Cold Barrel Zero (24 page)

“Mission first,” she said. “It was his choice. Getting us killed won't save him.”

The enemy .50s threw a torrent of bullets our way, sent a wall of water at the RHIB. I pulled away, choking from the smoke.

“We have to go, Byrne,” she said. “We can finish this.”

I circled the flames as they spread farther and farther, well beyond the distance Hayes could have swum.

“I couldn't save him,” I said quietly. I pictured him floating dead in the dark water and knew that the image would never leave me.

“You got her. You got the truth. You saved all of us. Now turn to shore.”

I POINTED THE
boat to the east, away from the wreckage. Our shadows flickered in the orange light, growing longer. After we'd gone one hundred meters, Nazar cried out, “My son.”

It was a relief to hear her talking.

“My son!”

I thought it was shock at first. I brought the boat to neutral and knelt over her. The veins in her neck stood out like thick, dark cables. They were massive, distended.

No.

I tore open her shirt and searched the skin with my light. It was a small red dot just beside her sternum that looked like a speck of paint. A puncture wound to the chest. The bruises around it were growing quickly, indicating major trauma. I took her pulse, rapid and weak, then listened to her heart. It sounded muffled, distant, like it was beating under the sea.

She put her hand to my face, stared at me, and screamed, “Son! No. Please!”

Altered mental status. With the other signs, that confirmed it. She had a cardiac tamponade. Her heart was drowning in its own blood. When the heart bled, it filled the sac surrounding it, and the pressure built, constricting the heart, killing her with every milliliter.

She had vital signs. But that wouldn't last.

I reached for the trauma kit, pulled out a 16-gauge needle, and attached it to a 20 cc syringe. My only hope was to buy her time.

“Do you need help?” Moret asked. “Is she okay?”

“It's all right. You rest.” A piece of metal must have stabbed Nazar in the chest, probably in the chaos as I helped her through the breach. I had missed it, and now she was dying.

The pressure was increasing on her heart as it pumped less with every beat. She blacked out. Two more breaths, then nothing.

The RHIB rocked on the swells. The burning
Shiloh
cast a faint red glow through the fog.

I sterilized the skin just below her sternum. You enter there, at the base of the sternum, aim the needle at the left shoulder, and drive it in at a 45-degree angle toward the heart. In hospitals, they use ultrasounds to help guide the needle, but I didn't have that option. I had to stab her in chest, break through the pericardium—the sac around the heart that was now filled with blood—and stop before I hit the ventricle and killed her. It was a margin of millimeters.

The RHIB slid down the back of a swell.

Hayes had traded his life for hers, and I had squandered it. Another woman dying in my hands. Another shade.

I lifted the thick needle and pressed it to the left of the bottom of her sternum. The skin tented, and then the needle broke through. I slid it forward as I pulled back on the plunger, my body moving with the rolling ocean, my eyes fixed on the syringe, waiting to puncture the membrane around her heart, waiting for the blood to pour out.

Suddenly I was back at Dagger, covered in blood to the elbows, Emily's heart in my hands.

Gunfire tore through the night. I pushed the needle in deeper. A wave crashed into the gunwale.

Blood spurted into the syringe.

RIGGS STOOD ON
the tilting fantail of the ship and reached for the rail. The men squinted as the diesel smoke blew into their eyes and the flames roared off the side of the
Shiloh
. This was supposed to be a straightforward coastal run—with a skeleton crew and the close-in weapon system off—and now they were crippled, under full attack.

“What's happening below?”

“They breached the crypto vault.”

“Nazar?”

“She's gone. We saw a RHIB take off.”

Riggs placed his hand over his mouth, then brought it down. It was impossible to believe. The attackers were still out there. They might lose the ship.

“Hayes is close. He wouldn't come this far and not finish it. He'll come back for us. You get the fuck out there, all of you, and search that water until you find him. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go!” Riggs shouted, and then crossed the deck. He went in and kept to the high part of the passageway. The metal was warm to the touch, but at least he wasn't on the main deck, where swells and fire washed over the side.

He could hear the water splashing below him. Two compartments had flooded. The ship was barely above the waterline.

He keyed his radio. “All available men out?”

“That's right,” Hall replied.

“And we're seaworthy?”

“For now.”

“What about support?”

“The Marines are sending Super Cobras from Pendleton.”

Attack helicopters. Riggs killed the radio, laid his arm over the top of a coiled fire hose, and rested his forehead against it.

One of Riggs's guards, a former Ranger, climbed down a ladder to the mess, a large dining area. The flooding rose halfway up the bulkheads, deeper on the port side due to the ship's tilting. He waded in up to his chest and began to cross.

Behind him, a shadow emerged from the black water. It was a man, rising to his chin and breathing deeply but silently, his eyes taking in the whole space.

Hayes rested like that for thirty seconds, until the panic and oxygen starvation abated. He listened to the guard's radio chatter, memorized every call sign. The guard began to turn, and Hayes slipped back under the water.

They would be looking for him out on the surface, so Hayes had come back in through the breach.

