Dead Zero

MARRIOTT RESIDENCE HOTEL

WILSON BOULEVARD

ROSSLYN, VIRGINIA

1108 HOURS

TWO DAYS LATER

He awoke in a stupor. Brain foggy, memory shot, limbs in pain. Only one dream, obvious. Handsome Prince tries to save the world but forgets to save the Beautiful Princess. Part of Prince, fool of fools, played by Bob Lee Swagger. Princess played by Susan Okada, St. Louis, daughter of oncologist; Yale University; career CIA; best, brightest, most beautiful; thirty-eight years old now and forever. What was the point of saving the world if there was no Susan Okada in it?

Fuck, he thought. If I had to do it again, I’d trade her life for all those guys in suits who think they’re so important. The generals, the admirals, the president, his cabinet officers. Let the devil have them all for an eternity of punishment and take me along for good measure, torture me, it’s fine, if it could spare Susan Okada’s life. Fuck ’em, he thought. Fuck ’em all to hell forever, and me too, fuck me, just fuck me to hell.

God, how it sucked hard and long. He wished he could sink back into dreamless nothingness. If only one of the thousands of shots taken in his direction over the years had been better aimed or untouched by wind he would not have this nearly unendurable thing festering in his brain. He just lay there for a long, long time, hoping to die, but death seemed to be off duty. Where was it when you needed it? Come on, motherfucker, take me, not her. Okay. Me, I’m the one you want, the one you been trying to nab all these years. But death didn’t answer.

Finally, he looked around the hotel room, remembered the debriefing, the statement, the medical check, remembered that Ray and Nick were somewhere else. He wasn’t sure what time it was or what time he’d gotten back, but he’d crashed hard and slept straight through after something like seventy-two on his feet. A message light blinked on the phone, and he picked it up, had twenty-six of them, dumped through them fast until Nick came on, saying, “We’re going to debrief again in the director’s office at one thirty today. Let me know you got this.”

He tried to figure out the coffee machine, finally got it going. He looked at his watch. It was 11:17 on the first day of a rest of his life he did not want. He went to the door, opened it, and found a Washington Post.

He glanced at it. About three-quarters of the front page seemed to be bullshit: spin, counterspin, counter-counterspin, blame, recrimination, disavowal, analysis long term, analysis short term. What the Administration said, what the opposition said, what the English and the French said, what Al-Jazeerah said. Where the fuck were the facts? One story seemed to be the update, and he pressed through it.

Six dead, the rest contusions, sprains, a few broken bones, a few heart emergencies, and some feeling very hurt. No big guys had gone down. Sing hallelujah. Decorate the tree. Hide the painted eggs. Get out the funny masks. Fuck all suits, uniforms, and the men who thought they deserved them. Theirs, ours, it was all the same.

As far as the launch team at Iwo: the two dead-by-police scientists were Khalid Biswa, who worked guidance in the Indian rocket program, though he was a Muslim. Indian Secret Service suspected him of passing secrets to the Pakistanis, and he had disappeared about three years ago. The other guy was Dr. Faisal Ben-Abuljami, University of Alexandria, computer sciences, consultant for years to various bad apple groups who wanted to take their jihad into cyberspace. And the final guy, the one who survived, a real world-class Palestinian operator named Bilal Ayubi, a thousand ops, wanted all over Europe and especially by the Israelis. Evidently the sort of guy you wouldn’t want to mix with on a dark night.

The phone rang.

It was Cruz.

“Hey, spotter,” he said. “How’s the old guy?”

“I feel like shit.”

“I’m sorry about Okada, Gunny. I know she was special to you.”

“You lose people. It’s wrong, it’s sad, it’s the cruelty of the goddamn process, but it ain’t ever going away. You lose people. I’ll go to the funeral, I’ll get over it, or at least figure out how to keep going. Anyway, hell of a shot you made.”

“That was Whiskey Two-Two’s shot. It’s the one I was born to make. It’s the one Billy Skelton died to get done. In the end, it was easy. Some old dog ranged it for me. I was just the triggerman.”

