Dead Zero (7 page)

“I would say somewhere between zero and negative two thousand.”

“That is not pleasing to me.”

“Sir, I will take a Humvee, with your permission, and personally make the request.”

“Tell them if they don’t, I’ll call in an artillery strike on their operations bunker.”

“Sir, I don’t think they’ve got a sense of humor. These people take themselves very seriously. But I do know a guy. In person, maybe I can get something set up. I know if we go routine channels through
radio request, some Army dental hygiene unit will be in an ambush somewhere up-country and they’ll get all the drone action.”

“Then you do that, S-Two. You do that and get me my picture show.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Good. Now everybody get some sleep. And pray for Ray if you’re religious. And if you’re not religious, pray for Ray. That’s an order.”

ROOF OF ABDUL THE BUTCHER’S

GUIZAR STREET

TANBOOR NEIGHBORHOOD

QALAT

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0700 HOURS

Bogier felt a little less edgy. He’d fucked two houris in a house of ill repute in the district, and at least had his rod problems quieted for a bit. He’d taken two dexes and a Chinese red tiger and his mind was racy with energy. All his boys had gotten a little shut-eye, and the two Izzies seemed in good spirits, and not likely to cut his throat while he slept. Now he had to call in, see what was going to happen. Maybe they could all go home. That would be the best result.

He got out the Thuraya, activated it, pressed the button, and waited.

In time Mr. MacGyver picked up.

“Did you have a good time at the whorehouse?” he asked.

“We all needed some R and R, Mr. MacGyver. Those satellites don’t miss a trick, do they?”

“Not when you’re carrying that GPS with you. Funny, I didn’t think you were a doggie-style guy.”

“Wow, that’s some satellite.”

“Joke. Bogier, even the great MacGyver has a sense of humor. So now you’ve gone to ground less than half a mile from the compound.”

“That’s right, sir. And I’ve eyeballed the Many Pleasures Hotel. It’s the usual fucking joint. Not exactly a Holiday Inn. Ugh, negative stars in Frommer’s.”

“I don’t need to know the details. Here’s the play. Get one of your Izzies into the place tomorrow morning or afternoon. He’s got to get to the roof somehow, and plant that GPS. We need a satellite lock-on to watch and see what goes down.”

“Is that where the marine is shooting from?”

“Bogier, if I don’t tell you something, it’s because I don’t want you to know it. So no questions, that’s still the deal.”

“Got it. Sorry. But it’s the only site with enough elevation to get a shot into the compound.”

“You’re a genius, Bogier. No flies on you. Let’s get back to tomorrow, shall we? After you plant that GPS, I want you to surveil. You set up all around. You cover each entrance. There can’t be that many.”

“No, sir.”

“You make sure the marine has entered the building.”

“Suppose he’s there already?”

“We don’t think he’ll take the chance. That’s our best thinking. He’s suspicious now, but he doesn’t know anything. So why put himself there with that big rifle and wait? It’ll make more sense to him to slide in late, check into a room, and cut his exposure to the minimum. Plus he’s got to buy some rope tomorrow, because he doesn’t want to come off that roof by stairway or an elevator built in 1891. He’ll want to get down fast, and rappelling is the only way, and it’s clearly within his skill set.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re looking for a man with a rifle under his robes. You think he’s hit? So wouldn’t he be moving tentatively?”

“Yes, sir, and if a .50 grazed him, he’s purple from shoulder to ankle. He’ll be moving
very
tentatively. Would it be easier to tell the police an assassination attempt—”

“No. Because they will surround the hotel crudely and he will go away. Then he will return to his HQ and make a formal report on everything that has happened and questions we don’t want to be raised may well be raised. No, we want him in that hotel.”

“And we take him on the roof?”

“No. You make certain he’s in the hotel, then you call me with the definite, then, if I were you, I’d take cover.”

MANY PLEASURES HOTEL

QALAT

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1850 HOURS

Soon came the call to evening prayers. Soon the sun set. Soon tea would be drunk, food would be eaten, life in all its manifold pleasures would be experienced by the rich and all its manifold pains by the poor. The city would go silent.

