Dead Zero

by Stephen Hunter

  “Those buildings will be closed down,” said Bogier. “No way he penetrates. The lawn will be closed down; no way he gets out onto it for a shot. And, you’re not considering his skill set. He doesn’t have to penetrate because, unlike you and me, he doesn’t need a stable rest, a pedestal or bipod, a Kestrel weather station, a range finder, a computer, any of that bullshit. He’s a super-offhand guy. He’ll shoot from there,” he said, nodding to indicate where his team boy should look.

  Tony took the cue and saw the end of the wall where there was just a little space between it and a perpendicular wrought-iron fence complete with a line of black shafts and spearheads. Z realized that the sniper could wedge himself into that space and on the other side of the wall get a direct line of sight to the library entrance through which Zarzi, after the speech, would waltz in triumph, wave to his fans, pose for the cameras, and begin a walk to the limousine parked out on 37th. The range would be about 250 yards.

  “Ray slides in there, out comes the rifle, poof goes the suppressor, and time in flight later, Zarzi, standing at the entrance, waving to reporters, supporters, and the world, has a crater for a face.”

  “Maybe he’ll crash one of those houses on the left side of Thirty-seventh. Shoot from upstairs. Has a nice angle into the library entrance.”

  “Secret Service has it covered. Guys have or will have knocked on all the doors, spoken to all the people, asked them to stay away from windows during and after the speech. There’ll be countersnipers on the roofs of the Georgetown buildings. Ray knows that and he knows his best bet is to kind of scuffle into the margins of the place, real late. Like I say, to just this spot.”

  “You don’t think they’ll have cops out here too?”

  “Yep. They’ll have P Street sealed off and Thirty-seventh as well. No car traffic. But it doesn’t matter. You know why? Because he’s already there.”

  “Already there?”

  “Maybe even now,” said Bogier. “That’s how bad he wants this shot. Look over the wall on P. See what’s behind it. Looks like some woods or forest, undeveloped, just waiting for Georgetown to build its new chem lab or something. He’ll hit it tonight, slide in there in ghillie, probably up close to the wall. Then he waits. He waits through tonight, he waits through tomorrow. He waits through rain, snow, sleet, earthquakes, animal bites, bouts of depression, winning the lottery, cats and dogs living together. Thirty-six hours without a move or a sound or a shit. That’s the zen of this bastard. They’ll close this place down tomorrow, but he’s already here. They’ll run dog teams, but he’s probably perfumed up with skunk piss, so the dogs’ll steer clear. No human eye will pick him out. Tomorrow night, game time, he comes out of his hole. His move to his shooting site is probably no more than fifty feet. He has to get over a wall, no biggie to an athlete like him. He may run into a cop but he’ll be on him and kung fu him down in two seconds, he’ll slide along into that gap between the fence and the wall, the Great Man comes out, the red dot comes up, and that’s the ball game. Ray doesn’t care about getting away. Getting away isn’t a part of the plan. And it doesn’t matter if I put a hollow point into his brain a second after or if he spends the rest of his life in federal prison or rides the needle. Sergeant Ray Cruz, USMC, did his job, and by his Semper Fi code, by all that bullshit that he believes separates him from us and makes us shit to his noble goodness, that’s what’s important. It’s moral vanity, his only flaw. He’s got a code; we don’t.”

  “And that’s why you hate him, Mick?”

  “I don’t hate the fuck at all. I love him. I wish I was half as hung as he is. No way I’d be where he is now, not with all the shit we’ve put on his ass. I wish I could let him have his shot. I wish we could just go away. But we showed the greed, we showed the need, we have to do the deed. We took the dough, so we have to go. That’s our code. It ain’t much of one, but goddamnit, I will play it out, same as him, right to the end.”

  “Where are we, Mick?”

  “Do you mean philosophically? Somewhere between Housman and Xenophon.”

  “No, Mick, I mean where are we space-time-location-wise. That kind of ‘Where are we?’”

  Mick pivoted, but did not point.

