Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Motherfucker,” said Bob. “Excuse my English.”

“How did you know it was him? If you hadn’t figured it out, we’d be sitting here with a dead national leadership cadre and a confidence crisis beyond the imagination.”

“It was just something that set peculiar with me. When we all met in the Agency, he told everybody about the rifle I captured that’s on display in your museum, right?”

“That’s right,” said Nick.

“Well, that is the rifle and I was the boy who captured it, no doubt about it. But that night, we had a big celebration at the firebase, steaks and beer, all the stuff that’s bad for you. And the CIA guy running the operation calls me aside afterward and tells me I got ‘talent.’ The Agency, he says, is always looking for ‘talent.’ Did I want a job? He could get me in real high, make a lot more than I could as a marine. No, I said, I’d stay with the corps. See, I had it in my head I wanted to retire as the command sergeant major of the Marine Corps. I thought that’d make my dad proud. I didn’t know I was going to lose my spotter and get my hip busted in another couple of weeks. So the guy says, ‘Sure, but I’ll write you up big in my reports and if you change your mind, you just tell ’em and they can look ’em up and that’ll get you in.’ And I said, ‘Can you do me a favor? I know Marine Corps politics, and if it’s out I’m connected up with you people, that could hurt me. They don’t like that dual-allegiance thing in the Marine Corps. So the best thing you could do is not mention me by name at all.’ He says, ‘You sure, Gunny?’ I says I’m sure. My name ain’t in no file on that rifle. So if Ted Hollister says he heard about it in Saigon as a way of browning me up, he’s lying. My file with the Agency begins six thousand quarts of bourbon later. So how’s Ted know? Ted could only know from the Russians. They kept a file on that SVD case and he’d seen it. So if he’s seeing Russian files on American marines, he’s up to something nobody knows about. Got it?”

“What on earth motivated him?” asked Nick. “He doesn’t seem like the Ames or Aldrich type.”

“He left a statement on his hard drive. Crazy bullshit, I don’t even know how to describe it. What do they say? ‘The kind of nonsense only an intellectual could believe.’ That sort of thing. And we’re not going to release the news on him. It makes the Administration look too bad, and for now, they’re the ones signing the checks that we all cash.”

“So,” said Nick, “basically this guy masterminds a plot to kill the president and the top leadership of the country by maneuvering Ibrahim Zarzi into the Rose Garden with a miniaturized FM transmitter. He uses Dixson to hire contractors to stop a marine sniper team, killing one marine and wounding another. He pursues the surviving sniper across America, kills a guy in South Carolina, kills nine Filipino immigrants in Baltimore, kills four cops in DC, kills six innocent bystanders at the White House, and… he gets away with it.”

“It’s not my decision. It’s politics. But it’s also reality. As I said, someone thoroughly professional got him out. As I said, maybe the Pakis. They’re very good, and there are elements of their ISI that we think are jihad sympathizers.”

“It’s a big world out there. We’ll try hard, but look how long we’ve been going after Osama,” said the director.

“You forgot one thing,” said Bob.

They looked back at Swagger. He had one of those drawn-in cowboy faces, now much cut with the wrinkles that sixty-four years of gunfights will engrave in a man’s flesh.

“You forgot me, ” he said. “My name is Bob the Nailer. I kill people.”

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

“AN ACCOUNT OF MOTIVE”

HARD DRIVE

NATIONAL SECURITY OFFICE IBM

C:\MY FILES\ACCOUNT.1.WPD

I am no Lee Harvey Oswald, surly and bitter and luxuriating in his own self-imposed bitterness. I am no John Wilkes Booth, full of grandiloquence, theatrical self-dramatization, narcissism, and insanity. I am no Leon Czolgosz, an idiot.

I’m just a man who sees the future, understands what it must be, and humbly aspires to facilitate it as mercifully and swiftly as possible. I did what I did because the West is no longer worth defending. It has been destroyed by the people it was built to protect: its women.

The West lasted from AD 732, when Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours, until 1960, where it fell without a battle. In 1960, the birth control pill became widely available. Many think of it as heaven, sexual nirvana, the route to self-expression, wish fulfillment, and liberation for millions of women. I think of it as Auschwitz in a bottle. It was and is genocide, as, using it, the women of my generation happily traded off 1,200 years of unparalleled growth, wealth, security, stability, scientific and ethical progress for a second BMW in the garage. The West ceased producing at a sustainable rate, while Islam continued to populate the world. You may look elsewhere for the demographics. This fact cannot be avoided: we Westerners currently may be analogized to upper-class Brits on the deck of the Titanic, April 12, 1912. My, my, why is the great ship tilting a bit? Why, dear, it’s probably some minor malfunction that the handsome young men will soon fix. Meanwhile, may I have another aperitif, steward?

But not only did the pill doom the West from without by limiting population, it destroyed the culture from within by destroying the gyroscope of civilization-that is, the balance between the sexes. The sexes had existed for that glorious 1,200-year span in a kind of brilliant equipoise: men provided and protected, women nourished and nurtured. It was a sublimely efficient system, if harsh. The result was generation after generation of bold, intelligent, hardy risk takers, driven by their fathers’ sense of duty but made compassionate by their mothers’ mercy. They were afraid of nothing, committed to a larger thing than themselves, all united in their confident sense of destiny. The men did what they had to do, the women did what they had to do. Together, they built a thing called civilization. In all realms, from the scientific to the industrial to the aesthetic to the military to the intellectual and the medical, Western thought and culture prevailed. It was extraordinary and it seems even now absurd that we threw it away in a single generation.

After 1960, the dominos fell quickly. Once the size of a family could be controlled, it shrank; women returned to the workplace. Soon-believe me, I am not arguing that they are “dumb” or in any way “inferior”-they were making equal or even more than the males, so male authority was challenged and, metaphorically, that leveraged and ultimately destroyed the whole concept of authority. Simultaneously, with small family size, more was invested in each of 2.4 children, so that the death of one meant a shattering emotional wastage. Soldiers could no longer die in the thousands, much less the hundreds. Without defenders, we are doomed.

Thus the only question that remains for a serious man: with the West gone, what system of governance best serves the most people of the world?

If the West can no longer be defended, the East can no longer be denied. The answer to the question, “What is next?” has to be Islamic theocracy. It alone has the harshness of temperament to control the feminism that doomed the West. At its purest, Islam is simply masculinity emboldened, masculinity without moderation, hesitancy, compassion, and introspection. That force alone can save us.

You say: Islam is submission, it is barbaric in its jihad against infidels. True enough.

But once Islam has achieved hegemony and exists without challenge, all that will change. That is what truly lies ahead: Islamic hegemony over the earth, based on masculinity-self-discipline, faith, obedience, and duty. That is the system of governance that will best serve the most people and make the most people the happiest. The intellectuals and ironists will never be satisfied; wisely, Islam will execute them. They do harm far disproportionate to their numbers in any society and must be eliminated without mercy. That is the system that will finally yield the dream of paradise of economic and spiritual equality where the state has withered away and each gives from his ability and receives to his need.