Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  “Corpsman! Corpsman up! Doc!” I saw them, bleeding out on the fine dust.

  My reaction was mostly automatic, muscle memory from all the training. I yelled for them to put the tourniquets on, find cover, and return fire. Hayes and I were the last ones standing, separated by about ten meters, flanked on both sides. I had taken some shrapnel in my back. Blood soaked his uniform blouse and trousers. A squad of bad guys with T-shirts tied around their mouths were coming down my sector. God knows where the air support was.

  I picked up the squad automatic that Farrell had dropped. Hayes and I engaged the enemy until Hayes was shot several times. I found cover farther forward and then went over it to kill the last man.

  Gunny Mullins managed to get his tourniquet on, but he must have bled too much to keep it tight. I crawled over. None of the others had a pulse. Standard procedure for care under fire is to leave the men you can’t save and start with the guys who have signs of life. Hayes was the only responsive one.

  His pulse was weak. I sheared his pants up to the thigh and saw a gaping wound, frothing blood, bright red: arterial. I held pressure hard. He groaned, a good sign. I filled the cut with QuikClot.

  He’d lost a lot of blood. I wanted to start an IV, but I couldn’t find a vein, so I prepped his chest, slammed the FAST1 into his breastbone, and started pumping him full of Hextend.

  Gunny Mullins, Rubino, and Farrell died. They’d been moving after we were first hit. I don’t know if I could have saved them, but I might have been able to give them a shot at least, held them together until they made it to shock-trauma.

  But my orders were to kill first. And that’s what I did. Nine enemy KIA.

  I found out two things that day: I was good at killing. And, worse, I loved it, in a way, that primal release of pure hate for the men who had hit us and the pleasure of tearing them apart with precise spurts of 5.56 from a smoking barrel.

  “Administer life-saving hemorrhage control as the tactical situation permits.” That’s from the field manual. Such dry language, but it’s haunted me for a long time, along with the images of my three Marines laid out as their blood clumped the dust.

  Did I go too far? Lose myself in the killing when I should have been saving lives?

  Our objective became a rallying point for the enemy. The battle lasted for a week and came to be known as K-38. Something strange happens to you after most of your squad gets killed and you come out alive with nothing more than a concussion and some metal in your back.

  I was in a sort of daze for a while after the ambush. And maybe it was more in my head, but I caught guys looking at me, and I was sure they were asking themselves the same thing I was: Why are you still here? What makes you think you deserve it?

  During the speech on the day they pinned that medal on me, they said I’d killed nine, but I counted twelve. They forgot to include Mullins, Farrell, and Rubino.

  While I recovered from the injuries, I got rolled from SARC, the training to be a doc with Force Recon and Special Operations. I was only a few credits shy of my undergrad degree. I started doing the premed prereqs while on active duty, studying biochemistry by headlamp. Most people thought I was crazy. Corpsmen sometimes go on to be nurses or PAs, but the whole enlisted-to-officer-and-full-MD route was rare.

  Hall and the colonel had asked me what I was hiding, why I had dropped recon to be a doctor.

  I’d wanted to learn how to do more than plug a guy up, scrape him together, and put him and the pieces on a helicopter. I wanted to learn how to fix him, heart and lungs, everything. I never wanted to watch friends die, to have to make that choice again. I wanted to put men back together, not take them apart.

  And above all, I was scared, scared at how easily I took to killing.

  I must have seen Hayes at the funerals, but I don’t remember it all that well. He was the kind of hard-ass but fair sergeant who everyone loved like a father. We were all trying to earn his respect. Despite the cool distance Hayes kept from his subordinates, everyone I talked to on the squad thought that he was the sergeant’s favorite. He inspired a kind of fanatic loyalty among his boys.

  Even after all the other guys started calling me Doc, Hayes stuck with Junebug, or just June. I didn’t let on that I gave a shit. But after I saved his life, I thought he might quit and start calling me Doc too. And I remember Hayes turning to me—it’s one of the few things I remember clearly from the hospital—and he said thanks, and then he called me Byrne.

