Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  She opened the door and tried the light in the bedroom.

  Nothing.

  The blackout blinds had been pulled. She sidestepped through the room as her eyes adjusted, banged her shin on the radiator, and cursed. She limped to the blinds and threw them open, blinking as the morning light flooded the room.

  It was empty.

  She took a deep breath, then walked over and checked the closet. No one was there.

  Her left hand trembled slightly. She shook it and sat on the bed for a moment until she calmed down, then walked to the bathroom.

  The door slammed into her shoulder and knocked her back. A man slid forward as she stumbled and hooked his heel behind her right leg. She tried to stab him in the temple with the file, but he blocked her arm and shoved her to the ground in one smooth motion.

  She rammed her elbow into the bridge of his nose as she fell back. The bone crunched. Her towel fell off. She came down hard on thin carpet over concrete and banged the back of her skull. She lay naked. The man threw the blinds closed and towered over her. He wiped the blood from his nose, leaving a long red streak on his forearm.

  “Listen, bitch. Let me tell you how this goes.”

  “Cop,” I said. “A quarter mile back.”

  Hayes eased off the gas until we were driving exactly the speed limit.

  “We’re almost there,” he said.

  “So Riggs killed them all just to cover his tracks?” That seemed like a stretch, but I did what I could to keep the doubt out of my voice.

  “We’re not sure. It seems monstrous, but I’ve seen worse in war. We got close to the base. I still couldn’t find Riggs, but we heard gunfire in a valley where a lot of our interpreters and their families lived. It was a fog. We had no clue what was going on.

  “We came to the village. These people had risked their lives to help us. It was a tribe that had been serially screwed over by every local and occupying power for the past two hundred years. They had been driven from their homes because of what they believed and were under constant threat of violence.

  “Dust was still blowing everywhere. As we pulled into the valley, we saw the warlord’s men standing outside a mud hut. They were executing the villagers. I had a long-barrel SCAR-heavy, and they were out at the end of the range. I lined up the shot, zeroed the SCAR for the cold barrel, and then I saw him in the crosshairs.

  “It was the colonel, watching as they killed the villagers, one by one. I scanned left and saw that Samael was standing beside him. The dust rolled in, and I lost the shot.

  “Whatever it was, it was criminal. We flooded the valley. We saw a child of one of the terps crawl out of the building through the dust. One man stood over him and shot him in the head.

  “I tried to inform the colonel over the radio that he was committing a grave breach, that the real enemy was beside him. War is ugly. I’ve done things I’ll never get over, killed the wrong people. I understand that there are gray areas. But that was black and white, and I didn’t care if they were going to hang me afterward, I had to stop it.

  “As soon as we identified ourselves, they retreated, taking potshots at us. We secured the valley floor. They’d rounded them up in the mud huts and slaughtered them. It was probably a hundred and ten degrees outside, a hundred and thirty or a hundred and forty inside. As we moved in, we heard moaning, a few weak thumps.

  “There were fourteen bodies in the first house. Our terps and their kids, whole families, three generations taken out in a few minutes.”

  Hayes’s voice went gravelly. He cleared his throat. “It was bad. They took the entire village. Most were dead, lying among the few possessions they had chosen to carry to safety—Korans, stuffed animals, family photos, deeds to houses their grandfathers had been driven from.

  “There was one kid left, about eleven. He’d survived by pretending to be dead. We used to play soccer with him. He told us that Riggs had sent someone to the interpreters who’d told them that they were being relocated, sneaked over the border. They’d get them someplace safe and then secure asylum for them in America to thank them for what they’d done. Imagine the false hope giving way as you watch your whole family die, your bloodline wiped out in an afternoon. The parents stood in front of their children, trying to protect them, but there was nothing they could do to stop those rounds.