  “Down P Street, almost to Wisconsin. Remember, the cops will have it cordoned off, so there won’t be any traffic. It’ll be a straight shot to his position. We park early to get a location. We go see a movie, then we come back, slip into our war gear, and set up. We’ve pre-lased the ranges, we’ve figured the angles, there’s not supposed to be any wind tomorrow night. I’ve dialed in the scope setting, so there’s no holdover. I’ll go with the .338 instead of the .50, much easier to manipulate and shoot. I’m prone in the back, shooting through the rolled-down window. You’re next to me, on the spotting scope. You pick him out, index me into him, and when I have him on the cross, I take the slack out on him whether he’s made his move or not. Suppressor mutes our signature; the only thing anybody hears is a sonic boom six hundred yards downrange indicating nothing. I pull the rifle into the car, you scramble to the driver’s. Then we just drive away, turn left on Wisconsin, drive to Baltimore-Washington airport and catch a flight to Florida. If we have time, we dump the guns and burn the car, but it ain’t no big deal. MacGyver says all the firepower was obtained overseas for black ops and can’t be traced, and the car is registered through a maze of shipping companies, holding companies, Cayman Islands banks, Mexican rental agencies, and what have you.”

  “Suppose you read him wrong, Mick. Suppose he doesn’t show or he doesn’t show at this spot.”

  “He will. He doesn’t know why, but I do. He has to do the deed the sniper way. He has to complete Two-Two’s mission, make Two-Two’s shot. That’s his thing. That’s what’s driving him, subconsciously. He’ll be exactly where I say he’ll be. It’s his only shot.”

  “But I’m saying a lot can go wrong. He doesn’t show. What then?”

  “Well,” said Mick, “I guess we commit hari-kari on the spot.”

  “Not me, Mick. Tony Z’s not that much into the samurai thing. I’ll just feel really bad for three full days, is that okay?”

  “Four days,” said Mick. “Minimum.”

  FBI INCIDENT COMMAND HQ

  O’BRIAN CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT CENTER

  BASEMENT

  3614 P STREET NW

  GEORGETOWN

  WASHINGTON, DC

  1530 HOURS

  FRIDAY

  I know you’re a professional, Sergeant. But let’s pretend I’m an infirm old man with short-term memory loss and I’ve forgotten we just went over this seven minutes ago. One more time, please.”

  Ray looked at the FBI executive hard, at the man Swagger who was supposedly—he was still trying to wrap his mind around this one—his father, at the beautiful Asian woman who repped the Agency, who were the stars here. Meanwhile, clerks, techies, SWAT cowboys, street agents, commo people bustled about, though all vehicles were parked a mile away.

  “You’re going to dump me off at Reservoir. My job is to infiltrate the mile or so down the hill, through the woods, and get to the other side of the wall that fronts P Street right at the point where P bends left to become Thirty-seventh.”

  “Do you think that’s a good choice?” asked the woman. “It all turns on that choice.”

  “It’s the only choice, ma’am. It’s my only shot.”

  “Swagger made the choice,” said Memphis. “He said it would be his choice.”

  “It was an easy read,” said Swagger.

  “I get in, I wait,” continued Ray. “I’m next to the P Street wall. I’m hearing police activity outside, I know there are cops all over the place. We’re hoping we have some bad guys down P Street, closer to Wisconsin.”

  “Another interpretation,” she said.

  “It’s right. If I’m here, they have to be there. It’s their only shot. We’re both locked in by the geography of the site.”

  “Go on.”

  “I wait, I wait, I smoke
a couple of cigarettes, I listen to Iron Maiden on my iPod, I watch the movie Mesa of Lost Women on my portable disc player, yadda yadda.”

  “He has a sense of humor,” said Memphis. “I like that.”

  “Humor deflects bullets, though it didn’t do Billy Skelton any good. Anyhow, the witching hour is 1915. At that point, I leave my hide, creep to the roadway that separates me from my shooting position at the end of the Thirty-seventh Street wall, check out the cop situation. I have to hop a wall. Maybe I can get across that roadway easy does it, on stealth, ’cause I’m a Ninja Turtle bastard from way back. Maybe I have to conk a cop. At any rate, I uncover, I move, and as I move into position, whammo, I’m hit, that is, by cops across the road. In ten seconds there are twenty cops there. I’m moving so fast Mick Bogier can’t risk a shot, he’s got no sight pic, or that’s the theory, at any rate. But he’s real into it, and he’s got Zemke spotting the action for him, he’s on me all the way. Anyhow, the cops wrestle me to the ground, a couple of cop cars pull up. I’m cuffed, surrounded by cops, and I’m dragged to the police car. I’m put in the back. And then I wait for the shot, head in profile through the back window. When he fires, I’m so fast, I can duck before it arrives.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Nick.

