As Riggs lay unable to move and bleeding into the dirt on that hill, Caro put the idea in his ear: “The crimes. Let them fall on Hayes.”
They called in the Rangers.
Through the agonizing recovery, Riggs nursed his grievance against Hayes, the man who had rebelled against him, the traitor. Caro wondered sometimes if Riggs had finally come to believe his own lie, that Hayes had cut those interpreters down.
It hardly mattered. That was the fire that drove Riggs, half crippled by Hayes’s hand, half blind with revenge, and he and Caro had labored together ever since, building their plans.
But now the work was complete and Riggs no longer useful. Caro stepped outside. There were two guards watching the ladder that led up the rear of the tower to the bridge. He thumbed the safety down on his pistol and waited for them to turn their backs.
Hayes reached for the next and highest railing, just below the wide windows at the top of the tower. He pulled himself up and eyed the wires running to the antennas. Adrenaline was the only thing keeping him going through the pain. He could haul himself onto the top of the bridge and then drop down to the wings, open platforms on either side, like terraces.
He grabbed the wire with his right hand, leaned out, and gripped it with his left as well. He planted his feet against the sheer face of the tower and began to walk his way up the gray steel. He stopped, waited.
Black smoke billowed past, offering concealment. He pulled himself up the wire, hand over hand, and was nearly to the top of the bridge when sparks blew beside him. He turned and saw guards on the forecastle below him. They had finally forced their way through the door he had wrecked when he blew up the oxygen tank. He posted his legs out, held the wire with his left hand, and fired the MP7 in three-round bursts at the men below.
Blue sparks burst from the side of his gun. He felt the fire jump across his hand, his neck, his face. His gun dropped to the end of its sling. A bullet had hit his MP7, maybe his hand. He couldn’t feel anything below the wrist, just the white-hot nothing of a fresh injury, the shock before the pain set in.
He had no time to think about it. He hauled himself up on the wire, pushed hard with his legs, and landed on his right side on the starboard bridge wing. His head pounded against the steel deck but he carried the momentum forward into a roll and came up in a crouch as a cloud of black smoke passed over.
The blood was seeping into the collar of his shirt. He took a quick look at his hand. The skin was shredded. He felt the cuts on his neck and cheek. The bullet must have fragmented off the gun. He felt the pressure. It was flowing slowly, nothing arterial. The shot had wrecked the chamber of the MP7. The pistol was gone. He reached across his body with his left hand, pulled his knife, got down low, and started toward the door of the bridge.
As the smoke cleared, he saw that the door was open. Riggs was just inside the pilothouse with a rifle aimed and ready in his good hand. Hayes stood, held the knife out front. And then he heard footfalls on the steel.
He turned. Behind him, on the bridge wing, Caro raised a pistol. He hadn’t come through the bridge. He must have climbed up on the outside ladder on the back of the tower.
Hayes watched the surface of the ocean ripple in the firelight—a gust of wind. The billowing smoke neared the railing. It would hide him. He might have a chance in the blackness to kill them both. He had to try.
He readied himself for the lunge to get Riggs’s rifle, prayed for the smoke to come, but it was too late.
Blue flames sprang from the muzzle in the shape of a star. Riggs fired an automatic burst.
Chapter 48
THE FOG OF diesel fumes closed in and Hayes saw nothing but the suffocating smoke. Then he heard it behind him, something slamming against the deck.
Caro’s body.
Hayes pivoted, leaped toward him, and felt along the man’s side through the slick of blood until he found the pistol. He dropped the knife and took the gun with his uninjured left hand.
Another gust, and the smoke cleared. Hayes and Riggs stood facing each other.
“He was coming for me,” Riggs said in a monotone. “I ordered my men to secure the bridge.”
Hayes looked down. “There are two bodies on the main deck. Not my work.”
“I heard it on the radio. Caro must have executed them. He was going to kill me, kill us all, and then blame you.” He lowered his gun. “Again.
“You’ve earned it,” Riggs went on. “Take the shot.”
“That’s not how this works, Colonel.”
