Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  The blast from an explosion is three times more powerful underwater. Hayes had told me we needed to use the hull for cover. That’s why we had come to the opposite side. We would detonate the charges, and then Moret would speed in on the port side and use the .50 cal to take out the Shiloh’s helicopter, its fast boat, and its close-in-weapon system: a 20 mm Gatling gun mounted near the bow of the ship that could shoot seventy-five rounds per second.

  We had radios fixed to the side of our face masks, but we would use them as little as possible, for stealth. Hayes checked with me. I gave him the okay.

  He tapped the radio. “Jericho, Jericho, Jericho.”

  It was the code to begin the assault. Hayes started counting down the twenty seconds Moret would need to race into effective range on the port side. He lifted the detonator, pushed aside the safety cover.

  Fifteen.

  Ten.

  It was strange to wait in silence, knowing what was about to happen. A long swell rocked us and the ship up and down.

  Five. They would be able to see her in seconds. It was time.

  My heart beat louder, a pulsing roar in my ears, amplified by the water pressing against them; it was one of the most unnerving parts of diving. I cupped my hand over my ass to protect my organs and opened my mouth so I wouldn’t shatter my teeth.

  Hayes triggered the driveshaft charges. The explosion surprised me: a low thud instead of a crack. The pressure didn’t hit me in the ears and mouth. It traveled through me, carrying me back with the water. I couldn’t hear, and the shock wave tore at my stomach and lungs, seemed to wrench them loose as I was thrown back, straining the muscles in my arm.

  The M2 Moret was firing was a fearsome gun, sixty-five inches long, capable of shooting down aircraft and killing from a mile and a half away. Even underwater we could hear it popping. Our first two explosions rocked the ship, and the distraction should have given her enough time to destroy the Shiloh’s other defenses and disable the helicopter on the flight deck.

  We waited as she rained gunfire down above the waterline. The timing of the bombs was critical. Hayes knew the tactics and procedures aboard the Shiloh. He checked his watch. They needed time to raise the general alarm, time for all hands to get to their stations. As part of the standard protocol, they would leave the prisoner. The ship compartment that contained her cell would be unguarded.

  The chug of Moret’s .50 cal died out. Between her fire and the prop bombs, we had stranded the Shiloh. Hayes gave the crew ten more seconds, and then swam to the surface. All attention would be fixed on the other side of the ship, where Moret had attacked. He placed a suction cup with a ring handle against the hull, gave my vest a tug to signal going up, then hauled himself out of the water.

  I surfaced next to him and reached for the ring as well. We were about to blow the breaching charges, and at that range, the pressure would kill us if we remained underwater.

  I hoisted myself up. Above the water, the sounds of battle leaped out at full volume: the rattle of gunfire hunting down Moret, the shriek of the sirens on the Shiloh, the cries of the men on deck.

  Hayes focused on his watch and the detonator. He pressed his thumb down, as calm as a man changing a channel on a TV, and triggered the last two charges.

  The ship shuddered and cavitated through the water. I could hear the steel tremble and strain, like teeth grinding inside my own head amplified one thousand times.

  The Shiloh was divided into a series of watertight compartments. It was designed so that even if two of those compartments flooded completely, it would still float, though barely. We had just taken one. The ship heeled slightly as seawater surged through the holes we had punched in the hull and filled the interior.

  The plan was to wait until the violent rush of water abated and then swim under and enter through the breaches.

  A light scoured the water a hundred meters back. “They’re coming,” Hayes said.

  We had hoped the gunfire would keep their attention fixed on the port side of the ship, but they had kept their heads and were now looking for attackers from every direction. I dropped back to the surface. Hayes unfixed the ring and slipped below the water. I followed.

  Once we were ten feet down, we didn’t even have to kick toward the breaches. The water pulled in a slipstream along the hull, dragging us along the barnacles toward the razor-sharp edges of the holes we had blown. We were in the black now, blind and barely able to steer ourselves with our fins.