In that falling dusk, the man known as the Beheader would leave his large house and walk to his jet black armored Humvee for a fuck with a woman without a voice. He would not make it. A bullet the size of a pencil tip would enter his body at well over 2,300 feet per second from a cartridge of the equivalent of an American .30-06 and would blow out several of his blood-bearing organs, most notably his heart. He would be dead before he fractured his expensive Dallas cosmetic-dentistry whitened and straightened teeth on the cobblestones.

Or something like that.

Ray looked up and down the street. No sign of any police or militia presence. An orange personnel carrier, bearing the emblem of the Royal Dutch Marines, had ground down the street once at around two, but since then all was normal, as lorries, bikes, scooters, to say nothing of hundreds of merchants and citizens and donkeys, even the occasional fleet of goats, filled the busy street that housed the hotel, directly across from the gated compound of Ibrahim Zarzi, warlord, politician, and best-dressed man of 1934.

His leg pain was muted somewhat by a morning of rest in a fleabag near the railway station, and a couple of kabobs for nourishment from a street-side vendor outside and half a bottle of aspirin from what passed as a “drugstore” in Afghanistan. He could have had keefe or bennies or dex or red who’s-your-mamas? or rolling chocolate death or whatever,
but stayed with the regular stuff. He’d also had about a gallon of the sugary tea.

Now, amid the hundreds, virtually indiscernible from them, he hobbled down the street, face down, his bad leg aching, the rifle suspended by the strap around his shoulder and threaded down his pants leg. It might print if he wore it across his back, or someone in a crowd might jostle against him and feel the presence of steel. It dangled, the butt of its stock directly in the armpit, the long skeleton of wooden stock extending its length ridiculously, the receiver group against his hip, the fore end and barrel down the side of his leg. He’d taped the magazine under the wooden fore grip, to keep the thickness of the thing, with its Chinese scope clamped up on top in some sort of steel frame, at a minimum. It meant that when he came to shoot, he’d have to take a second to rip the mag from its bonds of tape, quickly peel any filaments of tape away, slam it into the mag well, then pull and release the bolt as he rose and put himself in the offhand shooting position.

He didn’t need to tell himself, but he always did anyway, a kind of mantra: breathe, relax, let sight settle, focus on crosshairs not target, press not pull, follow through, pin trigger. He’d done it a hundred thousand times.

He entered the hotel. It was ancient, somewhat Anglified in its shabby dignity and brass fixtures, and in pre-Soviet invasion days had been a haven for the hippies who came to rural Afghanistan to enjoy the local crops unmonitored by police agencies. The Reds had turned it into a troop barracks, and when the Taliban kicked them out it had languished, as under those stern boys not a lot of traveling had been done in the country. Since, er, “liberation,” it had enjoyed substantially more prosperity, and now and then a particularly adventurous journalist or TV crew would stay there, in for an interview with the Beheader, who sometimes kept his appointments and sometimes didn’t.

Ray slid up to a desk and was greeted by the suspicious eyes of a clerk and he abated that suspicion by sliding over a 250-rupee note and his beautifully forged Afghan identity card, which had him down as Farzan Babur.

No words were necessary, nor were signatures. The fellow took the note and returned thirty-five rupees in change, and pushed over a key, which wore a brass tag with the number 232 on it. Ray bowed humbly, took the key and the dough, and sloughed to the stairway.

“Got him,” said Tony Z-for-Zemke, a forces washout who’d done nine years for Graywolf Security before being cashiered out on the same surrendering-pilgrim gig that had gotten Bogier fired. Since there were no radios, Tony Z had come running across the street, dodging bikes and donkeys. “Mick, I got him. Definite. A ‘limp,’ some kind of awkward thing under his robes if you looked. Clearly had a load on under all the Izzie shit he was wearing.”

“See his face? White guy, marine?”

“Scruffy black beard, face held low, maybe a little browner than you’d expect. Maybe he’s Asian or Mexican or some weird shit like that. You know, diversity’s the thing these days. Not a native, his skin wasn’t rough enough.”