“Do it.”
“You made the wrong choice in the village. Make the right one here. Call off the rest of your men. And work with me. What was Caro doing? What were you two planning? We have to stop it.”
“No,” Riggs said. “Just end it.”
Hayes stepped closer.
“After everything I did to you.” Riggs shook his head. “Your wife, your daughter. The people you had guarding the money are dead. Do the honorable thing and take the fucking shot.”
The colonel deserved to die, but Caro had risked coming to the U.S. for a reason, and Hayes needed Riggs alive to find out what it was.
“Call off your men,” Hayes said. “We need to stop what Caro set in motion.”
“It’s too late. No one will believe you. This is the only justice you’ll get. So don’t waste it. Take the goddamn shot.”
Riggs raised his gun, and Hayes his. Hayes weighed the choice with his finger on the trigger. A nonlethal shot on the deck of a shifting ship was almost impossible. It was suicide by cop, and if he murdered Riggs, he didn’t know if he could ever convince the authorities that he was innocent.
The barrel aimed straight at Hayes’s face and then kept moving up as Riggs brought the gun around. Hayes dived at the colonel as Riggs buried the muzzle under his own jaw.
He struck the gun arm. The shot boomed through the bridge. The muzzle flare blinded Hayes for a moment, and as his vision returned, he saw Riggs on the deck, with blood on his face. Hayes stepped on the wrist of his gun hand, took the carbine, and slipped its sling over his shoulder.
He cleared the blood away. The cheek was torn apart and scorched from the muzzle flare. Blood trickled from Riggs’s right ear, but he wasn’t dead. Not yet. Hayes tore off his sleeve and tamped it on the injury. Ears ringing, he dragged Riggs toward the bridge wing.
He could barely hear as the door inside the pilothouse opened. He turned. Four guards stepped out.
Hayes threw his injured arm around Riggs’s chest and lifted him up as a shield. It was Bill and three others. Hayes brought the gun forward with his left hand, pulling the sling taut to steady his aim.
“Drop the weapon and we can get this sorted out. We don’t want to kill you,” Bill said.
Hayes stepped back, over Caro’s dead body, crushing a pair of sunglasses that had fallen from his pocket. Caro’s head had been torn off by the gunshots.
He backed toward the edge of the wing. It was a forty-foot drop to the water, and he needed to make it far enough horizontally to clear the gunwale and not break his neck. Flames surrounded the ship, a slick forty feet wide.
A hard swell lifted the Shiloh. Helicopter blades chugged toward them. Hayes tried to keep Riggs close, but he knew that as their bodies drew apart, one of these men would get the shot. He had trained two of them in hostage rescue himself. Hayes stared down the muzzles of four carbines.
Marine Super Cobra helicopters closed in. Riggs couldn’t talk. He was still in shock. The truth wouldn’t save Hayes now.
He saw the barrel line up perfectly, and just before Bill’s muzzle flared, Hayes pulled Riggs tight to his body, compressed his legs, and threw himself over the edge.
The fall seemed to last minutes as they dropped toward the flames on the water. They passed through a chaos of heat and fire. The surface hit them like a car crash and then all was cold silence and darkness. The water soothed Hayes’s burns. He clamped Riggs to his side and stroked underwater with his good hand, slidi
ng through the dark, the red glow dancing above their heads.
Forty feet. Thirty. Twenty.
He could see full dark ahead, and pulled hard, drove himself with his legs.
Ten.
He kept on, then angled to the surface, broke through into the night air, and filled his lungs.
Hayes hit the IR beacon on his shoulder, floated on his back with the swells. He watched the clouds drift overhead.
A helicopter came in low, searching with its light like a circle of midday sun on the water. He dived and waited, dragging Riggs’s limp body down with him.
When he came up, he saw the floodlight moving away and heard another engine over the chug of the helos.
It was the RHIB. Fifty feet out he could see the man standing at the pilothouse: Byrne. Hayes had called him on the radio before he assaulted the bridge. The boat pulled alongside. Hayes hauled himself in, and he and Byrne dragged Riggs over the gunwale. Byrne brought the boat through a fast 180-degree turn and gunned the engines for the shore.
