Dead Zero

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

I, Sniper

Night of Thunder

The 47th Samurai

American Gunfight (with John Bainbridge Jr.)

Havana

Pale Horse Coming

Hot Springs

Time to Hunt

Black Light

Dirty White Boys

Point of Impact

Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Line of Movie Criticism

Target

The Day Before Midnight

The Spanish Gambit (Tapestry of Spies)

The Second Saladin

The Master Sniper

Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Stephen Hunter

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition December 2010

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or
[email protected]
.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.
For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at
www.simonspeakers.com
.

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunter, Stephen.

Dead zero : a novel / by Stephen Hunter.

p. cm.

1. Swagger, Bob Lee (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Snipers—Fiction.
3. Marines—Fiction. 4. Afghan War, 2001—Fiction. I. Title

PS3558.U494D43 2010

813'.6—dc22

2010046773

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3865-6

ISBN: 978-1-4391-4993-5 (ebook)

For
Nick Ziolkowski
1982–2004
KIA, Iraq
“The Sniper from Boys Latin”

If there is any glory in war,
let it rest on a young man such as this.

“Surely, God has cursed the disbelievers
And has prepared for them a Flaming Fire
Where they will abide forever.”

—Koran 72:23

1. Pull pin. Hold unit upright.
2. Aim at base of fire. Stand back.
3. Press trigger. Sweep side to side.

—
COMMON FIRE EXTINGUISHER
INSTRUCTIONS

PART ONE

WHISKEY 2-2

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0934 HOURS

Consciousness came and went; the pain was constant. It was the day after the ambush. The flesh wound in Cruz’s right thigh still oozed blood and the entire right side of his body wore a purple-yellow smear of bruise. It hurt so bad he could hardly negotiate the raw landscape that strobed in and out of focus all around him in the harsh sunlight. But Ray Cruz, a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, was one of those rare men with a personality of hard metal—unmalleable, impenetrable, unstoppable. Back at battalion, he was called the Cruise Missile. Once fired, he kept moving until he hit the target. Since 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion was a Special Forces–rated unit, it got all the cool jobs, and he was the go-to guy on patrol security, Agency snatch-and-grabs and various countersniper and IED problems. He ran Sniper Platoon. He was always there, in the shadows on the ridge line or the village roof—sometimes spottered up, sometimes not, with his SR-25, a beast of a .308 semiauto with a yard of optics up top—paying out survival for his people at long range in packages that weighed 175 grains apiece. He never missed, he never counted or cared about the kills.

Yet now, no one would confuse him for what he was. He was dressed in the loose-fitting, easy-flowing tribal garments of the Pashtun, the people of the mountains. He looked like Lawrence of Afghanistan. His brown face was crusty with beard and filth, his lips cracked. He wore sandals and a burnoose, obscuring his visage, and not one item of government-issue clothing. He was also among goats.

There were fourteen of them left. It is fine to love animals until you try to herd goats. The goats weren’t into team spirit. They free-ranged, somewhat raggedly, depending on need or whim, and Cruz was able to
keep them moving roughly forward by constant screaming and beating with his staff. And when he swatted at them with the staff, the weight went to his damaged leg and a new blade of pain thrust up into his guts. They shat everywhere, without apparent effort or awareness. They attracted flies in clouds. They smelled of shit and blood and dust and piss. They babbled constantly, not so much a classic
bah-bah-bah
but more of a whiney singsong bleating, like kids on a long bus ride. He hated them. He wanted to kill them with the rifle under his robes, eat them, and go home. But he had a goddamned job to do and he could not make himself quit on that job. It wasn’t will or habit, it certainly wasn’t out of any notion of the heroic or Semper Fi or memories of Iwo and Chosin and Belleau Wood. It was just that his mind wasn’t organized in such a way as to consider alternatives.

The rifle shifted uncomfortably under his swirl of robes. It was a little lighter than the SR-25, a Russian-designed, Chinese-manufactured thing called a Dragunov SVD, with a skeletal wooden stock and a longish barrel, looking a little like an AK-47 stretched in a medieval torture machine. A battlefield pickup from some long-forgotten firefight that its owner came out of second-place winner, its strap bit into his shoulder and its rough surfaces gouged him as it slipped this way or that. It was awkward, a heavy piece of crudely machined parts, mostly metal, with knobs, bolts, buttons, ledges, and all sorts of things sticking out of it. It represented the Russian school of ergonomics that was “Fuck you, end user.” A Chinese 4× sight had been clamped on top with a strange range finder—it looked like a cartoon of a ski-jump slope—as part of the reticle information that only someone from an East-bloc culture could dream up. He hated it. Yet he was lucky to have it. And one magazine of ten 7.62 × 54 sniper-grade Chinese cartridges.

It was all he had left. He’d started with a spotter, an ample supply of food and water, and no bullet having blown six ounces of flesh off his leg. The trek the long way around to Qalat would only be three days in. After the shot, maybe a day of escape and evasion. Then his spotter would put in the call, and a Night Stalker would helo them out and they’d be back at FOB Winchester in time for beer and steak. And the
Beheader, as Ibrahim Zarzi, warlord of the southeastern Pashtun tribes, opium merchant, prince, spy, charmer, betrayer, Taliban sympathizer, and Al-Qaeda liaison was known, would be sucking poppy from the root end first.

But it didn’t happen that way. Reality seldom follows mission-op outlines.

“Why send men, Major?” Ray had asked the battalion intelligence officer, the S-2, in the S-2 bunker, to an audience of the CO, the exec, and the Sniper Platoon lieutenant. “Can’t our Agency friends send a missile? Isn’t that what they do? Have some zen master pinball kid sitting in a trailer in Vegas flying a joystick take him out with a Hellfire?”

“Ray, I shouldn’t tell you this,” Colonel Laidlaw said, “but it’s your ass on the line, so you have a right to know. The Administration has tightened up on the missile hits. Too much collateral. The UN squawking. This guy’s complex is in heavy urban. You go all Hellfire on his ass, yes, you probably send him to his God. But you send two hundred other rug weavers along with him and you’ve got the
New York Times
violin section in full blast. These folks don’t like that.”