“Ray, let me just say it: you’re the goddamn best. Nobody ever pays the IOUs that guys like you-”

“And guys like you-”

“And Susan Okada. Whatever. Nobody pays the IOUs that guys like you and she rack up, so you end up doing it for free, for nothing. They even forget to say, hey, thanks, you saved the world, or at least a little neighborhood of it. But you and her, you saw what nobody else saw and you figured out what nobody else figured out and had the guts to move on it. Because of the two of you we’re going to live in one kind of a place instead of another.”

“She was the best. As for me, I just had a big charge of vitamin DNA.”

“Will I see you at this meet? Ray, we ought to get to know each other, hang out. I hope you’ll come and meet your sisters and step-mom. I hope-”

“Gunny, I’m calling from Lejeune. I turned myself in to shore patrol today. We’ll let the corps straighten out what’s to be done with me. I’ll get back as soon as I know and we’ll set something up.”

“Can’t wait,” said Bob, knowing he would make it happen.

FBI HQ

DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

HOOVER BUILDING

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1350 HOURS

Nobody said much. They were in the suite, not the office proper, a perk that came with being heroes. They sat in beautiful leather chairs, so English clubby, around a coffee table, and the director ran the show, assisted by Walter Troy, repping the Agency, head of the damage-assessment team.

“So it’s a victory but nobody’s happy. It cost a lot, maybe too much. We all feel the pain of the loss. But we have to go on. That’s all anyone can say.”

“I don’t want anything happening to Cruz,” said Swagger. “Losing Okada hurt enough but that would really screw the pooch.”

“I’ve been making arrangements, and as you might imagine, the White House is dead on board,” said the director. “He should get a stripe out of this or take the damned commission they’ve been trying to force on him for years. We managed to get the Baltimore prosecutor’s office to drop its interest in him, in exchange for the DNA samples that put Bogier in the Filipino house.”

“That’s good to know,” said Swagger. “I’m sure the corps will treat him fairly.”

“If it doesn’t, I’ll indict it,” said Nick.

“As for you, Mr. Swagger, I’m not sure what we can pay you. Money? I doubt you’d cash the check. Peace and quiet? That’s the only coinage you’d respond to. Or do you want more medals?”

“I’m fine,” said Swagger. “Cruz is okay and you’ll get Okada some kind of medal for her folks. Let’s change the subject.”

“I’m a little unclear on Arlington,” said Nick. “Couldn’t make much sense of it in the papers. How come the tough guy survived and the others didn’t?”

“Warrior’s luck. He shot it out with the Arlington police. Hit three times, too tough to die. He’s in the hospital, under heavy guard, expected to recover. Won’t say a word, hard to the end. The others were ordered to surrender and simply walked into the guns. The cops had no choice. They must have been good friends. They went to paradise together, holding hands.”

“Anything else?” Troy asked.

Bob said, “Have you arrested Hollister yet?”

“That’s the bad news. He dumped the SUV two blocks from the White House and disappeared. We figure he was going to a meet when you picked him up, and once he broke free, he disappeared. He called them, they came and got him. It had to be pro. They disappeared him well. I’m betting it was Pakistani intelligence. They’re all over this.”

“Motherfucker,” said Bob. “Excuse my English.”

“How did you know it was him? If you hadn’t figured it out, we’d be sitting here with a dead national leadership cadre and a confidence crisis beyond the imagination.”

“It was just something that set peculiar with me. When we all met in the Agency, he told everybody about the rifle I captured that’s on display in your museum, right?”

“That’s right,” said Nick.

