Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“How the fuck did they stay with him during the night?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Those fucking goats are slowing him down.”

“But if he doesn’t have the goats, then he attracts attention. He’s got to stay with the goats, and he knows it.”

“S-Two, get your Agency liaison on the horn and see if we can authorize a Hellfire into these guys.”

“I’ll try, sir, but they’re very close to the vest with the Hellfires these days.”

S-2 made the call; clearly it didn’t go well. At the frustration point, the colonel took over.

“This is Colonel Laidlaw. Who am I speaking to, please?”

“Sir, it’s McCoy.”

The colonel saw McCoy: thirty-five, redheaded, from Alabama, the ops chief’s right-hand boy, a former Delta commando.

“Look, McCoy, I’ve got a sniper way out on a limb and six bad boys moving in on him. You can see it on satellite feed yourself.”

“We’re watching it even now, Colonel. This is the Beheader mission, right?”

“That’s it. Look, I want to put a Hellfire blast-and-frag from a drone into those guys before they get much closer or before they separate too far for one strike. You’ve got a Reaper floating somewhere in the area?”

“Sir, I have to advise negative on the request. Sorry about your kid, but our directive is only to strike ID’d targets and then only with Langley clearance. I just can’t do it.”

The colonel gave the guy a few minutes of choice Marine Corps invective, but McCoy wouldn’t-couldn’t-budge and the ops chief was out in some hamlet or other reaching the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by teaching dental hygiene or constitutional democracy or something.

“Okay,” said the colonel to S-2, handing the phone back. “Keep trying. Go to 113 Wing at Ripley. Maybe we can send an Apache.”

“I’ll try, sir, but I don’t think an Apache can get there in time, and I don’t know that bringing a noisemaker like that into the area will sit well with command.”

“Goddamnit,” said the colonel and went back to watching as the pursuers closed in on the pursued.

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0619 HOURS

Ray was awakened that morning by a tongue. Too bad it belonged to a goat and not a beautiful woman.

He’d run hard through the arroyos in the dark, falling several times and remembering not to curse when he hit the ground. No moon made the trip an ordeal. But he had to keep moving and knew that if he didn’t, the leg would stiffen up on him and make the going even more torturous. He had to get as much out of himself as he could. But the arroyos weren’t a subway line; none of them led directly to Qalat, so he was always following one until it veered in an inappropriate direction, then scrambling up its rough walls mostly by hoisting himself upward with his staff, reaching the crest, slithering over the crest, and sliding down into another one that more or less seemed to be heading where he wanted to go. He knew he wasn’t making the best speed, but if he committed to the crests, his silhouette would be available to any hadji with stolen American night vision, or he might bump into a Taliban unit or opium smuggler or some Pashtun revengers, all of them richly festooned in AKs and RPGs. It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where you wanted to bump into folks.

Near dawn, he’d had it. He’d been running hard since the hit. His body could take more than most of the bodies in the world, but it had reached its limit. He found a relatively smooth area and nestled behind a rock; sleep overtook him quickly, a black blanket of dreamless escape.

The goat’s tongue smelled of shit, like everything in the ’Stan. Ray bolted up, felt the pain in his black-blue-green leg jack through him and squelched a cry. The fucking goats had found him. What goat-brain skill enabled them to stay with him in the dark? Sure, they could scamper over the landscape as if it were the surface of a billiard table, but was it smell, his lingering presence in the wind, that led them through the dark on a beeline to him? Another nuzzled up and licked his face and showed something like dumb-beast love in its moist and sentimental eyes. It bleated and shivered, shat of course, and then nuzzled him for affection again.

“You skaggy bastard,” he said, but still awarded the goat a neck rub in payment for his loyalty.

Breakfast: rice balls, dates, and some warm water from the goatskin water bag strapped to him. Fed and hydrated, he shot an azimuth with a much-abused Boy Scout brass compass originally manufactured in England in 1925, found a landmark for orientation, and began the trek anew.

It was the day after the ambush. The pain was constant, but consciousness inconsistent. It seemed he passed out several times while walking. The goats nestled against him or ran off on adventures and he enacted what goat discipline he could. Around him, the land was definitely not changing; it was still the endless sea of rough ridges, small hills, scrub vegetation, dust everywhere. He had to move faster because tomorrow would be Sunday and he had to make Qalat by nightfall so he could infiltrate on Monday, recon, and set up the shot for Tuesday afternoon; it was Tuesday afternoon or nothing, because he couldn’t last a week in the city-surely sooner or later someone would notice that he spoke no Pashto or Dari or any of a thousand other tells that would give him away. In fast, out fast-or no game at all.

He reached a crest, scurried over it, the goats bleating and yapping all around him, taking shit breaks or lunch breaks on the waxy vegetation. He got over the ridge, then slipped, put stress on the leg, felt a specific pain rise out of the general pain and hit him hard, almost enough to bring him down.

Water? No. He wouldn’t have enough for tomorrow if he started sipping every time he felt like it. But the leg hurt so goddamned bad.

Okay, he told himself, take a little rest. You’ve got another two hours of daylight, you can punch through the night with greatly reduced efficiency, you can grab a couple of hours of snooze time until a goat alarm clock sings “I’ve Got You, Babe” in your ear.

He awarded himself a little break.

He hunkered down, keeping his leg straight, squirmed until he’d found something near comfort as it might be defined in combat in Afghanistan, and set about paying off his oxygen debt. In a few minutes, he felt somewhat refreshed, no Semper Fi! or Gung Ho! bullshit, but some slight blurring of the generalized fatigue.

Time to go.

He thought also that it would be a good idea to take a fast recon of the area, just in case. He shimmied up to the crest of the ridge and in the low prone peered across the landscape he had just traversed. It looked a lot like the landscape he was just about to traverse. He saw the serrations of a hundred bayonets lined up, so the world was nothing but serrations-jagged rises and falls, edge beyond edge of them, endless, in that colorless color of the Afghan high desert, dun, dust, pale pink, mocha brown, whatever, even the plants were brown. High clouds piled up above, cumulus thunder bringers, the only clean, bright thing in the world, marble or alabaster. To the east, the mountains of Pakistan, much higher. He knew if he turned, he’d see the shadows of the Hindu Kush one hundred miles away. You could see the biggest mountains in the world from a long way out.

He was almost ready to pack it in when he saw them.

Oh fuck, he thought.

He slipped back, diddled with his caftan, performed the complicated negotiations necessary to free up the SVD strapped to his back, and came back to the ridgeline.

It took a while to relocate. The original indicator had been a jiggle of movement on a crest line way off, where movement shouldn’t have been. Sliding the rifle to his shoulder, popping the lens caps, he settled into a steady prone as he cantilevered over the hump of the crest line, poking the rifle barrel through some vegetation for clearer vision. He found his spotweld, which yielded his perfect eye relief, and his fingers flew to the focus ring of the crude Chinese tube. He checked to make sure the sun had no angle to bounce off his lens in give-away reflection, played with the focus, twisting this way and that, wishing he had Marine Corps-issue 10× magnification instead of ChiCom 4×, cursed the elaborate reticle with its goofy ranging system that blocked out too many details, and reoriented on the suspect area, letting the substandard lens of the Chinese optics resolve into finite detail all that could be resolved.