Free Dead Zero by Stephen Hunter Page B

young women in bikinis the size of thumbprints were lounging about and most of them would sneak a peek at Mick once in a while. No surprise, since he had the hard body of an NFL linebacker—muscles without fat, all of them nicely bunched and protuberant—and the tattoos were all professional and elegant and military, not jailhouse shit with crude images of Jesus bleeding out on the cross or some chick named Esmeralda woven into hearts and violets. Mick took another sip of his Knob Creek on the rocks as Pablo reached him and presented the phone.
    “Señor?”
    “Can you throw it in the pool?” Mick asked.
    “It would not be a good idea.”
    “Agh,” said Mick. Who knew he was here? No one. That meant someone with the connex.
    “Hello?” Mick said.
    “Bogier. Enjoying the view?”
    MacGyver. He thought he was done with that asshole. It played out as per, and indeed the agreed-upon large sum had been wired to Mick’s account. Mick had also decided it was time to quit Kabul, in case someonecaught on to something and marines came looking for him. So he awarded himself liberty. Maybe it would stop the ringing in his ears.
    “I was until I heard from you.”
    “Don’t be testy.”
    “I’m on vacation. I’m whipped.”
    “Vacation’s over. A detail has come loose.”
    “And that would be?”
    “The guy you were paid to handle? Well, chum, you didn’t handle him. He’s back.”
    “Hey,” said Mick, “you guys cratered that hotel. He was there, I put him there for you, and you pushed the button and ka-boom, no more hotel. By the way, thanks for almost killing me too. However you did it, that sucker blew like a nuke. Man, that was a payload.”
    Mick remembered. How could he forget? He was a little off the street with his screen of Izzies in the alleyway. He disconnected the phone, turned, and signaled the war party to fall back. Then a screaming came across the sky, and the det went. Jesus fucking Christ. He had been around explosions his entire professional life. He’d set them, he’d planned them, he’d been inside a couple, he’d been close enough to a couple to catch a ride through the air for twenty-five feet, he had a thousand pepper marks on his otherwise glorious body from supersonic debris. But nothing like this. Explosions have personalities and they express ideas, they are not all the same. This one carried the message of serious mega destruction. It wasn’t a warning or an exclamation point, it wasn’t witty, ironic, amusing, or earnest. It was the end of the world in a very small package and it literally evaporated the hotel in a single nanosecond with a percussion that seemed to drive the oxygen from the surface of the earth and in the next nanosecond deposited a rain of dust, wreckage, human and animal parts, chunks of iron and masonry, windowsills, curtain rods, shards of glass on everything for miles around. It knocked him down. What the fuck. That was a goddamned blast and a half.
    “It was thermobaric. We warned you to take cover. Did you need an engraved invitation?”
    “The timing was a little off. It came in ahead of sked and capped thirty-one pilgrims and almost buried yours truly under a pile of heads and arms.”
    “Cry me a river why don’t you. That’s the suck, your chosen workplace. You’re in this particular operation, you’ll work it through to the end. Got it? We don’t have time to do a recruitment drive. We pick you and you don’t have the latitude here to say no, mister.”
    Unsaid: whoever MacGyver was, his power in finding and reaching Mick here or in the Cat’s Eye cafe in Kabul where all the coyotes hung meant again: he had the connex. A phone call from him could bring major heat beaucoup fast on Mick’s ass.
    “Not on the same bill,” said Mick. “That one’s over. This one’s starting up. Same fee structure. I don’t work cheap.”
    “Corporate, aren’t we? ‘Fee structure,’ very Graywolf. Yes, of course, lots of money for