Dead Zero

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.”

“Okay, sir. I can take him. I’m just worried about the E and E from Qalat. I want to get my guy out and also my own ass. Can we have Warthogs standing by to cowboy up the place if it gets tight? We won’t have enough firepower to shoot our way out of anything.”

“I can get you Apaches ASAP. Our Apaches. I don’t want to lay on Air Force Warthogs because I’ve got to go through too many chains of command and too many people have to sign off on it. It’s not all that secure.”

The marines liked the Air Force guys because they thought the A-10 gun tubs were so well armored the pilots had the confidence to get down to marine level before they started blowing shit up and killing people. They thought their own pilots lacked the killer instinct-and the armor-for nose-in-the-dirt flying. They hung far off, launched Hellfires, then went home and slept between clean sheets after martinis in the officers’ club. Some even had girlfriends, it was rumored.

So: no Hogs, maybe Apaches. That was it and it never occurred to Ray to come up with a turndown. If he didn’t do it, somebody else would, and whoever that somebody was, he wouldn’t be as good as Ray.

It had to be done. The Beheader-the nickname came because it was rumored he was the mastermind behind a kidnapped journalist who’d suffered that fate when he’d gone off on his own in Qalat to get the Taliban side of the story-was an eternal problem for marines in the southeastern operating area. When IEDs went off as command vehicles passed in resupply convoys, it was because the Beheader’s spies had infiltrated and knew how to ID the one Humvee out of twenty-five that carried brass. When patrols were ambushed, and major ops had to be launched to get them out of the trouble they’d gotten into, and the shooters had mysteriously vanished into nothingness, it was suspected they had simply ducked into the off-limits Zarzi compound. When a sniper dinged a CIA operations officer, when a mortar shell or an RPG detonated with far too much accuracy to be a random shot, when an Afghan liaison officer was found with his throat cut, all the signs pointed to the Beheader, who was in all other respects a wonderful man; a charmer; a handsome, well-educated fellow (Oxford, University of Iowa) with impeccable table manners who, when he allowed Americans, including high-ranking marine officers, into his home, boldly violated Islamic taboo by designating a liquor room, where a superb bartender made any drink you could imagine served under a little paper umbrella.

“I want this guy dead’r ’n shit,” said the colonel. “I had to fight command and the Agency to get a kill authorized. Ray, I’d love to push the button and watch the computer kids whack him, but it’s not going to happen. You’ve got to walk in, drop him with a rifle shot, and walk out.”

“Got it,” said Ray.

The shooting site had to be the roof of the Many Pleasures Hotel, across the street from the Beheader’s compound. Once a week, the man was predictable. At twilight on Tuesday-it was always Tuesday-he left the compound by armored Humvee and went into the Houri district, where he visited a nice young prostitute named Mindi, with eyes like almonds, hair the color of night, and ways and means beyond the imagination. And why didn’t he just move her in? Well, concubine politics. He had three wives and twenty-one kids, and already wives number one and three hated each other; his second concubine was plotting against his first concubine; all the women were lobbying incessantly for a trip to Beverly Hills; and what little domestic tranquility that could be had would be shattered by adding Mindi to the mix. Thus it was felt that not only her sexual skills but the fact that she was deaf and dumb gave the Great Man a peace and serenity unavailable in his own hectic home.

In any event, Tuesday at twilight, he predictably strode from his house to the vehicle, a distance of some ten yards. It was then and only then that he was vulnerable to a shot. Shooting suppressed from a little over 200 yards out, with just enough angle to clear the wall but still access the target, Ray could easily put a Chinese sniper bullet into the Beheader in his five-second window of opportunity. Chaos would ensue, and the militiamen in the bodyguard squad would have no idea where the shot had come from and would certainly begin firing wildly, driving people to cover. Ray and his spotter would fall back from the Many Pleasures Hotel, rappelling off the roof and making their way into the crowded Houri district, just a few blocks away, where they would go to ground. They’d just be two more faceless, bearded Izzies in a city full to bursting with them. The next night, they’d exfiltrate the city, make it to a certain hill about five miles to the south, and wait for the Night Stalker to come pick them up.

“It sounds easy,” said S-2. “It won’t be.”

On the first day, he and Skelton had passed a couple of Taliban patrols on the high track but attracted no interest from those wary fighters, whose gimlet eyes were used to piercing the distance for the sand-and-spinach digital camo of marine war fighters. The Tallys saw goatherders all the time, and if these two were a little more raggedy ass than most they saw, it didn’t register. They moved at goat pace, without urgency, without apparent direction, letting the wiry little animals eat, shit, and fuck as their goat brains saw fit, but generally moseying in the direction of the big market at Qalat where their thirty-five treasures could be sold for slaughter.

As part of their security procedure, Whiskey 2-2 avoided villages, slept without campfires, ate rice balls and unleavened sheaves of dry bread, and wiped their hands on their pants and shat without toilet paper.

“It’s just like the Sigma Chi house,” said Lance Corporal Skelton as they came to the top of a rise and found a tricky path down the other side.

“Except you don’t jack off as much,” said Ray.

“I don’t know about you, Ray, but I don’t need to jack off much. I had a real nice time with that blond goat last night. She’s a princess.”

“Next time, keep it down. May be bad guys in the vicinity.”

“She sure does moan, doesn’t she? Boy, do I know how to please a gal or what?”

The two men laughed. Lance Corporal Skelton didn’t have a Chinese sniper rifle under his robes and vests, but he did have ten pounds of HF-90M Ultralight radio, an M4 with ACOG, ten magazines, and a case containing a Schmidt & Bender 35× spotting scope. All that shit: he moved like an old lady.

They were in high plains country, trending north. The Paki mountains rose ahead, over the unseen border, mantled in snow and sometimes fog, more tribal territory where Americans couldn’t go for fear of execution upon apprehension. The land they negotiated was rocky and hardscrabble, clotted with waxy, tough, gray vegetation. Rocks lay everywhere, and each hill revealed a new landscape of secret inclines and defilades, and it was all brown-gray, coated with dust or grit. They were right on the border between the rising plains and the actual foothills, and out here it was desolate. Except of course they knew they were being watched and always assumed some Taliban was gazing their way through the scope of a Dragunov or a nice pair of Russian binoculars. So no American-jock crap as young athletic fellows are wont to do, no air jump shots or long, deep fantasy passes; no scooping up the hot grounder and firing to first. No middle fingers, no mock-comic “Fuck yous,” no hyperattention to hygiene, no acknowledgment that such things as germs existed or that Allah was less than supreme. Prayer mats, five times a day on the knees to Mecca; you never knew who was watching.

And, of course, somewhere up above lurked either a satellite or more likely a Predator drone configured for recon and riding the breezes back and forth behind a tiny turbocharged engine, so they were probably on monitors in living color in every intelligence agency in the free world. It was like being on Jay Leno, except for the Afghanistan part. So another sniper discipline was: don’t look up. Don’t look at the sky, as if to acknowledge that somebody was up there to watch over them.

2ND RECON BATTALION HQ

FOB WINCHESTER

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1556 HOURS

A FEW DAYS EARLIER

I didn’t think it would take all this time,” said the colonel.

“Sir,” said his exec, “that’s rough land. That’s really rough land. And the goats. They seem to be having trouble with the goats. Maybe the goats were a mistake.”

“S-Two, are they on schedule?”

“More or less,” said the intelligence officer. “That goat market has been there for three thousand years and I don’t think it’s going anywhere anytime soon.”

The colonel rolled his eyes to his exec. What was it with intelligence people? They always had a little bit of the I-wouldn’t-be-in-intelligence-if-I-weren’t-intelligent deal going on. This one, even worse, was an Annapolis grad and convinced he was on a straight run to become the next commandant.

