Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  One of Riggs’s guards, a former Ranger, climbed down a ladder to the mess, a large dining area. The flooding rose halfway up the bulkheads, deeper on the port side due to the ship’s tilting. He waded in up to his chest and began to cross.

  Behind him, a shadow emerged from the black water. It was a man, rising to his chin and breathing deeply but silently, his eyes taking in the whole space.

  Hayes rested like that for thirty seconds, until the panic and oxygen starvation abated. He listened to the guard’s radio chatter, memorized every call sign. The guard began to turn, and Hayes slipped back under the water.

  They would be looking for him out on the surface, so Hayes had come back in through the breach.

  He wanted Riggs alone, or Caro. He waited until the soldier climbed back out, then rose and caught his breath. He dived and slipped through the water in silence toward the bow.

  He surfaced at the end of the passageway and climbed up a level. He was near the center of the ship. Ahead of him were the staterooms for the senior officers. He moved down the corridor and was halfway through it when he saw one of the dogs on a watertight door turning. He pressed against the bulkhead next to the door, his pistol ready at chest level.

  Through the glass porthole in the door, he saw Bill. He lowered the gun, and as Bill stepped through the door, he swung his left fist as though driving an ice pick into his temple. Bill stumbled. Hayes brought his left arm around his neck so Bill fell forward into the V of Hayes’s elbow.

  Hayes brought this right arm up, clasped his own biceps, and vised down on the man’s arteries, applying enough pressure on the airway to keep his cries quiet but not enough to crush his trachea. Bill clawed at Hayes’s forearm and head and blacked out after eight seconds. Hayes lowered him to the deck and flex-cuffed him. He pulled one of the straps off Bill’s ammo vest and stuffed it into the man’s mouth.

  He stood and caught a reflection in the porthole just as he felt the pressure against the back of his skull.

  Hall, Riggs’s deputy, stood behind him with a gun to his head.

  “So stupid,” Hall said, looking down at Bill. “You should have killed him.” He pressed the pistol in harder.

  Hayes snapped his neck back, driving the muzzle up, at the same time he lifted his knees to his chest fast enough that his feet came up off the deck. His whole body free-fell for a split second in a deep squat.

  His right hand snatched Hall’s wrist and brought the arm forward, past Hayes’s ear and down. Once Hayes had the wrist and the gun hand, he slammed his feet down, stood up to his full height, and drove his right shoulder into Hall’s elbow. He felt a soft pop and a crack as the ligaments and then the bones gave in to the hyperextension. The pistol dropped from Hall’s hand.

  Never put a gun that close, thought Hayes.

  He caught it by the barrel in his left hand and gave it a half turn as he pulled Hall forward by the broken arm as if he were going to throw him over his shoulder. That brought Hall’s body against Hayes’s back and slightly to the right as Hayes reached with the gun around his own torso, pressed it against Hall’s chest, and fired twice.

  The body, as he had hoped, muffled the pressure, which could have blown his ears in that confined space. Hall fell to the deck, bellowing. Hayes shot him in the eye. As Hayes wiped the blood from his face, he could hear footsteps clanging down the passageways.

  “Eagle? Eagle?” A voice came from the radio handset clipped near Hall’s shoulder.

  They’d heard the shots. They were coming.

  Hayes picked up the handset, stretched it toward himself, and put on labored breathing.

  “This is Eagle. Riggs. Riggs. Where are you? I’m hurt, he got away. He is heading toward the stern, the port-side passageway.”

  That was the opposite side of the ship.

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Eagle,” Hayes said. “Riggs. Where’s Riggs?”

  “Heading for the CO’s stateroom.”

  That was closer to the bow of the ship. He heard guards closing in on the doors at both ends of the passageway. The water was rising. Hayes would have to go down to move forward. He opened a hatch and pulled the radio from Hall’s corpse. After three deep breaths, he disappeared under the surface.

  Hayes navigated by feel, using the pipes along the overhead, and swam forward far enough to come under the passageway near the CO’s office. He climbed through a hatch, and as he rose from the water, he tilted his gun forward to drain the barrel.

