Dead Zero

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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.

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