  It was a start. I could never read him then, and I sure as hell couldn’t read him now.

  Engines gunned in the street. The colonel was here.

  Chapter 17

  RIGGS DIRECTED THE lead truck to stop around the corner from the address Byrne had given. Men climbed out in full assault gear, wearing black balaclavas, carbines across their chests. He led them down the block and pointed out the address, a store that sold cowboy boots and western clothes.

  “Go around the back,” Riggs said. “He’ll be expecting us from the front. Put two men out of sight on the south side in case he runs.”

  “You want to call the local cops for a perimeter?” Hall asked.

  “No. He’s by himself. This should be easy enough. And they’ll restrict our rules of engagement.”

  Hall looked confused. “Sir?”

  “You heard me.”

  He understood what Riggs meant. Byrne might know everything by now. If Hayes had told him the truth and he got away, it would be the end for Riggs, and for all of them.

  “Try to get him back here alive,” Riggs said. “But make sure you get him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They surrounded the building. At the rear door, one man pulled a sledgehammer from his pack and stood on the hinge side. Against the wall behind him, Hall crouched, his carbine ready, while the man beside him held a flash-bang and took out the pin.

  “Breach,” Hall said. The man in the lead brought the sledge back, swung it forward with both arms, pivoting from his legs as he brought the head hard against the bolt of the lock. The door flew open. The second man threw the grenade. It was like a flash of lightning inside the building. “Man in, left!” Hall barked as he rushed the door and sprinted for his corner. His team followed, their gun-mounted lights slicing through the space.

  As the smoke thinned, Hall smelled cowhide. Boots lined the shelves.

  “Go!”

  One covered while the two others moved down the hallway, one high, one low. They kicked in the flimsy interior door to the office, then the doors to the dressing rooms, and finally fanned out through the front of the store.

  It was hard to see through the smoke. A man stood in the corner of the room, a black silhouette.

  “Hands! Raise your fucking hands!”

  No answer.

  “Hands or I will kill you!”

  “Hands!”

  A shot cracked. Fire licked through the dark. The bullet tore through the figure, and something fell to the ground with a crunch.

  This was all wrong.

  Hall hit the overhead lights as the smoke cleared. He walked over to the fiberglass mannequin and looked through the hole in its chest to the street outside. The figure was wearing a cowboy shirt in black with silver thread. Its head lay on the ground.

  Hall lifted a white Stetson off the floor and tossed it to his teammate, whose mouth tightened into a thin line from embarrassment.

  “You should only kill the black hats.”

  Their flashlights shot through the display windows onto the street, where the other members of their team were crouched. Hall opened the front door.

  Riggs stepped forward. He turned to Caro, then shouted to Hall, “Where the hell did he go?”

  “It’s a trick,” Hall said, his eyes scanning the rooftops across the street. “Byrne was never here.”

  I watched the gunshots flashing behind the store window from a building down the street. The whole scene felt surreal, like a film or a nightmare, but I knew this was the reality I had
to face.

  They were certain I was alone. And still they came for me with grenades and shot to kill. The tin taste of fear dripped down the back of my throat, but there was no time to pay any heed or let my mind run in circles trying to grasp the full extent of the mess I was in. I ran out the back door of the building where I had been hiding, and I was five blocks away when I first heard the sirens. Either the police had heard the commotion themselves or Riggs had called in the local cops to hunt me down.

  The streets led me toward a steep hill going down to a freeway, blocked off by a fence. The wash of cars on the road below was like distant surf. The lights flowed red and white at the bottom of the canyon. It was a dead end. I needed to find a way out. I skirted the fence above the highway as it curved, but it was steering me back toward the police. As I made my way through the parking lots, away from the larger roads, the sirens seemed to be everywhere.

  I came out between a uniform shop and a pay-as-you-go-cell-phone store and looked across a four-lane street with light traffic. As I stepped onto the roadway, a patrol car appeared at the end of the block. I turned and started walking away, head down, fighting the overwhelming urge to run.