  “When I get in . . .” And he continued with Nick’s plan, chapter and verse, crossing all the t’s and dotting all the i’s and Swagger more or less blanked out, having heard it so many times already.

  “It’s a good plan, I think,” said Nick. “But then I thought it up, so I would think it’s good. Sergeant Swagger, do you have any comments?”

  “Sergeant Cruz, don’t get cute out there. You are never standing still, you are never not moving erratically. You give the motherfucker a whisper of a chance, he’ll put one right through you. And if he’s shooting a .50 or anything heavy, the body armor don’t mean a thing.”

  “I get it,” said Cruz.

  “You better get it. I’ll kick your ass if you don’t.”

  “My ass will be dead if I don’t.”

  “Don’t matter. I’ll kick it anyway.”

  Cruz just shook his head at the man’s intransigence. Once a sergeant, always a sergeant, no matter what.

  “I know you’d feel better if you had your rifle, Cruz,” Nick finally said. “But you know we can’t play it like that.”

  “Sure,” said Cruz. “I’ll play your little game, even if it sucks. Me, I’d just call in a Pred and order up a Paveway Two crater. But your game is the only game in town.”

  INFILTRATION ROUTE

  RESERVOIR ROAD TO P STREET

  GEORGETOWN

  WASHINGTON, DC

  1600 HOURS

  The van pulled to the extreme southern edge of the woodland behind the Georgetown University Hospital parking lot. It halted for just a second, and Ray slipped out, crossed a walkway, launched himself over a low brick wall, and found himself on a wooded downslope that ultimately would bring him to the intersection of P and 37th with its interesting geometry of walls, trees, open shots across the green to the library entrance, the FBI trap, and a meet with Mick Bogier on the wrong end of a rifle.

  Though encumbered by his ghillie suit and Kevlar body armor, he was unarmed, as per agreement. Through the trees ahead, he could catch glimpses of the twin Gothic spires that were the university’s contributions to the skyline. He oriented on them, followed the incline, listening intently for human sounds, reasonably sure that in this twilight his slow movement and camouflage kept him invisible to whoever would be out here in this inaccessible parcel of undeveloped slope.

  As he moved, he could not help but consider.

  The story was simple. Swagger said it came from late-arriving NIS witness accounts. Someone in the Navy’s investigative service, prodded by the FBI, had finally tracked down an elderly couple who knew Tomas and Urlinda Cruz on Subic Bay Naval Station in the late sixties and early seventies. The same investigator also found two other couples who had corroborated the story.

  The story: Tomas and Urlinda had widely lamented their childlessness, particularly now that Tomas had retired and wouldn’t be at sea anymore, and was running the Navy’s Special Services department at a salary that by Philippine standards was quite generous. He grew restive; he could play golf, go to Europe, visit with his wife’s relatives for only so long. They began to actively look into adoption.

  But after Tet, with the upheaval in Saigon, he and Urlinda disappeared for a month. When they came back, they had a three-month-old baby, and the story they told, lame as it was, was widely accepted: Urlinda had taken some fertility drugs, the two had gone to Australia for medical care, the child was born prematurely, and now they were back home. An Australian birth certificate validated the process, and so Reyes Fidencio Cruz was accepted as the natural son of Tomas and Urlinda Cruz, of such and such an address in the rather nice residential section of the vast naval installation, really a small American city in the islands.

  But State Department records had no mention of a trip to Australia. Instead, as an intrepid investigator found out, the Cruzes had gone to Saigon in the immediate aftermath of Tet. There, the inference was, they had been able to locate a black market mixed-race white-Asian baby for sale. They asked no questions, and even if they had, there would have been no answers. Presumably the aftermath of a major battle with massive civilian casualties would produce a bumper crop of babies for sale. The birth certificate, its fraudulence easily penetrated by the NIS investigators, must have been part of the deal, and in those days, who really cared? The Cruzes were happy, and the boy Ray grew up smart and lithe and quick, taking instantly to his dual heritage of American and Filipino, perhaps representing the best of both countries.