  He slipped down a passageway filled with the sound of seething water and the general alarm, then came to a corner and peered around. Riggs stood twelve feet away. It was sweltering. The fire was close. The bulkheads seemed to waver with heat.

  Hayes closed in before Riggs could turn. He pulled his knife and in one movement chicken-winged Riggs’s right arm behind his back and pressed the blade against his throat. With his grip on Riggs’s wrist, he torqued the arm all the way up to the shoulder. The only way to relieve the tearing pressure on the joint was to lean forward, into the blade.

  There was justice, order, duty. They gave Hayes’s life meaning. But they had been torn apart. The moment they came for his wife and child was the moment they moved past all limits on barbarity, on the animal instincts that had been sharpened in him over decades. He had seen the darkness poison Speed, but there was a time when killing was just.

  He could feel the fire getting closer. Sweat dripped and stung his eyes. He gripped the knife tighter, twisted Riggs’s arm harder, and turned his face away to avoid the wash of blood.

  “No one hurt them,” Riggs pleaded. “They’re okay. Your wife and child.”

  Hayes said nothing, made no sound save for measured breathing from his nose.

  “We can work this out,” Riggs said.

  Hayes relaxed the joint lock.

  “Where are they?”

  “Police custody.”

  “And Caro?”

  Riggs didn’t respond.

  “Caro,” Hayes said. “Where is he?”

  “He’s secure. That’s all I’ll say. You’re going to kill me either way. I’m not going to help with your revenge.”

  Riggs deserved to die, for the killing he had stood by and condoned and for what he had taken from Hayes. But this wasn’t about revenge. Hayes had a mission to defend and protect his people, and that meant stopping Caro. It was a mission he had taken on two years ago for a country that now called him a traitor. But that didn’t matter. The duty remained. And he wasn’t going to stop until he finished the job.

  He needed answers, not blood.

  “Nazar is gone. The truth is going to come out. You’re going down for the massacre, but you can still do the right thing. Caro is the real enemy. Tell me where he is.”

  “You talk about the right thing?” Riggs laughed. “I did what needed to be done in that village. You, though, you’re a traitor. Your job was to get burned. It’s what you signed up for when you went black. You disobeyed orders. Everything you’ve done from that day to this is a disgrace.”

  “I’m happy to suffer for my country’s sins, but not yours. Where is Caro? What are you planning?”

  He wrenched Riggs’s arm until the tendon almost tore.

  “False flags and proxy battles. We’re going to win this. You don’t have the stomach for the war we need to fight,” Riggs said.

  “You still don’t understand. Caro is Samael. He’s the terrorist we hit on the incursion. When they ambushed us, they had brand-new Colt M4s. They had fresh hundred-straps, CIA money. You helped him. You made a mistake. That’s understandable. It’s chess. It happens, but for Christ’s sake, don’t double-down with a terrorist.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You have to know. Jesus. Why would you get in bed with him? You saw him kill those people in the village,” Hayes said.

  “Those people gave your location to the enemy,” Riggs snarled. “The interpreters betrayed you, set you up for that ambush. We had to get r
id of them. It was ugly, sure, but they stabbed us in the back. Then someone had to take the fall. That’s your job.”

  Hayes understood at last.

  Caro had fed Riggs a bullshit story to cover up his own role in the ambush. He had blamed the interpreters, painted them as the true enemy. Riggs had thought killing them was a necessary evil, frontier justice. It was a grave crime, but now at least Hayes could understand what had happened. For Riggs, embracing the lie about the interpreters was easier than admitting he had been wrong, that he had aided the enemy. It was tragic in a way.

  But even Riggs couldn’t have been that willfully stupid, that blind.

