Cold Shot: A Novel

by Henshaw, Mark

  The second pair of five-inch shells hit the Brión, tearing into the steel plates, one round hitting the superstructure, and Loyo lost his footing as the entire island shuddered, as though some giant’s fist had struck his ship. The deck was hidden by dark smoke now, and Loyo could smell it in the air. Electronics were burning, the insulation on the wires melting.

  Vicksburg’s guns flashed again. There was only one choice to make and he had to make it now. The next five-inch shells might kill his radio and all hope of ending the fight while some of his men lived.

  Loyo picked up the mic, cleared his mind, and made sure this time that he was speaking in English.

  “Vicksburg, this is Almirante Brión,” he said calmly. “We surrender.”

  Two more shells from Vicksburg’s deck guns slammed into the Brión’s hull, ripping holes in the hard metal, one of them near the waterline.

  USS Vicksburg

  “Cease fire!” Riley ordered.

  “Cease fire, aye,” the XO confirmed. Down in the CIC, the fire control officer slammed his hand down on the controls and the guns obeyed their captain.

  The bridge crew turned to their captain, waiting for his next command. Riley looked out at the Venezuelan ship.

  The Brión was almost hidden by a cloud of black smoke. Oil and fluids were burning somewhere belowdecks and he could see the flames through the gaping holes in the hull. She’d taken six hits from his five-inchers and would’ve taken at least that many more before a Harpoon would’ve closed the distance and torn her in two. Riley wondered for a moment how close the fire control team had been to launching the antiship missile he’d ordered.

  He lifted the mic to his mouth. “Brión, this is Vicksburg. We accept your surrender. Heave to and prepare to receive boarding parties.”

  “Understood, Vicksburg. We will receive your boarding parties. Please understand that we fired on your vessel by accident. Repeat, we fired by accident. Can we render any assistance to your crew?”

  Riley’s eyebrows went up at the question. They want to help us? It took some humility for the man to make that offer, he realized. Their captain is telling the truth. Maybe we’ve got a chance to back everyone down here.

  He turned on the radio. “Brión, thank you for your offer. Your concern is much appreciated. We will discuss mutual assistance after our boarding party has come aboard your vessel.”

  “Understood, Vicksburg. Standing by to receive your launch.”

  Riley flipped the switch on the 1MC. “This is the captain,” he said. His voice echoed throughout the passageways and across the smoking deck outside. “I have accepted the surrender of the Venezuelan warship Almirante Brión. Their captain reports that they fired by accident and has offered their assistance. We will maintain general quarters until we confirm nonbelligerence.” The captain could imagine how well that bit of news was being received belowdecks by the crew. “Your performance during the fight was exemplary. Well done. Let’s show them how Americans can be gracious in victory. Boarding parties to the deck in one minute. All departments, send damage and casualty reports to the bridge immediately. Master Chief LeJeune to the bridge.”

  It took LeJeune less than thirty seconds to obey the order.

  “How does it look?” Riley asked.

  “We’re okay, I think. One clean hit to the island. We’ve got wounded; looks like four casualties and we took some damage to the multifunction radar.”

  “Status of the casualties?” Riley asked.

  “I’m not sure, sir. I saw them as I passed by them running. At least one critical that I saw, judging by the burns. Two others look serious. We’ll have to evac them out.”

  “Very well,” Riley acknowledged. “Make it so.”

  “Not going to seize the ship, sir?” LeJeune asked, nodding his head at the Almirante Brión. “You’re passing up your chance to be a commodore for a few hours,” he said, a bit of dry mirth in his voice.

  Riley pondered that for a minute. “No,” he said finally, too quiet for the rest of the bridge crew to hear. “He never fired a shot after that first salvo and he says that was an accident.”

  “You believe that?”