“It’s not the market, S-Two. It’s the Tuesday shot. If they miss that, they have to hang out there in goat city undercover for another full week. They’ll make a mistake and get nabbed and the Beheader will get to practice his specialty.”

“Yes, sir,” said S-2, “I only meant-”

“I know, S-Two. I’m just ragging on you because if I don’t pick on somebody I’ll have an anxiety attack.”

Colonel Laidlaw stood in the S-2 bunker behind the base’s many miles of concertina wire and sandbags. He had three patrols out, and word was brewing that the whole battalion was up for a major assault sometime in the next month and he had too many men down with malaria, too many in psych wards, and too many on leave. Battalion strength was about 60 percent, and recon battalions were smaller than rifle battalions to begin with. Nothing worked, one of his officers was showing disturbing signs of depression and replacing him would be a political nightmare, the intel that came through the Agency was always late and bad, and now he had two of his best guys way, way out on a limb. In other words, things were just about normal for combat operations.

He lit up what felt like cigarette number 315. It tasted just as shitty as cigs 233 through 314. He looked at what was before him on the monitor screen. It was Whiskey 2-2, from an altitude of about 2,000 feet, except that altitude was a magnification. Actually the bird was close to 22 miles up in the sky, rotating in a slow low-earth orbit, under the control of the geniuses at Langley, and it had cameras with lenses capable of resolutions nearly unbelievable only a few years before. They could probably tell if the Beheader had his eggs over easy or poached, if they wanted.

What Laidlaw and his staff saw from 0-degree angle on high and through the drifting smoke and the hum of tiny jihadi insects that buzzed and bit and were otherwise invisible, was the dark ripple, which was the crest of a ridge, running diagonally across the screen. On it a tiny, almost antlike movement that signified ambulatory life was held under the white, glowing cruciform of a center-lens indicator. A whole lot of meaningless numbers-Laidlaw wasn’t good on tech stuff-ran across the border, the top, and the bottom of the image, and it took some getting used to. A compass orienter floated about the screen, establishing direction. With practice, you adjusted to the stylizations of the system, the 0-degree foreshortening, the brown-to-black-to-gray color scheme, the scuts of dust that blew this way and that, all the interfering digital reads and indicators, and learned to determine the difference between the two marines and the longer, squirmier forms of the goats, spilling this way and that.

“How much longer?” asked the colonel, meaning how long before the satellite continued its way around the earth and Whiskey 2-2 passed from view for another twenty-four.

“Only about ten minutes, sir,” S-2 said. “Then they go bye-bye.”

They knew that these semiabstract forms against the opacity of the large monitor were Whiskey 2-2 and not some group of actual goatherders by virtue of the cruciform that kept the camera nailed. It signified the presence of a GPS chip and a miniaturized transmitter in the grip of Cruz’s SVD. The satellites told the chip where it was and the transmitter told the world what the satellite told the chip. This simplified the problematic issue of target acquisition and identification and meant that when the satellite was in range, it could eyeball the guys the whole way. But Whiskey 2-2 didn’t know this and both S-2 and Colonel Laidlaw felt a little uneasy about it. It was, in effect, spying on their own men without permission, as if an issue of trust was involved. The colonel justified it by telling himself it was necessary in the case of an emergency evac, if Lance Corporal Skelton, hurt or killed, couldn’t get to his radio and sing out coordinates. They could call in Air Force Warthogs and ventilate the area with frags and 30-millimeter while guiding in marine aviation for the extract if Whiskey found itself in a firefight.

“Who’s that?” someone said.

“Hmm,” said S-2.

“Where, what, info please,” said Colonel Laidlaw.

“Sir, ahead of them on the same axis, on the hilltop a little back, I’m guessing maybe a half mile out to the west, that is, to the right.”

To spare the colonel the agony of translating the directions into an actual location on the gray wilderness of the monitor, S-2 ran up to the screen and touched what the exec had seen first. No goats, that’s for sure. No, it was a group of guys, slightly whiter against the dull sage of landform, only they were lengthier than goats and not moving, which meant they were in the prone. If they were facing in the right direction, they were on line to intercept 2-2’s line of route.

“Taliban?”

“Probably.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Shouldn’t be. They ran into Taliban patrols twice yesterday and once earlier today. To the Tals, they just look like goatherders.”

“Yeah, but those guys were on their feet, standing, eyeballing, moving in their own direction. These guys are setting up. This could be an intercept.”

The marine officers continued to watch the monitor as the drama played out in real time before them. Laidlaw lit another cigarette. S-2 didn’t say anything snarky. Exec didn’t suck up. Sniper Platoon leader, twenty-two, refused to speak. It just happened.

The group ahead of 2-2 seemed to squirm, then settle. Damn, why hadn’t the staff seen them come in; maybe their direction of origin would have been an indicator.

“How much time?” asked Colonel Laidlaw.

“Two minutes.”

“Sir, I can reach Whiskey on the HF-90M. Give ’em a heads-up.” That was exec.

“Sir, all due respect, but if you do that, Skelton has to hunker down, peel off his caftan, unstrap the radio, and talk into the phone,” said S-2. “All those are tells. If these guys are bad or there are some other bad actors, say in caves, we’re not picking up on, that gives Two-Two away for sure. The mission goes down. They get whacked for sure, or end up in a running gunfight.”

“Shit,” said the colonel.

“I don’t like the orientation. Those guys are prone, they’re setting up to shoot. Could the Agency have a team in there?” said Exec.

“I got negative from liaison on that not an hour ago,” said S-2. “This is the only area op.”

“Let it play out,” said the colonel, “goddamnit.”

They watched. The two small forces drew inexorably together, the raggedy fleet of goats spilling across the landscape on the ancient track in the hills, and the six possible ambushers set up orthodox Camp Lejeune-style for a shoot, legs neatly splayed, maybe one up on his knees working binocs, the others bending into scopes.

“I don’t like this one fucking bit,” said the colonel. “Where’s our goddamned Hellfire when we need it. I’d like to punch those bastards out, whoever they are.”

“They’re probably birdwatchers from the National Geographic channel,” said S-2. “Or maybe missionaries from the World Orphan Relief League. Or-”

But the question was answered. Two-two had reached its point of maximum closure with the unknown force on the hilltop and lay exposed to them.

From twenty-two miles up, the satellite watched with God’s indifference as it picked up the spurting warp-speed blurs of muzzle flashes from the prone team, signifying high-rate-of-fire weapons.

“Ambush,” said the colonel.

WHISKEY 2-2

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1605 HOURS

It was raining goats. They flew through the air amid blasts of earth debris, some whole and bleating, some sundered and spraying blood, some atomized. The weather had become 100 percent chance of goat-red mist, gobbets of blasted flesh, unraveling intestines, the unself-conscious screams of animals suddenly sentient to the prospect of their own extinction.

Then Skelton launched. He pinwheeled fifteen feet through the air, his face a study in wonder, spinning, legs and arms extended, defying gravity as he sailed.

Ray lurched in that moment, saving his own life, for surely the gunner was shooting right to left, semiauto, had missed twice, hitting goat, the huge.50-caliber detonations unleashing waves of energy that flipped other goats airward and splattered them, then scoring a hard one that took Skelton solid, and then pivoted the huge weapon on the bipod another half a millimeter to plant one in Ray. But aiming for center mass, he was behind Ray on the action curve, and time in flight from half a mile out didn’t help and the express train hit Ray on the outer surface of the right thigh. It hit no bones, broke nothing full of coursing fluids, and delivered nothing but energy.