“Okay,” said Mick, “get the other guys and fall back to that cafe. I’ll make the call.”

Mick slipped back, tried to find some privacy on the busy roadway, couldn’t, slipped into a street that led nowhere except to stalls of Afghan wares—the kind of crap these people sold—felt good when one of his Izzies came up to offer screening, and got the phone out, unlimbered the antenna.

“Yes, yes?” MacGyver demanded.

“We got him.”

“You’re positive?”

“You didn’t give us a pic. What I have is a non-Afghani in tribal garb and turban with apparently a bad leg heading into the hotel, just as predicted. He had some kind of shit under his robes, obviously the rifle. My guy couldn’t get a close-up look-see, but all the indicators are there.”

“A white man? American white?”

“Ahhh—” Mick’s doubts came out.

“Well?”

“My guy said maybe he was a bit brown. Could have been Hispanic or maybe even Asian. He—”

“Bingo,” said Mr. MacGyver. “Now get undercover.”

2ND RECON BATTALION HQ

FOB WINCHESTER

S-2 BUNKER

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1904 Hours

Heeere’s Johnny,” said Exec.

“I am goddamned,” said Colonel Laidlaw. “I am getting that sergeant a medal.”

The cruciform locator on the screen centered on downtown Qalat, exactly at the site—authenticated breathlessly from maps by a triumphant S-2 who’d gotten Agency coop by calling in every favor he was owed, plus offering his firstborn if necessary to three separate officers—of the Many Pleasures Hotel across from the Beheader’s complex, as seen from a discreetly cruising Predator drone a few thousand feet overhead. Ray’s GPS was talking to its friends in the sky and by magical technical shit beyond the imagination of the colonel the chatter was being intercepted and used to pinpoint the GPS’s location, and the camera in the Predator laid out everything perfectly, despite the readouts all over the screen, the other small screens from other feeds, the gray-green-black color scheme.

They could see the walled complex, the big main house, the garages out back; they could see the incandescent scuttle of ants that were men, the glow of cooking fires on the property, a silver ribbon where a stream ran through it. Outside the walls, a human glowworm passed to and fro, this being the blur of pedestrian traffic. The white square roofs of the odd vehicles caught in this river of humanity showed clearly. It was the best movie Colonel Laidlaw had ever seen. He watched the hotel, slightly obscured under the cruciform of the locked-on locator, and saw the street scene from his memory, as on two occasions earlier on the tour he’d been a guest of the Beheader.

“Here comes the Humvee,” said S-2.

Indeed from one of the smaller buildings in Zarzi’s complex, the square roof of the armored vehicle scuttled forward, scooted between buildings, and came to rest in the driveway along one wall, perhaps thirty yards from the main building. The glowing signatures of underlings scurried this way and that. They seemed to form a security cordon right at the house itself, and it didn’t take long for the door to open—so sharp was the long-range image that the narrow slice of the door, viewed from above, was clearly resolved—and a figure stepped out.

Laidlaw remembered him: he was a tall, stately man, handsome, always well dressed and exquisitely groomed, who favored Savile Row suits under beautiful lavender pashminas and an elegant if discreet fez of some kind of highly glossy material, possibly silk or velvet, neatly encompassing his silver-gray hair. His vanity was watches. Patek Philippe, Rolex, Fortis, Breitling, always something beautiful and complex. He had deep brown, extremely empathetic eyes.

“Get ready to die, motherfucker,” said Exec.

All eyes switched to Ray’s site on the roof, 230 yards out, revealed by the cruciform.

At that moment, so hot it burned their eyes, so fast it had to be a phenomenon of explosive energy, a smear of white ruptured and radiated outward, sending waves of electronic disturbance across the screen and in another second the image itself wobbled crazily, as if a giant wave had reached and smashed into the light unmanned aircraft, disturbing its equipoise and threatening its survival.

“S-Two, what the fuck was that?”

“Detonation,” said S-2.

PART TWO