  “If it gives us the chance to avoid a shooting war and killing a lot of Venezuelans kids, I’ll choose to believe it,” Riled responded. “We’ll help patch them up and then send them home under their own flag. Tell Doc Winter to get over there and help take care of their wounded after he’s prepped our own for evac. We’ll airlift anyone he can’t treat here over to the Truman.”

  “That’s generous,” LeJeune conceded.

  “Maybe the sight of two wounded ships helping each other out after a misunderstanding might get everyone to calm down a bit,” Riley said.

  “Maybe, assuming it really was a misunderstanding,” the master chief agreed. “But the politicians aren’t always so good at connecting compassion with common sense.”

  Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

  The stars were out, the lesser ones near the horizon disappearing in the light that the port town was throwing into the sky. Jon stared at the darkness just over the town where only a single point remained. Mars, he thought. There was a red tint to it. Or perhaps the color came from the smoke. Several pyres rose from Puerto Cabello: four, and one had started in the last hour. All were too large to be campfires set by tourists on the beach, and if Marisa had been right, there wouldn’t be any tourists on the beach now anyway. He closed his eyes, hoping to pick up some stray sound from the port city that might give him some clue about what was happening, but all was silent. Humidity muffles noise, he knew, and this country had more than its share of humidity.

  He turned his back to the city lights and searched the now-darkened valley floor for any sign of Kyra. The young woman had left hours before to fetch the truck. He’d wanted to accompany her, but she’d insisted on going alone. You’re better on the Barrett, she’d said. The hill’s defensible and you can cover me. Neither was true. There was no defensible position against an enemy that could bring in helicopters and lay down fire from the air, and the forest canopy kept him from seeing her once she reached the base of the hill. But he couldn’t argue with her assertion that it made no sense for them both to get arrested if someone was waiting for them at the abandoned shack. So she’d left all her gear but her gun, climbed down, and walked into the woods. He’d stared through the Barrett scope at the cluster of buildings where they’d left the vehicle, looking for some sign of her until growing darkness had made that futile. Now he hoped to see truck headlights through the woods from that direction, but there was nothing. That made sense, too. Kyra would probably be navigating with her night vision alone, fearing that headlights would be visible from the air. There was no sound from her engine either. At this distance, the humidity was probably stifling that too.

  He could call her on the PRC-148. She was carrying hers. Without the antenna or transceiver, the radios were only good for line of sight and he could see far enough, but he didn’t want Kyra to think he was looking over her shoulder.

  Jon took up the cell phone instead. He dialed the one number in its memory, the call went through on the first try, and he waited for the encryption to start up.

  “This is Quiver.”

  “Quiver, Sherlock,” he told Mari. “Just checking in.”

  “Good to hear your voice,” she said. “What’s your status?”

  “Arrowhead has gone back to move the truck closer to our position. She left three hours ago, still isn’t here,” he reported. “She should be back soon. How are things at your place?”

  “Some of the locals weren’t thrilled to hear that Avila is trying to take the country nuclear,” Mari said. “Somebody threw a Molotov cocktail over the wall a half hour ago. Not sure what things are like outside the walls. None of the media are showing what’s happening. I think the president here has shut that down. We’re just getting snippets
and cell-phone video from bloggers. But from what we can tell, there are some pretty ugly riots going down across the country.”

  “I think that’s going on here too,” Jon said. “I see smoke columns going up from the city closest to my position.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Anything new on the bad guys?” he asked.

  “POTUS made an appearance before the UN and called them out. The Security Council approved his request for a blockade. He doesn’t want them moving their package out of the country. The ambassador is working the phones with the Colombians and the Brazilians to make sure their borders stay closed, but it sounds like Guyana isn’t cooperating . . . some greedy autocrats are holding out for some bribes in return for their help. Whoever thought Western security would hinge on Guyana? Anyway, congratulations. You set off the sequel to the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

  “It gets better,” Jon said. “I’m pretty sure the base where Arrowhead found the package has a nuclear reprocessing facility hidden away somewhere. Probably under the chemical plant.”