  The cruiser passed on the opposite side of the street. I forced myself to take a couple deep breaths.

  Whoop.

  The cop U-turned through the red light at the end of the block. I cut back through a used-car lot and sprinted away, turned at random on one street and then another, and finally threw myself over a low wall. The sirens grew louder, and floodlights closed on my position.

  I recognized the street ahead. It was where I had first escaped, the restaurant Hayes and his team were using as a safe house. As I started toward it, I heard the squawk of a police radio. A beam of light hit the corner where I had been standing.

  “There!” I heard someone yell. I took off running, but they were almost right behind me. There was nowhere to hide. As soon as they rounded that corner, I was done.

  “Byrne!” The voice was nearby. It couldn’t be the police. No one was that fast. I looked over my shoulder and saw an open door beside a loading dock. “Get in here!”

  It was Hayes. There was nowhere else to go. I wheeled around, sprinted, and threw myself through as the police came around the corner and fanned out down the street toward me.

  We were in a loading area, closed off by a steel rolling door. A man lay on the dock, eyes shut, bandages around his hand and throat. The door shut, plunging us into darkness. Light leaked under the rolling door, passing back and forth: the police. Someone pounded on the door I had just entered. The knob rattled. Another pound. Then the light moved away.

  A minute passed in silence. I waited until I was sure they had left. “What happened to your guy?” I asked.

  “Gunshot wound, neck. And he smashed his hand.”

  “Is he still bleeding?”

  “I don’t think so. Here.” He felt for my arm in the dark and placed something in my hands. “Put that on.”

  They were night-vision goggles. I slipped them over my head and saw the loading area in different shades of green and black. The injured man still had his eyes clamped shut. On the bandaged hand, two fingers pointed off at the wrong angle; serious trauma, but not life-threatening.

  “The gash on the neck was probably a graze,” Hayes said.

  I checked the bandages. The bleeding was under control.

  “Good work,” I said, and I ran my hand under the man’s body to feel for any other injuries.

  Open neck wounds are tricky. Most of your blood is under higher than atmospheric pressure; that’s why you bleed out. But above the lungs, it can be lower, and a wound can pull air in. With small amounts of air, that’s not usually a big deal (the idea that you can murder someone by injecting him with a little air bubble in a syringe is a myth), but a larger air embolism can block the flow of blood to the lungs and kill a person pretty easily.

  The trauma kit was open on the floor. I pulled out an occlusive dressing, basically Saran Wrap, and taped it down on four sides over the gauze. That would keep the air out until I had time to stitch him up.

  I checked his airway and pulse. He was in and out of consciousness.

  “We can move him. Is that door the only way out?”

  “No. Follow me,” Hayes said.

  The door to the showroom was locked by a keypad. Hayes shone a pen light on it.

  “Some of the keys are worn,” I said; the 1, 6, 8, and 9 were dull from use.

  “Birthdays,” Hayes said. “It’s 1968 or 1986.”

  He entered 1968. The red light flashed. Then he tried 1986: green.

  We went back, lifted the casualty, and crossed through into a room. We were in a manager’s office. Through the CCTV displays I could see it was a massive, warehouse-style used-furniture store.

  “Things didn’t go too hot with the colonel?” Hayes asked me.

  I remembered crouching in the shadows and flinching at the sound of gunfire. “No. Same with you?”

  He looked over at his injured teammate. “We stayed behind to cover the trucks. They shot Green. He was my medic.”

  Hayes looked straight at me. He needed a doc.

  “At least it’s his left hand,” I said.

  He shook his head. Left-handed.

  “That’s rough,” I said. “Would Riggs go after family? Loved ones?” Kelly was still out there, and if she got hurt because of me, I wouldn’t be able to go on, not again.

  “That’s why we came out of the woodwork, why we destroyed our Defense Cover records. He would come for our people to get to us.”

  I rubbed my hands together. Everyone said I was crazy to think that I was some kind of jinx. And then days like today happened. I pointed to the screens. “The front?”

