Zero Day (13 page)

I
T IS THE FIRE
he remembers, really. Always that. In some ways maybe
only
that. Rubber, metal, and human flesh ablaze all together give off a smell like no other. It is a scent that is burned right into your DNA. It becomes a part of you forever. It is a part of him forever.

His right forearm shattered, he fires with the left, the butt of his assault rifle wedged into his armpit. Left-hand trigger pull for a righty would normally be problematic, but he’s trained for this very moment. Sweat, blood, and guts for this very second. He’s become ambidextrous, can fight off both sides with nearly equal skill.

Diesel fuel soaks his combat uniform. His combat assault helmet is gone, blown off by the blast’s concussive force. The strap burned his chin on the way out of the Humvee. He tastes salty blood.

His and others’.

There are scraps of human tissue on his face.

His and others’.

The sun is so hot that it seems possible it could alone ignite the fuel, burn him to cinders. He is perhaps a few degrees away from being a walking conflagration.

He assesses the situation. Up, down, out, in. All relevant compass points. Doesn’t look good. Actually, it never looks good. Two heavy-as-hell Humvees blown onto their sides like downed rhinos. Despite the underside armor four of his men are dead or mortally wounded. He’s the only one mobile. There’s no good reason why this is the case. It’s luck, nothing more. None of the dead and dying
men had done anything wrong. He had done nothing particularly right.

The IED had packed some serious punch. The terrorists were getting better. Americans armor up, so the turbaned bombers make a bigger boom to compensate.

He sprays the area with his assault weapon, empties two mags, drops it, shakes free his pistol, and fires off the extended mag on that. He’s not really looking to kill the enemy with the barrage, only to get their attention. To let them know he’s still around. To let them know that they can’t come and just take him and his men. That it won’t be easy. Or smart to try.

The next weapon he pulls from the wrecked Humvee is his favorite. The Army bolt-action sniper rifle. This time he will fire with more deliberation, with far more care. He uses the metal skeleton of the Humvee as his support. He wants them to know he is serious.

He fires off one round merely to warm his rifle barrel. No matter how good a shot you were, a bullet traveling down a cold barrel often misses its target. Snipers normally had spotters, but he doesn’t have that luxury right now. Thus he counts his mil dots, gauges angles, distance, ordnance drop, ambient temp, and wind among other factors and dials in the necessary adjustments on his scope. He does this automatically, without really thinking, like a computer executing a tried-and-true algorithm. The longer the shot, the greater small mistakes in calculations add up. An inch off here or there meant you missed your target by yards over a great distance. He is chasing breathing figures performing horizontal sprints across the street. These men are all lean and can run all day. Not an ounce of Western fat on them. They are brutal, hardened; mercy is not in their lexicon.

Yet he is also brutal, hardened, and mercy has been absent from his vocabulary since the day he put on the uniform. The rules of engagement are clear and have been ever since men first took up arms against each other.

He relaxes his breathing and then lets out a long exhale, reaching his cold zero point of physiological perfection for a sniper. Between
heartbeats to minimize barrel motion, he executes a long, sure, and unhurried trigger pull using the ball of his finger to avoid a sideways pull on the weapon. The shot impacts its targets and spins the Taliban runner like a ballerina. He hits the Afghan soil at the mid-street point. He lies still for all time, his brain disintegrated by Corporal John Puller Jr.’s heavy round.

He exercises the bolt on his weapon and slides home another 7.62 shell.

A split second later comes another run by an even taller, leaner Taliban.

Puller performs his kill algorithm at lightning speed, his synapses traveling far faster than even the bullet he’s about to deliver. Another trigger pull and then there occurs a second spin of Afghani flesh and bone with essential brain parts missing. The target twirls with grace, with utter finality. There are no second acts on the desert stage. This Taliban, like the first, doesn’t even realize he’s dead, because the brain is slow on the uptake in such situations. The howls of his comrades rip the air. Racks on weapons pull back.

They are pissed.

His preliminary mission is accomplished. Upset people never fight well.

Yet there will be some caution, for they know he is a force to be reckoned with. He looks at his men. He triages from a distance as blood pours out of his own body from multiple points. Three of his guys are dead, already burned nearly beyond recognition because the fuel and ammo loads have blown up in their laps. No chance for any of them. One man has been thrown clear of the fire but is dying nonetheless. A chunk of his chest and right leg are missing and as Puller watches something bursts inside the wounded man and superoxygenated arterial blood sprays over him like a horrific fountain of red. He’ll be dead in seconds. Yet there are four injured men he can still save. Or die trying.

Shots come his way. The Taliban aren’t running anymore. They take cover, raise their weapons—often their American-made weapons, from the Russian invasion decades ago—and do their best to end Puller’s life.

They are determined.

So is he.

They have fellow warriors they are fighting for.

So does he.