  “Was that on the video?”

  “No. But it’s a logical deduction. I’ll spell it out for you when I see you. For now, just tell the folks back home. Someone there is bound to be smart enough to work backward from the conclusion to figure out my reasoning,” he replied.

  “You’re not a weapons analyst. How do you know this stuff?”

  “I’ve written a few Red Cell papers on proliferation,” he replied. “If the facility isn’t here, it’s at one of the other sites. And if that’s right, then all they need is a single nuclear reactor, even a small one, and they’ve got everything they need to run the nuclear fuel cycle.”

  “I believe you. You were always right.”

  “You always found that annoying,” he said.

  “Yeah, I did, but the arguments were fun,” she admitted. “Until that day in the sandbox. You were different after that. I always hoped you were going to get over what happened, but you never did.”

  “That’s the funny thing about Asperger’s. It turns out that when a memory gets dredged up, you get all of the emotions that came with it the first time . . . they don’t fade. Combine that with an eidetic memory and time doesn’t heal a thing.”

  U.S. Embassy

  Caracas, Venezuela

  Marisa closed her eyes as that revelation sank in. He never told me. No, that wasn’t right. You didn’t stay long enough to find out, did you? “How do you get past them?” she asked quietly, trying to be careful. Words felt dangerous now, each one a weapon primed to go off if she picked wrong.

  “You try hard to never think about them . . . or you replace them with something better. Whichever works,” he told her.

  “Is that what you’ve been doing since I left?” Marisa asked. “Replacing them?” Of course he was, she thought. How could he not?

  Jon said nothing and silence filled the time, giving her the answer. “Jon, Syria was coming apart. Assad was breaking out the chemical weapons. The Special Activities Center doesn’t always let us tell families or friends where we’re going. You know that.”

  “I do. But that doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell me you were coming back. I found out you were in D.C. when I read about it in an intel cable.”

  She shifted the phone headset to the other side of her head, used her newly freed hand to lock the window shades open, and looked out at the city as her mind sifted through the answers she could give. Small pyres of smoke were rising in a dozen columns, from the shantytowns that covered the mountain hills to more than one spot between the residential and commercial towers surrounding the Plaza Bolívar in the city’s heart.

  “I didn’t know how to help you—” she began.

  “So you just left?” he asked. “That certainly didn’t help.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do.” It was all she could find to say.

  “Almost anything else you could have done would’ve been more helpful than leaving,” he told her.

  Now it was Marisa’s silence that hung in the air. “Does it ever help when the other person says they’re sorry?” she asked finally.

  “No,” Jon said, plain and fast enough to cut. “That’s the funny thing about emotions, especially the rough ones. They don’t care why they were born and they’re never in a hurry to die. All you can do is live with them until you can learn to ignore them. And all the excuses and apologies in the world don’t change that a bit.”

  “I’m—”

  A Marine appeared in her doorway, a member of the Embassy Security Group. “Just a second, Sherlock,” Marisa said, using his unofficial crypt again, a signal that the conversation had gone from personal to professional. She covered the phone with her hand. “What is it?” she asked the sergeant.

  “The ambassador just received orders from SecState, ma’am. We’re evacuating the embassy. You and your people are to sanitize and secure your spaces, then report to the lobby in one hour. Choppers will be landing behind the building and all personnel will be relocated to the quarantine fleet, where you’ll board a transport for Washington.”

  Marisa sat, stunned into silence. She finally forced herself to speak. “I have people in the field. I can’t leave them out there.”

  “You can’t stay here, ma’am. You won’t do them any good if the mob comes over the fence and you get taken.”

  Marisa nodded. “Understood. Tell the ambassador the rest of my people will be ready to ship out. I’m staying here until my people are safe or the situation becomes untenable.” She put the phone back to her ear. “Jon . . . SecState is closing the embassy. We’re being evacuated.”

