Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  I reached for the folder. As my fingers closed around it, the lights went out.

  Chapter 12

  “DID YOU HEAR something?” Hall asked.

  “Will someone check the goddamn fuse box” came Riggs’s voice. “This place is ancient. Don’t worry. We have a backup—”

  A muffled crack cut him off. It sounded like lightning behind the fog.

  “Who has a radio?” Riggs asked. There was movement in the dark, then a crash from inside the house.

  I heard the crack and static of an open radio channel: “We lost power. You see anything out there?” Riggs asked.

  “Nothing,” a guard replied.

  “Keep your eyes open.”

  My vision slowly adjusted to the dark, but I could still barely make out the contours of the figures standing three feet away, like shadows in the fog.

  A man lifted a radio beside me. “We’re on the porch. Get down here with some lights.” It was Riggs.

  “Rog. We’ll—” The guard’s voice cut off, and then three cracks boomed from the radio speaker.

  “Say again. Say again,” Riggs ordered. But there was only silence from the other end. I could feel my heart pumping in my chest. “Say again,” Riggs demanded.

  Finally, a new voice broke in on the radio.

  “Someone’s inside.”

  “Where?” Riggs asked.

  A moment passed. No one answered.

  “Get to the courtyard,” a guard said. The words came over the radio between fast breathing, like a man running, and squelches of static. “Lock yourself in.”

  I followed the voices. We stepped through a door onto weathered tiles.

  “Byrne, you here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nazar.”

  “Yes.”

  I moved closer until I could see the others.

  “Good. We’ll be safe here,” Riggs said. “There are sentries above us. Everything’s locked. The only easy way in is through that door.”

  He pulled out his sidearm, thumbed down the safety, and stared at the door that led back into the house. We formed a loose circle, fanned out with our backs to a stucco wall.

  “We’re in the courtyard,” Riggs said into the radio.

  “We haven’t found anyone. They blew the generator. Sit tight.”

  My vision narrowed. Every sound seemed to grow louder. Time slowed. I moved on autopilot. There was fear and a flood of adrenaline. I felt strong and wanted the fight. Come on. Come for me. Jesus, how I had missed this rush.

  “I need a weapon,” I said.

  “None to spare.”

  His mistake. We waited. The other men were nearly hyperventilating. I felt like they were right beside me. The fog muffled the sounds, warped the sense of distance.

  This was bad. We shouldn’t be bunched up together. It was a basic rule when expecting contact. I took a few steps to the side.

  “Don’t move,” Riggs said.

  Far up, to my right, I saw blue flashes, and then I heard a rat-tat-tat. It seemed too quiet for a gun.

  “Are those shots?” I asked. “Suppressed?”

  “No,” Riggs said. He lifted the radio. “This is Riggs. Come back. Come back.”

  There was nothing.

  “Come back.”

  I heard a cry and a thump from inside, straight ahead of us. The colonel raised the pistol and aimed it at the door. A moment passed with no noise, no movement, just our breath in the fog.

  “Come on, assholes,” I heard Riggs whisper.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “No. They want us to panic.”

  We waited. Time stretched my nerves to the breaking point. I turned toward the colonel and saw a shadow moving silently down the wall from the second story: a man, slipping in like a wraith.

  “Riggs, behind you!”

  The figure let go of the rope and dropped to the floor. I lunged toward him. Metal clinked against brick. White light blanked out the world. The explosion hit me like a crashing wave, thumping my chest and deafening me. I fell back. My head hit the ground.

  I staggered up on my hands and knees. I could hear only a high-pitched whine in my ears, some aftereffect of the blast, could see only blue, like I’d stared into the flash of a camera. I took one step and fell forward, caught a wall with my hand, steadied myself as my eyes adjusted. The blue softened to red, and finally the black murk took over again.

  “Byrne.” I felt a gloved hand on my shoulder. “This way. We’ll get you out.”

