Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

I’ve directed my people to cooperate fully,” said the colonel, a solid linebacker guy with one of those square jaws and short, all-biz haircuts the upper-field grades favored. “And I will open any documents or records you require. I just have to tell you up front that a) we are very busy here fighting a war, and b) this matter was previously investigated by an Agency officer and she found no traces of anything handled incorrectly. But you say it’s a criminal matter, not a national security matter.”

  The three, plus the Wing Executive Officer and a secretary, were sitting in the commanding officer’s office, a well-lit room decorated with pictures of himself in various stages of his career, standing proudly before beautiful pieces of stainless steel sculpture that also happened to be supersonic jet fighters, all F-somethings, sleek and dangerous looking, like machined raptors hungry for a kill. In a few, as armored as a medieval knight, he sat in a cockpit under a raised plastic bubble with a winner’s wide grin while holding up a thumb as if to say “Mission accomplished” or even “Bogie downed.”

  “No, sir,” said Chandler, “we are not alleging criminal misconduct. We only say that it’s a possible criminal matter and that as a neutral agency, we have been asked to look at the data points again. You know the basics. On a certain date seven months ago, a hotel in Afghanistan was obliterated, possibly, but not certainly, by a missile. We have no forensics on the case because it was in tribal territory at the time, meaning an area full of bad guys. Subsequently, the site has been razed. There was a cursory investigation by Dutch security forces repping the UN, mainly photos. It tells us almost nothing except that something made a big hole in the earth. The reason we are here is that of the thirty-one Afghani nationals killed, one was an informant for the DEA. His loss set back one of their infiltration programs a great deal and that is a heavy poppy-growth area, and it ships product that shows up on the streets of, well, Indian Springs, for one, and Vegas, where I’m sure most of your staff and pilots live, for another. DEA says that other informants in the area claim the hotel was detonated by a missile. These reports are persistent, and it’s only a matter of time before they show up in an American newspaper. It would be a black eye if someone accidentally whacked a civilian structure, though of course it happens, and it would be an even bigger black eye if a DEA informant was among the killed, and the worst thing of all—I make no accusations here, but simply state fact—if it turned out a cover-up tried to obscure some second lieutenant’s honest mistake in the heat of battle. We have to be ahead on this one, not behind it, sir. And that is why we are here.”

  “Fine. By the way, does the guy who looks like Clint Eastwood ever talk?”

  “No, sir,” said Bob, “not since I shot Dillinger.”

  Everybody laughed, letting a little tension out.

  “All right. Here’s what I’ve set up for you. In the next room, you’ll find our complete documentation of air activities for that eight-hour duty shift. You’ll find a TV monitor and all our fire missions from that shift on tape, and you can look at them. We took sixteen shots that time, at all levels of permissibility. You’ll learn what a ‘level of permissibility’ is shortly. I have my battle manager from that shift on hand, and he can go over each mission separately with you if you need to do so. I also have seven pilots, that is, seven operators who fly, and I mean literally fly, the drones from our op center here at Creech. They’re the real heroes, and I’d hate to get any of them in trouble. They took the sixteen shots among them. I have one missing, First Lieutenant Wanda Dombrowski, whose term of service expired last month and who opted to end her commitment to the Air Force. She was great and I’m sorry to see her go. Anyhow, I have her next address and phone number, and if you feel it necessary to contact her, then you’re of course free to do so.”

  “All right,” said Starling. “Then let’s get to work.”

  “But first, just so you understand the situation we deal with in our duties, I want to walk you through our op center. I want to take you into the heart of combat, even if you’re in an underground room in a Nevada desert. Either of you have any combat experience?”

  “He’s been in a gunfight or two,” Starling said.

  “He looks like it. Well, Agents Chandler and Swagger, you’re about to see how the wars of the future will be fought. You won’t have to do as much ducking, Swagger.”

  CIA HQ

  Third floor “operations”

  Afghan Desk bay

  Langley, Virginia

  1555 hours

  So is it true,” asked Jared Dixson, Afghan Desk number two, handsome dog without conscience or tremor, eye-power seducer, and all around not-so-great guy, “that you were in a sword fight?”

