Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

This was the worst hell of war, Swagger thought. He’d shot and been shot at, killed with blade, slithered in fear, ridden himself to exhaustion, seen boys following on his orders blown to pieces, been hit hard a half dozen times, felt the fear when the blood pooled out in lakes, ceaselessly, felt panic, begged God for life, clenched tight as incoming blasts searched him out, seen human wave attacks, done it all. But nothing was worse than sending a son off to die. He started, very quietly, to cry.

HERE-4-FOOD

2955 WISCONSIN AVENUE

LOWER GEORGETOWN

WASHINGTON, DC

2048 HOURS

Cruz could see nothing at first. For some reason, a light fog lay across the cooler. All he saw was shoulder-high shelves and a glittery display of world beers. But he heard the breathing, followed it to its point of origin. Peering around a last shelf, he saw Bogier and the woman in a twisty heap against the back wall.

The woman’s face had gone to stupor. She had given up and seemed barely conscious. Bogier had her in a tight wrap, his legs clamped around her pelvis. The SIG, cocked, was an inch from her ear. Bogier leaned out from behind her head, and Cruz saw him for the first time: an astonishingly handsome man, with a somewhat grown-out thatch of blond hair, rugged, wide-boned face, thin cheeks under the bed-knob bones, and fierce or crazed warrior eyes.

“Bogier, let her go, goddamnit. She’s-”

“Shut up, junior, this is my dance, I paid the band.”

Ray froze, felt Bogier’s eyes on him.

“For so much trouble, you’re a scrawny rat. Goddamn you, if I’d have been a microsecond faster three separate times, you’d be among the permanently dead. You must have fucking reflexes like a cat. Think you can dodge this, sucker?”

The SIG came off the woman’s ear channel and floated onto Ray, dead zero for his center chest. Bogier’s finger teased the trigger.

“This isn’t war,” said Cruz. “This is execution. Some soldier you-”

“Shut up, motherfucker. I lost two very fine men trying to whack your ass. You know how hard it is to find men that good?”

“I knew one once. Billy Skelton, lance corporal, USMC. Some fucker blew him in two.”

“It wasn’t his day. You know what I fucking hate about you? I can feel it even now, at the very end. It’s your fucking moral certitude. You sit there, knowing I’m going to blow your heart out in three seconds, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you still think you’re so holy because you worship some bitch named Duty, and you don’t get it that she’s a whore and will fuck you up the ass any time she has a chance. Oh, yeah, you have a code. Duty, honor, country. Semper Fi, all that good bullshit, true believer, patriotism, Fourth of July, apple pie, all that war movie crap from the forties. Oh, you’ve got a code, Sergeant Cruz, that makes you morally superior.”

There was nothing for Cruz to say to this mad barrage.

“Look at me! Look at me,” Bogier screamed, and Cruz brought his eyes into total connection with the man.

“Guess what, junior. It’s easy to die for something you believe in. I’ve seen it ten thousand times and it ain’t that fascinating. You know what’s hard? Here’s hard: dying for a code you don’t believe in. That’s what the samurai knew. They died for the master they knew was corrupt, cowardly, venal, and pitiful. They died anyway. That was their code, and I’d say it was a hell of a lot tougher than that show tune you call patriotism.”

Bogier’s eyes bored into him.

“Here’s our code, asshole. These in the day when heaven was falling, when earth’s foundations fled, followed their mercenary calling, took their wages and are dead.”

He smiled, raised the SIG to his own skull, and happily blew his brains out.

NORTHERN VIRGINIA

2219 HOURS

At first, after the turn off the brown lights of the band of highway called a “beltway,” they saw nothingness. Trees on both sides of the roadway, steep embankments, the hazy sense of lights, homes, civilization behind the screening, the traffic too fast, still too heavy, Bilal driving especially carefully, so tense he could hardly stand it now, so close, so soon.

But then the trees broke in the dark, the river was clear off to the left, and beyond it, lit like some kind of theatrical production, lay the city itself.

“It’s no Paris,” said Khalid. “The first time I saw Paris, oh, that was a sight. But it’s nice. So white.”

The city loomed across the river and two sources of reflection helped it shimmer, the river beneath, the low clouds above.

“Pah,” said Faisal. “It is a city. It is not magical. Know its name or not, it’s just another urban sprawl with a few monuments, more beautiful by night in its gown of lights than by day, which reveals its tawdry-are they expecting us? Look!”

He pointed. Something was indeed happening. They saw a high, arched bridge ahead, spanning the river, and beyond it to the left a ridge, on top of the ridge two steeples and a collection of Gothic buildings, and somewhere above the buildings or just beyond them, a swarm of circling helicopters, a frenzy of searchlights knifing upward; and on the ground, intermittently visible through a maze of streets, much commotion as illuminated by the presence of a great many police lights blinking red-blue, on-off in great rapidity.

“Perhaps it’s a festival of some sort,” said Khalid.

“No, no, not with all the policemen,” said Bilal, at the wheel. “It’s probably some kind of civic catastrophe, a fire, a crime, something banal like that.”

“I hope nobody was hurt,” said Khalid.

“You are such a fool,” said Faisal. “These people bomb your country and kill your kin and occupy and defile your holy sites, they are infidel scum without souls, and yet you weep tears for a few of them caught in a brothel fire.”

“Actually, they have never bombed my country, and I am not weeping, but I feel pain for anyone’s loss. Loss is loss; it is degrading and debasing, no matter the faith of he who loses. You would know that, Faisal, had you ever developed any sort of empathy, but you are far too narcissistic for-”

“Narcissistic? Narcissistic! Do I spend an hour each morning patting my few remaining hairs this way or that? Do I secretly admire myself in every mirror, window, polished surface in America? Do I have a vocabulary of charming looks cultivated from debased Western movies? Khalid, give us ‘slightly angry but secretly pleased,’ please.”

“You have seen a Western movie or two. You have lusted after the flesh they display so wantonly. I see your dried-up eyes in that ancient prune face as they follow a sixteen-year-old child in tiny shorts and undershirt. I see you make adjustments to your sudden erection, hoping that no one will notice. You’re lucky you didn’t get us all arrested-”

“Old men!” screamed Bilal. “Silence! I am so sick of your bickering. Bicker bicker bicker, all the way across America. You hardly notice America, except for the ice cream-”

“It is the buzzard who is obsessed with ice cream.”

“I am no mirror-gazer, however, and my heart is true to Islam.”

“Stop it!” screamed Bilal, aware that under the stress of the argument he had speeded up. He nervously eyed the rearview mirror for any sign of Virginia police, but saw nothing, and eased back well under the speed limit.

“Silence. Just look at what you have come all this way to destroy. Face your destiny. Embrace your fate. Honor your God. Obey the text. And shut the fuck up.”

To the left, on the other side of the river, the silver-and-white city sped by. It looked like a movie Rome. Its temples were marble with columns thick as old oaks, its rooftops flat, all of it lit by a genius with an eye for the play of light and shadow across glowing surfaces, all of it sunk magically into lushness, like the hanging gardens of ancient memory. It twinkled and blinked across the wide, dark, glimmering river, offering up its famous sights one at a time, the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the high needle of the Washington Monument, a glimpse of the president’s mansion set in trees, just a smudge of white dignity in the dark, and finally that colossal dome, its flag rippling against the night wind, flashing blue-white-red signals as it furled and unfurled.