  “I left Green to work on the wounded and we went after the colonel. He and Samael took the high ground. It was a firefight. We were better trained but there were dozens more of them. I don’t know if it was me or one of my men, but someone shot the colonel. They hit the building with an RPG, killed the last of the victims and two of my men.” He tapped his finger idly on a long scar, a patch of white that cut through his hair.

  “They retreated, over the ridge. We didn’t know why. There was a moment of peace. Then the Rangers came. It was a whole company. We thanked God for the backup, and then they started shooting. My team sergeant went down.

  “Ward was our comms. She was able to listen in on the Rangers’ tactical net. The order had gone out: The base was under attack. We were the hostiles; go green, weapons free.”

  I knew the order. It meant fire at will.

  “After nine months in the wild, dressed to blend in with the local population, we looked like a bunch of muj. I can’t blame the Rangers for following Riggs’s orders, and we weren’t going to kill those boys. I had trained a lot of them at Benning. Me and my team broke contact. Got in the trucks, went back into the mountains. We’d been operating independently for months from caches, self-supplying. It was part of our work to have safe houses, false papers, and contacts among the smugglers. Being on the run wasn’t all that different from our day job.”

  “Was there anyone you could go to?”

  “No. You know what a drop weapon is?”

  I nodded. If the Marines found an AK or an enemy grenade, supposedly some of them would hang on to it, and if they accidentally killed an innocent local, they would lay it down next to him to justify the shooting. None of my guys had ever done that, and I liked to think it was a myth.

  “Riggs killed dozens. There was no way he could cover it up, so instead of a drop weapon, he used us. The whole thing was lined up. They’d caught us up to our elbows in the blood of innocents. The scene confirmed everything the Rangers’ commander, Riggs, fed into their ears and then told his friends in Tampa.

  “We took everything we had left from the incursion and disappeared. We tried to get the truth out, but the colonel had it wired at every level. It was done. He was an insider, and we were ghosts, living borrowed lives. We’d been on our own for months with barely any contact with the command. Our unit was designed to be denied and disavowed. Who better to take the fall?”

  I checked the speedometer and leaned forward in my seat.

  “Easy, Byrne, we’re almost there.”

  I had to get to Kelly, make sure she was safe. The old ghosts were everywhere; the dead woman in the backseat looked at me with those green eyes full of reproach. And that was the funny thing: I wasn’t all that scared of Hayes, but he should have been scared of me. She could have told him the truth—that I’d killed her, that I’d killed those Marines at K-38, and that I would kill Kelly, kill him, kill them all if they didn’t get away from me. But he couldn’t hear her. No one could ever hear her but me.

  I shut my eyes.

  “Why would the colonel get in further with the people who attacked you?”

  “There’s a lot about it I don’t know. Of course he wanted to cover his mistakes, but to double-down with the enemy? That seems too far. I don’t know what Samael and the warlords told him, if he simply lost his compass or if he somehow, in whatever corrupted way, thought he was doing the right thing. It doesn’t make sense a man could turn like that, even an ass like Riggs.”

  The motel was five blocks away.

  “So you’re the only one who has seen Samael?” There was so much about Hayes’s story that didn’t make sense, that seemed too convenient
; he was the only American who could recognize Samael, and no one would believe him. “Could you identify him if you saw him again?”

  “I saw him last night, with Riggs, in a black Mercedes as they closed in on us near the border. He’s inside the U.S.”

  We pulled up to the curb.

  “But what would be worth that risk?”

  “That’s what scares me—” Hayes broke off. I followed his gaze to the second floor of the motel as he took out his SIG Sauer pistol. “What was the room number?”

  “Two twenty.”

  “The door’s open.”

  We jumped out of the car and ran for the room. I sprinted while Hayes stayed a few feet behind, moving more deliberately, scanning the scene.

  I heard a crash from the room, a groan of pain. As I neared the door, I could hear more grunts and blows. I saw legs on the floor, a figure standing above the body, blood on the carpet. Rage coursed through me so strongly, my whole being fixed on one purpose: kill anyone who hurt her.