  I followed, arm extended, touching the guard’s back as we moved through the house. I don’t know how he managed to navigate. There was no light. The reek of explosives bit at the back of my throat, sent me into a fit of coughing. We crossed the foyer and made it outside. I could feel the damp as we started moving down the hill, toward the sound of crashing surf.

  The fog eased as we moved lower. I picked my way down the eroded hillside, the tufts of scrub and washed-out gullies above the cliffs. I heard the churn of an engine coming from the water below. Floodlights glared down at us from the house, filtered through the brush. The man I was with wore canvas utility pants and a gray long-sleeved shirt. He had no insignia. He blended into the shadows with black streaks of face paint.

  I stopped. Gunshots cracked behind us. I saw red flash through the fog to our left, coming from the house.

  The man with me wasn’t one of the colonel’s guards. It was one of the fugitive soldiers Riggs had described. He knew my name. I tried to think.

  “Thank you,” I said. He stood downhill from me. I moved closer to him. The waves boomed below us.

  “Don’t mention it. We’ve got to move. There’s a boat waiting.”

  “Is that it?” I pointed. He looked. I planted my foot on his shoulder, shoved him to the ground, and started toward the house, using my hands and feet in the crumbling dirt on the steepest part of the hill.

  I could hear rifle rounds tearing past us, coming close. “Don’t shoot!” I shouted. “It’s Byrne! Friendly!”

  He came from my left side, hit me hard, tackled me. A puff of dust exploded, and a sandstone bank let go where I had been crawling. The bullet would have torn through me. We tumbled down the hill, and suddenly, my stomach went light. We dropped in a free fall.

  The cold seized my body like an electric shock. I gasped as my head went under the blackness. I came up and cleared the salt water from my mouth and nose. The waves slammed into the rock face, threw spray twenty feet in the air. The water surged again. A swell carried me up, ready to throw me against a stone wall half covered in jagged shells.

  I felt the water suck me back, try to hurl me with the lip of the wave. I dived, expecting the blow any second. It pulled me down, but I made it out the back of the wave. I swam through the white water. I was in the middle of a set. I dived down again and came up to see another wall of black water feathering and crashing toward my head. I went under once more, no time for a breath. A third wave, a fourth, a fifth. I had no air left, could barely see them coming as I pulled myself down into the freezing water and fought the foam. I tried to breathe, sucked in air and frothing water.

  I heard an engine cut close. A black object materialized out of the fog. A rigid inflatable boat maneuvered twelve feet away, the pilot pivoting the engine perfectly to keep it steady as it slammed over the surf. My legs cramped from the cold and effort. I started to sink. With the last of my strength, I sidestroked through the lip of a wave and hauled myself to the gunwale. I grabbed the rope and pulled my body up, coughed out water against the rubber. I waited like that for a moment, breathing slowly, fighting the urge to hyperventilate. I wrapped my hand around a thwart and pulled myself up. A man stood over me. He reached down, grabbed the seat of my pants, and heaved me up and onto the floor as the engines revved. There were three men aboard.

  The boat took off planing, launching off the back of the swells, dropping six feet to flat water. I slammed agai
nst the deck with each crash. The others took them like it was nothing, some standing, not holding on to anything for support, absorbing all the momentum with their knees.

  The cliffs whipped by. I grabbed the column of the pilothouse as we picked up speed, accelerating to thirty-five, maybe forty knots. After each jump, we bottomed out; it felt like a car crash.

  Black waves flew past. The wind was up. The swells capped. We were maybe a mile out. I couldn’t see land or horizon, only fog. I knew I probably wouldn’t survive if I dived off.

  “What do you want with me?” My teeth clattered around the words.

  A man stepped over. I asked it again, as loud as I could over the roar of the twin diesels. It was the guy I had tangled with on the hill.

  “Relax, Junebug,” he said, and reached into a lockbox. He pulled out a damp wool blanket and handed it to me.