“Well, that is the rifle and I was the boy who captured it, no doubt about it. But that night, we had a big celebration at the firebase, steaks and beer, all the stuff that’s bad for you. And the CIA guy running the operation calls me aside afterward and tells me I got ‘talent.’ The Agency, he says, is always looking for ‘talent.’ Did I want a job? He could get me in real high, make a lot more than I could as a marine. No, I said, I’d stay with the corps. See, I had it in my head I wanted to retire as the command sergeant major of the Marine Corps. I thought that’d make my dad proud. I didn’t know I was going to lose my spotter and get my hip busted in another couple of weeks. So the guy says, ‘Sure, but I’ll write you up big in my reports and if you change your mind, you just tell ’em and they can look ’em up and that’ll get you in.’ And I said, ‘Can you do me a favor? I know Marine Corps politics, and if it’s out I’m connected up with you people, that could hurt me. They don’t like that dual-allegiance thing in the Marine Corps. So the best thing you could do is not mention me by name at all.’ He says, ‘You sure, Gunny?’ I says I’m sure. My name ain’t in no file on that rifle. So if Ted Hollister says he heard about it in Saigon as a way of browning me up, he’s lying. My file with the Agency begins six thousand quarts of bourbon later. So how’s Ted know? Ted could only know from the Russians. They kept a file on that SVD case and he’d seen it. So if he’s seeing Russian files on American marines, he’s up to something nobody knows about. Got it?”

“What on earth motivated him?” asked Nick. “He doesn’t seem like the Ames or Aldrich type.”

“He left a statement on his hard drive. Crazy bullshit, I don’t even know how to describe it. What do they say? ‘The kind of nonsense only an intellectual could believe.’ That sort of thing. And we’re not going to release the news on him. It makes the Administration look too bad, and for now, they’re the ones signing the checks that we all cash.”

“So,” said Nick, “basically this guy masterminds a plot to kill the president and the top leadership of the country by maneuvering Ibrahim Zarzi into the Rose Garden with a miniaturized FM transmitter. He uses Dixson to hire contractors to stop a marine sniper team, killing one marine and wounding another. He pursues the surviving sniper across America, kills a guy in South Carolina, kills nine Filipino immigrants in Baltimore, kills four cops in DC, kills six innocent bystanders at the White House, and… he gets away with it.”

“It’s not my decision. It’s politics. But it’s also reality. As I said, someone thoroughly professional got him out. As I said, maybe the Pakis. They’re very good, and there are elements of their ISI that we think are jihad sympathizers.”

“It’s a big world out there. We’ll try hard, but look how long we’ve been going after Osama,” said the director.

“You forgot one thing,” said Bob.

They looked back at Swagger. He had one of those drawn-in cowboy faces, now much cut with the wrinkles that sixty-four years of gunfights will engrave in a man’s flesh.

“You forgot me,” he said. “My name is Bob the Nailer. I kill people.”

THEODORE R. HOLLISTER

DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

“AN ACCOUNT OF MOTIVE”

HARD DRIVE

NATIONAL SECURITY OFFICE IBM

C:\MY FILES\ACCOUNT.1.WPD

I am no Lee Harvey Oswald, surly and bitter and luxuriating in his own self-imposed bitterness. I am no John Wilkes Booth, full of grandiloquence, theatrical self-dramatization, narcissism, and insanity. I am no Leon Czolgosz, an idiot.

I’m just a man who sees the future, understands what it must be, and humbly aspires to facilitate it as mercifully and swiftly as possible. I did what I did because the West is no longer worth defending. It has been destroyed by the people it was built to protect: its women.

The West lasted from AD 732, when Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours, until 1960, where it fell without a battle. In 1960, the birth control pill became widely available. Many think of it as heaven, sexual nirvana, the route to self-expression, wish fulfillment, and liberation for millions of women. I think of it as Auschwitz in a bottle. It was and is genocide, as, using it, the women of my generation happily traded off 1,200 years of unparalleled growth, wealth, security, stability, scientific and ethical progress for a second BMW in the garage. The West ceased producing at a sustainable rate, while Islam continued to populate the world. You may look elsewhere for the demographics. This fact cannot be avoided: we Westerners currently may be analogized to upper-class Brits on the deck of the Titanic, April 12, 1912. My, my, why is the great ship tilting a bit? Why, dear, it’s probably some minor malfunction that the handsome young men will soon fix. Meanwhile, may I have another aperitif, steward?

