Cold Barrel Zero (23 page)

The vault was filling faster than we had anticipated. And something was off. The water wasn't clear. The surface was a rainbow. I couldn't smell anything, but I knew that fuel was leaking somewhere nearby.

Hayes sank down a few feet and faced the door lock. It was a combination dial, group-three navy standard, that could be used on vault doors and safes.

I floated above and to Hayes's left, near the window, with a grease pencil and a small slate. He tried an old combination, with no success. He was going to have to decode the lock, and for that he needed a partner to keep track of the numbers.

The traditional way to crack a safe is by drilling at certain points, positions that are carefully guarded and specific to each model, that would allow the bolt to be drawn. We didn't have time for that and couldn't run a high-speed drill.

But every vault already has one hole drilled through it, for the dial, and that was the weakness Hayes would exploit. It was how he had managed to break in and steal his own classified records.

He pulled out a case marked
Falle Safe,
then jammed his knife behind the lock dial and pried it off.

That left the spindle exposed, poking out of the front of the lock. The spindle turns with the dial and lets the user manipulate the four wheels stacked inside the lock. Each wheel has a notch in it. The correct combination would leave those notches perfectly aligned, allowing a bar to fall down into them and the bolt to be drawn.

The spindle is a long threaded rod with a groove down its entire length. Hayes needed to remove it, but first he had to reach a wire all the way down that groove to the very back of the lock. There, a small piece of metal, called a key, had been hammered into the groove and bound the spindle to the wheels. If he knocked it out, he could unscrew the spindle.

He started feeding the wire in, then stopped.

This, he had told me, would be the critical moment. Attacking the spindle is one of the oldest, least sophisticated ways to crack a safe. Amateurs would simply hammer the spindle back into the vault. It destroys the wheels or pushes them off entirely, allowing the bolt to withdraw.

Any real safe has a countermeasure known as a relocker. These are inch-thick bolts held in by heavy springs that rest against the back of the lock and the wheel pack.

“Destroy the wheel pack?” Hayes had said. “The pins fire. Punch the spindle? You knock off the back of the lock, and the pins fire. Those pins can't retract. They permanently lock the vault. Not even the combination will open it. It takes hours of drilling at secret points known only to the manufacturer to disable those pins.”

If Hayes moved a few millimeters too far and set off the relocker, Nazar was dead, and our fate was sealed as surely as that vault.

It sounded like surgery.

He shook his hand out and tapped on the wire, pushing out the tiny piece of metal that held the spindle in place. It moved in, millimeter by millimeter.

He looked to me, put his hand flat, then raised it from his belly to his chest, asking how high the water was in the cell. I looked in, saw Nazar's desperate eyes, turned back to Hayes, and held my hand up to my neck.

He tapped the tool with the butt of his knife. Again; harder. Harder. It gave.

I held my breath, sure that he had gone too far and triggered the relocker. I listened for the clunk of the pins firing and heard nothing, but that didn't mean much. The noise could have been covered by the chaos in the water and the alarms sounding above our heads.

He unscrewed the spindle until it was free and put it aside. Nazar began to scream, which at least meant she was still breathing.

Hayes screwed a special replacement spindle into the lock. It had a hollow center that would allow him to feed a decoder—a thin rod—deep inside the lock mechanism. At the end of the rod was a metal clip that would reach around and let him feel the edges of the wheels and find those notches.

Nazar stopped screaming. I looked through the glass. Her eyes came above the surface one last time, then disappeared. We had two or three minutes until brain death started.

Hayes fed the rod in and turned it slowly. I waited with the slate. He found the first notch, and signaled:
68.
I wrote it down.

The second wheel took another thirty seconds:
10
. I could hear the chains rattling as Nazar struggled under the water. She was only wasting her oxygen.

The third wheel:
52.

One more.

The clanking inside the cell stopped. She was unconscious. She was dying.

Hayes pointed to the loop of my rebreather. I grabbed the tube to my counterlung and pulled it forward. Bubbles trickled out, slow and steady: a leak. I felt okay and double-checked the readout on my Dräger's display: no alarms.

He gestured for me to surface, but I didn't move.

He started on the fourth wheel:
27.

That gave us the combination, but it was relative. He needed one last measurement, of the wheel that would draw the bolt, to tell us the offset between our readings and the true zero of the lock. That was where I came in.

There was a chalky taste in my mouth, bitter and sharp. I thought at first it was just the coppery bite of fear, but I soon knew it was something far worse. I held on, held my breath. We needed those numbers.

