Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

The way of Islam is the only way, the predestined way, and I engineered my event to convince the West of the futility of resistance, its need to immediately abandon its adventuring in Muslim territories and to begin to study for the arrival of the Universal Caliphate.

Allah Akbar, God is great.

FBI DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1645 HOURS

Swagger leaned forward. His features grew wolfish, pointed, grim, his body tense, his face a war mask; he was the hunter, the tall-grass-crawler. He was the wind, he was the brush, he was the earth. He was the sniper.

“Just a few days ago,” he said, “I was beefing on security. I said we’d been penetrated. Remember that? There was a leak. No other explanation on how Bogier and his shooters kept showing up. Cruz thought I might have been the leak, somehow. Okada wouldn’t even talk to me about it, it made her so mad. Memphis said they had to be using satellites. But then I shut up. So, someone ask me, why did I shut up?”

“Why’d you shut up, Mr. Swagger?” asked the director after a bit.

“I figured if it was satellites, there’d be some kind of radio gizmo in the rental car. Went down and spent an hour going over it. Not a goddamned thing. So if it wasn’t in the rental car, where the hell was it?”

No answer.

“Well, I’ll make it easy. You got a man and a car. And it ain’t in the car.”

“Okay,” said Nick, “I’ll be the fish. So it was on… the man.”

“Now how could it be on the man? Hmm, so I thought hard on that one and tried to reckon as to the first time they showed up on my tail, and it was in South Carolina, in Danielstown. So I thought hard some more about South Carolina, and damned if I didn’t finally recall that on the first night, some guy tries to mug me, grabs my wallet, and another guy tracks him down and takes the wallet off him and returns it. Goddamn, that wallet was out of my control for a good two minutes. Easy to slip something into it, something thin and unremarkable.”

“A tag,” said Nick. “They tagged you.”

“Sure they did,” said Troy. “An RFID. Radio frequency identification device. A miniaturized transponder. It can be laminated into, say, a credit card, complete with aerial. A satellite is always asking it where it is and it’s always answering. If you can cut into that conversation, you can track… yes, and wasn’t there a BlackBerry in their SUV?”

“There was,” said Bob. “And when I looked in my wallet, there was a BankAmericard card. I hate them big banks, so I don’t do no business with them. I hadn’t put it in there, but like a dumb bunny, I’d carried it everywhere and they monitored me. That’s how they got to the Filipino house in Pikesville and to the car wash in Baltimore.”

“It’s very useful technology,” said Troy.

“Ain’t it though?” said Bob. “So I thought: I’m gonna throw this sucker out and that’ll be that. But then I thought: Hmm. It’s too good a gimcrack to pitch. How can I turn it against them? How can I get it on them? And that’s why I wanted the meeting. I had some arrogant idea I’d be able to spot our man. And goddamn, if he doesn’t give himself away, thinking he’s all friendlied up with me. My good pal Ted Hollister. Once he blew his cover with the rifle bit, I knowed he’s up to something. I picked up his briefcase. I slipped it in just before I handed it to him. Maybe he’s like me. He just sticks stuff in. He never checks the whole thing or goes through it. And I’m betting if that’s the case, there’s a fair chance it’s still with him, still in his briefcase, wherever he is. And you can track him by it.”

“Where’s this going?” Nick asked.

“It’s going to an MQ-9 Reaper,” said Bob.

OPERATIONS CENTER

INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

2120 HOURS

A WEEK LATER

Well,” said the colonel, extending his hand, “welcome back, Mr. Swagger. Now that I get who you are, I won’t be such a military dickhead. Congratulations and all that bullshit. Sorry we played so dumb for you the last time.”

“It ain’t nothing, Colonel Nelson,” said Swagger. “I’m happy to be here this time and I’m glad everything’s on the up-and-up.”

“We’d better get over there. She’s been on him for a long time and she’s getting ready to shoot. That’s what you came to see, right?”

“Yes I did. Like to see this fellow closed out.”

“He isn’t only going to be closed out. He’s going to be scattered to the four winds.”

They walked to the ops center, that vast dark cave of air-conditioning and keystroke sounds and the glow of monitors, past operators hunched over their control panels and sticks, past banners that read GO GET ’EM, COWBOY, and KILL TOWELHEADS NOW, and HAVE REAPER, WILL TRAVEL, and KILLING IS OUR BUSINESS AND BUSINESS IS GOOD.

But that wasn’t the only difference. The young operators wore backward baseball hats or cowboy hats, some had cups of dip parked on their panel boards, some chewed toothpicks or unlit stogies or wore one black, fingerless glove. Air Force? Never heard of it. It was more like some kind of skateboarders’ meet sponsored by Mountain Dew where the events included the double slalom, the long jump and spin, and the jihad splatter pattern.

In time they found the new ace, Jameson, tucked away in a corner, her eyes glued to the screen in front of her. She wore pink Bermudas, a tank top, flip-flops, and had her blond ponytail pulled through the gap in her Cubs hat. She wore Wayfarers under the clamped headset.

Nelson whispered, “Since this is your kill, she said you could watch. Just don’t move around a lot, or break her concentration.”

Jameson lay off to the east about twenty miles, keeping a ridge between 107 and the Jeep Cherokee. She flew lazy circles under the crest, and every once in a while, on no set schedule, zoomed over the line, got a quick visual on the vehicle as it zigzagged along the goat track farther and farther into Pakistan’s tribal regions. It was still there, as she knew it was; she checked only out of habit, for on another screen, a recon sitting much higher up watched it placidly, its electronic snooper finely attuned to the data stream the RFID sent to its satellite monitor.

Jameson’s stalk was not so intense that it closed other issues out of her mind. Number one being, which color toenail polish? Nude Crushed Pearl or Pacific Dusk? They were very close, a kind of shiny translucence with undertones of cream. Hmm. Both set off the tan of her legs and she had three days off for every two on and plenty of time to work on the tan, and Randy liked her legs tan but he also liked a redder, more dramatic shade on her toes. He’d be in this weekend, and they were going to go to the steak place at the Bellagio that everybody said was so good. A convergence of days off was rare in their relationship. The Creech Operations Center was a demanding taskmaster, as was Southwest Airlines, for whom Randy was a 737 copilot, but this weekend looked like it was going to happen. Anyway, all the magazines were pushing the cream thing. She pried her eyes from the screen and peered down quickly at her ten little piggies, now rather orange, the pedi a little outgrown. She thought it was called Persimmon Sunset.

“Cowpony 3-0-3, this is Ragweed Zulu, I have a possible target deviation.”

“Copy that, Ragweed,” said Jameson into her throat mike, “let me get a visual confirm.”

She oriented 107 in midair, took a quick glance at the ragged crest line between herself and the target, saw an upcoming gap. She eased back on the stick while giving the big bird a little more turbo, and inclined upward seven degrees. Without giving it a second or even a first thought, she toggled from the nose cam to left/lateral, and just as the lens broke free of the interfering rock mass, she brought up the magnification, waited for the self-focus, and brought the vehicle up so vividly on-screen it seemed just a few hundred feet away. Meanwhile, the compass readout above the image drifted around, quavered, and finally settled on a heading.