Ray flew. He left the earth behind. He’d seen-and hit-enough guys with a.50 to know what the phenomenon looked like. Usually the delivered energy is so high-in the 5,000-foot-pound range-that a frail sack of blood and struts like a human being will flip through the air, sometimes as far as 30 feet, limbs askew, and land in a pile of wreckage. So it was with Ray, and he seemed to be in midair for a long while, and had a full measure of time to miss his mother and father, who had given him exactly what he wanted and needed, love and support and belief, and as well to miss the Marine Corps, which took over when his parents were called away, and which had given him so many opportunities to do that at which he excelled, and then he hit the ground in a stir of dust and stones and sprigs of leaf and twig. He spat out a missile of phlegm and grit, thanked God he hadn’t landed on his back where such an impact would have driven the alien SVD into his flesh, possibly breaking some ribs and bruising his spine.

The surviving goats bleated pitifully, racing this way and that in utter panic, not even stopping to shit.

“Oh, God, Ray,” he heard Skelton scream, “I am hit so bad, oh, Ray, he killed me.”

“Stay there,” he yelled back, “I’ll get to you.”

“No, Ray, get the fuck outta Dodge. Fuck, he blew a hole clear through my guts and I can’t move, Ray, go, go, go.”

Another burst of.50s lit up the ridge line, delivering more theater of destruction. Goats flew, dust detonated from the earth, angry chips of stone and metal sang through the air. Ray was just a bit out of the beaten zone, as he’d been deposited by the whimsy of physics off the crest line, maybe a little below it, while poor Skelton was exposed for a second delivery.

Ray squirmed left, pushed himself down, and wished he could get a good visual on his pard. If the boy was dead, no point in hanging around. If he was wounded… well, that was a different story, as he had his rifle and if he played it cool and those motherfuckers came to examine their kill, he could take a bunch of them down before they closed. Ray low-crawled a few feet back up, slipped behind the carcass of a dead animal and peered over the top. Neither part of Skelton appeared to be alive.

Cocksuckers, he thought, and swore there’d come a time when he put the dead zero on these operators and watch them sag to stillness under the request of his.308 hollow points.

But that would be in some distant future. For now, escape was the only sane possibility, and he slipped backward, well below the line of the crest, took a brief look around, and decided to head toward an arroyo a few hundred yards away that itself led to more complex geological structures. He knew if he hastened, he’d leave signs and these Pashtun mountain fighters were wicked on tracking. So he made an effort to run on an indirect route to his goal, also moving from stone to stone, from low bush to low bush for at least the first hundred or so yards, figuring that by the time they got there, they’d have to stop, hunt for tracks, and it would take them hours to discover his true line, maybe not by dark, which would in turn buy him a night’s worth of time to put distance between himself and them.

But where would he go? He could peel around and head back to the FOB. Then what had Skelton died for? Meaningless death seemed so cruel to Ray. If you get whacked to do something, to take an objective, to get somebody out of a jam, that was one thing. If your death is random, just an abstract function of the physics of being at a certain place when a certain piece of lead flew through it, what have you got? You’ve got nothing.

He considered as he dashed his odd, springy, half-legged way down the crest, then doubled back to the arroyo. He had his rifle, he had a magazine loaded with 7.62 × 54 Chinese match, his leg hurt like fucking hell but didn’t seem to have suffered any structural damage, and he could get through something as negligible as pain. He had a head start on these clowns if indeed they were hunting him, and they may have been just a mob of jihadis who’d recently recovered a.50 Barrett from a wrecked Humvee and decided to amuse their savage selves by blasting some goatherders and weren’t much interested in elaborate games of pursuit.

He considered, he decided. Mission up. Finish the goddamned thing. Qalat by Monday night, then kill the motherfucker called the Beheader, then go home and cry for Billy Skelton.

2ND RECON BATTALION HQ

FOB WINCHESTER

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1555 HOURS

THE NEXT DAY

The suspense was murder. S-2’s IT set up the satellite feed with the usual contempt that ITs have for the technically illiterate, though he knew, as did the whole battalion, that Ray and Skelton had been bounced. He couldn’t keep the speed and sureness with which his fingers flew to keys out of the equation though, that special IT thing that the officers regarded as mysterious and unknowable. That was just him.

There had been no radio contact the long night through. Either Skelton’s HF-90M was junked by a slug or had fallen into a ditch or, as Marine Corps radios have a tendency to do, awarded itself an R & R in the middle of a combat operation, who knew? Commo people had been trying to reach 2-2 on the right freak, and on emergency freaks, Air Force freaks, even Afghan army freaks all night long. Not a goddamned peep.

The image came up, the gray-green-black-brown surreal reality, Zabul from space as brought to you via station W-CIA in lovely downtown Langley, Virginia, and beamed half a world away to a roomful of tired marine officers smoking too much, worrying too much, and angry too much.

The cruciform was untethered, as it always was. It seemed to move in a search pattern but it was really the television lens, aloft in the ether twenty-two miles over the Hindu Kush, that was moving. It was searching for the frequency of the GPS chip and transmitter embedded in the grip of Ray’s rifle.

It drifted, this way and that, seeming to float without a care in the world as before it the panorama of the ragged landforms of Zabul fled, mostly dust broken by rocks and ridges, except the part where the rocks and ridges were broken by dust.

“Goddamn,” said Colonel Laidlaw, halfway through Marlboro number 673. “Make it work faster, Lance Corporal.”

The lance corporal didn’t answer, not out of rudeness but because he knew the colonel’s style was to make comically infantile demands as a way of amusing everybody within earshot.

And then-

“Lock-on! Lock-on!” said the lance corporal.

Indeed, as a glowing message in the bottom quadrant of the screen made clear, the frequency hunting doohickey in outer space had located Whiskey 2-2’s signal and clenched it between its electronic jaws. The terrain that lay before it looked like-well, it looked like any other terrain in Zabul.

“Is it him?” Exec wondered. “It could be some Taliban motherfucker with a shiny new rifle.”

“Where is it, S-Two?” the colonel demanded humorlessly. “I need a location.”

“Yes, sir,” said S-2, reading the satellite coordinates and trying to relate them to the geodesic survey map he had pinned to a table. He calculated quickly. “I make him to be about seven miles east of the location of the ambush, still moving on a line to Qalat, still aiming to come in from the west.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Exec. “He’s got goats.”

It was true. Somehow, some way, the survivors of the goat massacre had managed to track Ray down amid the arroyos, switchbacks, and fissures of Zabul and had reassembled around him. Yes, that would have to be him, a slightly glowing figure at the center of the smaller but just as annoying platoon of goats, moving down a dusty trail.

“That is one tough Filipino,” said S-2.

“I believe he’s got some conquistador blood and maybe a little kamikaze DNA in him. Nothing stops the Cruise Missile,” said Ray’s section lieutenant.

“Look!” said S-2. “Is that what I think it is?”

He pointed.

Down at the bottom of the screen, slightly hidden behind a fusillade of rushing integers from a digital readout that no one in the room understood, not even the IT, six glowing figures picked their way across the landscape. They had arranged themselves in classic tactical diamond formation, with a point man and two flankers out a hundred yards in each direction. They moved, it was evident, with easy, practiced precision.

“They’re hunting him,” someone said.

“S-Two, give me a range.”

S-2 did the calc and said, “They’re within a mile. They’ve got a vector on him too. I don’t think they’re tracking. They’re moving too fast to be tracking.”

“How the fuck did they stay with him during the night?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Those fucking goats are slowing him down.”

“But if he doesn’t have the goats, then he attracts attention. He’s got to stay with the goats, and he knows it.”

“S-Two, get your Agency liaison on the horn and see if we can authorize a Hellfire into these guys.”

