to be back before the next outing, that speech in Georgetown.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Anything to say? Any disagreement with my conclusion? For the record, I was impressed. You handled yourself very well and you slipstreamed nicely with my lead on the interrogations. Hard to believe you aren’t a trained agent.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Just trying to be helpful.”

More silence.

Then she said, “What did you mean?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You said, ‘Nothing we didn’t know before.’ But we didn’t know anything before. We still know nothing, or am I missing something?”

“Well, I would say we learned that a) there is a secret CIA program, and that b) we know what it does and how it’s structured and who mans it and what its task is, and c) that Dombrowski took the shot on the day in question, though it wasn’t a Hellfire, it was more likely one of the big boys, a Paveway Two.”

Starling was silent for a while, then she guided the car to the shoulder. Cars buzzed by loaded up with prospectors, hungry to reach the promised land just ahead and, as promised, lose all their money. The comical town with its pyramids and space towers and Renaissance castles set against a crusty rim of low mountains lay bleaching in the sun. It looked like an idiot child’s creation.

“All right, Swagger. What are you seeing that poor dumb Chandler isn’t? What does the cowpoke Svengali have up his sleeve?”

“Yes, ma’am. First, the milieu. Hey, ain’t that a fancy word? Can’t believe I used it. I must have read it in some book or something.”

“No attitude, please.”

“I’m just funning you, Agent Chandler.”

“Since you seem dead set on destroying my entire interpretation of the last sixteen hours, why don’t you call me Jean. Or, I suppose, ‘Starling,’ since everybody else does.”

“The milieu. If you looked carefully-”

“I suppose I didn’t.”

“You saw a lot of tape strips. Meaning there were a lot of banners taped up in that op center that they took down. It had been sanitized, you know, like a toilet in a motel with a paper ribbon around it. I’m betting the banners said things like ‘Kill Towelheads!’ and ‘Go Git ’Em, Tigers.’ All that fighter pilot macho kill-the-bastards stuff. See, that’s that colonel. He’s a fighter jock, he brings fighter jock mentality to the job, his thing is get in close and blow the bastards away. That’s the spirit of the room, not the hum of techies. All those kids, they was suppressing, they was holding it in. They’re young killers and they’re proud of it. And they compete. That’s why they have nicknames like New-D and Old-D and I bet the rest have ’em too, like Saxon Dog and Red Hawk and Bravo and Lion-heart. They don’t want us to see that but that’s how people who kill operate, because they have to stay close to their high so they’re together when the shit is in the air. I know. Three tours, ’Nam, one as a sniper.”

“I know you’ve done some killing.”

“Way too much.”

“So what does that tell us? That’s not-”

“No, but it sets up the climate of the place and it tells us it ain’t as ‘professional’ as it seems and in that kind of a joint, things are sloppier, wilder, crazier. The stars have latitude, the bossman wants his kids to perform, he doesn’t want to override them with ridiculous rules and bullshit, so he relaxes the regs. But he tightens it up for us and Jameson almost got with the program, but she couldn’t say no to her comfy flip-flops today and go with the short little heels the women officers wear with that duty uniform. She probably normally hunts in jeans and a T-shirt or a tank top, and she loves it and they love her for it, because right now she is at the top of her game. But what that tells me is: there’s room for something to slide by the Air Force monitors.”

“I’m listening.”

“Second thing: her battlefield manager, Captain Peoples. Remember him?”

“He was the dullest of the dull.”

“He did seem like an IRS agent, didn’t he? He is the key guy. He had to be in on it, and he probably reports directly to the Agency in certain circumstances. His console is so complex he could have all kinds of communications circuits the brass know nothing about.”

“That doesn’t prove-”

“I watched him extra hard. Remember when you asked him, ‘And there’s no other category of permissibility except Tango, Oscar, and Sierra?’ And he said, ‘No, ma’am, absolutely not’?”

“Sort of. I think I asked Colonel Nelson that.”

“You asked everyone that. But only Captain Peoples was interesting when he answered. You know why?”

“Obviously not.”

“Because unlike Colonel Nelson or any of the others, Captain Peoples leaned forward in his chair, fixed his eyes on yours, and did not blink. They all blinked, all through their chats, it’s human to blink. You don’t blink if you’re concentrating on controlling your eyes because you don’t want to give up the lying tell signs, the sideways or upper look to the script you’re trying to remember. He had been professionally coached on how to get through an interrogation, how to lie without no tells. They trained him too good and he overdid it.”