Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  “Was that for us?” I asked Hayes.

  “He was doing the job, that’s all. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Had him stable, but something’s off. Heart rate is rising, BP is dropping.”

  Cook looked up at us with terror in his eyes. He tried to talk but could only pant.

  I looked at his trachea, shifted almost imperceptibly to his left. His chest seemed hyperexpanded.

  “This is going to suck for a second, okay?”

  Cook nodded. He was barely breathing now. If this kept going, circulatory collapse was a few minutes away.

  I put my ear to his chest, tapped it on the left and then the right. The right sounded like a drum, and there was no trace of air moving.

  I looked to Green.

  “Tension pneumothorax?” he said.

  Trauma to the chest, often a broken rib, can tear a lung. With each breath the patient takes, air enters the lung and then escapes into the chest cavity. Sometimes the tear works like a one-way valve, allowing air to leave the lung and enter the chest but not letting the air back out. Pressure in the chest cavity builds, causing the lung to collapse and, as with Cook here, compressing the vena cava and other major blood vessels, obstructing the blood flow to the heart.

  “You have a chest tube?” I asked.

  “No. Just the needle kit.” He handed me a package containing a 15-gauge needle catheter attached to a syringe, a length of tubing, and a valve, and we both put on gloves.

  “You want to do it?” I asked as I tore open the plastic, doing my best to keep everything sterile. Green had been shattered, but he could rebuild.

  He looked from me to the kit and back. Cook moaned and blacked out.

  “Sure.”

  Green took the needle catheter in his right hand as I swabbed the right side of the chest wall with Betadine. He inserted it into the skin about two inches below the middle of the collarbone. His hand didn’t shake.

  He advanced the needle into the chest, pulling back on the plunger, and suddenly air rushed into the syringe. Green smiled as he threaded the catheter farther into the space and then removed the needle and syringe. The trapped air that had been compressing the heart and lungs now had a way out. He’d just saved this man’s life.

  I grabbed a stethoscope and listened; the lung had partially reinflated, and there were breath sounds bilaterally. “Good,” I said as I secured the catheter.

  Green reached for a Heimlich valve, a one-way valve that would let air out when Cook exhaled but seal off when he inhaled, preventing another tension pneumo.

  “It’s broken,” Green said.

  I found a sterile surgical glove, snipped off one of the fingers, cut the tip off that, then taped it to the end of the catheter. It looked like a small windsock hanging from a plastic tube.

  As Cook exhaled, air passed through the latex sleeve. When he breathed in, it sealed off, wrinkling up against itself, maintaining the vacuum in the space around the lung.

  “That’s how we used to do it before the kits, with a glove or a condom.”

  “Hayes told me you were a corpsman. You’re a full doctor now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long did that take?”

  “A decade, not counting pre-reqs and military obligations.”

  “Jesus. I’ll be lucky if I can stick a vein.”

  I pointed to his injured hand. “Let me take a look at that.”

  He held it out. I unwrapped the bandage and inspected the damage. There was minimal swelling, and he had full strength and normal sensation in the splinted fingers. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.

  “A good orthopedist and you’ll be a hundred percent.”

  “I’ll be lucky if I live to see tomorrow.”

  “We’ll make it,” I said, and I handed him a pair of shears. Medics and corpsmen wore them on their chests, clipped to the webbing of their body armor, almost like badges. “And then find an ortho guy. You’ll be all right. From everything Hayes told me, you’d make a fine doctor.”

  “Thanks.” He put the scissors in his chest pocket, then checked Cook’s blood pressure, moving confidently.

  “Hey,” Cook said, eyes closed and slurring the words as he came to. “Green. You’re alive. That’s fucking awesome.” He opened his eyes and focused on the tube coming out of his chest. The finger of the surgical glove filled and collapsed like a flag in a light breeze.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “A flutter valve. It’s keeping you alive.”

  “Okay. Cool. My face hurts, man. How’s my face?”