“I’ll try, sir, but they’re very close to the vest with the Hellfires these days.”

S-2 made the call; clearly it didn’t go well. At the frustration point, the colonel took over.

“This is Colonel Laidlaw. Who am I speaking to, please?”

“Sir, it’s McCoy.”

The colonel saw McCoy: thirty-five, redheaded, from Alabama, the ops chief’s right-hand boy, a former Delta commando.

“Look, McCoy, I’ve got a sniper way out on a limb and six bad boys moving in on him. You can see it on satellite feed yourself.”

“We’re watching it even now, Colonel. This is the Beheader mission, right?”

“That’s it. Look, I want to put a Hellfire blast-and-frag from a drone into those guys before they get much closer or before they separate too far for one strike. You’ve got a Reaper floating somewhere in the area?”

“Sir, I have to advise negative on the request. Sorry about your kid, but our directive is only to strike ID’d targets and then only with Langley clearance. I just can’t do it.”

The colonel gave the guy a few minutes of choice Marine Corps invective, but McCoy wouldn’t-couldn’t-budge and the ops chief was out in some hamlet or other reaching the hearts and minds of the Afghan people by teaching dental hygiene or constitutional democracy or something.

“Okay,” said the colonel to S-2, handing the phone back. “Keep trying. Go to 113 Wing at Ripley. Maybe we can send an Apache.”

“I’ll try, sir, but I don’t think an Apache can get there in time, and I don’t know that bringing a noisemaker like that into the area will sit well with command.”

“Goddamnit,” said the colonel and went back to watching as the pursuers closed in on the pursued.

WHISKEY 2-2

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0619 HOURS

Ray was awakened that morning by a tongue. Too bad it belonged to a goat and not a beautiful woman.

He’d run hard through the arroyos in the dark, falling several times and remembering not to curse when he hit the ground. No moon made the trip an ordeal. But he had to keep moving and knew that if he didn’t, the leg would stiffen up on him and make the going even more torturous. He had to get as much out of himself as he could. But the arroyos weren’t a subway line; none of them led directly to Qalat, so he was always following one until it veered in an inappropriate direction, then scrambling up its rough walls mostly by hoisting himself upward with his staff, reaching the crest, slithering over the crest, and sliding down into another one that more or less seemed to be heading where he wanted to go. He knew he wasn’t making the best speed, but if he committed to the crests, his silhouette would be available to any hadji with stolen American night vision, or he might bump into a Taliban unit or opium smuggler or some Pashtun revengers, all of them richly festooned in AKs and RPGs. It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood where you wanted to bump into folks.

Near dawn, he’d had it. He’d been running hard since the hit. His body could take more than most of the bodies in the world, but it had reached its limit. He found a relatively smooth area and nestled behind a rock; sleep overtook him quickly, a black blanket of dreamless escape.

The goat’s tongue smelled of shit, like everything in the ’Stan. Ray bolted up, felt the pain in his black-blue-green leg jack through him and squelched a cry. The fucking goats had found him. What goat-brain skill enabled them to stay with him in the dark? Sure, they could scamper over the landscape as if it were the surface of a billiard table, but was it smell, his lingering presence in the wind, that led them through the dark on a beeline to him? Another nuzzled up and licked his face and showed something like dumb-beast love in its moist and sentimental eyes. It bleated and shivered, shat of course, and then nuzzled him for affection again.

“You skaggy bastard,” he said, but still awarded the goat a neck rub in payment for his loyalty.

Breakfast: rice balls, dates, and some warm water from the goatskin water bag strapped to him. Fed and hydrated, he shot an azimuth with a much-abused Boy Scout brass compass originally manufactured in England in 1925, found a landmark for orientation, and began the trek anew.

It was the day after the ambush. The pain was constant, but consciousness inconsistent. It seemed he passed out several times while walking. The goats nestled against him or ran off on adventures and he enacted what goat discipline he could. Around him, the land was definitely not changing; it was still the endless sea of rough ridges, small hills, scrub vegetation, dust everywhere. He had to move faster because tomorrow would be Sunday and he had to make Qalat by nightfall so he could infiltrate on Monday, recon, and set up the shot for Tuesday afternoon; it was Tuesday afternoon or nothing, because he couldn’t last a week in the city-surely sooner or later someone would notice that he spoke no Pashto or Dari or any of a thousand other tells that would give him away. In fast, out fast-or no game at all.

He reached a crest, scurried over it, the goats bleating and yapping all around him, taking shit breaks or lunch breaks on the waxy vegetation. He got over the ridge, then slipped, put stress on the leg, felt a specific pain rise out of the general pain and hit him hard, almost enough to bring him down.

Water? No. He wouldn’t have enough for tomorrow if he started sipping every time he felt like it. But the leg hurt so goddamned bad.

Okay, he told himself, take a little rest. You’ve got another two hours of daylight, you can punch through the night with greatly reduced efficiency, you can grab a couple of hours of snooze time until a goat alarm clock sings “I’ve Got You, Babe” in your ear.

He awarded himself a little break.

He hunkered down, keeping his leg straight, squirmed until he’d found something near comfort as it might be defined in combat in Afghanistan, and set about paying off his oxygen debt. In a few minutes, he felt somewhat refreshed, no Semper Fi! or Gung Ho! bullshit, but some slight blurring of the generalized fatigue.

Time to go.

He thought also that it would be a good idea to take a fast recon of the area, just in case. He shimmied up to the crest of the ridge and in the low prone peered across the landscape he had just traversed. It looked a lot like the landscape he was just about to traverse. He saw the serrations of a hundred bayonets lined up, so the world was nothing but serrations-jagged rises and falls, edge beyond edge of them, endless, in that colorless color of the Afghan high desert, dun, dust, pale pink, mocha brown, whatever, even the plants were brown. High clouds piled up above, cumulus thunder bringers, the only clean, bright thing in the world, marble or alabaster. To the east, the mountains of Pakistan, much higher. He knew if he turned, he’d see the shadows of the Hindu Kush one hundred miles away. You could see the biggest mountains in the world from a long way out.

He was almost ready to pack it in when he saw them.

Oh fuck, he thought.

He slipped back, diddled with his caftan, performed the complicated negotiations necessary to free up the SVD strapped to his back, and came back to the ridgeline.

It took a while to relocate. The original indicator had been a jiggle of movement on a crest line way off, where movement shouldn’t have been. Sliding the rifle to his shoulder, popping the lens caps, he settled into a steady prone as he cantilevered over the hump of the crest line, poking the rifle barrel through some vegetation for clearer vision. He found his spotweld, which yielded his perfect eye relief, and his fingers flew to the focus ring of the crude Chinese tube. He checked to make sure the sun had no angle to bounce off his lens in give-away reflection, played with the focus, twisting this way and that, wishing he had Marine Corps-issue 10× magnification instead of ChiCom 4×, cursed the elaborate reticle with its goofy ranging system that blocked out too many details, and reoriented on the suspect area, letting the substandard lens of the Chinese optics resolve into finite detail all that could be resolved.

Nothing.

I know I saw something.

He decided to give it a few seconds. I would have seen them on a crest. Now they’re behind the crest. They’ll be on top of another crest and-

He watched them come over, emerging headfirst, then disappearing as they scattered down the slope of the rill they’d just crossed. Khaki clad, bloused boots, burnooses obscuring their features, bearded men with necks wrapped in shemaghs in the green-black pattern so beloved by many. Bandoliers loaded with mags crisscrossed on their chests. Wait, one guy wore a baseball cap, khaki or sage, and he was the one with the heavy.50 Barrett, that monster rifle just at the limits of luggability, a twenty-five-pound ordeal as awkward as an iron cash register, and good for one thing only, nailing Johnny Pashtun at a long way out. The others were AK-ed up, standard for this part of the world, and one had a couple of RPGs over his back.