  I could hear the driveshaft turning, the wrenched metal grinding in its housing. Running the propellers was a standard antipersonnel measure. The ship went nowhere.

  I felt myself rising, moving faster. We were close. I kicked hard, oriented myself with the flow, and waited.

  Something slammed hard into my lower back as I was pulled through the breach, but it was less violent than I had feared. The compartment we had flooded was nearly full, the pressure almost equalized.

  Red and white lights shot by in a flash. I was upside down. Hayes was ahead of me, shining his spot around the compartment. Now that we were inside, light security didn’t matter. We had entered through the larger breach, about three by four feet, with the hull plating curved in, torn into jagged edges. I half expected to see maimed bodies, viscera, and blood snaking through the water, but it was clear.

  The large breach led into a machinery room lit by the glare of a single emergency light, with an open door to the passageway that ran up and down this side of the ship. I followed Hayes through. It was empty except for pipes and junction boxes along the bulkheads. To our left, toward the stern, the passageway ended in a heavy watertight door.

  Riggs might have known that divers had played a part in the assault, or maybe he believed that it all somehow came from another boat. But there was almost no chance he would imagine that we were already inside, with a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of water pressing against the door between his crew and us. It would give us time to rescue Nazar—if we didn’t drown her first.

  We turned and headed right, toward the bow of the ship. There were three rooms along the passageway, all on the same side, just inside the hull. We had come through a breach in the first. Next to it was the vault room, and finally there was a third room, with the door blown open, where we had breached the second, smaller hole.

  We swam toward the door to the vault. Then I heard a tink behind us, like the highest key on a piano.

  I turned.

  Tink. Tink-tink-tink.

  Hayes shone his light back down the passageway. The partitions and doors within the compartments weren’t nearly as strong as the massive walls that separated the watertight compartments from one another. If there was an area within this compartment that hadn’t flooded, the weight of the water would build up on one side of the partition with nothing but air on the other until the partition blew in an implosion.

  There was another tink, then a loud crack as a bolt sheared.

  Hayes said something, but there was so much noise inside the ship, my radio was useless. I grabbed for a railing along the bulkhead. At the end of the passageway behind us, metal screamed, and the partition began to crumple away from us.

  It gave out with a blast as the unflooded area swallowed enough water to fill it completely in seconds. The rush of water grabbed me, hauled me back down the passageway, nearly pulled my regulator from my mouth.

  I bit down, held on as I smashed into rivets and pipes and prayed that I wouldn’t tear my loop or puncture either one of the counterlungs that were keeping me alive. I rag-dolled through the compartment and slammed hard upside down into a pipe as the water dragged me, folded me around it, tore at my equipment.

  Finally, pressure bounced back the other way and threw me off the pipe. I was upside down, breathing far too fast for my Dräger.

  After a half a second of peace, a jet of froth and bubbles filled the passageway and roiled the water. I couldn’t see. I patted myself, checking for lacerations. I tried to calm down, slow my breathing, w
aited for the drunken feeling of too much carbon dioxide in the loop or the nausea and tunnel vision of too much oxygen.

  I could hear water in my rebreather, a faint gurgle with every breath. Some water I could survive—there were traps in the loop to catch it—but a leak would be fatal. And the danger of the Dräger is that once that careful balance of breathable air is gone, you’re likely to die before you even figure out something is wrong.

  Debris filled the water: upended chairs, fire extinguishers, papers, and a whiteboard. I reached for my chem light—my flashlight was gone—and scanned for Hayes.

  He was ahead of me in the passage. I swam toward him as he lifted our bailout, the backup tank we had been carrying. Divers on rebreathers always carry a small tank of breathable air, like those used in traditional scuba, for emergencies. He ran his finger across his throat. Our bailout was gone. The next mistake would kill us.

  The strong room was the first door on our right, protected by a steel door in a steel frame. It was originally a vault built into the ship for holding cryptographic equipment, but Riggs had found a new use for it. There was a small glass panel, about two inches high and eight inches wide, set in the door at eye level. I peered through it.