Hayes gave me the offset, and I added it to our four numbers. As I wrote out the last figure, the pen in my hand seemed to recede to a small circle at the end of a long tunnel. I held the slate out to him.

Hayes entered the combination, tried the handle. It didn't work.

My chest spasmed, desperately sucking for air. I couldn't stop it. The caustic liquid rushed into my mouth. I vomited instantly into my mouthpiece, then spat it out and watched as the yellow plume melted the rubber of my loop and floated past me in a cloud.

I stroked for the surface with my last strength and bumped against the steel overhead. A small air pocket was trapped between two supports. I put my face in it and tried to breathe. Water ran into my mouth with each gasp, some into my lungs, and I coughed violently, swallowing more with each fit. My vision wavered. Hayes lifted me, kept my face in the pocket.

My eyes were an inch from the steel. I could taste diesel. The water rose, up my cheek, to the corner of my mouth.

“Take my regulator,” Hayes said. It would take me minutes to make up for the carbon dioxide poisoning, minutes Nazar didn't have, and there was no way Hayes could work the dial with me buddy-breathing on his back.

“No. Open that door.”

“The relockers must have fired. It's over. She's dead.”

The water splashed against the overhead. I craned my neck, sipped the last air.

“They didn't,” I croaked. “You can open it.”

“There's no point killing yourself—”

Nazar was in worse shape than I was. “I can't let another one die. Open that door.”

The water came over my nose and mouth. There was no air left.

He pulled out his regulator and handed it to me.

I kept my mouth shut, shook my head no. Hayes exhaled in anger and frustration, then brought his regulator back to his mouth. As my vision narrowed further, he turned down, grabbed the dial, and spun it hard.

Then the darkness took me.

THE PAIN BLOOMED
in my cheek, again and again. Someone was smacking me. I opened my eyes and threw up water that tasted like salt and gasoline. I looked over and saw Nazar, barely conscious, and Hayes, swimming between us.

We were inside the vault, in an air pocket near the overhead. The door was open.

“The key I pushed out must have fallen into one of the notches. I spun it out. You were right.”

My mouth and throat burned from the chemicals. In the red wavering light, I filled my chest, over and over, ignoring the choking diesel fumes to take in everything I could before the air pocket disappeared.

“Is she okay?” I asked. “Injuries?”

“Nothing immediately life-threatening.”

“Torture?”

“No sign.”

I felt along her neck, found the pulse; strong. The rainbow surface of the water rose closer to the overhead.

“No. No,” Nazar muttered and began to weep.

“We're going back underwater,” Hayes said.

“No!” she screamed.

“We're getting you out of here.” He backed against her. “Hold on to my shoulders and breathe through this.”

Hayes brought her arms over his shoulders and turned the mouthpiece on his Dräger around.

“Byrne, can you make it out of here in one?”

The air felt like fire against the swollen, burned skin of my mouth.

“Yes.”

He held Nazar's arms tight against his chest with one hand, held his regulator in the other.

“If you spit this out, we're all gonna die. Understand?”

She nodded. Hayes pushed the regulator into her mouth and opened the valve. He watched her suck the air in.

“Slower,” he said.

Nazar was still in shock, taking short, shallow breaths as the water rose over her chin and lapped against the overhead.

“We've got to go,” Hayes said. He dived through the door and entered the passageway. I took a long last breath. It was twenty-five meters to the breach. We had done fifty on one breath during training at Camp Pendleton. I had this, I told myself, ignoring the years since and the fresh trauma to my body.

I slipped under the water. We turned back the way we had come, toward the room where we had blasted the larger hole.

Hayes stopped, grabbed my shoulder, and pointed up. There was a small pocket of air trapped in a hatch. I came up inside it.

Metal clanged ahead of us.

“What is that?”

“They're opening the door. They carry scuba on every deck. They're coming for us.”

“What?” If they opened the doors, a second watertight compartment would flood, and the
Shiloh
would barely be able to float. “But anything goes wrong and the ship will go down.”

“That's how bad Riggs wants us.” He grabbed Nazar and held her above the water, dunking his own head for a moment.

A red light strobed below us. The door was opening.

“I'll hold them off,” Hayes said. “Bring her to the other breach.” He started to remove the Dräger.

“You'll need it more,” I said. “We can make it. I'll get her out and come back for you.”

“No. Stay with her. She's more important.”

Hayes pulled his knife from the sheath on his chest rig. “I'll be behind you with the loop if you run into trouble.”