It was the guy in the ball cap who gave it away, even to the 4× of the Chinese scope. Yes, he was bearded, yes, he was nut brown from the cruel Afghan sun, yes, he moved with the wiry, wary grace of the Pathan warrior who’d haunted these climes for a thousand years, mixing it up with Alexander’s spear chuckers, assorted Hindu invaders, and then troops from a Victoria, a Mikhail, a George W., and now a Barack. Yes to all that, and yes to one other thing as well: he was white.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

2035 HOURS

We don’t have much light left, Mick,” said Tony Z.

“Hey, I don’t want to hear that. What I want to hear is, Mick, let’s push harder, goddamnit.”

“Mick, let’s push harder, goddamnit,” said Crackers the Clown.

“Not funny, Crackers.”

The team saw just hills, hills, hills before them in the fading light. At last report the guy was less than half a mile away, and they were closing. But the shot at a daylight takedown, much hoped for, was rapidly disappearing. Mick didn’t want to do a night thing. Guys shooting, flashes, bad vision, only one set of night vision goggles between them, no long shots, no, you couldn’t tell what might go wrong and very little ever went right at night.

On the other hand, if the guy saw them, he might set up and start picking them off from far out with his long gun. Then, assuming he wasn’t the first to go, Mick might have a chance at taking him down with the motherfuckingseventonsofagonybullshit.50 Barrett he carried with him. You could do a guy at a mile with the thing, and Mick had done enough of it to know.

Which set him off again: Aghh! He had the sniper team cold-bore dead zeroed and yet he missed, maybe a little puff of breeze edged the first 750-grainer that way or this and only blew goats into the air; the second freight train missed too, goddamnit, and then he found the stroke and blew one guy thirty feet in the air, cranked to the other as he was disappearing and blew him aloft like a Frisbee sailing across a college lawn. Then he worked the beaten zone with the rest of the mag, blowing more goats to barbecue heaven and hitting the one visible body a second time so hard it landed in two pieces.

Then, when they got to the kill zone an hour later, after a slow, tactical approach, no fucking second body.

“You see blood?”

“A few spots down here, Mick. But clearly, not a big, huge gut wound; he won’t be bleeding out.”

“I saw him go bye-bye from midair,” said Tony.

“Even a glancer from a motherfucker like this will send a guy off like a V-2. I hit a guy in Bagra once at just the right angle and it actually blew him out of the windshield of his car and about thirty feet down the road. Man, that was one surprised dude.” It was a nice warm memory and Mick cherished it.

Thus the conclusion: one of the marines had gotten away.

“It’s time to cut to the chase,” said Crackers.

“Wait a minute,” said Tony Z. “See, we’re already on the chase. This is the chase. So how can you cut to the chase from the chase?”

“Fuck you,” said Crackers.

“Knock it off,” Mick said. “We got a pursuit on our hands. Guy has to have been hit, he can’t move fast. He’ll probably lay up in a cave. We have to track him and take him out.”

“Mick, I didn’t sign up for an adventure movie. I’m just here for the hit and the grins.” That was crazy Crackers, like Mick, once a soldier, and young.

“We are getting top dollar to deliver two heads. We will deliver two heads. Crackers, with your forces background, you’re the jock, why don’t you run the man down for us.”

“I left my track shoes at the motel,” said Crackers.

Now, nearly a day later, at nightfall, they knew they had to be close.

But Tony Z said, “I’m thinking we ought to deviate, go around him, and let him come to us. He’s been pushing hard and I saw him fly, so I know he’s hurting beaucoup from a glancer. He’ll have to hunker down. He’s only a marine. He ain’t Superman.”

Mick wasn’t ready to commit.

“Let’s think about this a little while. I want this thing done up right.”

One of the hadjis-he had three, Taliban boys whom on other days Mick might have blown away without a thought, but his passport to safety in the tribal areas depended on this one-spoke his gibberish and Tony Z, who understood it, told Mick, “Mahoud says there’s a path low around this set of hills, mostly flatland. We could probably get ahead of him that way.”

So tempting. No more chase shit. No more waiting for Marine Hero to get the first shot off and go for him, he-man with Barrett. Mick was a soldier, as he’d been a football hero, because he was so big. He’d known from childhood that he had the strength to make people obey, and he didn’t mind, rather enjoyed it, ultimately becoming addicted to hitting people to get their attention. Alas, it was a hard habit to break, which is why each of the various colorful entities that had paid him to do violence on their behalf had grown tired of his disciplinary problems, his thief’s axiomatic greed, and the way he subverted every team he ever joined to his own ends. He was finally even cashiered out of Graywolf for shooting a surrendering hadji on CNN, a bad career move if ever there was one; now he had another client, less picky about certain moral distinctions.

He checked his big gizmo Suunto watch, that Finnish bubble of high tech that could almost predict the future it was so complex, and saw he had just a few minutes until he could get a position fix.

“We’ll wait here till I call MacGyver. We’ll see where he is.”

The dark advanced shadows across the raw land, and a little night breeze kicked up dust or sand. One of the hadjis began to chew some suspicious weed or other, maybe for night vision, maybe for martyr’s frenzy. Tony Z hung next to Mick, crouching, lovingly fingering his AK. Tony was a gun guy; he had a Wilson custom.45 in a shoulder holster and a Ruger.380 plastic pocket pistol with a laser sight floating around in his cargo pants pocket.

Mick, happy to be shed of the weight of the Barrett for a few minutes, slipped off his backpack, unlashed its flap, and withdrew a chunk of silicon technology called a Thuraya SG-2520 encrypted satellite phone. It was what held this whole mad little trip together. It looked like any other cell of the usual dimensions, 5.5 by 2.1 by 0.8 inches, but its distinguishing feature was a kind of plastic tube on top, which, when pulled, yielded a good five inches of stout antenna that enabled it to use the Thuraya constellation of forty-eight low earth-orbiting satellites if the GSM satellite coverage was not available. Other than that, it had the usual phone shit, a screen, a keyboard, all in gray Jet-sons plastic. It was preconfigured to one number. He pushed call.

He waited, knowing he was about to send his voice into outer space, where it would bounce off various metal orbs full of circuits and chips and nanotechnologies, until it finally beamed down to a cell phone somewhere in America (he didn’t know where) and a man humorously calling himself “MacGyver” would answer. The best thing was: the call was completely private.

“You’re early,” MacGyver said.

“We’re close. The issue is: should we press on in the dark and overtake or try and get around him and set up an ambush on the other side? I need to know his position and if he’s still moving.”

“Which option do you prefer?”

“I don’t like night action. Too much can go wrong. I’d prefer to set up and whack him tomorrow as he comes into town.”

“Excellent. Of course you’re wrong, so do exactly the opposite.”

“Mr. Mac-”

“He’s gone to earth for the night. I saw him on the big screen just a few minutes ago. I can give you his exact coordinates, to the meter. I can get you close enough to smell the goats. You’ll find him conked out. Get up close, shoot him about a thousand times, and get the hadjis to get you out of there. That’s what you’re being paid way too much for.”

Mick got out his pen and notebook and wrote down the exact mathematics of the sniper’s location.

“Bogier, get this done. Are you hearing me?”

“Yes, sir,” said Mick, hating the asshole, and then he closed down the transmit.