  In the blue glow of my chem light, I could see Nazar leaning forward, shackled to the bulkhead, as water poured in all around her, flooding the vault. I could barely make out her condition.

  She was still alert enough to cry for help. The door had held. It was more than enough to keep the water back, but the cell was filling fast, the cold black Pacific up to her knees and rising. It flowed from the vents and the pipe fittings near the overhead—what the ceiling is called on a ship.

  The vault was filling faster than we had anticipated. And something was off. The water wasn’t clear. The surface was a rainbow. I couldn’t smell anything, but I knew that fuel was leaking somewhere nearby.

  Hayes sank down a few feet and faced the door lock. It was a combination dial, group-three navy standard, that could be used on vault doors and safes.

  I floated above and to Hayes’s left, near the window, with a grease pencil and a small slate. He tried an old combination, with no success. He was going to have to decode the lock, and for that he needed a partner to keep track of the numbers.

  The traditional way to crack a safe is by drilling at certain points, positions that are carefully guarded and specific to each model, that would allow the bolt to be drawn. We didn’t have time for that and couldn’t run a high-speed drill.

  But every vault already has one hole drilled through it, for the dial, and that was the weakness Hayes would exploit. It was how he had managed to break in and steal his own classified records.

  He pulled out a case marked Falle Safe, then jammed his knife behind the lock dial and pried it off.

  That left the spindle exposed, poking out of the front of the lock. The spindle turns with the dial and lets the user manipulate the four wheels stacked inside the lock. Each wheel has a notch in it. The correct combination would leave those notches perfectly aligned, allowing a bar to fall down into them and the bolt to be drawn.

  The spindle is a long threaded rod with a groove down its entire length. Hayes needed to remove it, but first he had to reach a wire all the way down that groove to the very back of the lock. There, a small piece of metal, called a key, had been hammered into the groove and bound the spindle to the wheels. If he knocked it out, he could unscrew the spindle.

  He started feeding the wire in, then stopped.

  This, he had told me, would be the critical moment. Attacking the spindle is one of the oldest, least sophisticated ways to crack a safe. Amateurs would simply hammer the spindle back into the vault. It destroys the wheels or pushes them off entirely, allowing the bolt to withdraw.

  Any real safe has a countermeasure known as a relocker. These are inch-thick bolts held in by heavy springs that rest against the back of the lock and the wheel pack.

  “Destroy the wheel pack?” Hayes had said. “The pins fire. Punch the spindle? You knock off the back of the lock, and the pins fire. Those pins can’t retract. They permanently lock the vault. Not even the combination will open it. It takes hours of drilling at secret points known only to the manufacturer to disable those pins.”

  If Hayes moved a few millimeters too far and set off the relocker, Nazar was dead, and our fate was sealed as surely as that vault.

  It sounded like surgery.

  He shook his hand out and tapped on the wire, pushing out the tiny piece of metal that held the spindle in place. It moved in, millimeter by millimeter.

  He looked to me, put his hand flat, then raised it from his belly to his chest, asking how high the water was in the cell. I looked in, saw Nazar’s desperate eyes, turned back to Hayes, and held my hand up to my neck.

  He tapped the tool with the butt of his knife. Again; harder. Harder. It gave.

  I held my breath, sure that he had gone too far and triggered the relocker. I listened for the clunk of the pins firing and heard nothing, but that didn’t mean much. The noise could have been covered by the chaos in the water and the alarms sounding above our heads.

  He unscrewed the spindle until it was free and put it aside. Nazar began to scream, which at least meant she was still breathing.

  Hayes screwed a special replacement spindle into the lock. It had a hollow center that would allow him to feed a decoder—a thin rod—deep inside the lock mechanism. At the end of the rod was a metal clip that would reach around and let him feel the edges of the wheels and find those notches.

