Cold Barrel Zero (18 page)

THE ORDER CAME
from Hayes. “Is the box ready?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Move out.”

Hayes's associates dropped the crate in front of the consulate general of Egypt, on Wilshire in Los Angeles's Miracle Mile, then disappeared into the endless traffic of rush hour.

The black, white, and red flag of Egypt hung slack from the pole. A dog walker who approached forty minutes later was the first person to see the crate. She noticed the strange Arabic markings, jerked the leash, and quickly moved away from the consulate, an imposing tower of brown stone and black glass.

A guard came by next and called down the embassy's chief of security. After a brief back-and-forth with the head of mission, they contacted the Secret Service, which is responsible for diplomatic security.

There was a private elementary school across Wilshire, and a public middle school on the same street.

The box sat partially obscured by the walls of the parking lot. The Secret Service closed off the street. LAPD cruisers blocked off Wilshire and the side streets for half a mile in either direction. They emptied the four-story terraced apartment buildings next door. Most of the office buildings were empty, but the cleaning crews were evacuated as well. Crowds gathered at the roadblocks. People filmed on their cell phones and craned their necks to see as the mine-resistant ambush-protected truck trundled past the police cars.

If the box was full of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, like the explosive in the Oklahoma City blast, the lethal radius would be a hundred and fifty yards. That attack killed a hundred and sixty-eight people and injured six hundred and eighty. If it was full of C-4, it would leave a crater fifty feet wide, spray lethal shrapnel for a quarter mile, and send a mushroom cloud four hundred feet in the air. The effect would be about 50 percent more devastating than Oklahoma City.

The explosive-ordnance disposal team stepped out of the MRAP wearing short-sleeved black uniforms. They moved purposefully but kept going back and forth to check with their commander and the LAPD, who were maintaining security at the scene. A few phones remained in the air snapping photos, but once the spectators saw the two techs help the third into the bomb suit, they began filing away from the barriers as quickly as they could.

The EOD team sent a robot to do an X-ray inspection. The results were inconclusive. Two hours had passed. The Miracle Mile, a traffic nightmare even on a typical day, had been reduced to a snarl of horns and cursing drivers all the way back to Beverly Hills.

The techs double-checked the specialist's helmet, and he began to lumber down the center of the empty six-lane boulevard.

They called it the long walk.

The radiological and bioassays found nothing. He took a pry bar and forced it under the lid of the crate. The nails creaked as he wrenched it open.

Inside, there was a trunk the size of a dresser. He didn't recognize its origin. It was made of brass and bone, which he mistook for ivory, inlaid in an intricate design.

He checked again for any signs of radioactivity or a bioweapon.

Nothing.

A drop of sweat fell from his nose and beaded on the inside of his face mask.

“Opening the package,” he said into his helmet mic.

He reached for the clasp. It was unlocked. He took a deep breath and lifted the lid.

VEHICLES FROM HALF
a dozen law-enforcement agencies filled the marina parking lot. A towboat had pulled the burned wreck of the
Odessa
into the harbor. Cox had caught the stench of burning oil and scorched fiberglass from a half mile away.

He crouched next to the body. Half of the corpse had been burned beyond recognition, with the flesh charred and tightened, giving it a mummified look, but the upper torso and head were intact. Shallow cuts and missing skin. Death from head trauma, not exsanguination. Given the extent of the flaying, that meant an expert interrogator with a steady hand and a strong stomach.

Cox looked at the face. It was definitely Foley. He had found a photo of him and Hayes together and got some background on their relationship from one of Hayes's former commanding officers. Foley was not Hayes's father, but he might as well have been. He had been a Special Forces vet, a track coach who saw something in Hayes when he was a foster child and took him under his wing.

The more Cox learned about Hayes, the less this made sense. He was the child of refugees, abandoned to foster homes. He didn't know his own race, his own people. He could be anyone. The Joint Special Operations Command seized on that chameleon nature and his deep psychological desire to join, to blend in, to belong. He was born to go behind enemy lines.

Hayes had been the best in Force Recon, and then the Marine Special Operations Command. They pulled him into the JSOC classified units because he wanted to be more than a trigger puller. He liked working with Special Forces, studying languages, going deep on cultural background.