“Okay,” he said, and drew his two white teamboys close to map it out, figure an approach, and plan the kill.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0315 HOURS

At the base of the hill, the guys shed everything, stripping down, hadjis too, to pants and shirts. Even if it dropped to the thirties and froze them solid, Mick didn’t want the heavy caftans or the schemeggahs slopping this way and that, roughing up the dust, scraping rocks, catching on thorns or sprigs. The guys could shiver; he just didn’t want them to make noise.

The map was only so helpful. It identified the major landforms, even to the degree of suggesting approaches, but not the boulders and rock faces that gave those approaches practical meaning. Far better was his own recon through the AN/PV5-7 night vision goggles. As he took each man around to his starting point, he let them on the night vision set to get a good look-see of what lay before, how the rocks fell, how the arroyos trended, where the small trees for leverage were. He reminded them of the rules: no one was to rise above waist level until 0430; if they saw anybody walking upright, blast him. It would have to be the marine, awake, continuing his journey. Other rules: Do not fire at gun flashes, as the odds decreed you would be shooting your own teammate. And watch for goats. The guy wasn’t dumb; he’d tether goats to himself, and run the risk of goat piss against the fragile restiveness of the beasts, who’d bleat and whimper at the approach of a predator. So you didn’t startle a goat. If you moved low, quiet and easy, the goats would not be a problem. Afterward, they could butcher an animal and have a nice breakfast.

Since Mick, with the night vision, was almost certain to be the one to reach the hilltop first and would have the good vision to make the shot, he would signal them with a cowboy yeehaw when he’d scored. If for any reason that hadn’t happened by 0500, then 0500 became go time. They were to continue to the top, slide in on the sleeping marine, and let him have it. There wasn’t much else to say. It was pretty simple: infiltrate and execute. What could possibly go wrong?

Then he left each guy and slipped back as noiselessly as possible to his own starting point.

He checked his watch. It was now 0330 and the 0430 deadline was predicated on the assumption the distance was about 200 meters; it should take each man about an hour to edge, inch by silent inch, to the summit.

Mick began his crawl. He’d left the Barrett behind as there was no point in dragging it along; it was no close-quarters weapon. He had a Beretta 92 with a wicked Gemtech suppressor sticking from its snout like a can of frozen orange juice. At close range, it would finish up this asshole and get them the hell out of town in time for martini hour at the Kabul Hilton. He slithered, pulling his way along, enjoying the chilled air and the freedom from the ache of the big Barrett he’d been toting for three or four days. This was the cool part, the part he always loved, the special part of special ops work: the silent stalk. He enjoyed his own war craft, his ability to undulate silently, to ignore on will alone all the prods and pricks and pokes of the rough ground and thorny vegetation he crawled over. He moved more quickly than the others because through the night vision goggles, he could see what rocks lay ahead, where the breaks were, where the smaller brush collected, and so his progress was more assured.

He made it to the crest in less than half an hour. He found a larger rock and eased around it, hearing at the same time the gentle moaning of a goat or two. In the green world of the goggles the goats glowed incandescently, about 30 yards ahead. Three or four seemed tethered to what had to be the sniper, some kind of less-glowing form concealed in robes on the ground, heaving in and out with movement as the lungs took in air and then spent it, once in a while kicking.

Shoot him, Mick thought.

But it was a long shot for a pistol, particularly one wearing a suppressor that might change the point of impact off the sights, which were hard to see even in the ambient light’s amplification. He had him. Wait it out. Be disciplined, wait it out, when 0500 gets here, we’ll all hit him at once and pump his ass on the ground.

Mick sat back and waited, selecting memories to keep him toasty through the long hour. Hmm, the two Japanese girls in Tokyo that night? Or that CBS correspondent in Baghdad, the Brit? Man, she was hot and she’d done half the guys in Delta. Or what about the black gal in Dar es Salaam. Boy, that was a night, even if he’d caught a dose. Or…

In this fashion, he passed the time quickly, pausing now and then for a recon through the night vision to make sure the guy was still there, snoozing fitfully on the ground amid his screen of goats. Their bleats and baas came softly through the night but the goats were so intent on keeping warm that no man-scent alarmed them. They drifted and moseyed around the sleeping form and meanwhile Mick explored the brothel of his memory for suitable pornographic energy to keep himself distracted from the slow slippage of time on his Suunto or the numb chill spreading through his lower extremities. He timed it perfectly, jigging to release at roughly 0450, giving himself plenty of time to clean off and settle in.

A last check of the pistol. Shell in chamber, yes, hammer down, yes, safety off, yes, magazine seated, yes, suppressor can cranked tight against the threading, yes. He rose to knees, then to haunches, the gun in one hand, steadying himself on the rock with the other and enough of a sleeve hike to show the face of the watch as the Suunto digits dissolved steadily toward 0500 until they yielded that number exactly.

He took a breath, raised himself full, shouted, “Go!” in his loudest sergeant’s voice, acquired the pistol in his support hand, and began moving ahead, examining the world through his goggles. He watched as incandescent goats fled at his approach, except for those tethered to the sleeper, and they bucked and busted against the ropes that secured them, sensing death on the come. The animals began a chorus of anguish, their voices involuntarily rising in pitch and urgency as those who could flee fled and those who couldn’t tried to, desperately.

Mick got within twenty feet and fired, saw the drama of the operating pistol as it ejected a shell through its slide blowback, fired again against the much shorter cocked trigger pull, and then settled into a rhythm and fired three more times, and for just a second saw the impacts of his bullets as they puffed gas into the sealed fabric around the body and then it was obliterated.

The others were close enough, and on Mick’s shots they fired, AKs blazing hot in the night, the extreme percussion of the small arms in the stillness of the air, the bullet strikes that stitched a beaten zone and ripped and tossed and pummeled the guy on the receiving end, who even as he was being speared multiple times by warheads moving at two thousand feet per second, began to issue copious amounts of blood-soak through his robe.

A goat fled by Mick, knocking his leg. Of the three tethered goats, two were hit by late-burst uncontrollables, and twisted angrily under the impact, knowing they had been killed; the survivor simply pulled desperately against his rope, finally broke it, and sped off.

“Cease fire, cease fire,” Mick yelled.

The guns went quiet except for one Izzie joker who’d evidently just changed magazines and was determined to get his full money’s worth out of the labor of the switch. His last thirty rounds served as the coup de grace, “Taps” and a fare-thee-well to the poor sonovabitch all shot to hamburger in his robes.

Then total silence except in the ringing inner ears of the shooters. Mick sniffed the delicious home-at-last smell of all the burned powder, felt a bit of wind whipping against the boys. One of the Taliban fighters kicked the two dead goats aside, and Mick bent to expose the corpse and was surprised to note that it wasn’t a man but just another goat, its legs tied, its muzzle tied, itself very dead from all the wounds that had pretty much shredded its torso.

Suddenly a flurry of SureFire beams came onto the mess and the blood was as boldly bright as Mick’s fuck-up.

“Shit,” said Mick. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“How the fuck-”

“What the-”

“The satellite said he was here,” said Mick, uncomprehending. “He was here, the eye in the sky, it said he was here.”

It was Tony Z whose SureFire found the gizmo. It lay under the dead goat, soaked in blood, clotted with dirt, but enough metal showed for Tony’s beam to catch. He bent, plucked them out, a small cylinder of metal the size of one joint of a man’s finger and a little, almost featureless plastic box.

“That’s the GPS chip and transmitter,” said Mick. “Fucker either knew or figured out how we were tracking him, and suckered us with it. Smart guy. Didn’t just toss it and clear the area but set us up to waste the night while he moved on. Goddamn his ass.”

It was then that the two Taliban guys started to chatter between themselves excitedly.

“What’re they saying?” Mick asked Tony.

“‘Where’s Mahoud?’ That’s what they’re saying. ‘Where’s Mahoud?’”

