Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero

“Dead zero,” said Swagger.

This book began in 1977 with the best idea I never had. The man who had it was a British thriller writer named Patrick Alexander. In that year he published a novel entitled Death of a Thin-skinned Animal . It crossed my desk-I was the book review editor of the Sunday Sun, of Baltimore-and immediately attracted my attention.

I had written two unpublishable thrillers and was about to take my last swing. I had decided, from hard experience in failure, that the next book must extend from a tight premise with a limited set of characters in a small geographical area over a specific time frame and should be about a sniper. Death of a Thin-skinned Animal, at least from the flap copy, offered all that. I immediately placed it on my must-never-read list. I was afraid of my larcenous tendencies.

Death of a Thin-skinned Animal reflected Britain’s obsession in the seventies with the bad-boy dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin; I’m guessing it had a whisper of le Carré to it as well, as he was the colossus who bestrode the thriller-writing world in those days.

As Alexander had it, British intelligence decides a crackpot African dictator cannot be dealt with in his leftward slide, and must therefore be terminated. A British army sniper is sent on the job, but after he’s in country, the politics change. Now, the dictator is a friend, and must be protected at all costs. As the sniper is beyond recall, he is coldly betrayed and disappears. Five years later the dictator arrives in London for a celebration but is preceded by a radio message, in a code five years out of date. It states that the sniper will complete his mission in London.

Great setup and I suspect it’s a fine book. I still haven’t read it (though now I own it). In the end, I let it go, and instead of stealing from Mr. Alexander stole from Mr. Pynchon. I managed to publish The Master Sniper in 1980. Sometime thereafter I realized that The Master Sniper was really Pynchon’s great Gravity’s Rainbow reimagined through the prism of a more concrete, less gifted mind.

I continued, stealing left and right. The Spanish Gambit was Homage to Catalonia combined with For Whom the Bell Tolls and with a dash of Brideshead Revisited thrown in, even though I had not then and have not now read Brideshead Revisited . (I saw a little of the TV movie.) Most flagrantly, The Day Before Midnight appears to be Dr. Strangelove, beat by beat, scene by scene, and revelation by revelation, though told from Colonel Bat Guano’s point of view. If I had noticed it then, would I have changed it? Probably not. Dirty White Boys was anything by Jim Thompson, although again, I had never read anything by Jim Thompson. On and on it goes: Pale Horse Coming was Aeschylus, Faulkner, and Charles Askins. The 47th Samurai was a movie, not a novel, as directed (in my head) by Hideo Gosha in 1978. For crying out loud, I stole Bob Lee Swagger from Carlos Hathcock.

Cut to 2009 when I’m looking for a plot, and what should drift before my nostrils but whiffs of Death of a Thin-skinned Animal. It was not the second time I considered the premise but the third, as evidently I almost wrote a book like this in 1993 instead of Point of Impact. But this time, I couldn’t resist. It’s a great premise, and I saw how it could be updated to the war in Afghanistan and the high-tech milieu that sniping and other forms of state-sanctioned killing have become, as well as provide an opportunity to crank the Swagger family history in another direction and express my contempt for the leftward drift of the American press over the past decade or so. Plus I got to write love poems to Susan Okada. I had great fun. So thank you, Mr. Alexander-he died in 2003-for being there when I needed you. I hope this plug sells a billion more of your books.

The question remains: is this theft or inspiration? Or where does the inspiration end and the theft begin? If you didn’t know of the origin of Dead Zero and you read it and Death of a Thin-skinned Animal, would you see the connection? I’m not sure but I hope Mr. Alexander wouldn’t be too put out at my light fingers-it’s a tribute to his imagination, after all-in our mutual quest to keep readers awake all night and give them a nice vacation from their actual lives.

In more mundane matters, much thanks, once again, is due Gary Goldberg who has become my technical intelligence adviser. He’s the one who understands transponders and RFIDs and Thuraya satellite phones and that sort of stuff. He also helps me send pages to New York via e-mail, a task that will remain permanently beyond my pay grade. (Alan Doelp pitched in when Gary was on vacation.)

Gary and I also went to Vegas for a look at Creech and while out there we took a course in Suppressor Theory and Practice from Long Mountain Outfitters and there met Dan Shea, president of LMO and one of the most knowledgeable guys in the world on certain subjects. Dan, editor and publisher of Small Arms Review , was far more helpful than the U.S. Air Force in understanding the intricacies of Hellfire ACM-114, though at Dan’s suggestion, I have blurred and faked a lot of the technical stuff to keep mischief makers in the dark.

Jeremy Woody, a marine combat veteran of the war in Iraq, loaned me his official Marine Corps manuals, by which I tried to solve the organizational, communications, tactical, and equipmental mysteries of that great organization, though mistakes are mine, not his. Good friend and co-author (of American Gunfight ) John Bainbridge turned his steady eye to proofreading for me.

On a sad note, it hurts to report that Weyman Swagger, former photo editor of The Sun , Bob’s namesake and my original mentor in gun culture way back when dinosaurs roamed the planet, succumbed in the spring to lung cancer. He was, in the best Swagger tradition, cool, funny, and calm through the end. I hope I go out half as well.

My steady readers Lenne Miller, Jeff Weber, Jay Carr, and Gary, of course, were supremely helpful. The great aviation writer Barrett Tillman pitched in with info on military radiospeak, a poetic subdialect I happen to love. Through Gary, I met two retired FBI Special Agents, Bernie Murphy and Peter Ahearn, who talked to me about various security issues. At S & S, my new editor, Sarah Knight, was aces; at ICM, my agent Esther Newberg was her usual stalwart self throughout; and every morning as I headed upstairs into the slovenly pit where I put these things together, a thermos of hot coffee awaited me, courtesy of my wife, Jean Marbella. Without the coffee, I fear, most of these pages would have remained blank.