Cold Barrel Zero (12 page)

 “Our injured were barely holding on, but we couldn't call for medevacs until we got back to the border. We were black. We couldn't be found in that country. When we finally reached the line, we called for help for our casualties. But there were no helos available. They were all tied up because Riggs was filming himself entering a compound the Rangers had cleared the week before, conquering-hero-type stuff. ‘Psyops,' he called it. It was a highlight reel for his résumé, for the commanders in Tampa. One of our men died on the drive back.”

“But who from our side would help Samael?”

“We had no clue, but it had to be the colonel. He styled himself as the ‘hard choices' guy, working with these warlords. All the Cold War, pre–Church Committee, golden-age posturing. ‘They may be sons of bitches, but they're our sons of bitches.' But they played him. Samael must have known he could hook this naive officer. The local forces Riggs was working with must have been funneling everything he gave them—arms, cash, and intel—up the chain to the real bad guys.

“But at the time, we were just trying to make sense of what was happening. Riggs had cut us off from all our other contacts; everything went through him. He probably started to guess at what went wrong. The only people who knew about his skimming and his work with the local clans were the interpreters he used, the bad guys, and us.”

“Wait,” I said. “Why are you telling me this now? Back at the restaurant, you couldn't say a word.”

He gave me a look—
I think you know
—then changed lanes.

“Because I'm a dead man,” I said.

“Sorry, Byrne. Riggs has figured out that you've gone off the rez. He won't let you go given what you know. You're the enemy now, same as I am. No one will ever believe a word you say again. They're hunting you too.”

I looked out the window, watched the other cars creep ahead of us.

“So what did Riggs do when you found out what he was up to?”

“What does any good bureaucrat do? He covered his ass.”

Kelly looked through the peephole. The cop had checked his jacket and then said his ID was in his car. He'd left to get it, but several minutes had gone by and there was no sign of him. Kelly didn't like it. She was going to get out of there. She went into the bathroom, still wearing the towel, and put her contacts in.

There were circles under her eyes. She hadn't slept. Eighteen dollars and some loose change was all that remained of the money. She didn't know where she would go next.

A breeze came under the bathroom door. Then the room went dark. She reached through the blackness for the wall, touched the door frame, found the light switch, and toggled it.

Nothing happened.

She felt along the sink for her makeup bag, pulled out a metal nail file, and held it like an ice pick.

“Hello,” she said. “Hello!”

She opened the door and tried the light in the bedroom.

Nothing.

The blackout blinds had been pulled. She sidestepped through the room as her eyes adjusted, banged her shin on the radiator, and cursed. She limped to the blinds and threw them open, blinking as the morning light flooded the room.

It was empty.

She took a deep breath, then walked over and checked the closet. No one was there.

Her left hand trembled slightly. She shook it and sat on the bed for a moment until she calmed down, then walked to the bathroom.

The door slammed into her shoulder and knocked her back. A man slid forward as she stumbled and hooked his heel behind her right leg. She tried to stab him in the temple with the file, but he blocked her arm and shoved her to the ground in one smooth motion.

She rammed her elbow into the bridge of his nose as she fell back. The bone crunched. Her towel fell off. She came down hard on thin carpet over concrete and banged the back of her skull. She lay naked. The man threw the blinds closed and towered over her. He wiped the blood from his nose, leaving a long red streak on his forearm.

“Listen, bitch. Let me tell you how this goes.”

“Cop,” I said. “A quarter mile back.”

Hayes eased off the gas until we were driving exactly the speed limit.

“We're almost there,” he said.

“So Riggs killed them all just to cover his tracks?” That seemed like a stretch, but I did what I could to keep the doubt out of my voice.

“We're not sure. It seems monstrous, but I've seen worse in war. We got close to the base. I still couldn't find Riggs, but we heard gunfire in a valley where a lot of our interpreters and their families lived. It was a fog. We had no clue what was going on.

“We came to the village. These people had risked their lives to help us. It was a tribe that had been serially screwed over by every local and occupying power for the past two hundred years. They had been driven from their homes because of what they believed and were under constant threat of violence.

“Dust was still blowing everywhere. As we pulled into the valley, we saw the warlord's men standing outside a mud hut. They were executing the villagers. I had a long-barrel SCAR-heavy, and they were out at the end of the range. I lined up the shot, zeroed the SCAR for the cold barrel, and then I saw him in the crosshairs.