Where was Mahoud?

It only took half an hour to find him, by backtracking over the hill along the axis that had been assigned to Mahoud in the ascent. The peep of sun over horizon bringing rapid pink illumination to the vast sky was a big help as well.

He hadn’t made it very far.

Tony leaned over the still figure, facedown on the dust of Afghanistan, and pulled his head up for examination. There wasn’t much to see. His throat had been deeply and expertly cut from earlobe to earlobe. Not many of the anatomical structures remained unsundered, as if the cutter had truly enjoyed sending this one to Allah.

“I would say,” said Tony, “we are dealing with a very angry individual.”

QALAT

CAPITAL CITY OF ZABUL PROVINCE

HOURI DISTRICT

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0130 HOURS

He sat in the shadows, drinking tea. Under his robes, the SVD with its unyielding structure and all its knobs, prongs, jutting edges, and lengthy barrel had to be wedged to the side, its sling loosened and the beast itself carefully adjusted so that it nestled against the length of his body, braced against the stiffness of his very bad leg. The leg itself, stressed beyond stress, now announced loudly that it had no further interest in completing the mission.

Ray sat far back in the crowded marketplace, at some kind of outdoor rude wooden cafe that looked rustic and slatternly, and he’d just finished some kind of meal, a mystery meat that had to be goat (except, wasn’t meat supposed to be brown or red and not naval gunboat gray?), a thin gravy, lots of surprisingly good rice, and those patties of baked dough the Afghans ate, the ones that looked like Pop-Tarts but had no jam inside. But all in all, it could have been the best meal of his life, if for no other reason than that he was alive to enjoy it.

Tea: good, sweet, loaded with energy.

Rest: good, after the ordeal of the past few days.

Crowds: very good. People swirled everywhere in this city of thousands, most of them nut brown men in strange headgear or head- and face-obscuring turbans, dishdashas in blazing colors or patterns obscuring bodies, the necks draped in long scarves-graceful, scrawny, furtive, loud, animated, with faces that looked like the beaten hide of an African shield. Many were Pashtun tribals, openly carrying daggers or AKs that nobody was going to take from them; many were city folk, in suits with shirts but no ties. Many were women, some in tribal outfits, some in the Afghan version of the latest hot look from a New York they saw only on CNN satellite pickup, some young, some old. But so many of them. They traveled by every conveyance known to man, from bike to motorbike to motorcycle to tri-wheel covered motorcycles to pickups to full-blown lorries to the odd sedan, all of them competing for space with other life-forms, dogs, goats, even the occasional cow and some humped, hairy beasts that looked like Star Wars creatures. The place baked in the odors of combustion and methane and probably piss and keefe too, and a kind of blue haze of dust and exhaust hung low over everything.

Nobody seemed to have noticed Ray. It helped that he was dark, that his eyes were deep and brown to a degree that could have concealed an Islamist’s serpentine way of thinking even if it only concealed a rigorous Catholic boyhood, and that he was thin, wiry, ropey, graceful, and with his thick dressing of robes, almost anonymous. The exoticism of his face could easily have been Mongolian, Chinese, Tartar, Uzbek, anything; it surprised nobody.

His plan: to sit here till twilight. In the falling darkness, he’d mosey the several blocks to the warlord Ibrahim Zarzi’s compound and examine the Many Pleasures Hotel across the way. Getting into it shouldn’t be too hard. The idea was to rent a room there tomorrow morning, sleep a bit, then carefully ease his way up to the roof. No door or lock could stop him, for he was as clever in the ways of penetration as he was clever in the ways of evasion.

He’d slide into shoot position just a few minutes before it went down. He wouldn’t be at the building’s edge, but as far back as possible while still retaining the angle. He’d thought this out; it wouldn’t be the classic sniper’s rested shot, off something like a bench. No, he’d be in character as the tribal wanderer until the very last, squatting on the roof. At the proper moment, he’d rise, lifting the rifle with him. If there was some structure upon which he could lean to stabilize himself, that would be excellent. If not, he’d take the kill shot offhand. It was only a little over 200 yards and he had superb offhand skills, something not many snipers build on but which had obsessed him one year at Camp Lejeune as a weakness in his game. He could hit that shot one hundred out of one hundred, no problem. He might even have time for a follow-up, put another one into the already stricken man.

In the courtyard there’d be chaos, craziness, insane hubbub. It would take a few minutes for things to calm down, for someone to issue orders to Zarzi’s well-armed militia, for the pathetic Afghan police or the hopelessly incompetent Dutch peacekeepers to be called. Ray would use that time to dump the rifle, and slip out of the hotel and off into the crowds.

Ray took another sip of tea.

It was as good a plan as could be imagined.

But it didn’t deal with the problem.

The problem was: there was a mole somewhere who’d given him up to the contractors.

He was blown. He was hunted.

Now what does a nice Catholic boy do about that? He hadn’t figured it out yet, but he knew one thing. He’d have to slit some more throats.

UNIDENTIFIED CONTRACTOR TEAM

QALAT OUTSKIRTS

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

1700 HOURS

The city shimmered before them in the afternoon sun. It almost looked like Oz or Mecca or the Baghdad of the many tales, white and dignified, sprawled across the plain under the mountains, except for the fact that it was utterly crappy. It had a skyline that consisted of a few decrepit buildings of the sort that were old fashioned in 1972 when they’d been built, and the rest low-rent ramshackle construction improvisations, none more than a couple of stories high, thrown together more or less on the fly, wherever. Mick and his pals wandered farther, heading downtown.

What lay farther along was, to the Western mind, somewhat baffling: a maze of dusty, crowded streets lit up by a riot of color and confusion, Arabic signs amid universal symbols like small Coke bottle signs, a brand of Japanese gasoline, pictures of kabobs, the ubiquitous BankAmericard and MasterCard symbols, Indian teas. Other identifiables amid the clutter consisted of but were not limited to carts, shops, tents selling mostly woven things gaudy with color, pots, guns guaranteed to fire at least fifty times before exploding, kabobs, rice balls, custard, more pots, whatever. The vehicles seemed from 1927, many of them with an odd number of wheels, many painted extravagantly. You could not move in the place without raising a shroud of dust, for less than 2 percent of the roads were paved.

Mick had ditched the ball cap-a long-billed SureFire giveaway for big-time customers in the trade-for his own turban, and by this time, he’d become expert in draping it so his features were obscured. The sunglasses and beard helped, but what helped most was that Qalat was still tribal, meaning really lawless, and there were enough Westerners about of dubious pedigree that the addition of a few more didn’t set off signals. He didn’t have to pretend to be native, just psycho, not a stretch for him. Plus, he was escorted by two heavily armed Tals, whose glares and do-not-approach hand signals were enough to keep him safe from all but the most insane militia. And there was Mick’s size, impressive, and his body language, which said fuck-not-or-die, and his own AK-47, the Barrett being stashed in the foothills, to be picked up if time and circumstance permitted. Then too he had Tony Z and Crackers the Clown, also festooned with AKs, robes, grenades, daggers, and dust, and those two serious pilgrims amplified the fuck-not-or-die message.

Mick’s ears were still red. Such a reaming he’d gotten. Mr. MacGyver had not been a happy camper, wherever he was, whomever he worked for. Mick winced at the conversation, held at 0730 that morning.

“Make me happy,” the control had said in answering and when Mick merely swallowed, accepting that which was about to be bestowed, his voice box seemed disconnected from his brain. Mr. MacGyver had said, “You bastard. You moron. You idiot. You had his location, the cover of darkness, the advantage in numbers, firepower, ruthlessness, aggression, and experience, and yet he defeated you. Bogier, you were highly recommended but you are a total loss. Where is he?”

