Cold Barrel Zero
Page 30
She had done the same thing decades before with the previous army that occupied her lands. She played her role as a collaborator with that foreign army so well that her own people turned on her, rejected her and her bastard son. It would have broken most women, but she used it to burnish her legend as an ally of the West, to prove to the Americans that she could be trusted. She had suffered for decades and sacrificed her son to sell the lie.
After Hayes’s team was ambushed on their way back from the infiltration, she knew it would be clear that there had been leaks from Riggs’s command. Someone had to take the fall. She blamed her own people in order to cover up her role.
She rounded up the villagers and lured them to their deaths. She told Riggs that they were guilty of the treacheries she and Caro had committed, and she watched as they were slaughtered. The massacre eliminated the only souls who could help piece together the origins and true nature of her and Caro’s relationship.
Riggs’s role in the massacre provided them with valuable leverage. Caro couldn’t use the evidence of the massacre to blackmail Riggs himself. The colonel would never trust someone who was coercing him, so she took over. She kept Riggs in check with the evidence while Caro promised to protect him. She made Riggs a hero by backing up his story and helping him frame Hayes as the man who had committed the massacre. That got Hayes—the only one who knew the truth about Caro—out of the way. Hayes would be hunted down and killed by his own military.
They had Riggs cornered and developed the best source ever recruited in the West. She would never actually release that evidence. The threat alone was enough to control Riggs, to force him to do everything he could to destroy Hayes, to keep Riggs scared and dependent on Caro.
There had been only one mistake: they had sold their story too well. Riggs believed Nazar’s bluffs. He overreacted and came after her, shot up her car, and dragged her away. But Caro had been able to step in and stall long enough for his men to get the black money back and kill Riggs—the only one who knew enough about Caro’s plan to link him to the Sidwell bombing.
The F-1 grenade had a four-second fuse, and Hayes started the count:
Three.
He ran toward her as she held the pineapple-shaped bomb out like a talisman.
He ignored it, and seized her biceps.
Two.
As the fingers of his right hand depressed her brachial nerve, her hand relaxed, and the grenade fell into Hayes’s open left palm.
One.
He threw it hard left-handed through the open door and heard it hit the marble in the hall. It was a stone house, Beaux-Arts French, probably at least a hundred years old. The walls were plenty thick. He dragged her down behind the desk. The grenade blew. Shrapnel rained through the suite and dug into the beautifully carved oak panel they had used for cover.
He turned her arm, put her facedown on the floor, then took her other arm and bound her wrists.
Nazar prayed that death would come but knew that it would most likely be a worse fate, with her last years hidden from the sun in a long betrayal of everything she had built, everything she had sacrificed. How many of the militants who spat on her, thinking that she was a traitor, would never know the truth: that she was the best soldier and commander they ever had.
That was her lot, and her choice, and she wasted no time regretting it. Only the work mattered. There would be helicopters and planes, and the Americans would bring her hooded and shackled to a cool place that smelled like a cellar where time stretched endlessly and daylight never reached.
They would break her. Everyone breaks, just as she had broken Foley. Even as she held out, she knew in the end she would give them the intelligence they wanted. And after so many years she’d spent pretending to be the West’s lackey, the lie would become the truth.
She was old and seemed harmless. Treating her as the threat she was would only embarrass her interrogators. They were always men. In time, they would grow complacent. There were ways out. A prisoner swap, perhaps, or one of the American Congress’s periodic retreats into isolationism and penny-pinching. She was a patient woman, and Americans were a forgetful people. They didn’t like to think about the darkness in the world.
Through it all, one thought gave her strength. Among all the lies, there was one truth that mattered. She had found her son. Caro had grown into a great fighter. And she had been able to tell him the truth of where he came from, and who she was, and why she had done it all. And they were able to use his curse—the blue eyes of the infidel—as a weapon. In the end he understood everything, and that was enough. The Americans could never take that from her.
Hayes heard the growl of engines in the streets, and through the window he saw the militiamen arrive. Two Toyota Hilux trucks sped toward the villa, .50 cals mounted on their beds.
He lifted his radio and called the quick reaction team. “How we doing?”
He checked his watch, took a C-4 charge, and went to the landing. He primed it for six seconds, then threw it toward the front door. He ran back into the office and began pulling hard drives and files and dumping all the intelligence he could grab into trash bags.
The charge blew. The wreckage at the front door would hold off the militants for a few more minutes at least.
He threw Nazar over his shoulder and stepped through the French doors leading to the terrace. It looked out on a courtyard and, beyond that, the Mediterranean. Gunfire popped in the streets below. The Little Bird helicopter started as a speck in the sky, chugging toward him, its rotors growing louder. There was nowhere to land, so the pilot nosed down until one skid rested on the terrace railing. Hayes threw the garbage bags through the door.