“It was the colonel, watching as they killed the villagers, one by one. I scanned left and saw that Samael was standing beside him. The dust rolled in, and I lost the shot.

“Whatever it was, it was criminal. We flooded the valley. We saw a child of one of the terps crawl out of the building through the dust. One man stood over him and shot him in the head.

“I tried to inform the colonel over the radio that he was committing a grave breach, that the real enemy was beside him. War is ugly. I've done things I'll never get over, killed the wrong people. I understand that there are gray areas. But that was black and white, and I didn't care if they were going to hang me afterward, I had to stop it.

“As soon as we identified ourselves, they retreated, taking potshots at us. We secured the valley floor. They'd rounded them up in the mud huts and slaughtered them. It was probably a hundred and ten degrees outside, a hundred and thirty or a hundred and forty inside. As we moved in, we heard moaning, a few weak thumps.

“There were fourteen bodies in the first house. Our terps and their kids, whole families, three generations taken out in a few minutes.”

Hayes's voice went gravelly. He cleared his throat. “It was bad. They took the entire village. Most were dead, lying among the few possessions they had chosen to carry to safety—Korans, stuffed animals, family photos, deeds to houses their grandfathers had been driven from.

“There was one kid left, about eleven. He'd survived by pretending to be dead. We used to play soccer with him. He told us that Riggs had sent someone to the interpreters who'd told them that they were being relocated, sneaked over the border. They'd get them someplace safe and then secure asylum for them in America to thank them for what they'd done. Imagine the false hope giving way as you watch your whole family die, your bloodline wiped out in an afternoon. The parents stood in front of their children, trying to protect them, but there was nothing they could do to stop those rounds.

“I left Green to work on the wounded and we went after the colonel. He and Samael took the high ground. It was a firefight. We were better trained but there were dozens more of them. I don't know if it was me or one of my men, but someone shot the colonel. They hit the building with an RPG, killed the last of the victims and two of my men.” He tapped his finger idly on a long scar, a patch of white that cut through his hair.

“They retreated, over the ridge. We didn't know why. There was a moment of peace. Then the Rangers came. It was a whole company. We thanked God for the backup, and then they started shooting. My team sergeant went down.

“Ward was our comms. She was able to listen in on the Rangers' tactical net. The order had gone out: The base was under attack. We were the hostiles; go green, weapons free.”

I knew the order. It meant fire at will.

“After nine months in the wild, dressed to blend in with the local population, we looked like a bunch of muj. I can't blame the Rangers for following Riggs's orders, and we weren't going to kill those boys. I had trained a lot of them at Benning. Me and my team broke contact. Got in the trucks, went back into the mountains. We'd been operating independently for months from caches, self-supplying. It was part of our work to have safe houses, false papers, and contacts among the smugglers. Being on the run wasn't all that different from our day job.”

“Was there anyone you could go to?”

“No. You know what a drop weapon is?”

I nodded. If the Marines found an AK or an enemy grenade, supposedly some of them would hang on to it, and if they accidentally killed an innocent local, they would lay it down next to him to justify the shooting. None of my guys had ever done that, and I liked to think it was a myth.

“Riggs killed dozens. There was no way he could cover it up, so instead of a drop weapon, he used us. The whole thing was lined up. They'd caught us up to our elbows in the blood of innocents. The scene confirmed everything the Rangers' commander, Riggs, fed into their ears and then told his friends in Tampa.

“We took everything we had left from the incursion and disappeared. We tried to get the truth out, but the colonel had it wired at every level. It was done. He was an insider, and we were ghosts, living borrowed lives. We'd been on our own for months with barely any contact with the command. Our unit was designed to be denied and disavowed. Who better to take the fall?”

I checked the speedometer and leaned forward in my seat.

“Easy, Byrne, we're almost there.”

I had to get to Kelly, make sure she was safe. The old ghosts were everywhere; the dead woman in the backseat looked at me with those green eyes full of reproach. And that was the funny thing: I wasn't all that scared of Hayes, but he should have been scared of me. She could have told him the truth—that I'd killed her, that I'd killed those Marines at K-38, and that I would kill Kelly, kill him, kill them all if they didn't get away from me. But he couldn't hear her. No one could ever hear her but me.

I shut my eyes.

“Why would the colonel get in further with the people who attacked you?”