There are many more of them. He has called in for backup. It will take longer to get here than he probably has to live. To get out of this he will have to kill them all.

John Puller is prepared to do just that. In fact, he expects to do just that.

All extraneous thought is banished. He focuses. He doesn’t think. He simply employs his training. He will fight until his heart stops.

Total focus. This is it. All those years of sweat, of agony, of having someone screaming that you can’t do something but actually expecting that you will do it better than anyone ever has. All for the next three minutes. Because that’s probably how long it will take to declare a winner in this one encounter between desperate men. If you multiply all these individual fights to the death by a factor of a million it will add up to something called a war.

He lets their gunfire pass. The rounds ping off American Humvee armor. Others rip past his head sounding like miniature jet fighters. One grazes his left arm, a totally unremarkable wound among all the others. He will find out later that another rifle round whipsawed off the armor plates on his flak jacket, ricocheted off the toppled Humvee, reversed course, and found purchase in his neck after losing most of its juice. To the docs it will look like a big metal zit, right underneath the surface of his skin. Right now, he doesn’t even notice. Doesn’t care.

And then John Puller raises his weapon once more…

A
S ALWAYS
, Puller didn’t jerk awake. He simply eased off his thin mattress at Annie’s Motel. He was in control, his movements measured, steady. He was not on the outskirts of Kandahar fighting turbaned killers. He was in American coal mining country looking for perhaps homegrown killers.

He didn’t have to check his watch. His internal clock told him what he needed to know: 0430. He showered and took an extra thirty seconds under the hot water to lift the stench of a years-old memory. But it didn’t work. It never did. He was just going through the motions. He dressed in what had quickly become his uniform here: jeans and CID polo shirt, but he substituted an old pair of his beige Army jump boots for the sneakers. It was already hot outside. It likely never grew cool overnight. But no matter how hot it ever became, nothing could come close to Afghanistan or Iraq in summer. That was a heat that was impossible to forget. Especially when it was fueled by diesel fire. By the screams of men burning to death. Turning black and raw and then disintegrating right in front of you.

His cell phone rang. The office. Or maybe Cole. Maybe something else had happened. He checked the ID on the screen. His expression changed from one of alertness to something else, something diminished.

“John Puller.”

“You never called me back, XO.”

“Out on a mission.” He paused, but only for a second. “How you doing, General?”

John Puller Sr.’s voice was like the bark of a large, big-chested dog. It was an Army myth that the man could kill men simply with his voice, by making their hearts seize up with fear.

“You never called me back, XO,” he said again, as though he hadn’t heard Puller’s reply.

“Was going to today, sir. Problems?”

“My command is going to shit.”

Puller’s father had had his sons later in life. He was seventy-five now and in failing health.

“You’ll whip them back into shape. Always do. And they’re good men. They’ll respond. Rangers lead the way, General.” Puller had long since given up trying to reason with his father, tell him that he no longer had a command of any kind. That he was old and sick and dying far faster than he believed. Or it might be the old warrior didn’t think he was ever going to die.

“I need you down here. You can get them in line. Always count on you, XO.”

Puller had joined the military on the tail end of his father’s illustrious career. They had never served together. But the old man had kept a close eye on his youngest son’s accomplishments. Things had not been made easier for him because of his connection to the lieutenant general. In fact, they had been made infinitely harder.

“Thank you, sir. But as I said, I’m on another mission.” He paused again, checked his watch. He was behind schedule. He didn’t like to use this card, but he did when he had to. “I saw Bobby the other day. He told me to tell you hello.”

The line immediately went dead.

Puller closed the phone and slipped it into its holder on his belt. He sat there for a few more seconds, gazing down at his boots. He should go, he really should. Instead, he slid his wallet out of his pocket, flipped the photo out.

The three Puller men were all in a row. All tall, but John Jr. was the tallest, beating his old man out by a bare half inch. The general’s face was carved from granite. The old man’s eyes had been described as hollow-point ordnance with max loads. You could do pull-ups on his chin. He looked like Patton and MacArthur rolled
into one, only bigger, meaner, and tougher. He’d been a son of a bitch as a general, and his men had loved him, died for him.

As a father he’d been a son of a bitch too. And his sons?

I love him. I would’ve died for him
.

Senior had been the captain of the Army basketball team at West Point. They’d never won the championship during his father’s four years. But every team they played went home bruised and battered. And those that ended up beating his father’s team still probably felt like they’d lost. “Getting Pullered” was an expression often used back then. On the basketball court. On the battlefield. To the old man it was no doubt the same thing. He simply kicked the shit out of you until the buzzer sounded.

Or the armies ran out of ammo and bodies to throw at each other.

Puller’s gaze held briefly on the spot in the photo just to the left of his father. There was no one there, though there should have been.

There should have been
.

He put the photo away, gunned up and slipped on his CID jacket, and locked the door behind him.

The past is just that
.

Gone
.