This was the part Mick dreaded.

“Qalat. I guess.”

“You guess? You guess?”

Mick laid it out, the trick with the GPS transmitter, the throat-cutting of Mahoud, the night lost in slow approach and final assault, and the fact that if the marine was six or seven hours ahead of them, he was already there or damn near.

“Who knew he was that good? He was really good.”

“So not only did you fail, but he also ditched the GPS, which means we won’t be able to track him on any screen? Is that right?”

“I guess so.”

“You’ve got it. That’s you we’re tracking, that’s what you’re saying.”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so. You guess so. You were paid to do a job and he has outfought you at every turn. Who is he, Superman?”

Mick wanted to say, Hey, asshole, you were the one who told me the GPS was him, so it was you he outfoxed, not me. What was I supposed to do, assault the position or set up perimeter security with six guys? Yet he also knew it was his refusal to close when he had the chance and instead wasted another hour and a half jerking off while his team positioned itself that had really cost them badly. No way they could catch up now.

“What do you want us to do?”

“Ever hear of a lovely Japanese thing called seppuku? Gut splitting. Just open your guts with a very sharp blade and die quietly, all right?”

Mick waited as MacGyver’s rage crested.

“All right,” the control finally said, “you’ve left us with a very big problem. I will have to make some arrangements from this end. You go into Qalat and find a place near the compound. I may need you to move quickly if I can get done what I need to do. You call in at 0700 hours tomorrow your time, and we’ll see where we are.”

“Got it,” said Mick. “Out and-”

But he was talking to dead air.

UN PEACEKEEPER HUMVEE

PLATOON C, 5TH ROYAL Dutch Marines

ROYAL DUTCH MARINE OUTPOST

QALAT

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

2300 HOURS

Ray popped the lock, slid in. These royal marines must be aching for a bad suicide bombing because their post security was so porous anyone could get in or out. It probably represented their absolute hatred of this job and this country. Imagine: you join the Royal Dutch Marines well aware that you’re not going into combat anytime soon, and that you’re basically signing up for a lifetime sinecure with cool guns; but you end up in an outpost in a slum city on the edge of the wildest area in Pakistan, surrounded by men who want to kill you. And your job, really, isn’t to win any war, it’s to represent some politician’s alliance with an American ideal that has nothing to do with the Netherlands. Wouldn’t you be depressed? And if you’re depressed, you quickly turn fatalistic and lazy, and the next thing you know, you’re getting by on luck alone. Maybe you’ll get blown up, maybe you won’t, now pass the hooch, please, and a little of that fine Afghan keefe that will help the time fly faster.

So while the Dutchmen explored their morose natures inside their sandbagged building, he’d slipped under the barbed wire and gotten into the Humvee, one of several parked outside. The guard posts weren’t even manned by Dutchies, but by Afghan army troopers and they were at low readiness, so Ray had no trouble getting by.

He cracked the plastic dashboard, peeled the broken shielding off to reveal the ignition wiring, probed it with his knife blade, and in a bit it had stirred to life; he let it idle, peeped up to make sure no one in the guard post had noticed and that no drunken, high Dutchie was coming to check. He was momentarily secure.

He looked to the radio, saw that it was the standard mounted high-frequency AN/MRC-138, a higher-powered version of the PRC-104, the universal talk box of the war on terror. Ray knew it well, having been a radioman sometime in an ancient Marine Corps past, and turned it on, watching it pop and crackle to life as a small red light reached peak intensity, signifying full power, then went to the frequency knob, turned it slowly, and finally acquired 15.016 MHZ, the battalion operating freak. With no mountains in between, it ought to be a loud-and-clear chat.

He held the push-to-talk button down, and spoke into the phone.

“Whiskey-Six, this is Whiskey Two-Two. Do you receive, over.”

“Whiskey Two-Two, this is Whiskey-Six, roger. Authentification, please.”

“Olympic downhill,” said Ray.

Commo tumbled out of protocol.

“Ray, Jesus-”

“Whiskey-Six, do you have Six Actual there, over.”

“Negative, Two-Two, I’ll get him, over.”

“Whiskey-Six, negative, no time now. Be advised Two-Two is on-site and will execute tomorrow. I say again, Two-Two on-site, running hot, straight and dead zero, will execute as planned tomorrow and then exfiltrate by any means possible. Scrub the chopper pickup, Two-Two will hump it out the soft way. Do you read, over?”

“Copy that, Two-Two, will advise Six Actual ‘On-site and will execute to-’”

“Whiskey Six, that is all. Two-Two out.”

Ray cut off the power, hung the phone on its cradle.

He turned off the idling engine, eased out of the vehicle, low-crawled seventy-five feet to the sector of fencing farthest from the guard post, staying out of the lights, and took his cuts and punctures while slowly picking his way through the lower coils. That wasn’t easy but far from impossible, for the barbed wire was meant to slow down, not stop, incursion. A little beyond the wire, he found shadow and rose and slipped away to the site where he’d cached his SVD. Tomorrow was shaping up to be a very interesting day.

2ND RECON BATTALION HQ

FOB WINCHESTER

S-2 SHOP

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

2350 HOURS

Jesus Christ,” said Colonel Laidlaw, “and kiss my ass! He made it. The Cruise Missile made it.”

S-2 asked, “He didn’t say anything more? No details, no-”

“I had the idea he was stressed,” said the corporal who’d been on radio watch. “He didn’t want to talk at length. He just communicated the message-those are his exact words, sir-and signed off. I have no idea of the origin of the call. He had all call signs right, authentification code right, and I know Sergeant Cruz well and recognized his voice.”

“That’s fine, Nichols, you can go now,” said the colonel, and the young NCO rose, left the bunker tent, and headed back to his duty station.

The colonel, in his nighttime sweats, the exec still in camos, and S-2, also still in camos, sat around the working table under the now-dead monitor on which they’d watched the fate of 2-2 play out. Cigarettes were consumed, and the colonel had the whiff-just the tiniest-of bourbon to him.

“Should we notify higher HQ, sir? The Agency liaison? At least helos at Ripley so we can put a bird airborne to get him out if he calls in again and needs emergency extract, no matter what he says tonight.”

“Negative, negative,” said the colonel. “I don’t like the way they were jumped and that the shooters knew exactly who they were.”

“Sir, it could have just been Taliban assholes. They’ll shoot up anything and say it was God’s will.”

“These guys were not Taliban. They were too disciplined. They were all in prone, they were in a good tactical array, when they moved, they moved professionally, not like hadjis going to a book burning. And let’s not forget: they hit the target. No, we’ll keep this to ourselves. It’s our party, we invented it, it’s our man, our materiel, our mission. No, this is for us. Tomorrow I want a patrol in force to head out on the road to Qalat and I want a lot of other smaller patrol activity in that sector. I want Humvees all over the place, lots of corpsmen and sniper teams. Lots of marine presence and I want the troops on the alert in case Ray needs help fast or needs a place to go to with a pack of hadjis on his ass.”

“Yes, sir,” said the exec. “I’ll draft the orders.”

The colonel turned to S-2.

“Will we be able to eyeball him from above at that time tomorrow, or is the satellite somewhere helpful, like Hawaii or Omaha?”

“We only get real-time satfeed from 1400 through about 1530 tomorrow, sir.”

“Ach,” said the colonel. “That is not pleasing. S-Two, try to think of something that might please me. Think real hard. I know you can do it.”

“Sir, I can request that the Agency task a recon Predator tomorrow and get us a real-time feed while this thing is going down.”

“And what are our chances that these wonderful folks will cooperate with us?”

“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.