  “You saw him doing the killing,” Hayes said. “And then you believed him when he turned around and gave you that story. Why? Jesus, just think for a second—”

  “Believed him? No. I didn’t believe him. I wouldn’t have taken his word alone. He wasn’t the one who first told me about the villagers stabbing us in the back. I believed—”

  The booming pressure swallowed the words, and then fire roared through the compartment. It knocked Hayes forward. The flames felt cool at first, a strange numbness along his back as he stumbled and Riggs threw himself to the side.

  The explosion swallowed the oxygen in the passageway. Hayes gasped for breath but no air came. The initial shock of the blast resolved into pain now, tearing across his back. He rose to one knee. Something had exploded. Molten rubber and plastic coated his back, burning down through the skin.

  He couldn’t see Riggs through the choking fumes. He rolled twice but had no way to tell if he had extinguished the flames. Then the first bullet came through the smoke, sparked blue against the bulkhead. Shrapnel rained down on the passageway.

  He rose to his feet and sprinted around the corner. Footsteps clanged on the metal. Voices came on the radio: “Forward, move…move. Protect the bridge.”

  He tried to think through the fog of pain. He could understand their tactics from their comms. It was typical for teams that hadn’t spent enough combat time together; slow, cautious, deliberate. They couldn’t flow, couldn’t anticipate, couldn’t work with the speed, silence, and violence necessary. They knew they had contact. They were closing on the bridge.

  The Shiloh had a wide tower—known as a superstructure—roughly at its midpoint that rose thirty feet above the main deck of the ship. Hayes and Riggs were inside the base of the tower, where the commanding and executive officers had their offices and staterooms. Above them was the bridge, the windowed room at the top of the tower with a panoramic view of the sea where the commanding officer could control the ship.

  That would be the standard place to evacuate the principals, where the watch would circle and protect them. That’s where Riggs had been headed and that’s where Hayes knew he would find Caro; he’s secure, Riggs had said.

  The only way to get in was by climbing the ladders inside the tower or by climbing up the rungs on the back of the tower in the open air. With those few access points, it was a kill funnel for anyone attempting an assault, and it’s where Hayes needed to go.

  But there was another way.

  Hayes lifted the MP7 and shot along the bulkhead. The hollow-point rounds were the best choice for close-quarters work on ships because they fragmented and spalled. Hayes used the narrow angles to bounce the shards of bullet around the corner, covering the passageway behind him.

  It felt like the skin was sloughing off his back, but Hayes kept calm, checking the route ahead while firing behind him, intending more to suppress than kill his pursuers.

  He was in a room at the very front of the tower. Ahead of him a door opened to the outside and the forecastle, the main open-air deck at the bow of the ship, shaped like a triangle.

  He grabbed an emergency escape breathing device off the bulkhead, a small tank of air with a plastic hood attached for use in case of fire or gas leak. Inside the pack was a green cylinder of pure oxygen.

  They shouted after him. He opened the door to the forecastle and laid the green bottle across the frame.

  “Grenade,” he shouted. Fair warning. He didn’t want to kill them all. He wanted Caro.

  He stepped outside. Swells threw burning water over the deck. He slammed the door shut with every ounce of strength, and the closing steel sheared off the tank’s valve.

  He’d seen oxygen tanks go before. They didn’t even need a flame. The gas was under a few thousand PSI and the friction as it expanded was enough for ignition. Hayes’s unit had lost an apprentice armorer who thought he was swapping out the valve on an empty oxygen tank. All they found afterward was the case from his Omega and his left foot. The tank was a quarter mile away, embedded two feet deep in a concrete wall.

  The blast lit up the passageways at the base of the tower. The overpressure alone would knock out anyone approaching through the confined spaces, and likely wreck the doors. Glass blew out over his head.

  He stepped onto the forecastle. The wrecked turret of the ship’s 20 mm Gatling gun stood near the bow. He turned and looked back at the tower looming over his head and the bridge windows thirty feet up.

  The front of the tower was a vertical plane of painted steel, a hard climb even without the smoke and the flames. He traced a route: the footholds in the dogs of the door, the railing above, and then the wires of the standing rigging that led to the antennas sticking out from the top of the bridge.

  It was the only way.

  He lifted his radio and made the call.