  Nazar stopped screaming. I looked through the glass. Her eyes came above the surface one last time, then disappeared. We had two or three minutes until brain death started.

  Hayes fed the rod in and turned it slowly. I waited with the slate. He found the first notch, and signaled: 68. I wrote it down.

  The second wheel took another thirty seconds: 10. I could hear the chains rattling as Nazar struggled under the water. She was only wasting her oxygen.

  The third wheel: 52.

  One more.

  The clanking inside the cell stopped. She was unconscious. She was dying.

  Hayes pointed to the loop of my rebreather. I grabbed the tube to my counterlung and pulled it forward. Bubbles trickled out, slow and steady: a leak. I felt okay and double-checked the readout on my Dräger’s display: no alarms.

  He gestured for me to surface, but I didn’t move.

  He started on the fourth wheel: 27.

  That gave us the combination, but it was relative. He needed one last measurement, of the wheel that would draw the bolt, to tell us the offset between our readings and the true zero of the lock. That was where I came in.

  There was a chalky taste in my mouth, bitter and sharp. I thought at first it was just the coppery bite of fear, but I soon knew it was something far worse. I held on, held my breath. We needed those numbers.

  Hayes gave me the offset, and I added it to our four numbers. As I wrote out the last figure, the pen in my hand seemed to recede to a small circle at the end of a long tunnel. I held the slate out to him.

  Hayes entered the combination, tried the handle. It didn’t work.

  My chest spasmed, desperately sucking for air. I couldn’t stop it. The caustic liquid rushed into my mouth. I vomited instantly into my mouthpiece, then spat it out and watched as the yellow plume melted the rubber of my loop and floated past me in a cloud.

  I stroked for the surface with my last strength and bumped against the steel overhead. A small air pocket was trapped between two supports. I put my face in it and tried to breathe. Water ran into my mouth with each gasp, some into my lungs, and I coughed violently, swallowing more with each fit. My vision wavered. Hayes lifted me, kept my face in the pocket.

  My eyes were an inch from the steel. I could taste diesel. The water rose, up my cheek, to the corner of my mouth.

  “Take my regulator,” Hayes said. It would take me minutes to make up for the carbon dioxide poisoning, mi
nutes Nazar didn’t have, and there was no way Hayes could work the dial with me buddy-breathing on his back.

  “No. Open that door.”

  “The relockers must have fired. It’s over. She’s dead.”

  The water splashed against the overhead. I craned my neck, sipped the last air.

  “They didn’t,” I croaked. “You can open it.”

  “There’s no point killing yourself—”

  Nazar was in worse shape than I was. “I can’t let another one die. Open that door.”

  The water came over my nose and mouth. There was no air left.

  He pulled out his regulator and handed it to me.

  I kept my mouth shut, shook my head no. Hayes exhaled in anger and frustration, then brought his regulator back to his mouth. As my vision narrowed further, he turned down, grabbed the dial, and spun it hard.

  Then the darkness took me.

  Chapter 45

  THE PAIN BLOOMED in my cheek, again and again. Someone was smacking me. I opened my eyes and threw up water that tasted like salt and gasoline. I looked over and saw Nazar, barely conscious, and Hayes, swimming between us.

  We were inside the vault, in an air pocket near the overhead. The door was open.

  “The key I pushed out must have fallen into one of the notches. I spun it out. You were right.”

  My mouth and throat burned from the chemicals. In the red wavering light, I filled my chest, over and over, ignoring the choking diesel fumes to take in everything I could before the air pocket disappeared.

  “Is she okay?” I asked. “Injuries?”

  “Nothing immediately life-threatening.”

  “Torture?”

  “No sign.”

  I felt along her neck, found the pulse; strong. The rainbow surface of the water rose closer to the overhead.

  “No. No,” Nazar muttered and began to weep.

  “We’re going back underwater,” Hayes said.

  “No!” she screamed.

  “We’re getting you out of here.” He backed against her. “Hold on to my shoulders and breathe through this.”