  Hayes followed, pistol out. “Byrne. Wait!”

  I gathered this wasn’t the tactically wisest entry, but I didn’t give a shit. I couldn’t let another one die. I shoved open the door and found myself staring down the barrel of a 9 mm.

  Chapter 19

  KELLY LOWERED THE gun, threw her arm around me, and pulled me inside. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. Blood streaked her torso.

  “Jesus, Tom,” she said. “I nearly shot you.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She ran her hand through her hair and gave the man on the floor a kick in the ribs.

  She followed my eyes to the blood drying on her side.

  “It’s not mine,” she said.

  The man lay on the ground with a bruise growing around his eye and an obviously broken forearm, half wrapped in the towel.

  “I threw the towel at him and twisted it around his arm,” she said.

  I checked his pulse.

  “Alive?”

  “Yes,” I said as Kelly pulled on her clothes.

  Hayes stepped through the door. She aimed the gun.

  “He’s with me,” I said. “This is Hayes. He’s…an old friend.”

  I heard sirens in the distance.

  “Time to go,” Hayes said.

  “What the hell is going on?” Kelly asked.

  “There’s more where he came from. We should get moving.” I grabbed her bags. “I’ll explain on the way.”

  “Fine.”

  Hayes rolled the man over and stood above him with his pistol drawn, ready for an execution.

  I wheeled away just as Hayes put his foot down on the man’s good forearm, grabbed the wrist with his free hand, and jerked it up, cracking the ulna and radius like pieces of kindling. The man screamed and buried his face in the carpet. I remembered Hayes’s words: went in nonlethal. This guy wouldn’t be giving us any more trouble.

  We trotted down the steps as the sounds of the police sirens grew louder to the south and east. Kelly took the backseat behind Hayes. I rode shotgun. He drove.

  “You sure you’re good?” I asked her. I could tell she was so hopped up on adrenaline she probably wouldn’t have noticed if she were walking on a broken leg.

  “I think so. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank God,” Kelly said. “Because I got a call from the police. They said you’d been taken, to call them if I saw you. And to be on the lookout…”

  I turned. She had the pistol pressed against the back of Hayes’s seat. “On the lookout for military types.” I looked from her to Hayes. In action, there was a command presence that gave him away. Kelly might have thought this was all coercion.

  “Don’t,” I said. “It’s cool.”

  She didn’t respond. I watched her finger inside the trigger guard, watched her weigh the choices as the sirens chased us.

  She pulled the gun away, looked at me grimly, then put her lips to my ear.

  “Thanks for coming to get me, Tom. Now please tell me you didn’t join up with the men who stole that truck. Because you won’t have to worry about the police or these soldiers or whoever the hell was following us yesterday. I’ll kill you myself.”

  “‘Join up’ seems a little strong,” I said.

  She sat back. Hayes looked at her in the rearview. “Kelly, was it?”

  “That’s right. Kelly Britten.”

  “You have some training?”

  “I’m a first lieutenant in the Guard. Army. Combat engineer.”

  “Sapper?”

  “Yeah.” That meant she’d made it through special training in small-unit tactics, explosives, and urban combat. I didn’t know she’d earned the distinction.

  “I like your style, Britten. Thanks for not shooting me.”

  Chapter 20

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, I was looking for orange peels.

  Hayes had told me that was our danger signal. We were trying to reconnect with the rest of his team, but they had lost a radio in the raid back at the safe house, so we couldn’t use that to communicate until we met in person and were able to set up new encryption keys. We fell back to a series of predetermined rally points.

  “And if I see an orange?” I’d asked him.

  “It means someone is about to kill us.” The meeting site would be under surveillance, and we could be walking into an ambush.

  He led us through a patch of dry grass and palms in the shadow of a freeway overpass.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  I looked around. A plastic shopping bag blew by and snagged on the scrub.