  “How long?” he asked.

  “One hour . . . not enough time for you and Arrowhead to drive back, even if you could get inside the gates, which you can’t. They’re going to relocate us to the fleet. I’m staying here until they drag me out. Once I get to whichever ship we land on, I’ll talk to the captain and see if we can’t arrange a personnel recovery mission for you. If you have to move, get to a safe house.” Marisa paused. “Arrowhead knows where one is in Caracas.”

  “Roger that,” Jon said. “Don’t forget about us.”

  “I never have,” Marisa said. Jon disconnected. She stared at the phone, then dropped it on her desk. She started to stack the classified folders on her desk. The chief of station could already hear the industrial shredders in the next room warming up.

  Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

  Jon turned the phone off. The sky was full of stars now, the sun entirely gone. He could have forgotten that he was in a hostile land if not for the smoke that broke up the lights of Puerto Cabello on the horizon. He was still watching the sky an hour later when the growl of the truck’s engine finally cut through the silence.

  DAY EIGHT

  Palacio de Miraflores

  Caracas, Venezuela

  Elham watched Presidente Avila as the chief of state read the intelligence report for a third time, disbelief on his face. Carreño and Ahmadi both stood in silence on the other side of the antique desk. None of the senior men had spoken a word in five minutes. The soldier turned back to the window and stared at the manicured garden below. The sun was behind the office towers now and soon would drop below the hills to the west. Dark shadows were stretching out behind the buildings with bright sunbeams cutting through the spaces between them. Farther away, an American Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk helicopter glided over the skyline, descending toward the embassy that sat out of sight beyond the trees that surrounded the complex. Smoke was rising out past the gates, some of it black as ink. The locals were burning tires now, some not too far from the presidential offices.

  Avila had made a great show of machismo when they had finally arrived, calling them hermanos and boasting that matters were proceeding as planned. That last claim was a lie. Getting here had been tedious, the motorcade having to move slowly throug
h the streets clogged with protesters. The crowds had been mixed, some among them turning on each other with their words, some with their fists and whatever weapons they could find lying about. An unhealthy number had attacked the cars, requiring the SEBIN guards to assault more than a few men to clear a path to the gates. The presidente was like so many other civilian leaders Elham had served over the years, assuming that the world would happily comply with their grand designs and having no contingency plan when events refused to go as they willed. If nothing else, the Americans certainly had shown themselves to be a disobedient bunch.

  “They fired on our ship,” the presidente finally muttered. “I had not thought they would fire.”

  “Actually, our ship fired first,” Carreño corrected him. “The captain claims it was an accident but the American vessel then opened up with all guns and beat her into submission. Why they didn’t put a missile in her, I have no idea. A single one would’ve finished our vessel. The Brión would have been sunk in short order had she not surrendered.” It was not a pleasant statement but it was an honest one, though not the kind that Avila usually liked to hear in this room. “The Americans boarded, helped the wounded and repaired the damage to the navigation system, then sent her on her way back to our naval base at Puerto Cabello.”

  “There must be some way we can play this to our advantage,” Avila suggested.

  His voice reeked of desperation to Elham’s ears and the soldier found his patience was exhausted. “You have nothing,” he said. Carreño and Ahmadi both turned toward him, surprised to hear the Revolutionary Guard soldier interject himself into the conversation.

  “Elham—” Ahmadi started, caution in his voice.

  “They have denied you victory at every level,” Elham noted. “Had they sunk her, you could have claimed American aggression had cost Venezuelan lives and there would have been no witnesses to contradict you. Had they left her adrift with wounded sailors, you could have yelled about American arrogance or cruelty. Had they seized her, you could have cursed the Americans for seizing Venezuelan property and holding your men. Now they have beaten you with both guns and charity. And the UN Security Council has agreed to their quarantine of your coast, denying you even the claim that they are acting as imperialists. I believe the Americans would say that you have no leg to stand on.”