“There's a lot about it I don't know. Of course he wanted to cover his mistakes, but to double-down with the enemy? That seems too far. I don't know what Samael and the warlords told him, if he simply lost his compass or if he somehow, in whatever corrupted way, thought he was doing the right thing. It doesn't make sense a man could turn like that, even an ass like Riggs.”

The motel was five blocks away.

“So you're the only one who has seen Samael?” There was so much about Hayes's story that didn't make sense, that seemed too convenient; he was the only American who could recognize Samael, and no one would believe him. “Could you identify him if you saw him again?”

“I saw him last night, with Riggs, in a black Mercedes as they closed in on us near the border. He's inside the U.S.”

We pulled up to the curb.

“But what would be worth that risk?”

“That's what scares me—” Hayes broke off. I followed his gaze to the second floor of the motel as he took out his SIG Sauer pistol. “What was the room number?”

“Two twenty.”

“The door's open.”

We jumped out of the car and ran for the room. I sprinted while Hayes stayed a few feet behind, moving more deliberately, scanning the scene.

I heard a crash from the room, a groan of pain. As I neared the door, I could hear more grunts and blows. I saw legs on the floor, a figure standing above the body, blood on the carpet. Rage coursed through me so strongly, my whole being fixed on one purpose: kill anyone who hurt her.

Hayes followed, pistol out. “Byrne. Wait!”

I gathered this wasn't the tactically wisest entry, but I didn't give a shit. I couldn't let another one die. I shoved open the door and found myself staring down the barrel of a 9 mm.

KELLY LOWERED THE
gun, threw her arm around me, and pulled me inside. She wasn't wearing any clothes. Blood streaked her torso.

“Jesus, Tom,” she said. “I nearly shot you.”

“Are you okay?”

She ran her hand through her hair and gave the man on the floor a kick in the ribs.

She followed my eyes to the blood drying on her side.

“It's not mine,” she said.

The man lay on the ground with a bruise growing around his eye and an obviously broken forearm, half wrapped in the towel.

“I threw the towel at him and twisted it around his arm,” she said.

I checked his pulse.

“Alive?”

“Yes,” I said as Kelly pulled on her clothes.

Hayes stepped through the door. She aimed the gun.

“He's with me,” I said. “This is Hayes. He's…an old friend.”

I heard sirens in the distance.

“Time to go,” Hayes said.

“What the hell is going on?” Kelly asked.

“There's more where he came from. We should get moving.” I grabbed her bags. “I'll explain on the way.”

“Fine.”

Hayes rolled the man over and stood above him with his pistol drawn, ready for an execution.

I wheeled away just as Hayes put his foot down on the man's good forearm, grabbed the wrist with his free hand, and jerked it up, cracking the ulna and radius like pieces of kindling. The man screamed and buried his face in the carpet. I remembered Hayes's words:
went in nonlethal.
This guy wouldn't be giving us any more trouble.

We trotted down the steps as the sounds of the police sirens grew louder to the south and east. Kelly took the backseat behind Hayes. I rode shotgun. He drove.

“You sure you're good?” I asked her. I could tell she was so hopped up on adrenaline she probably wouldn't have noticed if she were walking on a broken leg.

“I think so. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank God,” Kelly said. “Because I got a call from the police. They said you'd been taken, to call them if I saw you. And to be on the lookout…”

I turned. She had the pistol pressed against the back of Hayes's seat. “On the lookout for military types.” I looked from her to Hayes. In action, there was a command presence that gave him away. Kelly might have thought this was all coercion.

“Don't,” I said. “It's cool.”

She didn't respond. I watched her finger inside the trigger guard, watched her weigh the choices as the sirens chased us.

She pulled the gun away, looked at me grimly, then put her lips to my ear.

“Thanks for coming to get me, Tom. Now please tell me you didn't join up with the men who stole that truck. Because you won't have to worry about the police or these soldiers or whoever the hell was following us yesterday. I'll kill you myself.”

“‘Join up' seems a little strong,” I said.

She sat back. Hayes looked at her in the rearview. “Kelly, was it?”

“That's right. Kelly Britten.”

“You have some training?”

“I'm a first lieutenant in the Guard. Army. Combat engineer.”

“Sapper?”

“Yeah.” That meant she'd made it through special training in small-unit tactics, explosives, and urban combat. I didn't know she'd earned the distinction.

“I like your style, Britten. Thanks for not shooting me.”