  He tapped the monitor. There was a cop on the corner I had completely missed.

  “How about this side exit?”

  “Better than nothing,” he said. I looked at the cars on the external camera, moved closer, squinted at it.

  “Think you can steal that one?” I said and pointed to a FedEx truck.

  “It should be easy—no engine immobilizer—but it’s probably the slowest car on the block. Why would we take that?”

  I told him what I had seen just before his men hooded me on the drive out.

  “Can you take us back to that spot?” I asked.

  “It’s not too far. And the sun will be up soon.” He considered it for a minute and seemed to like the plan. “It’s good to have you back, Byrne.”

  I took Green’s radio and earpiece, and we carried him to the side door. Hayes opened it a crack, then ran to the truck in a crouch and set to work on the padlock that secured the rear gate.

  I keyed the radio: “Car coming.”

  A patrol car pulled to the mouth of the narrow street and lit it like day with the light mounted on the side of the cruiser. Hayes dropped, crawled under the truck, and just missed being caught.

  “Hold,” I said. “Hold. He’s just looking. I’ve got you.”

  The light moved forward. The cop pulled away.

  “You’re good.”

  A minute later Hayes said, “I’m in.”

  He ran back and we carried Green and loaded him onto the truck. The medic moaned, muttered a few words I couldn’t make out, and then asked for seconds of mashed potatoes as we closed the rear door; he was totally disoriented. There were faster cars on the street—I had passed an older BMW 540i—but the FedEx truck had one advantage that I hoped we wouldn’t have to use. I expected Hayes to mess with the wires, but he just jammed a screwdriver deep into the ignition, gripped it hard, and twisted it until something cracked. The engine chugged twice, then started running.

  He drove the speed limit, trying not to attract attention. We saw two police cars pulled over ahead of us near an intersection with a four-lane boulevard. I ducked down. He pulled past them, stopped at a light twenty feet away from the cops. We waited. I lay on the floor, looked up, and watched dawn stain the sky
blue-gray.

  We rode away and were about thirty seconds past the intersection when I heard the sirens cry. Hayes punched the gas. I slammed into the passenger jump seat folded up against the wall. I crouched, looked in the mirrors, and saw two cop cars in pursuit.

  We rounded a corner at speed and the van began to tilt. Hayes worked the wheel and fought the van’s oversteer. “I’m starting to think this is the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”

  “Keep going!”

  The cruisers closed in. I could see that the colonel’s trucks had joined the convoy. I looked through the window and pointed past the next intersection. “There!”

  Hall pressed the throttle down. The six-liter V-8 roared. They were closing in on Hayes. There was no way he could get away.

  “Faster,” Riggs said. “I’ll hold the police back. We should get to them first.”

  Caro watched calmly from the center of the rear seats. He had guided Riggs as they closed the noose around Byrne. He didn’t like surprises, as a rule, but did enjoy a good fight. Byrne was proving to be interesting prey. Caro braced himself against the door. He looked forward to getting his hands on this doctor.

  The cruisers ahead slowed and whooped their sirens to stop traffic coming through the next intersection. A tractor-trailer slammed its brakes, blocking the route ahead.

  “Don’t slow down!” Riggs yelled.

  “What?”

  “Go around!”

  Hall swerved to the left to get by the eighteen-wheeler and hit the median curb as he curved back into his lane. The Suburban bucked and tossed the men in their seats. Riggs looked in the rearview at the semi. It was a FedEx distribution truck.

  There were three FedEx box trucks ahead of them.

  “Which one is it?”

  More trucks, identical, pulled out from the side streets. Some came from the other direction.

  “Which should I follow?”

  “What the fuck is going on?” Riggs asked.

  Caro saw it first, a warehouse to their right that filled the whole block. Over the entrance was a sign: FedEx Distribution Center. Everywhere they looked, more white vans trundled off, dozens of them, spreading out through the city on their morning rounds. He understood instantly. Byrne and Hayes had outplayed them.