Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

Nothing.

I know I saw something.

He decided to give it a few seconds. I would have seen them on a crest. Now they’re behind the crest. They’ll be on top of another crest and-

He watched them come over, emerging headfirst, then disappearing as they scattered down the slope of the rill they’d just crossed. Khaki clad, bloused boots, burnooses obscuring their features, bearded men with necks wrapped in shemaghs in the green-black pattern so beloved by many. Bandoliers loaded with mags crisscrossed on their chests. Wait, one guy wore a baseball cap, khaki or sage, and he was the one with the heavy.50 Barrett, that monster rifle just at the limits of luggability, a twenty-five-pound ordeal as awkward as an iron cash register, and good for one thing only, nailing Johnny Pashtun at a long way out. The others were AK-ed up, standard for this part of the world, and one had a couple of RPGs over his back.

It was the guy in the ball cap who gave it away, even to the 4× of the Chinese scope. Yes, he was bearded, yes, he was nut brown from the cruel Afghan sun, yes, he moved with the wiry, wary grace of the Pathan warrior who’d haunted these climes for a thousand years, mixing it up with Alexander’s spear chuckers, assorted Hindu invaders, and then troops from a Victoria, a Mikhail, a George W., and now a Barack. Yes to all that, and yes to one other thing as well: he was white.

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

2035 HOURS

We don’t have much light left, Mick,” said Tony Z.

“Hey, I don’t want to hear that. What I want to hear is, Mick, let’s push harder, goddamnit.”

“Mick, let’s push harder, goddamnit,” said Crackers the Clown.

“Not funny, Crackers.”

The team saw just hills, hills, hills before them in the fading light. At last report the guy was less than half a mile away, and they were closing. But the shot at a daylight takedown, much hoped for, was rapidly disappearing. Mick didn’t want to do a night thing. Guys shooting, flashes, bad vision, only one set of night vision goggles between them, no long shots, no, you couldn’t tell what might go wrong and very little ever went right at night.

On the other hand, if the guy saw them, he might set up and start picking them off from far out with his long gun. Then, assuming he wasn’t the first to go, Mick might have a chance at taking him down with the motherfuckingseventonsofagonybullshit.50 Barrett he carried with him. You could do a guy at a mile with the thing, and Mick had done enough of it to know.

Which set him off again: Aghh! He had the sniper team cold-bore dead zeroed and yet he missed, maybe a little puff of breeze edged the first 750-grainer that way or this and only blew goats into the air; the second freight train missed too, goddamnit, and then he found the stroke and blew one guy thirty feet in the air, cranked to the other as he was disappearing and blew him aloft like a Frisbee sailing across a college lawn. Then he worked the beaten zone with the rest of the mag, blowing more goats to barbecue heaven and hitting the one visible body a second time so hard it landed in two pieces.

Then, when they got to the kill zone an hour later, after a slow, tactical approach, no fucking second body.

“You see blood?”

“A few spots down here, Mick. But clearly, not a big, huge gut wound; he won’t be bleeding out.”

“I saw him go bye-bye from midair,” said Tony.

“Even a glancer from a motherfucker like this will send a guy off like a V-2. I hit a guy in Bagra once at just the right angle and it actually blew him out of the windshield of his car and about thirty feet down the road. Man, that was one surprised dude.” It was a nice warm memory and Mick cherished it.

Thus the conclusion: one of the marines had gotten away.

“It’s time to cut to the chase,” said Crackers.

“Wait a minute,” said Tony Z. “See, we’re already on the chase. This is the chase. So how can you cut to the chase from the chase?”

“Fuck you,” said Crackers.

“Knock it off,” Mick said. “We got a pursuit on our hands. Guy has to have been hit, he can’t move fast. He’ll probably lay up in a cave. We have to track him and take him out.”

“Mick, I didn’t sign up for an adventure movie. I’m just here for the hit and the grins.” That was crazy Crackers, like Mick, once a soldier, and young.

“We are getting top dollar to deliver two heads. We will deliver two heads. Crackers, with your forces background, you’re the jock, why don’t you run the man down for us.”

“I left my track shoes at the motel,” said Crackers.

Now, nearly a day later, at nightfall, they knew they had to be close.

But Tony Z said, “I’m thinking we ought to deviate, go around him, and let him come to us. He’s been pushing hard and I saw him fly, so I know he’s hurting beaucoup from a glancer. He’ll have to hunker down. He’s only a marine. He ain’t Superman.”

Mick wasn’t ready to commit.

“Let’s think about this a little while. I want this thing done up right.”

One of the hadjis-he had three, Taliban boys whom on other days Mick might have blown away without a thought, but his passport to safety in the tribal areas depended on this one-spoke his gibberish and Tony Z, who understood it, told Mick, “Mahoud says there’s a path low around this set of hills, mostly flatland. We could probably get ahead of him that way.”

So tempting. No more chase shit. No more waiting for Marine Hero to get the first shot off and go for him, he-man with Barrett. Mick was a soldier, as he’d been a football hero, because he was so big. He’d known from childhood that he had the strength to make people obey, and he didn’t mind, rather enjoyed it, ultimately becoming addicted to hitting people to get their attention. Alas, it was a hard habit to break, which is why each of the various colorful entities that had paid him to do violence on their behalf had grown tired of his disciplinary problems, his thief’s axiomatic greed, and the way he subverted every team he ever joined to his own ends. He was finally even cashiered out of Graywolf for shooting a surrendering hadji on CNN, a bad career move if ever there was one; now he had another client, less picky about certain moral distinctions.

He checked his big gizmo Suunto watch, that Finnish bubble of high tech that could almost predict the future it was so complex, and saw he had just a few minutes until he could get a position fix.

“We’ll wait here till I call MacGyver. We’ll see where he is.”

The dark advanced shadows across the raw land, and a little night breeze kicked up dust or sand. One of the hadjis began to chew some suspicious weed or other, maybe for night vision, maybe for martyr’s frenzy. Tony Z hung next to Mick, crouching, lovingly fingering his AK. Tony was a gun guy; he had a Wilson custom.45 in a shoulder holster and a Ruger.380 plastic pocket pistol with a laser sight floating around in his cargo pants pocket.

Mick, happy to be shed of the weight of the Barrett for a few minutes, slipped off his backpack, unlashed its flap, and withdrew a chunk of silicon technology called a Thuraya SG-2520 encrypted satellite phone. It was what held this whole mad little trip together. It looked like any other cell of the usual dimensions, 5.5 by 2.1 by 0.8 inches, but its distinguishing feature was a kind of plastic tube on top, which, when pulled, yielded a good five inches of stout antenna that enabled it to use the Thuraya constellation of forty-eight low earth-orbiting satellites if the GSM satellite coverage was not available. Other than that, it had the usual phone shit, a screen, a keyboard, all in gray Jet-sons plastic. It was preconfigured to one number. He pushed call.