  “I was, yes,” said Susan. “I held a guy off, until someone stronger stepped in and cut the head off the guy who was about to take mine.”

  “Wow. So what does it look like when a guy gets his head cut off?”

  “It’s very moist.”

  “They should call you ‘the Beheader,’ not Zarzi.”

  “Well, if the Times is right, he’s no more a beheader than I am.”

  Dixson laughed. “Well, between you and me and the woodwork, the best three words to describe Ibrahim Zarzi are ‘guilty,’ ‘guilty,’ and of course, ‘guilty.’ We call him ‘Dishonest Ib,’ but only when we’re drunk. The Times bought that phony Paki intel report hook, line, and sinker. We had great fun drawing it up. It’s Afghan Desk’s most profound moment of theater, up until the bastard gets the Freedom Award from the president next Saturday night.”

  “He’s an asshole?”

  “You have no idea. A watch queen with the sexual appetites of a Warren Beatty. He’d seduce the meter maid if you let him. But he’s our watch queen and that’s the point. So we’ll get him all the meter maids we can and let him cut off the odd journalist’s head if it gets us some sort of stability in Crazyland.”

  Dixson was assistant to Jackson Collins, who was, in the argot of the joint, the actual Afghan Desk himself, though no one ever called him “Mr. Desk.” They called him “MacGyver,” as he was an ex-SEAL, and had actually blown up a lot of stuff in the way-back when he was operational yet had a kind of too-serious-for-the-ironists quality that rendered him faintly ridiculous and thus earned him the nickname of a fatuous TV jerk from the eighties. Even his serious creds couldn’t make the joke go away: he was an Annapolis grad, Hopkins Institute of Foreign Studies star, former Brookings Fellow, and epic drinker, and under this Administration had become the senior executive in charge of running the Agency’s missions in Afghanistan in coordination with policy goals set by the Administration through the National Security advisor’s office, if not the president himself.

  “So,” she said, “are you getting along with Jack ‘MacGyver’ Collins any better now?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Dixson. “He used to call me ‘Pussyboy.’ Now I’ve been promoted to ‘Dr. Vulva.’”

  “Wow, that’s progress. I had a guy like that in Tokyo. Office was like a destroyer bridge. We called it ‘the fo’c’sle.’ He was as dumb as a screwdriver. No moving parts whatsoever.”

  “These Annapolis guys, what’s with them? They think if you don’t know which one is port and which one is starboard, you’re worthless. By the way, which one is port?”

  She laughed. The guy was funny, just the tiniest bit upper-class swishy with a face that was too lively with emotional information. Reputedly brilliant, clearly resentful, Jared had run hard into the Agency’s ancient military cerebellum. But then she said, “Look, you know why I dropped by.”

  “Of course. You’re using your appointment to the FBI liaison committee as an excuse to come visit your long-time crush object Jared Dixson. I’m glad that you’ve finally made peace with your abiding love and intense sexual longing for me. It was so wrong of you to play hard to get for all those years. Think of the motel time we could have logged.”

  “Gee, another married guy who wants the cookies but doesn’t want to pay for the bowl to mix them in. Oh,
that’s right, you’ll be married to—what’s her name, Buffy? Jennifer? Gigi?—forever because she’s got all the money. You can’t divorce.”

  “Why, what would one do without three houses, six cars, a stable, a really big sailboat, and a very fine collection of vintage wines? Her name happens to be Bunny. No, Fluffy, no, no, now it’s coming back, Mimsy.”

  “You’re such a bastard. Anyhow, I want to go through our missile and munition records for that day when the hotel blew up. One more time. Maybe I missed something.”

  “I doubt you ever missed anything in your life.”

  “Well, the near-kill in Baltimore has got people asking about Cruz’s motives again. I just have to make sure that base is covered, that we are in the clear. It would prove so embarrassing if Afghan Desk were taking shots at our own people to save the Watch Queen’s ass.”

  “You know, that stuff’s way classified. I know you’re cleared most of the way, but how about all of the way?”

  “I’m cute, it’s allowed.”

  “Okay,” he said. “MacGyver’s a big-foot asshole, but he’s not that big an asshole, I guarantee you. I will get you everything,” he said, “except of course Pentameter. You understand, Pentameter can’t be compromised.”