  “It’s not too bad. You’re going to be fine.”

  “You’re lying through your teeth, Green, but thanks. How’d I do?”

  “You did great. Just take it easy.”

  “It feels so good to breathe. Oh.” He closed his eyes again, took long deep breaths for a while. “Green…come here. I need to tell you something.”

  “You should rest.”

  “Green.” He waved him closer. Green knelt beside him like a priest administering last rites.

  “What is it, Cook? Are you okay?”

  “How many South Americans”—he paused, winced against the pain—“does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  “I don’t know, Cook.”

  “A Brazilian.”

  Green snorted, then started laughing.

  I left them and walked back to Hayes. “So Riggs went after Nazar at the same time we did.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus. I thought…I thought you were coming for us.”

  Hayes and his crew had done everything they could to pose as Riggs’s men in order to mislead and provoke Nazar when they ambushed her. So when Riggs actually showed up, guns out, I assumed his shooters were Hayes and the team. “How’d they find us?”

  “Ward picked up a second signal coming from Nazar’s cell. They must have been tracking her, eavesdropping on her conversations. We tried to turn them against each other. We did our job too well.”

  I took one of the water bottles, poured some out into my hand, and wiped my face off.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Hayes.

  “You had no way of knowing who was taking shots at you. You trust me now?”

  I drank some of the water. Swallowing made the pain in my skull flare up.

  “I have to see that shipment you stole from the armored truck,” I said. “I need to know what I’m part of.”

  Hayes crossed his arms. “For a guy who just tried to kill me, you’re asking for a lot of trust.” He considered it for a moment. “You’ve earned it, but you can’t see it. The trunk is gone, Byrne.”

  “What is it?” I couldn’t shake the images from Revelation, the seven seals, the seven trumpets. “Riggs had me thinking it was some kind of weapon, nuke or bio.”

  “It’s the ultimate weapon, really.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We dropped the trunk outside the Egyptian consulate. They should be opening it any second now, depending on their security posture.”

  “And then what?”

  “Nothing. It’s empty. The trunk was a false front, Byrne, to smuggle the shipment in. The Egyptians will have it in a museum soon unless some cultural attaché turns it around on the black market. We just needed to get rid of it. What matters is what was inside.”

  He walked over to a black trunk, one of eight stacked against the wall. I stepped closer, and he opened the lid.

  Chapter 36

  HAYES’S WIFE, WHO now went by the name Lauren Parker, turned a page in the textbook. She rested her elbow on the table and her head in her hand as she copied notes down onto an index card. The house was a modest ranch, neat, though showing its age, with deep-pile brown carpet and linoleum in the kitchen.

  She was still wearing the scrubs she’d had on for fourteen hours. A year of coursework remained for her to become a nurse-practitioner. It had taken her a little longer than the others in her class because she was raising Maggie by herself an
d working full-time as a registered nurse. Plus things had been hard ever since Hayes…she tried not to think about Hayes and focused on the page:

  The Cockcroft-Gault Equation for Creatinine Clearance

  She worked through the problem set. Her daughter stood on a chair next to her. She had started asking questions about everything recently, which was normal for her age. But more and more, she asked about her father, and those questions Lauren didn’t know how to answer.

  Maggie mimicked her, placing her head in her hand and, armed with a crayon and a Babar book, pretending to work her own calculations.

  Lauren couldn’t help but crack up. She checked the clock on the stove: eight p.m. She should have put Maggie to bed fifteen minutes ago, but this was the only time they had together. The child thrived on the schedule, and it was selfish to let her stay up. But it was nice not to be alone, especially at night, out here in the middle of nowhere, with good reason to believe every creak of the house or engine in the distance represented a coming threat.

  Ten more minutes, she told herself, and she returned to Cockcroft and Gault. She couldn’t focus. After everything that happened, she was used to having eyes on her. For two years, every car, every passing stranger had seemed to be following her. And she’d learned to deal with the paranoia, but today had been different. She couldn’t convince herself that it was all in her head, that no one was hunting her.

