Stephen Hunter - Dead Zero: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel (Bob Lee Swagger Novels 07)

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

I, Sniper

Night of Thunder

The 47th Samurai

American Gunfight (with John Bainbridge Jr.)

Havana

Pale Horse Coming

Hot Springs

Time to Hunt

Black Light

Dirty White Boys

Point of Impact

Violent Screen: A Critics 13 Years on the Front Line of Movie Criticism

Target

The Day Before Midnight

The Spanish Gambit (Tapestry of Spies)

The Second Saladin

The Master Sniper

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

Copyright 2010 by Stephen Hunter

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition December 2010

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Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hunter, Stephen.

Dead zero : a novel / by Stephen Hunter.

p. cm.

1. Swagger, Bob Lee (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. SnipersFiction.
3. MarinesFiction. 4. Afghan War, 2001Fiction. I. Title

PS3558.U494D43 2010

813'.6dc22

2010046773

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3865-6

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

For
Nick Ziolkowski
19822004
KIA, Iraq
The Sniper from Boys Latin

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

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

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

PART ONE

WHISKEY 2-2

ZABUL PROVINCE

SOUTHEASTERN AFGHANISTAN

0934 HOURS

Consciousness came and went; the pain was constant. It was the day after the ambush. The flesh wound in Cruzs 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 metalunmalleable, 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 Forcesrated 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 roofsometimes spottered up, sometimes not, with his SR-25, a beast of a .308 semiauto with a yard of optics up toppaying 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 werent 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 wasnt will or habit, it certainly wasnt 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 wasnt 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 finderit looked like a cartoon of a ski-jump slopeas 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. Hed 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 theyd 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 didnt happen that way. Reality seldom follows mission-op outlines.