  “And how do we find your people?”

  He lifted a rock next to a stanchion. There was a Chinese menu underneath it, a crumpled piece of garbage no one would have noticed. It was the second drop we’d checked.

  “We go to China,” he said.

  It took me a minute to understand. Different ethnic menus were prearranged codes for different sites—they told team members where to meet or pick up a message.

  “Old-school.”

  “Electronic communications are the government’s strong suit these days. You can just sit at a computer and strong-arm Google. So we go back to mono. Everyone’s weak on the classic stuff, in-person, hand-to-hand. The orange peel is an old KGB favorite. When my instructors from Peary were getting trained, it was hard to find a good spot for dead drops around DC that wasn’t already marked with a few other intelligence services’ chalk and pushpins.”

  “Who’s on the other end?”

  “Friends,” he said. “Even I don’t know everyone.”

  “Compartmented. Cells,” Kelly said. “Like…”

  She didn’t say it.

  “Know your enemy,” Hayes said. We started walking.

  “What about the car?”

  “Forget it.”

  After I explained everything that had happened, Kelly didn’t say much. She seemed to be considering her options. I was hoping it was simply deliberation and not shock. The police were on our heels. Our first priority was to get somewhere safe.

  We worked our way downhill past Petco Park toward downtown. Hayes had run inside a Goodwill, and we had swapped our working gear for polos and button-downs. As the neighborhood changed, from skid row to business to upscale tourist district, Hayes’s stride and manner adjusted accordingly. If anyone was tailing us, it would have been impossible for him to blend in among the changing demographics we passed through.

  He moved quickly but never rushed, and by his example I forced myself to relax my manner, to disappear among the locals, to stop looking over my shoulder like a hunted man.

  Hayes checked the windows of stores as he passed, using the reflections to look behind him. We came closer to the bay front, the embarcadero, and the tourist areas around the USS Midway.

  “Why don’t you go to…not the police or the press, but there must be someone,” Kelly said to Hayes.

  “It’s not how we operate. If I got killed downrange, they would tell my wife it was a
training accident. The other men and women, my closest friends, would lie to her. But if I got caught behind enemy lines, thrown in a labor camp—tough shit. The government never heard of me.”

  “But they accused you of all this, pinned it on you. At some point you have to say, ‘Deal’s off.’ If they’re lying, why can’t you tell the truth?”

  “One of the younger guys on our support crew tried that, tried to come out of the wilderness. He was from white Special Ops—unclassified teams. He was shot outside the wire before he had a chance to say a word. In any case, that’s not how we do things.”

  “There must be exceptions.”

  “We knew what we were getting into, the mission we were working. If people found out where we went, where we had come from, which nations had helped us, it would be enough to start the dominoes tumbling—proxy attacks, a war in the region. So if me and my guys were the sacrifice for holding that off, then fine. It’s the job.”

  “So what will you do?” I asked.

  “We fix our own messes.”

  “Kill Riggs?”

  “No,” Hayes said. “I could have done that back on the peninsula. Would have been easier. We have something better in mind.”

  “Something to do with a hijacked truck?”

  He didn’t answer, just looked into the distance. I followed his gaze, caught a glint of light on a rooftop. He kept moving, scanning everyone in the crowd. Every face was a potential threat.

  “Correct.” He turned to me and used the cover of our conversation to check the harbor in both directions.

  “Stay here,” he said, and he walked toward a cluster of wood-shingled tourist-trap shops along the waterfront.

  Parents helped their children onto the horses of an antique carousel in the center of the plaza. My attention kept going to the trash cans. Something orange eight feet out from one seized my attention like a signal beacon. I froze, but it was only a discarded tube of sunblock.

  Hayes looked behind a hedge on a little-used walk between two of the stores. That must have been the China drop site. Traffic coursed behind me. I was just starting to relax when someone tossed a piece of litter out the window of a van. It hit the ground next to the trash can.