The siren sounded and the door shuddered in its track. I wrapped my arm around Nazar's chest like a lifeguard, dived, swam in the other direction, past the vault and toward the second breach. I hauled her through the door and saw the hole through the hull. It was smaller, and jagged around the edges, but Nazar and I would be able to get out one at a time. The alarms seemed to grow louder, and I could hear and feel the grinding of a motor through the water. Nazar started to panic. I grabbed a pipe next to the breach, took off my small inflatable vest, and looped it over her neck. I pointed through the hole. The veins bulged at her throat; her chest spasmed. Her limbs started to shake.

Divers called it the sambas. She was working too hard. I pushed her toward it. She groped for me, knocked my mask to the side.

Gunshots behind us, low
poof
s underwater. The door was open. If we didn't get through that hole right now, we were done.

I shoved her through and put my chest and shoulder out halfway at the same time. The metal tore through my wet suit, cut my ribs. Cold water flushed down my side.

A current streamed through the breach into the ship, growing stronger by the second. They had opened the door behind us, and as it flooded it was pulling water down the passageway and in through the holes.

Three more gunshots cracked behind me, where Hayes had gone.

I fought against the current and yanked the red tab on the vest. It inflated instantly, and Nazar began to rise outside the ship. I grabbed for her ankle but the torrent of water picked up and pulled me back through the breach. I held it off for a moment, but now it was like a waterfall. I grabbed hold of a pipe and tried to fight against the weight of all that rushing water.

The current grabbed her, slammed her into the side of the ship, but as she bounced off the steel, the buoyancy took hold, and she began to rise toward the surface outside the ship.

My arm trembled, and gave out. I shot toward the passageway. I reached for the bulkheads, for anything, cut up my fingertips against a bolt, then finally caught a handle as the water rushed past me. The desperation built. My chest bucked for oxygen.

I looked back down the compartment. There was no sign of Hayes. The ship began to heel to one side. Nazar was floating up there on the surface, easy pickings for Riggs and his men. I had to get out to get her. I had to get out to breathe. I dived down, fought the easing current, grabbed the rough edges of the main breach, and hauled myself through.

I stroked for the surface as my body shook harder, my burned mouth screaming in pain, my vision narrowing to a pinpoint. The surface seemed to move farther away with every stroke.

I broke through, gasping the second my face hit the air, sucking in diesel fumes and the water I churned up.

Through the fog, there was no sign of Nazar, only the rolling swells crashing me into the side of the ship. I looked up. The starboard gunwale was moving closer, the hull leaning farther and farther. Ships can shift ballast to offset flooding, up to a point, which the
Shiloh
had long since reached.

The twenty-foot-high side of the ship slowly tilted down over my head. I swam hard as it moved faster. The rush of displaced water picked me up and washed me out as the steel loomed. The tilting slowed as the ship found its new equilibrium, the main deck just a few feet off the water.

Gunfire snapped overhead. I swam away as fast as I could. The fog gave me some cover. A hundred meters out, I turned on my back, taking in great breaths as the pain finally cut through the adrenaline. My body was wrecked, the skin over my ribs shredded and bruised.

I checked my watch; fourteen minutes since Hayes had called out
Jericho.
It had felt like an eternity.

I scanned the water. Nothing but spilling whitecaps. “Hayes,” I said into my radio. “Nazar,” I said, then again, louder.

The only answer was the splashing of water as the rifles closed in on my voice.

Moret came on the channel. “Byrne. Are you okay? What's your location?”

“Midship, starboard. A hundred meters out. They're shooting. I can get farther away.”

“I'm coming, lights on.”

I reached for a small infrared beacon on my shoulder and flipped the switch on the side. I couldn't see it shine, but she would. I tried to raise Hayes, but heard nothing. Then a roar grew on my two o'clock: a diesel engine.

“Is that you?”

“Yes. Be there in a few seconds,” Moret said.

I detached my submachine gun and brought it up just in case. The diesel coated my skin. The fumes were overpowering. I started to retch, and every gag scorched the burns inside my mouth.

The RHIB materialized out of the fog. I lifted the beacon. Gunfire burst behind us, threw curtains of water. The men on the
Shiloh
must have gotten their own .50 cals going.

As she angled toward me, I braced for the impact. She passed close and I grabbed for the rope, wrenching my left shoulder out of the socket. The boat dragged me along, planing on the surface of the water. My right hand closed on a plank seat and I hauled myself over the gunwale as the gunshots walked closer and closer. Moret threw the boat into a 180-degree turn.

“You okay?” she asked.