  I hadn’t heard that in years. My sergeant had given me the nickname at Field Medical Training Battalion, where they put the corpsmen through infantry training so we could hack it with the Marines. We had been drilling on the yard, and as I ran with my class, I inhaled a bug. I doubled over and caused a three-corpsman pileup in front of the command master chief. I’d never lived it down.

  The man who’d given me the blanket brought his face in front of mine and ran his hand through his wet hair.

  “Hayes?” I said.

  “Good to see you, Byrne.” He pounded me on the back. “I’ll bring you up to speed in a minute. For now, just hang on.”

  Chapter 13

  CARO STOOD OUTSIDE the school, with its gleaming glass facades and angular architecture. He was in Al Bateen, an affluent neighborhood of villas in Abu Dhabi that was popular with diplomats and the Western expats. He had chosen to live here in the Emirates’ capital. It was more self-assured, in contrast to the flash, the transience, the arrogance of Dubai.

  His Mercedes idled beside him, the driver at the wheel. Caro crouched beside his daughter, took a linen handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the corner of her mouth.

  “What’s that smell, Father?”

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  “It’s like chemicals.”

  “They probably changed a filter in the car,” he said. “You’re going to be late.” He ran his hand over her hair, gave her her backpack, and watched as she walked up the steps to the school.

  He got back in the car, took off his Ray-Bans, and hung them from the pocket of his bespoke suit.

  “Ready, sir?” the driver said, and he put the S550 in gear.

  “No.”

  He looked at the stragglers entering the school. His blue eyes scanned the windows as he watched the children climb the stairs and gather in the classrooms.

  It was a beautiful winter morning. He sniffed his jacket. Yes. It was unmistakable: burned plastic. It had been a long day. He had flown back to the Emirates from Central Asia this morning and hadn’t had a chance to shower after visiting the cells.

  The whole trip had been a waste of time. He’d sat in as two men, trained by his deputy, entered the latter stages of interrogation in a detention facility they had set up in an abandoned refinery. They were in a basket-case former Soviet republic that offered complete freedom of operation for a price.

  The subject had been tied to the table, mottled with blood and filth. The two questioners took turns. One gripped what was left of his hair and shouted questions while the other held a torch to an empty water bottle and let the molten plastic drip onto the skin. It would fall, burning, and fuse with the flesh.

  “Where were you going?” one barked.

  He said nothing. The scalding was the easy part.

  The second man waited, let the plastic harden, then grabbed its edge.

  “Who were you going to meet?”

  He jerked it back, bringing the flesh with it. It was a favorite trick of Saddam’s Mukhabarat. Now everyone used it.

  The man began to sputter.

  “What? What? Speak up!”

  He broke. They asked the questions in a rapid-fire sequence. Names, dates, addresses; it all came in a torrent.

  The two interrogators turned to Caro, the senior commander, though he held no official role. That would have circumscribed his freedom of movement, made him far too interesting to other intelligence agencies.

  It was a common problem; the young men would try to impress him, go too far to prove their viciousness. It was amusing, in a way, because if they’d known whom he was working for, they would have executed him on the spot. They thought in black and white. They couldn’t understand the nuances of the great game.

  “You brought me here for this?” Caro asked.

  One man stepped closer, the concern clear on his face.

  “Just stop,” Caro said.

  The man on the table mumbled what thanks he could.

  “But he just told us.”

  “He would have told you anything,” Caro said.

  “Didn’t you hear?”

  Caro’s temper broke through. He took the torch and held the flame to the bottle, then laid a line of burning plastic from the man’s temple across his cheek to his neck, just below the jawline.

  He ignored the screams, simply looked at the two interrogators, a patient teacher.

  “Was Kyenge there?” Caro barked at the captive.

  “Kyenge?” the man asked, desperate.

  Caro tore the strip away in one clean stroke. Even the interrogators blanched at the damage.