  “Sure,” she said, thinking, What the hell is Pentameter?

  PART THREE

  PENTAMETER

  CREECH AFB

  OPERATIONS CENTER

  INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

  1600 HOURS

  Here was war. In glowing screens that sent gray-blue shafts up to the ceiling of a smokeless bunker in a room that could have been full of insurance adjusters, or newsletter writers, or catalog telephone operators, the young people of the 143rd Expeditionary Wing (UAV) hunted and killed and blew shit up extremely well.

  “You’ve been briefed on MQ-9 Reaper?” asked the colonel as he led them through the large, hushed room, ultra-air-conditioned, almost like a religious space occupied by intensely filled confessionals.

  “More or less,” said Starling.

  “Let me recap. It’s our primary hunter-killer system. It’s the Mitchell bomber of the war on terror, the do-anything, go-anywhere airborne sniper. It can hang in the air low or high for fifteen hours at a time and the kids who run it develop an almost mystical feel for its handling capabilities. They meld with it somehow, as an old fighter jock like me might say. It has superb optics and target-guidance systems. It has weapons hard points for up to twelve missiles and two guided munitions, as smart bombs are called. It’s a big thing too; you think ‘drones’ you think little buzzy kites with motors. Uh-uh. It’s the size of a Warthog, with a 950-shaft horsepower turbocharged engine. It’s nothing but wings and streamline and gizmos, and one of the reasons people assume it’s small is because it has no features, not really, to give it a sense of scale; no personality, no eccentricities, no pizzazz. It’s just white streamlined death. We think of it as ‘deadly persistence’ in the way it hangs around while it hunts. It’s got all the bells and whistles, including a Raytheon AN/AAS-52 multi-spectral targeting sensor suite which includes color and monochrome daylight TV, infrared, and image-intensified TV with laser range finder and target designator. You could broadcast a talk show from it.”

  “What’re you shooting from it?” asked Swagger.

  “Primarily, Hellfire AGM-114. And we are talking some kind of precision. They say ‘Hellfire’ is an acronym for hel-i-copter launched fire-and-forget. Sounds weak to me. I think it’s just some Baptist general’s Old Testament imagination for hellfire and brimstone, raining down on the evil and depraved of Sodom and Gomorrah and Afghanistan. For the record, it’s a laser-guided rocket with a twenty-pound warhead, initially developed to burn red tanks rolling through the Fulda Gap. No tanks here, so we put what we call a blast-and-frag sleeve on that twenty pounds of explosive so that when it goes, it sends out a hundred-thousand-piece spray of supersonic steel. It’s primarily for killing people or blowing up vehicles. It can take out a small building too. For those hard-to-reach spots, we have a little treat called ‘thermobaric,’ which means that in a nanosecond before detonation the explosive atomizes, that is, turns to droplets of mist that fill the air. Then it goes and it really rips a hole in the wall of the universe. We can put it nearly anywhere. Hellfire can fly about three miles, top speed 950 miles per hour, so time in flight is minimal. Originally it was to be TV guided but they couldn’t make it work. They switched guidance systems to what is called soft laser; our operators lock on the target from here and download that info into the guidance system of the weapon itself and then engage, and the bird follows the laser signature down to the end of the ride. It goes hot in a few hundred feet and then it’s very reliable. It’s a nasty bitch; it comes in at a low angle, a little over treetop level, and depending on how accurately it’s been aimed, it can go through a window, pass the Coke machine and the water cooler, stop and use the men’s room, knock on the door, go into the imam’s anteroom, wait until he’s ready, then go in and blow him up.”

  Swagger got the joke, if Starling didn’t quite.

  “But it’s a tank killer, basically, right?” asked Swagger. “Suppose you’ve got something bigger to whack?”

  “That’s our Paveway Two,” Nelson said. “It’s a smart bomb, a TV-guided, five hundred pounder, thermobaric for enhanced destructiveness. The camera’s in the nose, the operator can switch to it and actually ride it down. That’s our crater maker, and each Reaper carries two, in case we need to wipe out a building. It happens. Now how do we decide to use these beautiful little toys? That is the question, isn’t it?” Nelson said.

  “That’s why we’re here, sir,” said Starling.