He wanted Riggs alone, or Caro. He waited until the soldier climbed back out, then rose and caught his breath. He dived and slipped through the water in silence toward the bow.

He surfaced at the end of the passageway and climbed up a level. He was near the center of the ship. Ahead of him were the staterooms for the senior officers. He moved down the corridor and was halfway through it when he saw one of the dogs on a watertight door turning. He pressed against the bulkhead next to the door, his pistol ready at chest level.

Through the glass porthole in the door, he saw Bill. He lowered the gun, and as Bill stepped through the door, he swung his left fist as though driving an ice pick into his temple. Bill stumbled. Hayes brought his left arm around his neck so Bill fell forward into the V of Hayes's elbow.

Hayes brought this right arm up, clasped his own biceps, and vised down on the man's arteries, applying enough pressure on the airway to keep his cries quiet but not enough to crush his trachea. Bill clawed at Hayes's forearm and head and blacked out after eight seconds. Hayes lowered him to the deck and flex-cuffed him. He pulled one of the straps off Bill's ammo vest and stuffed it into the man's mouth.

He stood and caught a reflection in the porthole just as he felt the pressure against the back of his skull.

Hall, Riggs's deputy, stood behind him with a gun to his head.

“So stupid,” Hall said, looking down at Bill. “You should have killed him.” He pressed the pistol in harder.

Hayes snapped his neck back, driving the muzzle up, at the same time he lifted his knees to his chest fast enough that his feet came up off the deck. His whole body free-fell for a split second in a deep squat.

His right hand snatched Hall's wrist and brought the arm forward, past Hayes's ear and down. Once Hayes had the wrist and the gun hand, he slammed his feet down, stood up to his full height, and drove his right shoulder into Hall's elbow. He felt a soft pop and a crack as the ligaments and then the bones gave in to the hyperextension. The pistol dropped from Hall's hand.

Never put a gun that close,
thought Hayes.

He caught it by the barrel in his left hand and gave it a half turn as he pulled Hall forward by the broken arm as if he were going to throw him over his shoulder. That brought Hall's body against Hayes's back and slightly to the right as Hayes reached with the gun around his own torso, pressed it against Hall's chest, and fired twice.

The body, as he had hoped, muffled the pressure, which could have blown his ears in that confined space. Hall fell to the deck, bellowing. Hayes shot him in the eye. As Hayes wiped the blood from his face, he could hear footsteps clanging down the passageways.

“Eagle? Eagle?” A voice came from the radio handset clipped near Hall's shoulder.

They'd heard the shots. They were coming.

Hayes picked up the handset, stretched it toward himself, and put on labored breathing.

“This is Eagle. Riggs. Riggs. Where are you? I'm hurt, he got away. He is heading toward the stern, the port-side passageway.”

That was the opposite side of the ship.

“Who is this?”

“This is Eagle,” Hayes said. “Riggs. Where's Riggs?”

“Heading for the CO's stateroom.”

That was closer to the bow of the ship. He heard guards closing in on the doors at both ends of the passageway. The water was rising. Hayes would have to go down to move forward. He opened a hatch and pulled the radio from Hall's corpse. After three deep breaths, he disappeared under the surface.

Hayes navigated by feel, using the pipes along the overhead, and swam forward far enough to come under the passageway near the CO's office. He climbed through a hatch, and as he rose from the water, he tilted his gun forward to drain the barrel.

He slipped down a passageway filled with the sound of seething water and the general alarm, then came to a corner and peered around. Riggs stood twelve feet away. It was sweltering. The fire was close. The bulkheads seemed to waver with heat.

Hayes closed in before Riggs could turn. He pulled his knife and in one movement chicken-winged Riggs's right arm behind his back and pressed the blade against his throat. With his grip on Riggs's wrist, he torqued the arm all the way up to the shoulder. The only way to relieve the tearing pressure on the joint was to lean forward, into the blade.

There was justice, order, duty. They gave Hayes's life meaning. But they had been torn apart. The moment they came for his wife and child was the moment they moved past all limits on barbarity, on the animal instincts that had been sharpened in him over decades. He had seen the darkness poison Speed, but there was a time when killing was just.

He could feel the fire getting closer. Sweat dripped and stung his eyes. He gripped the knife tighter, twisted Riggs's arm harder, and turned his face away to avoid the wash of blood.

“No one hurt them,” Riggs pleaded. “They're okay. Your wife and child.”

Hayes said nothing, made no sound save for measured breathing from his nose.

“We can work this out,” Riggs said.

Hayes relaxed the joint lock.

“Where are they?”

“Police custody.”

“And Caro?”

Riggs didn't respond.

“Caro,” Hayes said. “Where is he?”

“He's secure. That's all I'll say. You're going to kill me either way. I'm not going to help with your revenge.”

Riggs deserved to die, for the killing he had stood by and condoned and for what he had taken from Hayes. But this wasn't about revenge. Hayes had a mission to defend and protect his people, and that meant stopping Caro. It was a mission he had taken on two years ago for a country that now called him a traitor. But that didn't matter. The duty remained. And he wasn't going to stop until he finished the job.