But not only did the pill doom the West from without by limiting population, it destroyed the culture from within by destroying the gyroscope of civilization-that is, the balance between the sexes. The sexes had existed for that glorious 1,200-year span in a kind of brilliant equipoise: men provided and protected, women nourished and nurtured. It was a sublimely efficient system, if harsh. The result was generation after generation of bold, intelligent, hardy risk takers, driven by their fathers’ sense of duty but made compassionate by their mothers’ mercy. They were afraid of nothing, committed to a larger thing than themselves, all united in their confident sense of destiny. The men did what they had to do, the women did what they had to do. Together, they built a thing called civilization. In all realms, from the scientific to the industrial to the aesthetic to the military to the intellectual and the medical, Western thought and culture prevailed. It was extraordinary and it seems even now absurd that we threw it away in a single generation.

After 1960, the dominos fell quickly. Once the size of a family could be controlled, it shrank; women returned to the workplace. Soon-believe me, I am not arguing that they are “dumb” or in any way “inferior”-they were making equal or even more than the males, so male authority was challenged and, metaphorically, that leveraged and ultimately destroyed the whole concept of authority. Simultaneously, with small family size, more was invested in each of 2.4 children, so that the death of one meant a shattering emotional wastage. Soldiers could no longer die in the thousands, much less the hundreds. Without defenders, we are doomed.

Thus the only question that remains for a serious man: with the West gone, what system of governance best serves the most people of the world?

If the West can no longer be defended, the East can no longer be denied. The answer to the question, “What is next?” has to be Islamic theocracy. It alone has the harshness of temperament to control the feminism that doomed the West. At its purest, Islam is simply masculinity emboldened, masculinity without moderation, hesitancy, compassion, and introspection. That force alone can save us.

You say: Islam is submission, it is barbaric in its jihad against infidels. True enough.

But once Islam has achieved hegemony and exists without challenge, all that will change. That is what truly lies ahead: Islamic hegemony over the earth, based on masculinity-self-discipline, faith, obedience, and duty. That is the system of governance that will best serve the most people and make the most people the happiest. The intellectuals and ironists will never be satisfied; wisely, Islam will execute them. They do harm far disproportionate to their numbers in any society and must be eliminated without mercy. That is the system that will finally yield the dream of paradise of economic and spiritual equality where the state has withered away and each gives from his ability and receives to his need.

The way of Islam is the only way, the predestined way, and I engineered my event to convince the West of the futility of resistance, its need to immediately abandon its adventuring in Muslim territories and to begin to study for the arrival of the Universal Caliphate.

Allah Akbar, God is great.

FBI HQ

FBI DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

WASHINGTON, DC

1645 HOURS

Swagger leaned forward. His features grew wolfish, pointed, grim, his body tense, his face a war mask; he was the hunter, the tall-grass-crawler. He was the wind, he was the brush, he was the earth. He was the sniper.

“Just a few days ago,” he said, “I was beefing on security. I said we’d been penetrated. Remember that? There was a leak. No other explanation on how Bogier and his shooters kept showing up. Cruz thought I might have been the leak, somehow. Okada wouldn’t even talk to me about it, it made her so mad. Memphis said they had to be using satellites. But then I shut up. So, someone ask me, why did I shut up?”

“Why’d you shut up, Mr. Swagger?” asked the director after a bit.

“I figured if it was satellites, there’d be some kind of radio gizmo in the rental car. Went down and spent an hour going over it. Not a goddamned thing. So if it wasn’t in the rental car, where the hell was it?”

No answer.

“Well, I’ll make it easy. You got a man and a car. And it ain’t in the car.”

“Okay,” said Nick, “I’ll be the fish. So it was on… the man.”

“Now how could it be on the man? Hmm, so I thought hard on that one and tried to reckon as to the first time they showed up on my tail, and it was in South Carolina, in Danielstown. So I thought hard some more about South Carolina, and damned if I didn’t finally recall that on the first night, some guy tries to mug me, grabs my wallet, and another guy tracks him down and takes the wallet off him and returns it. Goddamn, that wallet was out of my control for a good two minutes. Easy to slip something into it, something thin and unremarkable.”

“A tag,” said Nick. “They tagged you.”