That's why the massacre of the villagers didn't add up. Hayes was a refugee himself, always searching, always looking for a home. Maybe that need to be a part of something was too great. He had stayed too long behind enemy lines. He'd lost his wife and kid. His own country had placed him into a deniable unit, ready to disavow any knowledge of him if anything went wrong. In the end he'd decided he belonged there, on the other side.

Foley had been the key person Cox wanted to find and interview. Now he was dead. Cox's only other good lead had turned up in seven pieces in a white marine cooler.

He shook his head. He had been just a few hours away from finding these two men, but he was too late.

Hayes was a step ahead of him, covering his trail through violence, killing as needed. How could Cox, operating within the law, possibly outstrip that sort of evil?

The medical examiner arrived and gave Cox an unwelcoming look. “Can I help you?”

“Probably not,” Cox said. He had what he needed. He climbed out of the cabin and stepped onto the dock.

Once he was clear of the local law enforcement, he lifted his cell and dialed Riggs's number. The colonel should know: Hayes was coming, and he was out for blood.

Riggs picked up. There was an echo, as if he were in a tiled room.

“Hayes just killed our two best leads.”

“Foley?”

“That's right. Looks like Hayes tortured him. I want you to think about coming onto a base, where it's safe.”

“I'm safe,” Riggs said. “I'll take care of my security.”

Was that a dig? Cox wondered. If so, he deserved it. Hayes was winning.

“So Hayes is killing anyone who might lead us to him?”

“Seems like,” Cox said.

“It's inhuman,” Riggs said.

“Yes.” But Cox wasn't sure. He thought of the body again. Tortured. But you don't torture if you're covering your tracks, eliminating anyone who has information about you. You torture to get information. You torture if you're
following
tracks. Which could mean that someone else was hunting these men down, just as Cox was, only better, more ruthlessly, without a thought for human life or suffering.

“What's up?”

“It's…” Cox hesitated. “Nothing. I'll keep you posted.”

Riggs hung up the phone and stepped through the metal passageway toward Caro.

They were on a ship called the
Shiloh
that Riggs controlled through his military-contracting firm. It was often used by the Special Operations command for off-book jobs. They were on the third deck, below the waterline, surrounded by the sounds of running engines and waves washing along the hull.

“They found Foley,” Riggs said.

“And?”

“They think Hayes tortured him to death. What did you do to the old man?”

“Nothing,” Caro said, waving the question away.

“How did you make it back here so fast?”

He ducked that too. “So we're good as far as the official investigation?”

“Yes,” Riggs said. “Did Foley give up anything?”

“Not as much as we hoped. But we have a few of their rally points and codes. We can go through them by process of elimination and tighten the noose around his network. They're using country names as codes for the rally. We're heading to a site referred to as Italy. We don't know if it's a safe house or a waypoint.”

“We?”

“I have some men in-country,” Caro said.

Riggs nodded, doing a decent job concealing his surprise and what looked to Caro like a hint of suspicion. “What are the grids? I can have my men help.”

They both knew what was at stake. Whoever took Hayes would also control the shipment.

Caro knew he had to get there first, had to have control over the box. He put his hand on Riggs's shoulder.

“Excellent,” he said, and he opened the door to his right. It had once been the cryptography vault on the
Shiloh
. A dial-combination lock, the type used on safes, secured the door.

Hall, Riggs's deputy, stood guard just inside. Caro stepped through and looked at the captive. Her wrists were bound to the railing above her head, and she was slumped against the bulkhead with a blood-soaked bandage on her neck. It was Nazar.

He noted the shock of recognition in her eyes, less fear than sadness, a look of love lost, maybe even misguided hope.

Caro didn't react, just turned back to Riggs. “What exactly did she say when she made the call about the evidence?”

“She said to get it ready to release. And then she panicked and told him to do it. We think she gave the photos to her lawyer for safekeeping.”

Hall stepped toward Nazar, racked a .22-caliber pistol, crouched slightly, and pointed it at her temple.

“Not yet,” Caro said, ignoring her as she whimpered around her gag.

“Wait until we hit the lawyer and get the evidence. We have to destroy every copy. We may still need her.”

The Mechanic slipped the bomb vest over Bradac's head and then stood behind a camera. There would be no recording, of course, no evidence.