  And that was the story Ray himself believed in until the man who called himself Ray’s biological father told him another.

  According to Swagger, he was back in country on combat tour number two. Already a superstar marine NCO with one spectacular tour behind him, he had returned as a loaner to the Central Intelligence Agency’s SOG operation, the OSS of Vietnam, as it were, staffed by the best and the brightest and the bravest American NCOs and junior officers, most from Special Forces, some from the marines, some from the SEALs. Swagger made it sound like a KP detail, scrubbing pots away into the night. But Ray knew that SOG operators were incredibly brave men; they were the commando elite, going on long missions into Laos; they ambushed supply trains, they dared the VC to come out and fight; they did their share and much more. But on one mission, Sergeant Swagger had been wounded, and sent to Saigon for recuperation.

  There he met and fell in love with one Tien Dang, the eldest daughter of Colonel Nguyen Thanh Dang, of the 13th Airborne Rangers, ARVN. It wasn’t your wartime hayroll at all. He met her parents, he explained his prospects, he formally proposed and married her. He went to great lengths to arrange a visa so she could accompany him to the States when his tour was over; but the paperwork proved difficult, so he extended his tour and made arrangements for her to give birth in the naval hospital.

  It all fell apart at Tet. Swagger was in Laos, leading what was called a hatchet platoon, whose mission was to serve as a blocking force into which other units would drive main force VC and North Vietnamese formations for heavy engagement. It was dangerous, productive work, and many believed that SOG showed how the war should have been fought and how it could have been won. But Swagger wasn’t able to get back to Saigon for a month and when he did, the Dang neighborhood had been occupied by VC regulars and bombed out. Few survivors. No records. He never knew if she had the child or not before the war came and crushed everything.

  The rest was unsaid, reconstructed by Ray as he slid through the darkening woods on his way to the wall at P. He inferred that Swagger lost his wife and child in Vietnam, and tried to imagine the anger and the bitterness and the sense of loss it would create. And maybe that’s why he’d trained so hard to come back as a sniper and why he pushed himself so hard up in Indian country, and why he made war up
on the enemy like few in the whole decade’s doomed venture; and maybe that explained the twenty years of drunken, bitter solitude that followed before the man reinvented himself and somehow, some way, found a path back into the world, DEROS at last.

  Swagger had insisted on a DNA test, but knew it to be so: he said, in certain lights, with a certain hard set of his features as viewed from a certain angle, Ray looked so much like his own father, Earl, it was a little startling. The way he carried his head, his hands, the way he squinted when he thought, his refusal to show anger, excitement, elation, anything at all with anything other than a dry chuckle and a wisecrack. All Earl, as Earl as any man could be, far more Earl than Bob.

  Fine for him, Ray thought. But what about me? Who am I? Am I American, Bob’s son, Earl’s grandson, am I Filipino, Tomas’s son, or am I, all of a sudden, Vietnamese?

  Then he realized who he was: he was, taking after his father, sniper all the way through.

  UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

  P STREET, JUST ABOVE WISCONSIN

  GEORGETOWN

  WASHINGTON, DC

  2030 HOURS

  They’d seen a movie. It sucked. They went to a massage parlor. It sucked. They had a nice dinner. It sucked. They’d taken a cab back to Georgetown. It sucked. They were nervous. It sucked. Now, crouched in the darkened car on the quiet street, two blocks east of the police barricade that cut off P as it headed to the bend in the road that turned it to 37th, they pulled on body armor over black tactical pants and shirts. They pulled on watch caps tight, covering the ears.

  “Almost fucking done,” said Tony Z.

  “Z, listen up. If I’m hit, don’t do anything stupid like coming back for me, or hanging around to give cover fire. Once we put this asshole down, it’s ejection time and if you have to go one way while I go another, that’s fine. If you make it and I don’t, that’s fine. We’ll link in Miami.”