“Sure they did,” said Troy. “An RFID. Radio frequency identification device. A miniaturized transponder. It can be laminated into, say, a credit card, complete with aerial. A satellite is always asking it where it is and it’s always answering. If you can cut into that conversation, you can track… yes, and wasn’t there a BlackBerry in their SUV?”

“There was,” said Bob. “And when I looked in my wallet, there was a BankAmericard card. I hate them big banks, so I don’t do no business with them. I hadn’t put it in there, but like a dumb bunny, I’d carried it everywhere and they monitored me. That’s how they got to the Filipino house in Pikesville and to the car wash in Baltimore.”

“It’s very useful technology,” said Troy.

“Ain’t it though?” said Bob. “So I thought: I’m gonna throw this sucker out and that’ll be that. But then I thought: Hmm. It’s too good a gimcrack to pitch. How can I turn it against them? How can I get it on them? And that’s why I wanted the meeting. I had some arrogant idea I’d be able to spot our man. And goddamn, if he doesn’t give himself away, thinking he’s all friendlied up with me. My good pal Ted Hollister. Once he blew his cover with the rifle bit, I knowed he’s up to something. I picked up his briefcase. I slipped it in just before I handed it to him. Maybe he’s like me. He just sticks stuff in. He never checks the whole thing or goes through it. And I’m betting if that’s the case, there’s a fair chance it’s still with him, still in his briefcase, wherever he is. And you can track him by it.”

“Where’s this going?” Nick asked.

“It’s going to an MQ-9 Reaper,” said Bob.

CREECH AFB

OPERATIONS CENTER

INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

2120 HOURS

A WEEK LATER

Well,” said the colonel, extending his hand, “welcome back, Mr. Swagger. Now that I get who you are, I won’t be such a military dickhead. Congratulations and all that bullshit. Sorry we played so dumb for you the last time.”

“It ain’t nothing, Colonel Nelson,” said Swagger. “I’m happy to be here this time and I’m glad everything’s on the up-and-up.”

“We’d better get over there. She’s been on him for a long time and she’s getting ready to shoot. That’s what you came to see, right?”

“Yes I did. Like to see this fellow closed out.”

“He isn’t only going to be closed out. He’s going to be scattered to the four winds.”

They walked to the ops center, that vast dark cave of air-conditioning and keystroke sounds and the glow of monitors, past operators hunched over their control panels and sticks, past banners that read GO GET ’EM, COWBOY, and KILL TOWELHEADS NOW, and HAVE REAPER, WILL TRAVEL, and KILLING IS OUR BUSINESS AND BUSINESS IS GOOD.

But that wasn’t the only difference. The young operators wore backward baseball hats or cowboy hats, some had cups of dip parked on their panel boards, some chewed toothpicks or unlit stogies or wore one black, fingerless glove. Air Force? Never heard of it. It was more like some kind of skateboarders’ meet sponsored by Mountain Dew where the events included the double slalom, the long jump and spin, and the jihad splatter pattern.

In time they found the new ace, Jameson, tucked away in a corner, her eyes glued to the screen in front of her. She wore pink Bermudas, a tank top, flip-flops, and had her blond ponytail pulled through the gap in her Cubs hat. She wore Wayfarers under the clamped headset.

Nelson whispered, “Since this is your kill, she said you could watch. Just don’t move around a lot, or break her concentration.”

Jameson lay off to the east about twenty miles, keeping a ridge between 107 and the Jeep Cherokee. She flew lazy circles under the crest, and every once in a while, on no set schedule, zoomed over the line, got a quick visual on the vehicle as it zigzagged along the goat track farther and farther into Pakistan’s tribal regions. It was still there, as she knew it was; she checked only out of habit, for on another screen, a recon sitting much higher up watched it placidly, its electronic snooper finely attuned to the data stream the RFID sent to its satellite monitor.