Hayes flex-cuffed Riggs, then took the helm with his good hand while Byrne tended to the colonel.
“He’s in shock, but he should live,” Byrne said. He stepped to the pilothouse and started dressing Hayes’s neck and hand.
“Nazar has major trauma to the chest. She’s going to die if we don’t get her to a cardiothoracic surgeon.”
“Oceanside,” Hayes said, and scanned the skies behind him: no aircraft. He could hear them in the distance, but they weren’t in close pursuit. “There’s a cache. It’s our best chance.”
“We can’t go in over the beach with these casualties.”
“The harbor,” Moret said. “But they’ll catch us.”
Hayes looked to Moret, to Nazar. A syringe attached to a catheter in the old woman’s chest was half full of blood.
“I’m not letting anyone die,” Byrne said. “The harbor.”
Hayes turned the wheel.
“You dive when we’re close to shore,” Byrne said to Hayes. “Run for it. I’ll take the casualties in.”
“I’m not running. We stopped Samael. We brought them Nazar, brought them the truth. I did what I needed to do. We have to warn them.”
“They’ll try you.”
“I knew what I was doing. If I broke the law, I’ll pay the price. I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
“Don’t,” Byrne said. “They might execute you.”
“I can’t kill them all. I can’t make them believe at the point of a gun. This is too big for Riggs to control anymore. I have to trust my country.”
Nazar moaned, and Byrne crouched next to the old woman. The swells picked up.
“How are we doing, Byrne?” Hayes shouted.
“Blood pressure’s dropping. Give it everything.”
Hayes pushed the throttle. The boat skipped over the surface of the ocean. The chug of helo blades never quit the horizon as they saw the mountains rise behind Camp Pendleton and the glow of Carlsbad and Oceanside resolve into lights, and then houses.
“We’re losing her,” Byrne said. They rounded the mouth of the harbor. He cleared the blood from the syringe.
Hayes headed for the end of a dock. The attack helicopters came in fast from the west and south. They had held off, and now they were tightening the noose. There was no way out of the harbor.
The dock came closer as the helicopter lit them up with a flood. Police and navy aircraft touched down in the parking lot beside the water. The Super Cobra hovered just ahead, its 20 mm turreted cannon aimed straight at the RHIB.
In the lights from the circling aircraft, Hayes could see the SWAT teams closing in on land. There were a dozen SUVs, more patrol cars, and two armored personnel carriers. The tactical teams fanned across the parking lot and surrounded the dock. The police took aim from behind the doors of their black Suburbans. The whole waterfront was a circus of blinking lights.
“Drop your weapons! Drop your weapons!”
Hayes brought the boat to the dock, stepped onto the concrete, and raised his hands.
“Don’t give them an excuse to kill you,” he said to the others.
The SWATs circled him. He watched them move in slowly and cautiously, checking off each step, like they had just watched a long PowerPoint presentation on squad tactics.
He kept his hands in the air. “I have Colonel Riggs and Cyrine Nazar on this boat. They are innocent and require medical attention. Do not hurt them.”
A squad leader moved in.
“The woman has trauma to her heart and needs an airlift to a surgeon. She can tell you the truth about who we are and what we have done.”
An officer shoved Hayes forward and tried to trip him to his knees. He didn’t go down.
A man in a suit parted the crowd. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“I need to talk to your CO,” Hayes said. “Do what you want with me, but listen. There is an imminent threat. Listen to Riggs. People are going to die.”
“What did he say!” someone barked.
“On your knees!” A rifle butt slammed into Hayes’s back. He took a knee but didn’t fall.
Cox tried to move through the crowd. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” But his voice was lost in the chaos.
“A plot is under way. People are going to die. You can stop it. Let me talk to your CO.”
“Is that a threat? Is there a bomb?”
The SWATs crowded in.
Hayes could see the fear in their eyes, their hands tight on the grips of their rifles, the fingers on the triggers, the discipline ebbing. Caro was dead. Hayes had completed the mission. He could die content.