Faking the fingerprints hadn't been too difficult. He'd printed them out on a transparency, using as much ink as possible, and took an impression from the toner with liquid latex. The only clues from the bomb would point in the wrong direction: to Hayes, and to false enemies.

The Mechanic stoked the visions in Bradac: the entry into a new life; the forgiveness of sins at the moment the martyr's blood is shed; the immediate admission to heaven, no suffering in the tomb, the privilege of standing in the highest gardens of heaven, next to God, among the prophets, saints, and righteous believers, and the marriage to the houri, the heavenly maidens.

“Can you see it?”

“I can see it.”

“Can you see it?” It was almost a chant.

“It's beautiful.” Bradac stared into the middle distance of the dingy warehouse, ran his thumb along the handheld detonator, and began to weep as he smiled. “I can see it, I can see it.”

In his unsteady gaze, the maidens danced in the garden.

THE PAIN WAS
everything when I came to, a ringing in my ears, electric-blue lines arcing across the inside of my eyelids. I was on my back on what felt like a tile floor. My head rested on rolled fabric, a used T-shirt, from the smell of it. I opened my eyes. White light flooded in. I closed them again. The injuries were plenty, but they seemed so small next to the guilt I felt, filling my body like some black poison.

Kelly; where was she? My mind raced quickly to the worst: she was dead. And that was just my small, private pain. I had helped Hayes kill the main witness against him, led him to whatever Nazar was hiding, moved him one step closer to his goal of using whatever tool of destruction he had stolen from Riggs.

I had wanted to believe that Hayes had done no wrong. That he could be redeemed. That anyone could. Because I needed redemption.

Riggs had warned me. Kelly had warned me. I'd refused to listen. And Kelly would pay.

Kelly. Goddamn it, why hadn't they just done me a favor and killed me during the firefight?

I opened my eyes again, just a millimeter or two. The light diffracted through my lashes. I was in a modest home that looked brand-new. It was unfurnished. The solvent smells of paint and processed wood lingered. To my right there was a medical kit and some bloody gauze. Men moved in and out of the room. I closed my eyes, waited for the men to leave.

My hand stole to the side.

I waited for the shouts, the kicks in my ribs. None came.

“Over here.” It sounded like Hayes. Footsteps drew closer.

“Speedy, have you seen the shears?”

He moved away. Then stopped. I felt the plastic handles under my palm, the metal point against my wrists. They would kill me five seconds after I went for it, I knew, but they would be doing me a favor.

I gripped the shears tightly and steeled myself to attack.

This wasn't the first time I'd lain on a cold floor waiting for death.

The first was after I killed the woman, Emily. She was an anesthesiologist I worked with in Afghanistan, part of a forward surgical team at Camp Dagger.

Dagger; that's what made me angrier than anything else. Hayes had said Samael was behind the Camp Dagger attack, had used it as a way to draw me in. He had exploited the death of a woman I loved, profaned her. And I had fallen for it, given in to revenge.

The camp was little more than a collection of plywood huts and tents, but it was our best chance to save the casualties near the line. It sat in a valley not far from Gardez. We were hemmed in by ice-covered mountains and rock-filled defiles on all sides, but the valley itself was beautiful in summer; sheep and goats grazed, and green fields surrounded an oxbow in the river.

Emily was a few years younger than I was and came from the sticks outside Louisville. I didn't have time for much of anything outside of medicine, hadn't had for years. I liked being busy. It kept me from thinking about the dead boys at K-38, about what I had done. It had been so many years since then. I was a doctor now, a lieutenant commander.

Between the helicopters shuttling urgent surgical cases in and all the cutting, there wasn't time for sleep, let alone relationships. She was a good doctor, one of the best I'd ever worked with, and that was the end of it. I couldn't let myself be distracted by the thought of those green eyes looking at me from over the mask.

I remember the day it started. A kid came in, a nineteen-year-old Marine with an unexploded rocket-propelled grenade in his abdomen. The EOD techs called us out to a second operating room, surrounded by blast barriers. We wore flak jackets and helmets over our scrubs.

One of the corpsmen started to say that if anything happened to him, someone should tell his wife and kid that—and Emily cut him off, sent him out of the room. No nonessential personnel. “I don't need a fucking jinx
and
a bomb in here.”