Inside were six operators, kitted out for a raid.
“Sorry, guys,” he shouted above the rotor wash. “It’s over. I just need a lift out.”
He looked inside the bird. Typical. It was full up. Everyone wanted in on the action. There was nowhere for him to sit. They took Nazar, and Hayes planted his ass on the narrow pod above the skid as the helicopter rose, spun, and took off for the last red glow of sunset streaking over the desert.
A hand reached out and tapped him on the shoulder. The medic handed down a four-by-four square of gauze and pointed to Hayes’s neck.
Hayes touched it, felt the blood. The big guard must have gotten a touch in with the knife. He’d barely noticed with all the adrenaline. He pressed the gauze down, let his rifle fall to the end of its sling, and watched the bombed-out city flash by underneath his boots.
He remembered what Lauren had whispered just before he left.
Finish this. Then come back to me, John. This is where you belong.
He was going home.
Acknowledgments
My wife, Heather, joined me on countless brainstorming walks as this novel developed and always steered me right. My family patiently acted as a sounding board as I untangled the plot. Shawn Coyne, my agent, provided invaluable help editorially and professionally as I struck out in a new direction. He is a story guru, business sage, and great guy.
Hachette Book Group and Little, Brown and Company are publishers of exceptional talent and principle, and I have the good fortune to remain part of their family as I join the ace team at Mulholland Books.
My editor, Wes Miller, brings an extraordinary level of care and insight to his craft and vastly improved the manuscript. Hachette Book Group is full of great people, and I am indebted to all of them, but I would particularly like to thank Reagan Arthur, Michael Pietsch, Pamela Brown, Joshua Kendall, Lauren Harms, Nicole Dewey, Heather Fain, and Sabrina Callahan.
Dr. Drew Wilkis and Dr. Steven Davis helped me with the trauma scenes and procedures. Tracy Roe is a superb copyeditor and a physician. She saved the day with her artful edits and medical expertise.
I couldn’t have written a book about war without getting to know the subject through the work of correspondents I have long looked up to: Mark Bowden, William Langewiesche, Jeffrey Goldberg, James Bennet, Sean Naylor, Jon
Lee Anderson, George Packer, Dexter Filkins, Robert Young Pelton, Spencer Ackerman, Mark Kukis, and Graeme Wood. I am especially grateful to the last three for their help with this novel and their friendship over the years.
Dozens of books and other resources were consulted in my research, but a few were particularly indispensable: Delta Force, by Charlie A. Beckwith; The Mission, the Men, and Me, by Pete Blaber; Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden; The Command, by Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady; Locks, Safes and Security, by Marc Weber Tobias; and Not a Good Day to Die, by Sean Naylor.
I sought to be as realistic as possible for a thriller. The Special Operations folks I talked to reminded me that my first task was to tell a good story, so I have taken liberties to that end.
Thanks to Kevin Reeve and everyone at OnPoint Tactical, a company that provides survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training to elite military units and civilians alike, for kidnapping me and chasing me through Los Angeles. Deviant Ollam, Chris Gates, and Matt Fiddler advised on technical security matters. David Swinson, a former special investigations and major crimes detective with the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC (as well as a terrific author with Mulholland Books), helped with law-enforcement questions. Abraham Sutherland, who spent three years with the State Department in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, brought that dangerous world to life for me.
Roger Pardo-Maurer, former deputy assistant secretary of defense and Special Forces veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, was a continual source of inspiration, good sense, and laughs. Lieutenant Colonel James R. Hannibal, a former stealth bomber and predator UAV pilot (and a first-rate military-thriller writer), kindly guided me on drone details. Don Shipley, a retired Navy SEAL senior chief, very generously answered my questions about combat diving missions, and army captain Cornell Riley took the time to review the manuscript and saved me from many errors. And to the others who will go unnamed here: thank you.
It has been an honor to hear the stories of all those who serve and all those who put themselves in harm’s way. I am in awe of and profoundly grateful for the work they do and the sacrifices they make.
About the Author
Matthew Quirk studied history and literature at Harvard College. After graduation, he joined the Atlantic and spent five years at the magazine reporting on a variety of subjects, including crime, private military contractors, terrorism prosecutions, and international gangs. Quirk’s bestselling first novel, The 500, is currently in development as a major motion picture. He lives in California.
Also by Matthew Quirk
The 500
The Directive
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Matthew Quirk
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2016 by Rough Draft Inc.
Cover design by Lauren Harms
Cover photograph of interchange by xPacifica/Getty Images; fire by Ross Beckley/Getty Images; Special Ops by Milpictures by Tom Weber/Getty Images
Cover © 2016 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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ISBN 978-0-316-25920-0
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