He needed answers, not blood.

“Nazar is gone. The truth is going to come out. You're going down for the massacre, but you can still do the right thing. Caro is the real enemy. Tell me where he is.”

“You talk about the right thing?” Riggs laughed. “I did what needed to be done in that village. You, though, you're a traitor. Your job was to get burned. It's what you signed up for when you went black. You disobeyed orders. Everything you've done from that day to this is a disgrace.”

“I'm happy to suffer for my country's sins, but not yours. Where is Caro? What are you planning?”

He wrenched Riggs's arm until the tendon almost tore.

“False flags and proxy battles. We're going to win this. You don't have the stomach for the war we need to fight,” Riggs said.

“You still don't understand. Caro is Samael. He's the terrorist we hit on the incursion. When they ambushed us, they had brand-new Colt M4s. They had fresh hundred-straps, CIA money. You helped him. You made a mistake. That's understandable. It's chess. It happens, but for Christ's sake, don't double-down with a terrorist.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You have to know. Jesus. Why would you get in bed with him? You saw him kill those people in the village,” Hayes said.

“Those people gave your location to the enemy,” Riggs snarled. “The interpreters betrayed you, set you up for that ambush. We had to get rid of them. It was ugly, sure, but they stabbed us in the back. Then someone had to take the fall. That's your job.”

Hayes understood at last.

Caro had fed Riggs a bullshit story to cover up his own role in the ambush. He had blamed the interpreters, painted them as the true enemy. Riggs had thought killing them was a necessary evil, frontier justice. It was a grave crime, but now at least Hayes could understand what had happened. For Riggs, embracing the lie about the interpreters was easier than admitting he had been wrong, that he had aided the enemy. It was tragic in a way.

But even Riggs couldn't have been that willfully stupid, that blind.

“You saw him doing the killing,” Hayes said. “And then you believed him when he turned around and gave you that story. Why? Jesus, just think for a second—”

“Believed him? No. I didn't believe
him.
I wouldn't have taken his word alone. He wasn't the one who first told me about the villagers stabbing us in the back. I believed—”

The booming pressure swallowed the words, and then fire roared through the compartment. It knocked Hayes forward. The flames felt cool at first, a strange numbness along his back as he stumbled and Riggs threw himself to the side.

The explosion swallowed the oxygen in the passageway. Hayes gasped for breath but no air came. The initial shock of the blast resolved into pain now, tearing across his back. He rose to one knee. Something had exploded. Molten rubber and plastic coated his back, burning down through the skin.

He couldn't see Riggs through the choking fumes. He rolled twice but had no way to tell if he had extinguished the flames. Then the first bullet came through the smoke, sparked blue against the bulkhead. Shrapnel rained down on the passageway.

He rose to his feet and sprinted around the corner. Footsteps clanged on the metal. Voices came on the radio: “Forward, move…move. Protect the bridge.”

He tried to think through the fog of pain. He could understand their tactics from their comms. It was typical for teams that hadn't spent enough combat time together; slow, cautious, deliberate. They couldn't flow, couldn't anticipate, couldn't work with the speed, silence, and violence necessary. They knew they had contact. They were closing on the bridge.

The
Shiloh
had a wide tower—known as a superstructure—roughly at its midpoint that rose thirty feet above the main deck of the ship. Hayes and Riggs were inside the base of the tower, where the commanding and executive officers had their offices and staterooms. Above them was the bridge, the windowed room at the top of the tower with a panoramic view of the sea where the commanding officer could control the ship.

That would be the standard place to evacuate the principals, where the watch would circle and protect them. That's where Riggs had been headed and that's where Hayes knew he would find Caro;
he's secure,
Riggs had said.

The only way to get in was by climbing the ladders inside the tower or by climbing up the rungs on the back of the tower in the open air. With those few access points, it was a kill funnel for anyone attempting an assault, and it's where Hayes needed to go.

But there was another way.

Hayes lifted the MP7 and shot along the bulkhead. The hollow-point rounds were the best choice for close-quarters work on ships because they fragmented and spalled. Hayes used the narrow angles to bounce the shards of bullet around the corner, covering the passageway behind him.

It felt like the skin was sloughing off his back, but Hayes kept calm, checking the route ahead while firing behind him, intending more to suppress than kill his pursuers.

He was in a room at the very front of the tower. Ahead of him a door opened to the outside and the forecastle, the main open-air deck at the bow of the ship, shaped like a triangle.

He grabbed an emergency escape breathing device off the bulkhead, a small tank of air with a plastic hood attached for use in case of fire or gas leak. Inside the pack was a green cylinder of pure oxygen.

They shouted after him. He opened the door to the forecastle and laid the green bottle across the frame.

“Grenade,” he shouted. Fair warning. He didn't want to kill them all. He wanted Caro.

He stepped outside. Swells threw burning water over the deck. He slammed the door shut with every ounce of strength, and the closing steel sheared off the tank's valve.