The anesthesiologist runs the OR. Emily knew exactly what to do. She shut off everything electric. Took the patient's pulse using the second hand of her watch, dosed the anesthesia by counting drip by drip.

I cut out the RPG and put the kid back together as best I could with the tissue that remained. He'd be using a colostomy bag for the rest of his life, but that was better than the alternative.

Afterward, Emily and I ducked outside and watched the EODs blow the grenade a mile off.

She offered me a cigarette. Most of the doctors smoked. I would take one now and then, but I passed that night.

“How'd you know what to do in there?” I asked.

“An article I read.”

“That's it?”

She nodded, dropped her head in her hands, and sighed. “Jesus Christ.”

She had been pure confidence the entire operation, had steeled our whole team, and now she could finally let the fear out.

“Sometimes I picture myself in a nice gastroenterology practice in Buckhead,” she said. “Six hundred K a year. In at eight, out at four, just sitting in an ergonomic chair at the head of the table and watching the GI guys look up people's asses all day.”

“Sorry, Miller,” I said, and I thought of everything I knew about her. “I think you'd get bored with asses.”

“A girl can dream.”

It's hard explaining what it's like downrange. The rest of the world is an abstraction. Death is everywhere, so life draws you in. We weren't looking for it, but it found us.

Personnel weren't supposed to sleep together, but that only added to the tension as we passed each other in the halls every day, sat side by side in the DFAC—the dining facility. Even before we got together, others could see it coming off us like a cloud of guilt as we talked like old accomplices or sneaked off after a sixteen-hour shift to drink some of the moonshine her father made in his own still and shipped to her in perfume bottles.

She liked Afghanistan, liked that people still rode horses there. It reminded her of where she had grown up.

We were good. We kept it secret, never flouted the rules. The only chance to be open about it was on R&R. It probably shows how fucked up things were that we went to Kashmir for R&R. We rented a houseboat on a lake in the mountains in Srinagar, looking out over the Mughal gardens and floating lotus.

We were together for fourteen months and due to return to the States soon. There would be time for everything.

Two nights after we got back to the base, we were walking back from the operating theater to our B huts when she turned to me with a look on her face like she was about to do a cliff dive.

“I'm late.”

I was too surprised to say anything. When she was thirty-one, doctors had told her she most likely wouldn't be able to have kids.

“How late?” I asked.

“I'm eight weeks pregnant.”

“But…”

“Never count out a Miller. My mom was forty and on the pill when she got pregnant with me.”

We were standing at the edge of a dusty airstrip. The Spin Ghar Mountains and the Khyber Pass were silhouetted against the stars.

“Marry me,” I said.

“What are you doing, Byrne? No, no, no.”

“Say yes,” I said. I dropped to one knee.

“What? Come on. Get up.”

There had been so much death, so much blood, and now life.

“I'll get up if you say yes.”

“You're serious.”

“Don't I look serious?”

“You look ridiculous.”

“Say yes.”

“Yes…we can talk about it.”

I stood up, lifted her in the air, and kissed her.

“All I heard was yes.”

She died within the month—a rocket attack. Shit luck, was all. We took fire all the time, would hole up in the bunker for hours. She had sneaked into my quarters. The blast woke me up. Everything was chaos and noise. She was beside me, and her body was torn apart.

We had just been lying there, but her body protected me. The rockets kept coming. She was awake for a minute before shock set in.

“It's deep, Tom,” she said. “See what you can do.”

They called us into the bunkers, but I ignored it.

They blew up the main OR. I carried her to the secondary operating theater. There was penetrating trauma to her chest and abdomen.

She tried to say something else, but I couldn't make it out. I've spent two years wondering what she said. She went unresponsive, not breathing, pulseless, but with some electrical activity in the heart.

I had two corpsmen with me. The procedure is called an emergency thoracotomy, or sometimes a clamshell. I cut her chest from sternum to flank and spread her ribs.

The only good thing was that the injury was to the right side of her heart. That gave her a chance. The shrapnel had torn the right ventricle. Blood poured out with every pump. The heart muscle around the wound was shredded, but I gathered enough tissue to sew it up. Fifty-six stitches and a double square knot. She was hemorrhaging in the lower abdomen, but the lungs were fine, and I had sealed up her heart.