“Listen to Riggs. To the woman.”
They slammed him facedown onto the concrete.
“What did he say! He could trigger it!”
“What’s he doing? Do I fire? Do I fire?”
A deputy, the youngest and most inexperienced of the forward squad, leveled his rifle and aimed at the back of Hayes’s head from five feet away. He would later swear he had heard the order.
“Take the shot. Now!”
His finger pulled on the trigger.
Chapter 49
BRADAC BOARDED HIS second bus of the morning and fed his dollars into the fare box. His ride toward Sidwell took him away from downtown, and the bus was uncrowded. The Mechanic knew the checklists that American law-enforcement officers used to spot suicide bombers—freshly shaved face, the scent of flower water to prepare for heaven, mumbled prayers—and had coached Bradac to avoid them.
Many of the warning signs were unconscious—sweating, nervous tics, unnaturally fast or slow breathing—but as Bradac sat on the 30N, he gave no indications of his intent. He had been through this before. The only thing that could upset him would be the denial of his chance at heaven. The twenty minutes passed as in a dream, and he was beaming the entire ride.
He caught the eye of an older Salvadoran woman holding the hand of a grandchild. Most of the riders stared into space, at their phones, or at the floor, but Bradac’s bliss was infectious. The woman smiled back at him, and the little girl turned her brown eyes his way and followed suit.
The bus climbed the long hill toward Sidwell Friends School.
He waved to her, and she laughed and hid her face in her grandmother’s side.
As they approached Tenleytown, a massive office building made to look like a colonial mansion rose to their left. “Upton Street,” chimed the prerecorded female voice.
Bradac pulled on the yellow cord to signal for a stop, then exited through the rear doors of the bus. School had been in session for thirty-five minutes at Sidwell, and students had settled in for their first lessons.
The vice president’s daughter, age twelve, raised her hand to ask a question in pre-algebra on the second floor. The national security adviser’s grandson, age seven, sat at a cluster of desks listening to a reading lesson on silent e’s. The House Whip’s daughter, a speech therapist, was working in the resource room by the south stairwell
with a small group of children, including the niece, age six, of the deputy secretary of defense for Special Operations.
A fence ringed the entire campus except for the entrance to the middle school. Bradac walked along Upton, turned south on Thirty-Seventh Street, and saw his target. There, the windows on both floors of the school were only twenty feet away from the sidewalk. He didn’t have to enter the campus or deal with the security guards at an institution that had educated the First Families of the United States since Theodore Roosevelt sent his son Archibald through its doors.
He stopped across the street, placed his USPS package on the ground, and tore away a tab—a friction fuse.
Nothing happened. He waited, and watched. A dark spot appeared on the box, turned into black ash, and then sparks flew crackling from the top. They poured into the air, sixteen feet high, red and black and brilliant electric white.
The morning was still. The smoke rose straight toward a clear blue winter sky.
Bradac crossed the street, hands plunged in the jacket of his coat, thumb pressed against the trigger. He watched the colors flare. It was beautiful. Children crowded around the windows, awestruck, their eyes open wide, inches from the glass.
Their souls were pure, and they would enter heaven too, without ever having to suffer the tomb, and his mother, whom he’d found when he was their age dead with her skirt up and a needle stuck in her groin because her arms were too scarred to shoot, would be there, and she was alive again and as beautiful as he remembered and they were all there in heaven because on this one winter morning he had been so brave.
“There is no god but God.”
He gripped the detonator, shut his eyes, and pressed his thumb down on the toggle switch.
Chapter 50
THE NAVY C-20 jet cruised at four hundred and sixty knots at forty thousand feet. From the sounds, Hayes could tell they were in flight aboard a small jet but knew nothing else. He had been blindfolded and shackled wrist and ankle since his capture. At some point they cut his clothes off without loosening the restraints and left him naked in a cold cell. They stitched up his face and hands, then placed him in coveralls and readied him for a long flight.
Cold Barrel Zero Page 27