  The first screamed words were unintelligible, but then they became loud and clear: “Yes! Yes! Kyenge. He was there. I know him. I can show you where.”

  Caro looked to the two juniors, who avoided his gaze with shame.

  Kyenge had been dead for eight years. The man was lying.

  Caro stood close to him, nearly whispering in his ear. “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s over now.”

  “Please,” the man said. “Please—”

  “It’s okay,” Caro said. He took the man’s jaw firmly in his left hand, then reached his right into the man’s armpit and slid him up the table until his head just hung off the edge. He shoved the man’s face straight down toward the floor. The head fell back and dangled at a strange angle.

  The body shuddered and then relaxed completely, voiding on the table. The table’s edge had dislocated his cervical vertebrae and severed his spinal cord. The dead man’s member rose, taut, toward the ceiling; angel lust, a phenomenon that, even the hundredth time, never failed to unsettle Caro, though he gave no sign.

  He was grateful to the man for supplying the lesson so many of the younger fighters forgot. Terror wasn’t an end in itself, some pure expression of power or some innate evil, as the blacks and whites of the American outlook had it. It was a tactic, pure and simple. These boys had done too much killing and not enough reading—Qutb, Clausewitz, Robespierre. Terror was necessary, of course, but it had to be applied with care. Against a stronger man, it might have been appropriate, but this man was weak, and in the face of such pain, he crumbled. Fear was a means, a tool like any other. The ends were what mattered.

  Caro thought of that lesson again as he looked at his daughter’s school through the tinted windows of his Mercedes. Several buses rolled into the lot; today was a class trip. The children’s faces lined the windows.

  He watched them, their eyes wide open, inches from the glass.

  He turned away, paused, then looked back.

  The eyes. The glass.

  He would have to double-check the details of the operation. There would be a show first, a distraction before the main event, to draw them to the windows, and the charge would be much smaller, because terror was a tactic, and it’s far too easy to forget the dead. There are things worse than death. Knowing those things intimately was his specialty and his curse.

  One more day.

  “Sir, there is some traffic on the way to the airport.”

  Caro looked away from the school. He had been in Abu Dhabi, the closest
thing he had to a home, only long enough to see his daughter, swap out his suitcase, and pick up a different passport. He didn’t like being home, with the strange smells and sounds of a hospital coming from the rear of the apartment.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He had to make his flight to Los Angeles. His associates now had the shipment inside the United States. He would have his hands on it soon, and in twenty-four hours he would pull the trigger.

  Chapter 14

  THE BAG OVER my head hung close, damp with my own breath. I smelled fried food and chlorine. I had been stripped naked and searched. They took my clothes and my wallet and cut them apart stitch by stitch with a fixed-blade knife.

  My whole body was electric with fear, my skin goose-pimpled and my hair on end, but there was no panic. When things got bad, whether it was back in the navy or in surgery, it was always the same: I would slow down, grow quiet, focus.

  They pulled the hood off. I’d been wearing it for the last ten minutes. I sat naked on a wooden dining chair.

  My eyes focused on the stainless-steel shelves to my right and left. I was in a walk-in commercial freezer that wasn’t running. The space was warm, the air stale. Craning my head, I could see through the open door into the restaurant’s dining room. It looked long abandoned, and a sign that read Mariscos hung over some smiling Day of the Dead skulls.

  In the part of the kitchen I could see, all the windows were blacked out with plywood, and four rucksacks leaned against the wall. One man rested on the concrete floor.

  “No cell phone?” Hayes asked me.

  “The police kept it.”

  He handed me a pair of work pants and a long-sleeved gray shirt. I pulled them on.

  “Hayes,” a woman called from somewhere out of sight.

  He walked out of the freezer.

  The man who had been sleeping approached the door, yawned, and then gave me a hard stare. He held his rifle ready, his finger just outside the trigger guard. No hoods or masks for him. That was a bad sign. I could identify him, if I lived.