The heart stopped. I took it in my hands and began to help it beat. The sutures held. No blood came from the ventricle. The gunfire crackled outside. I kept going, a hundred beats per minute, far slower than my own heart rate. And it started to move in my hands.

I thought I saw her fingers extend to reach for me, but I knew that she was too far gone for the movement to be intentional. Her heart continued to beat. I closed up the thoracic cavity and set to work on her abdominal wound. The pulse was strong, and then nothing.

She was gone.

The autopsy found that the ventricle had ruptured near the repair. They had had to pull me away from her body.

I worked through the night on the rest of the casualties. Operated for fifty hours before they forced me to bed. I didn't want to stop, couldn't stand to be alone with my thoughts. I had been caught by a secondary blast, a chunk of stone blown out from a Hesco barrier. I didn't tell anyone about the broken ribs, about the pain. I couldn't stop moving.

I don't know if it was the ribs or what happened to Emily, but I couldn't sleep. I would work until I couldn't stand any longer, and when I had to catch a few hours' rest, I would dose myself against the pain. It was a way to shut my mind down, to keep the thoughts at bay as I lay there trying to pretend it hadn't happened, that I hadn't failed her, killed her.

I had been going too hard, for too long.

I was in the pharmacy tent. I slid the needle into my arm, and within a few seconds, my legs crumpled. I'd grabbed the wrong vial. I knew it must have been a paralytic because I hit the floor like a sack of dirt. The muscles in my arms drew tight in spasm, then let go: fasciculation. That meant it was succinylcholine. We called it sux around the OR.

It paralyzes the patient. My diaphragm slowed, a last shallow breath from my still lips. My lungs emptied but didn't refill.

You would never use it without a ventilator. The patient would asphyxiate. And you never use sux alone, without general anesthesia, or the patient would be fully conscious but unable to move or breathe on his own, a living death. You could end up operating on someone who feels every stroke of the blade but can give no sign or reaction as you cut.

I could see the syringe at the edge of my field of view but couldn't control the muscles to turn my eyes toward it. The plunger was a third of the way down. Thirty-three milligrams of the typical one-hundred-milligram dose. I weighed a hundred and eighty-five pounds. The paralysis would last two to ten minutes. Brain cells typically start to die after one minute; real damage kicks in at three, and by ten, no one recovers.

A horse race.

I was buried alive inside my body. The air started to run out. I willed myself to breathe but couldn't. Sixty seconds without oxygen. My mind played with the numbers. I tried to distract myself, hide in the calculations, but in the end it was a coin toss whether that first gasp would come before my life ended.

My vision began to waver, an early sign of hypoxia.

I didn't care.

I couldn't stop thinking that maybe I made the wrong call on the thoracotomy. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I'd killed her when I cut her open and grabbed her heart. The ventricle had given out. The surgeon's stitch is like the runner's stride; it's personal, distinctive, the foundation of everything else. And mine had failed. I didn't care what they'd said about underlying tissue damage. It was my fault, my table, my stitches. I'd killed her.

I waited for death.

Ninety seconds…one hundred.

I blacked out, but my body kept fighting, and somewhere in the dark came that last saving gasp.

The paralytic wore off. I was breathing again. I would live, like it or not.

But I was done.

I left the navy. They cleared me of any blame, commended me, but I knew the truth. I skipped the ceremonies. The medals came in the mail. I signed up with a locum tenens shop, worked trauma at a string of hospitals. I tried to make up for the lives I had taken with the lives I saved but I always came up short.

It gave me an excuse to keep moving. When you stay in one place, you find people, you get close. They trust you. And everyone who had ever trusted me was dead.

Over time, I started to believe what the others told me. That this was crazy. That I had to stop. That I couldn't be alone forever. But it had been greed on my part.

I'd wanted what I didn't deserve. And then I brought Kelly in and made her trust me.

And now I'd killed her too.

“They were right over here,” Hayes said. His voice was close. I could smell him. His fingers touched my neck, probed for the pulse of my carotid artery, held there. I lay still, focusing on the breath coming and going from my belly, trying not to betray that I was awake.

He put his hand on my cheek. It felt like 220-grit sandpaper. His thumb touched my eye, pulled the lid up. I looked at him, fought the impulse to squeeze those shears tight. I couldn't afford to show any sign of consciousness. He shone a light in my eye, watched the pupil contract, let the lid shut.