  Were the police going to take her again for endless hours of questioning? Would the rumors start again? Would she have to move for the fourth time, change her name and cut ties once again? Part of her believed it would be Hayes, and she was never sure whether to be hopeful in those moments or afraid. And then it would cycle: hating the men who did it to him, hating him, and sometimes hating herself for hating him.

  Maggie put her finger on a graph of drug concentrations and did her fake-reading bit: “Blah-blah-blah.”

  Lauren looked at the page.

  “Exactly what I was thinking, kiddo.” She scooped her up in her arms. “Time for bed.”

  Maggie rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. She pointed out the kitchen window. “What’s that?”

  Lauren turned. She could see the dome lights in the vans and trucks. There were at least four. She went to the bathroom, kept the light off, and looked out the window. Two squads of four men were approaching the house.

  There was a pistol in a safe above the fridge. A long gun locked in the hall closet. Instinct told her to grab one or both and defend her child. She was a better shot than 90 percent of the guys at the range. But that would only give them what they wanted, confirm their fears, grant them a reason to kill her.

  “Bailey!” She snapped her fingers and pointed to her daughter’s door, closest to the living room. The chocolate Lab slipped inside, and she closed the door behind him.

  They would come from the front. Lauren took Maggie into the kitchen. She knelt down and looked at her.

  “Sweetheart, we’re going to play a game. We’re going to lie on the floor and keep our hands out to the sides no matter what happens. It may be scary, but we’re going to be brave and just stay where we are and not get up and not run. It’s all a game. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

  Lauren’s hands were trembling so badly she could see them shaking her daughter’s arms.

  Maggie’s lower lip stuck out. “I’m scared.”

  “It’s going to be fine. Will you play? For Mommy?”

  “Okay.”

  “Here we go, baby.” She kissed her on the forehead and laid her down.

  “Police!” The door splintered in, and something metal tinked against the wall. A half a second later, the explosion shook the house. Pure white light burned Lauren’s eyes.

  Maggie was silent for a moment, then opened her mouth wide and held it, held it before the sobs broke through.

  “Stay there, sweetie! It’s just a game!”

  This was a night raid. It was what her husband did for a living, in Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan and the Horn of Africa and God knew where else.

  She heard the rattling of the load carriers. It was bad enough that they were here but worse that she had seen them coming. This was not her husband. These were small-town police, tweaked on adrenaline.

  One glint, one move, one shout. An ashtray, a wallet, a silver necklace. Anything could set them off. She had to be brave at the wrong end of the gun, give them nothing to react to. If she let the fear take her and grabbed Maggie and ran like every nerve in her body was screaming for her to do, they’d kill her.

  The sliding door to the patio blew out and sent a shower of glass into the living room, skittering along the floor toward her daughter. She looked back, saw the men throw the forty-pound battering ram down and rush in: four, eight, twelve. She stood up and tried to count as they blinded her with flashlights.

  “Where is he!”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband!”

  “He’s not my husband. I haven’t seen him in years. My daughter is here. Please. It’s just the two of us. Please. We’re cooperating. Please don’t shoot.”

  She knelt down. He pushed her to the ground, spread her arms out to the sides.

  “Put your hands out. What are you carrying? Who else is here? Do you have any weapons?”

  “It’s just my daughter and me. There’s a pistol in the kitchen. Rifle in the closet. They’re locked and I have a permit. There’s a dog in that first bedroom. He’s friendly. Please don’t hurt—”

  Another man stormed over. “Where is your husband! You got any guns?”

  Maggie screamed for her mother, boosted herself onto her knees. The lights crossed to her in the dark.