Jameson’s stalk was not so intense that it closed other issues out of her mind. Number one being, which color toenail polish? Nude Crushed Pearl or Pacific Dusk? They were very close, a kind of shiny translucence with undertones of cream. Hmm. Both set off the tan of her legs and she had three days off for every two on and plenty of time to work on the tan, and Randy liked her legs tan but he also liked a redder, more dramatic shade on her toes. He’d be in this weekend, and they were going to go to the steak place at the Bellagio that everybody said was so good. A convergence of days off was rare in their relationship. The Creech Operations Center was a demanding taskmaster, as was Southwest Airlines, for whom Randy was a 737 copilot, but this weekend looked like it was going to happen. Anyway, all the magazines were pushing the cream thing. She pried her eyes from the screen and peered down quickly at her ten little piggies, now rather orange, the pedi a little outgrown. She thought it was called Persimmon Sunset.

“Cowpony 3-0-3, this is Ragweed Zulu, I have a possible target deviation.”

“Copy that, Ragweed,” said Jameson into her throat mike, “let me get a visual confirm.”

She oriented 107 in midair, took a quick glance at the ragged crest line between herself and the target, saw an upcoming gap. She eased back on the stick while giving the big bird a little more turbo, and inclined upward seven degrees. Without giving it a second or even a first thought, she toggled from the nose cam to left/lateral, and just as the lens broke free of the interfering rock mass, she brought up the magnification, waited for the self-focus, and brought the vehicle up so vividly on-screen it seemed just a few hundred feet away. Meanwhile, the compass readout above the image drifted around, quavered, and finally settled on a heading.

“Ragweed Zulu, this is Cowpony, I have a deviation, he’s shifted from 123 north to about 204 west and I’m getting a slightly higher speed read, I’m putting him at close to thirty mph.”

“Copy that, Cowpony.”

“Ragweed, I am requesting a map indexing, can you handle, over?”

“Cowpony 3-0-3, I copy that, over, be advised to give me a minute, please, over.”

Ragweed got busy with his maps while Jameson went back to the issue of feet. She always kept hers as pretty as possible. She was not one of those thin things with hardly an extra ounce anywhere, but if solidly constructed, she was still stunning, a blond, blue-eyed all-American girl, seventh in her class at the academy, the big gun on her shift, and, everybody said, every bit as good as the legendary Dombrowski.

“Cowpony 3-0-3, this is Ragweed Zulu, over.”

“Go ahead, Ragweed Zulu.”

“Cowpony, I have a village called Pesh el-Aware a couple of clicks ahead. We ran a 114L gig there two years ago, so it has been an active Taliban and Al-Q site but there was a collateral issue, I am advised. Do you want to shoot him now before he gets into it? We’d cut down on the collateral.”

“Ragweed Zulu, I’ll take that under advisement. But maybe these guys will send someone out to meet him, and we’ll get a twofer. That’s my play, Ragweed, over.”

“Cowpony, this is Ragweed, I support that call, you stay low and off, over.”

“Copy that, Ragweed.”

PASHMIN MOUNTAINS

EASTERN PAKISTAN

0850 HOURS PAKISTANI TIME

The journey had been so long, and he was tired. He was scared too, and had a major melancholy going on, a case of buyer’s regret. He tried not to think of the things he’d never sample again or the moment of horror when he’d cut the woman’s throat. The weapon was X-ray proof, an intensely sharp plastic blade nestled in the lapel of his tweed sports jacket. He took no pleasure in using it. That’s not me. I had to do it. But the look when he slashed her, and the amount of blood, so unexpected, and the ease with which it transpired, all of it, so vivid, so awful, yet also somehow satisfying.

On either side: nothing, as if out of a Beckett play. A denuded rural landscape of high desert, rock scut, leathery vegetation without flower or color, mud, dirt, stones, and sky. In the distance, the Hindu Kush showed its snowy magnificence but it was a sight one grew used to quickly. He thought instead about the nothingness he saw now, and how out of that nothingness, inspired by the desert’s emptiness, a man had created a vision and it was, after all was said and done, the moral vision. He had committed to it. He was a moral man. He clutched his briefcase to his chest.

“Not much farther, I think,” said his bodyguard from the front seat, “the village just ahead, and we are there.”

Except of course there was no there there just as there was no here here.

“That is good,” he said.

“You must be a very great man,” said the guard, holding his rifle close. “They value you a great deal and honor you. Your comfort will be my duty. I cannot give you New York and bright lights, but I do bring you the clarity and the beauty and the serenity of the high desert.”

