Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

Mick got within twenty feet and fired, saw the drama of the operating pistol as it ejected a shell through its slide blowback, fired again against the much shorter cocked trigger pull, and then settled into a rhythm and fired three more times, and for just a second saw the impacts of his bullets as they puffed gas into the sealed fabric around the body and then it was obliterated.

The others were close enough, and on Mick’s shots they fired, AKs blazing hot in the night, the extreme percussion of the small arms in the stillness of the air, the bullet strikes that stitched a beaten zone and ripped and tossed and pummeled the guy on the receiving end, who even as he was being speared multiple times by warheads moving at two thousand feet per second, began to issue copious amounts of blood-soak through his robe.

A goat fled by Mick, knocking his leg. Of the three tethered goats, two were hit by late-burst uncontrollables, and twisted angrily under the impact, knowing they had been killed; the survivor simply pulled desperately against his rope, finally broke it, and sped off.

“Cease fire, cease fire,” Mick yelled.

The guns went quiet except for one Izzie joker who’d evidently just changed magazines and was determined to get his full money’s worth out of the labor of the switch. His last thirty rounds served as the coup de grace, “Taps” and a fare-thee-well to the poor sonovabitch all shot to hamburger in his robes.

Then total silence except in the ringing inner ears of the shooters. Mick sniffed the delicious home-at-last smell of all the burned powder, felt a bit of wind whipping against the boys. One of the Taliban fighters kicked the two dead goats aside, and Mick bent to expose the corpse and was surprised to note that it wasn’t a man but just another goat, its legs tied, its muzzle tied, itself very dead from all the wounds that had pretty much shredded its torso.

Suddenly a flurry of SureFire beams came onto the mess and the blood was as boldly bright as Mick’s fuck-up.

“Shit,” said Mick. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“How the fuck-”

“What the-”

“The satellite said he was here,” said Mick, uncomprehending. “He was here, the eye in the sky, it said he was here.”

It was Tony Z whose SureFire found the gizmo. It lay under the dead goat, soaked in blood, clotted with dirt, but enough metal showed for Tony’s beam to catch. He bent, plucked them out, a small cylinder of metal the size of one joint of a man’s finger and a little, almost featureless plastic box.

“That’s the GPS chip and transmitter,” said Mick. “Fucker either knew or figured out how we were tracking him, and suckered us with it. Smart guy. Didn’t just toss it and clear the area but set us up to waste the night while he moved on. Goddamn his ass.”

It was then that the two Taliban guys started to chatter between themselves excitedly.

“What’re they saying?” Mick asked Tony.

“‘Where’s Mahoud?’ That’s what they’re saying. ‘Where’s Mahoud?’”

Where was Mahoud?

It only took half an hour to find him, by backtracking over the hill along the axis that had been assigned to Mahoud in the ascent. The peep of sun over horizon bringing rapid pink illumination to the vast sky was a big help as well.

He hadn’t made it very far.

Tony leaned over the still figure, facedown on the dust of Afghanistan, and pulled his head up for examination. There wasn’t much to see. His throat had been deeply and expertly cut from earlobe to earlobe. Not many of the anatomical structures remained unsundered, as if the cutter had truly enjoyed sending this one to Allah.

“I would say,” said Tony, “we are dealing with a very angry individual.”

CAPITAL CITY OF ZABUL PROVINCE

HOURI DISTRICT

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0130 HOURS

He sat in the shadows, drinking tea. Under his robes, the SVD with its unyielding structure and all its knobs, prongs, jutting edges, and lengthy barrel had to be wedged to the side, its sling loosened and the beast itself carefully adjusted so that it nestled against the length of his body, braced against the stiffness of his very bad leg. The leg itself, stressed beyond stress, now announced loudly that it had no further interest in completing the mission.

Ray sat far back in the crowded marketplace, at some kind of outdoor rude wooden cafe that looked rustic and slatternly, and he’d just finished some kind of meal, a mystery meat that had to be goat (except, wasn’t meat supposed to be brown or red and not naval gunboat gray?), a thin gravy, lots of surprisingly good rice, and those patties of baked dough the Afghans ate, the ones that looked like Pop-Tarts but had no jam inside. But all in all, it could have been the best meal of his life, if for no other reason than that he was alive to enjoy it.

Tea: good, sweet, loaded with energy.

Rest: good, after the ordeal of the past few days.

Crowds: very good. People swirled everywhere in this city of thousands, most of them nut brown men in strange headgear or head- and face-obscuring turbans, dishdashas in blazing colors or patterns obscuring bodies, the necks draped in long scarves-graceful, scrawny, furtive, loud, animated, with faces that looked like the beaten hide of an African shield. Many were Pashtun tribals, openly carrying daggers or AKs that nobody was going to take from them; many were city folk, in suits with shirts but no ties. Many were women, some in tribal outfits, some in the Afghan version of the latest hot look from a New York they saw only on CNN satellite pickup, some young, some old. But so many of them. They traveled by every conveyance known to man, from bike to motorbike to motorcycle to tri-wheel covered motorcycles to pickups to full-blown lorries to the odd sedan, all of them competing for space with other life-forms, dogs, goats, even the occasional cow and some humped, hairy beasts that looked like Star Wars creatures. The place baked in the odors of combustion and methane and probably piss and keefe too, and a kind of blue haze of dust and exhaust hung low over everything.

Nobody seemed to have noticed Ray. It helped that he was dark, that his eyes were deep and brown to a degree that could have concealed an Islamist’s serpentine way of thinking even if it only concealed a rigorous Catholic boyhood, and that he was thin, wiry, ropey, graceful, and with his thick dressing of robes, almost anonymous. The exoticism of his face could easily have been Mongolian, Chinese, Tartar, Uzbek, anything; it surprised nobody.

His plan: to sit here till twilight. In the falling darkness, he’d mosey the several blocks to the warlord Ibrahim Zarzi’s compound and examine the Many Pleasures Hotel across the way. Getting into it shouldn’t be too hard. The idea was to rent a room there tomorrow morning, sleep a bit, then carefully ease his way up to the roof. No door or lock could stop him, for he was as clever in the ways of penetration as he was clever in the ways of evasion.

He’d slide into shoot position just a few minutes before it went down. He wouldn’t be at the building’s edge, but as far back as possible while still retaining the angle. He’d thought this out; it wouldn’t be the classic sniper’s rested shot, off something like a bench. No, he’d be in character as the tribal wanderer until the very last, squatting on the roof. At the proper moment, he’d rise, lifting the rifle with him. If there was some structure upon which he could lean to stabilize himself, that would be excellent. If not, he’d take the kill shot offhand. It was only a little over 200 yards and he had superb offhand skills, something not many snipers build on but which had obsessed him one year at Camp Lejeune as a weakness in his game. He could hit that shot one hundred out of one hundred, no problem. He might even have time for a follow-up, put another one into the already stricken man.