  “Fair enough. We have very strict policies on when we can and when we can’t fire. There are three levels of permissibility. The first is called Tango, mil-speak T, for tactical. Normally, all the tac jobs are handled by service aviation. A marine company is pinned down, they call their own command and get a marine Apache and he Hellfires the crap out of whoever’s shooting at the marines. Doesn’t concern us, but sometimes for whatever reasons, the Apaches aren’t able to get there fast enough and we have a drone in the area, our people will take the shot on a Tango license to shoot. They can communicate directly in real time with the grunts. I’m somewhat prejudiced here, but I think the marines would prefer a drone shoot over an Apache or an F-15, because our people are so much better. I mean this is all they do, day after day, and some of them get an almost zen feel for what the aircraft can do and what it can’t, and they can turn on a pin, change angles of attack in a split second, Immelmann turn to the deck, do amazing things with those little aircraft and really put some hurt on the bad guys.”

  Swagger watched: in one of many similar cubicles, a young woman in the smart uniform of an Air Force officer, but for her pink flip-flops, sat at a console. She had one hand on a joystick and one hand on a lever to her left. Before her, a black-and-white television screen mounted in a wall of switches and buttons displayed a landform sliding underneath her from ten thousand feet, plus all sorts of technical readouts. Her ears were muffed with earphones, and a prong mike curved around her cheek to her mouth. She was talking, flying, searching, and hoping all at the same time.

  “Lieutenant Jameson represents our second level of permissibility. It’s called Oscar, that is O, the O standing for opportunity, as in targets of. Using intel developed by on-the-ground CIA assets, she knows where there is likely Taliban activity. Her battle manager vectors her onto the area, and they’re both looking hard for signs of men with weapons. They may or may not represent any direct threat to coalition troops, but our rules of engagement won’t let us just pop anyone. We have to see a weapon. Sometimes we’ll stay with a truck or an SUV for hours waiting for a glimpse of an AK muzzle. Then we spend ten minutes trying to get permission, first from whoever’s area of responsibility it is, then from the Agency, first on the ground in Afghanistan, then from an agency coordinating committee, then from AF command, and
they have a legal officer sitting in on all Oscar operations, and all of them have access to the same battlefield visuals. Then and only then do we shoot. That’s most of our shooting.”

  Lieutenant Jameson seemed to have come up with a possible target. Now she was really flying the aircraft ten thousand miles away, and Bob watched as her body language indicated the torque and concentration she was putting in as she delicately played the two controls against each other.

  “The stick,” said Colonel Nelson, “is vehicle manipulation, stick and rudder in the old days. Up, down, left, right. The rudder pedals are now part of a computer program, so she’s not pumping away with her feet at the same time. Meanwhile, the lever on the left is throttle, controlling airspeed, engine pitch, that sort of thing. When we’re close to the ground and engaging targets, we’re operating right near the stall zone, so the trick is to find the equipoise between the stall and the maneuver. As I say, these folks develop an amazing touch for it, I mean I’ve seen them do things I couldn’t even dream of in my F-15.”

  Jameson was good. Just a few feet from her glowing, lit-by-screen face, in black and white and flickering with the technical monitors that, in a river rush of cascading integers, told her the speed, direction, health, and mood of her unmanned aviation vehicle, the ridges of Afghanistan slid by. After one of them, she banked hard left, tilting her wings to forty-five degrees to match the incline of the slope beneath, then jacked into what felt like a left hand so harsh Swagger could feel the imaginary Gs in his stomach as she skittered over a village, twirled again, until a cruciform was on a single house. She rotated in low orbit, the house staying locked in the cruciform reticle.

  “Jameson’s our new ace. They call her New-D, which she doesn’t like, but it’s a tribute to her and to Old-D, Dombrowski, who was the best until she left. Now watch: Jameson could take it out with the snap of a button,” the colonel said, “but not without permission. You can’t hear it, but she’s on the horn this very minute, extremely intense conversations with a variety of sources, not only her battlefield manager”—he pointed to an officer on a platform in the center of the room, bathed in gray light as he was following several dramas of interception at once—“but the other sources I mentioned. She’s even reading the license plates of the vehicles to see if they match any affiliated with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda.”