  The smoke closed in. He jogged at the steel bulkhead, jumped, planted his foot, and grabbed the railing. Ignoring the agony from his back, he hauled himself up.

  Riggs came to in the passageway at the base of the tower. Caro was the first to reach him and found him looking like a broken man, gasping on the deck. He draped the colonel’s arm over his shoulders and helped him walk away from the smoke after the oxygen explosion.

  “Was it Hayes?”

  “What?”

  “Hayes!” Caro shouted.

  Riggs opened and closed his eyes twice.

  “Was it—”

  “It was him.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you talk to him? What did he say?”

  “What?”

  “What did Hayes say? I heard you talking.”

  Riggs grabbed the handrail of the ladder leading up the tower to the bridge.

  “What did he say?” Caro asked. He had kept the truth hidden for so long, and now it could destroy him.

  Riggs looked at him for a moment, as if deep in thought.

  “Nothing,” Riggs said. “Nothing.”

  “Let’s get to the bridge. Leave your men down here on watch,” Caro said.

  “Wait here,” Riggs said. He radioed for his guards and didn’t move until they arrived. “I’ll check out the bridge,” the colonel said.

  “I’ll come with you,” Caro offered.

  “No,” Riggs said, and turned to his men. “Guard these ladders. That’s the only way up.”

  He closed his good hand on the railing and started climbing.

  Caro watched him go. He had seen doubt like that on Riggs’s face before, on the day of the massacre.

  After Hayes had been ambushed on his way back from the infiltration, Riggs couldn’t understand what had happened. He knew that Hayes had been hit and that arms and information from Riggs’s command had possibly made it into the enemy’s hands.

  Caro had calmed him down. “He was ambushed in the badlands near the border. We know who leaked his location—it was the interpreters.”

  They were the traitors in their midst. “Where are they? They may try another attack to kill the rest of your men.”

  Riggs was silent, and finally he’d turned to Caro.

  “Can you help me take care of them?”

  Riggs was desperate. Take care of them. What did Riggs think Caro would do? Give the villagers plane tickets? Resettle them somewhere? No.

  And Caro w
as sure that Riggs hadn’t thought about it too hard, because his primary goal was saving his own career. However it had happened, the ambush reflected terribly on Riggs. The leaks had happened on his watch.

  Caro sent his men to round up the villagers. Riggs arrived just after the killing started, and his mouth fell open with horror. He pulled Caro aside. It was a moment when Riggs had to decide what kind of man he was.

  He had lived only in the United States, had never seen combat up close before, had never seen how things were done in the hard corners of the world. That day Caro showed him what it took to win wars in a land where mercy was interpreted as weakness and weakness was death.

  Caro offered Riggs a way forward, an escape from his own mistakes. They would sacrifice the villagers’ lives—people whom the world had forgotten anyway—in order to protect their own, to go on and save countless more. Caro broke him out of the CNN mentality that flinches from violence and ties America’s hands in battle. “This is what you do with traitors.”

  And there, looking at the huddled villagers, Riggs had to make his choice. He stood at the entrance to the house with his sidearm out, unsure.

  He turned back to Caro and said, “Whatever it takes.”

  He had to believe the villagers were guilty. What was his alternative? To admit that it was all his fault? To sacrifice his career? No. The truth would have destroyed him, so Riggs doubled-down on a lie. Who wouldn’t?

  From then on, Caro held the secret of Riggs’s role in both the ambush and the massacre, and that secret proved to be a powerful weapon. Caro owned him, whether Riggs cared to admit it to himself or not.

  When Hayes and his team arrived at the massacre, it could have ruined everything, but there was grace in the bullet Hayes fired. It shattered Riggs’s hand as he pointed into the valley and then tore through his upper chest. Hayes’s men were down in the village, trying to save the dead, painting their hands with blood.

  Hayes made it easy for Riggs to pin the blame on him. He had tried to relieve Riggs of command, had shot his superior officer. It was mutiny, and the punishment for mutiny in a time of war was death.