“That is all I want,” he said. “I have seen enough of those cities. I have tasted their wickedness to my content. It is now time to dedicate myself to further learning and meditation and to prepare myself to be of use in the next great development.”

“Oh look,” said the bodyguard. “They sent a delegation. Oh my goodness, look who it is! A very high commander! Oh, I am so impressed.”

The Land Rover closed the distance with them, and came to a halt. Five fighters tumbled from it, and then a distinguished man hung with bandoliers of magazines, a smile on his bearded face.

“My friend!” he called. “My brother!”

Hollister climbed from the Jeep, felt stiffness crank through his old legs but did not want to acknowledge it at this high spiritual moment, and opened his arms to embrace his new leader.

“My brother!” he said. “God is great.”

At that moment, a screaming came across the sky.

CREECH AFB

OPERATIONS CENTER

INDIAN SPRINGS, NEVADA

2152 HOURS

Nude Crushed Coral! It had to be! The other had too much orange in it and with the dress she planned to wear might be too matchy-matchy, because the dress had an orange tone to it that somehow, with the tan, made her teeth look very white. Randy liked that too.

“Cowpony 3-0-3, this is Ragweed, do you read?”

“Ragweed Zulu, this is Cowpony 3-0-3, I copy, over.”

“Cowpony, the big bird is picking up a heat-emission signature, possibly another vehicle, maybe the greet you figured on, over.”

“Ragweed, this is Cowpony, I will take a recon and advise, over.”

“Go ahead, Cowpony.”

She vectored 107 left, and went high, high, high, so the bird, though a Reaper was as big as a B-25 bomber on the ground, would be at twenty thousand feet nothing but a white speck, its roar lost in the tides and surges of the atmosphere. Look at me way up high, suddenly here am I, I’m flying! She loved this part. Breaking the surly bonds of earth. Too bad it wasn’t an F-15, but a Reaper was still a good ride and it did what had to be done.

From twenty, she put the white cruciform on the small blot of illumination that signified the RFID data-stream source, brought up the magnification on her primary screen, and again watched as the tiny objects leapt to recognizability. She saw the Jeep, a new Land Rover, and a crowd of men engaged in hugging and congratulating one another. Many had weapons.

“Ragweed, this is Cowpony, I read armed targets, request permission to engage.”

“Cowpony, this is Ragweed Zulu, I am acknowledging request, confirming weapons, waiting for any comment from the Six, getting none, assuming shot clearance in place, entering it in the logbook. Go to weapons, Cowpony, and engage when ready, over.”

“Ragweed, this is Cowpony, acknowledging permission.”

She snapped a button and a computer icon of her weapons choices came up on the screen; given the altitude and the high value of the targets, she designated Paveway II, with the thermobaric 500-pound warhead.

“Ragweed, I have designated left inboard Paveway Two, am now arming weapon, and switching screen to secondary feed.”

“Copy that, Cowpony, over.”

She lifted one wing while dropping the other, circled majestically, bird of prey, soaring eagle, riding the invisible superhighways of rushing wind, held the group of men and their two cars stable under the cruciform, seemed to take an involuntary breath.

“Ragweed Zulu, I am engaging.”

She pushed a button, then watched from the nose camera as the bomb took its long, last ride to earth, as internally the CPU sent minor corrections to the vehicle’s vanes, tweaking this way and that as it sought its destiny under the white cruciform imposed from on high, nothing radical, just turning a good trajectory into a perfect trajectory, and the earth and its bounty of men and vehicles and justice rushed ever so fast toward her until it resolved into a complete blur. She switched the secondary readout to the long shot from 20,000 and saw the screen blank out and then return to quasiclarity. The center ruptured in a spew of radiance, an outgoing circular wave of pure energy registering as an incandescence that overwhelmed the screen.

A cheer rose in the room, and somewhere close by, a couple of operators jumped up to slap out some high fives.

“Hoochie mama,” someone called.

“He didn’t like that,” came another.

“Welcome to hell, pilgrim.”

“Dead zero,” said Swagger.