My teeth ground together from pain. I shoved myself across the deck to the center console of the RHIB. After two deep breaths, I gripped my left arm with my good hand, raised it up and behind my head, and pulled hard. The joint wouldn't reduce. I steeled myself and pressed my elbow against the console until the humerus popped back into place with an audible snap.

A string of obscenities poured out of my mouth and my vision started to darken; I was on the edge of passing out.

“I've had better days,” I joked to Moret, but the words were unintelligible. I sounded like Frankenstein's monster.

“What?” She turned and got a good look at me for the first time. “Jesus, you—”

A bullet tore through her right shoulder. She grunted and went down, grabbing the wheel. The boat lurched hard to port and buried the gunwale in the water. I slammed into the pedestal, planted my feet, fought my way against the spin toward the throttle, and pulled it back.

She was on the deck, eyes shut, blood streaming from her shoulder.

“Stay with me, Moret.” I stood and gunned the engines on the RHIB to get us out of range.

“I'm all right,” she said, and tried to sit up.

“No, you're not.”

Once we were clear, I checked the wound: in and out under her right armpit. That's high-value real estate, brachial plexus and the brachial artery. She could be dead in a minute.

I pulled the shredded fabric back and checked the wound channel. No frothing, no pulsing, no arterial blood.

“Can you move your hand?” She touched her thumb to her index finger. “Good,” I said. “I'm going to put something in it to stop the bleeding. It's going to hurt.”

She nodded.

I pulled out the QuikClot and stuffed it into the hole. She gritted her teeth and groaned as I leaned her forward and plugged the exit wound. I could fit four fingers in it.

She took long, deliberate breaths. I could see she was counting them out.

“That's good. You're going to be fine.”

“Where's Hayes? Did you get the woman?”

“Nazar got out. Hayes, I don't know.”

“Find them. I'll hold up.”

I took the wheel and lifted her NVGs. The whole field of vision blazed white. I took them down, figuring they were broken, and then saw red light flare through the fog, and smelled the acrid petroleum smoke.

The water was on fire.

The flames illuminated the sea near the ship, under the bank of cloud. I scanned the surface again; no sign of either one. Near the bow of the ship, I caught a white flash, the reflector built into my buoyancy vest. My breath caught. It was Nazar. The rush of water must have carried her there. A massive slick of diesel covered the water between us and her, covered the entire starboard side of the
Shiloh
. The fires near the ship hadn't ignited all of the fuel yet but would any second.

I reached for the throttle.

“Mako One, Mako One,” a voice came over the radio. It was Hayes. He was alive.

“This is Mako One. Where are you?”

“Twenty meters out from the stern, starboard side.”

“I'm on my way.”

“Where's the woman?”

“In the water. Starboard bow. I'll—”

“Get her first,” he said.

I turned the wheel to port to take us to Hayes.

“I'll get her after—”

“This is all about to burn. You don't have time for both of us. Get her first.”

“You have your rebreather. Dive. I'll find you.”

“Don't worry about that. Get the witness. Take her home.”

The flames jumped from puddle to puddle across the water. The whole slick was ready to blow. I knew the choice he was making: he was trading his life to clear his name, to finish this.

Another one who trusted me. Another one dead. I couldn't.

“I'm coming for you.”

“This is what I want, Byrne. Now go.”

I growled in anger and kicked the pedestal so hard I shattered the fiberglass, then I gunned the throttle and turned the wheel hard the other way, heading for the bow. The flames raced us to Nazar. They moved closer, rose behind us as we threw a giant tail of water, making straight for her. I switched hands, held the wheel in my right, and leaned toward the gunwale.

I could smell the nylon and rubber burning behind me. Nazar splashed in the water, then looked back to see the wall of fire speeding at her. It was so loud.

My hand skimmed over the surface of the water. I braced, grabbed her life vest with my left hand, and hauled her through the water, away from the flames. I lifted with both my legs, threw her onto the deck, and spun the boat around. The shoulder didn't dislocate again, but the pain tore through the whole left side of my body. My vision tunneled for a moment, and my legs went weak, but I held on.

I flew at the edge of the flames toward the stern, toward Hayes. The heat choked me, left me coughing.

“You're going to lose the boat, Byrne,” Moret said. “It's too hot.”

There was no oxygen. I couldn't see through the fire. I reached the water near the stern, at the border of the fire, ran out, turned back for another pass. Bullets ripped by. Two more passes. A gunshot blew out the Plexiglas on the pedestal. Fire raged where I had last seen Hayes. I turned away, scanned the water, yelled for him on the radio.

“He's gone, Byrne.”

“He can't be.”