  “Just stay there, sweetie,” Lauren said. “Please…please don’t hurt my daughter. Please don’t take her away. Her aunt lives fifteen minutes from here. If you’re going to arrest me, please let me call her to take my—”

  “You’re lying. We know he’s—”

  Wood splintered in the hallway. The dog’s barks echoed down the hall. They kicked down the bedroom door.

  “He’s friendly! Please don’t hurt—”

  Three cracks of rifle fire. The dog whimpered.

  “Did you have to shoot my dog!” she screamed.

  Other men heard the gunfire.

  “Shooter? Shooter?”

  The voices drowned each other out. More shots. The cries of the dog, hurt badly. Maggie screaming, and someone else groaning in pain.

  “I’m hit! Shooter! Shooter!”

  More shots. The room stank of smoke. Lauren gagged.

  Some cops yelled for order, but the panic was contagious.

  “Bailey!” Maggie screamed. Lauren saw her stand. She was going to run.

  “Stay still, baby. Please.” Lauren reached for her. “My daughter. Don’t hurt her!”

  “Don’t you move!” A light mounted on the barrel of a rifle shone in Lauren’s eyes. “Are you trying to warn him? Where is he!”

  Lauren saw the gun lights converge, the lines pass through her and her daughter, reflect off windows, illuminate the sweaty faces of the men, veins plump in their necks, eyes wide with fear and panic, their fingers too tense on their triggers.

  “Lie down, baby! Please—”

  Her daughter took a wobbling step toward the dog, arms outreached.

  “Freeze!”

  Lauren saw the officer near the kitchen, wearing black goggles and a black helmet, take aim.

  “No!”

  Her daughter fell to the floor.

  Chapter 37

  HAYES STOOD TO my right. I put my hand on the lid of the trunk and looked inside.

  At first it seemed like reams of printer paper wrapped in thick blue and clear plastic. Through a transparent section, I could see it was made of many smaller plastic-wrapped bricks. Then I saw Benjamin Franklin, with his scraggly hair and sad eyes, staring back at me.

  “How much is it?”

  “Sixty-eight million,” Hayes said
. “All four of those are full.”

  “Jesus, you could buy an F-16 with that.”

  “Two, actually. Or a Pakistani nuke. It cost only half a million to pull 9/11 off, and those guys didn’t have the kind of connections and state support Samael has.”

  Hayes lifted one of the bundles, considered it, then let it fall back. He shut the case. “The root of all evil, prior to every bomb, every bullet. Sell your cloak and buy a sword.”

  “It’s the black money Riggs stole. You stole it back.”

  “That was our first step. Take the money, his strength. He doesn’t have all those people working for him because they believe in him.”

  “What was he doing with it?”

  “He plays it off as some service project, giving jobs to warriors after they leave the military, but he’s hiring guns. We didn’t know exactly why. Then we saw him with Samael. He doubled-down with him. He had the funds and the means and he’s working with one of America’s most dangerous enemies.

  “I don’t know what his exact motivation is, but he was a ‘the worse, the better’ kind of guy, believed the U.S. should let things fall apart, let the bad guys wipe each other out, and then step in to start rebuilding the region from scratch.”

  “Is stealing this enough to stop him?”

  “No. We took his legs out, made it hard for him, but there are other ways. All we know is that he is planning something big, he has unofficial sanction, and he could pull the trigger any minute.”

  “Who did Nazar call? Didn’t she order the evidence to be released?”

  “A lawyer, an Iranian exile up in Orange County. He’s dead. Car crash. Tried to outrun Riggs’s men.”

  “And the evidence?”

  “It’s still out there. We were able to pick that up from their comms. They hit him too early. He tried to run, lost control of his Jaguar. They forced the lockbox he was carrying. And it was empty. He must have been going to get it.”

  “So Nazar is the only one left.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we get to her, maybe turn her against Riggs?”

  “If we can rescue Nazar, after what Riggs has done, she would almost certainly turn, but Riggs already has her. He took her in the firefight. That’s the last audio pickup we got: ‘Keep her alive enough to talk.’”