Cold Barrel Zero

by Matthew Quirk

  Getting to the wheel wells had been the decisive point of the operation. Hayes had timed it for when their guard was down, when the truck was empty.

  He stepped into the back of the box truck. “Any crypto?” he asked Ward.

  “No,” she said. “It’s all single-channel. Easy to listen in. They’re bringing it back to the compound. No word on the route. You want to wait?”

  He considered doing it here. Urban terrain favors the guerrilla. It’s ideal for ambushes, for melting away. The truck exited the cargo area, riding noticeably lower on its springs. Hayes had spent enough time in LA to know that one of the favorite local sports, up there with Lakers basketball, was car chases. It seemed like there was one on the news every night, and a half a dozen helos could be found overhead at any moment.

  Hayes checked the maps of the mountains to the east. He knew that Riggs’s primary compound was in rural Riverside County. There were two main routes the truck could take to reach it. Both ran through foothills, miles of sparsely populated terrain. He traced the roads, the switchback approaches to the passes. There were plenty of spots.

  “Yes. Fall in behind them. Stay out of sight. We’ll hit them in the country.”

  The three vehicles—box truck, pickup, and sedan—let the armored truck go ahead and then picked up the pursuit. They were two minutes behind it on the 105. They had GPS on the truck now, and Ward could track the radio signals as well.

  The truck continued inland and eventually began winding its way through the hills. It was clear which route it would take.

  Hayes pored over the maps, tracing topographic lines in the Santa Ana Mountains. The highway ahead narrowed to two lanes. Hayes checked the contours. The 5 percent grade would slow the truck. Two switchbacks would give cover, and the steep pitch on either side of the road would block the escape routes. He knew the men in the armored truck were seasoned. They must have known, or figured out by now, that they were carrying a high-value shipment. The usual tricks—fake cop, stranded woman—would send them straight into evasive action. Hayes and his team had to take them head-on, one shot.

  “Green, go ahead,” Hayes said into the radio. The pickup accelerated. In a minute, Green caught sight of the armored truck. He passed it easily as it labored up the hill and then raced off ahead.

  Hayes took one more look at the map, then his GPS.

  “Two minutes,” he said, and he glanced into a corner of the truck. “Wake him up.”

  Speed had folded himself up between the wall and the motorcycle and was snoring. Ward kicked the wall a foot from his head. He stirred, wiped the corner of his mouth, and made a noise like he’d just had a really good meal.

  There was little double-checking or fussing. They’d test-fired their weapons before they headed out. This was routine infantry against armor ambush: blind, halt, destroy. They had drilled it, done it, and taught it for so long it was about as exciting as parallel parking.

  Speed rubbed his eyes, pulled a silver and orange can from his pack, drank it down, and shivered.

  Hayes waited at the rear door beside Cook. “Any fishing while you were out in the wilderness?”

  “Yeah,” Cook said. “Pretty much lived off dogfish.”

  They didn’t talk much about where they had been, never shared specifics. It was better to keep things in compartments.

  “One minute,” Hayes announced. The team lined up behind him. “I thought those were trash fish.”

  “Ugly, sure, but I love them. Did you get out on the water?”

  They pulled onto the shoulder of the highway, a quarter mile behind the armored truck.

  “Free diving. Lobster, mainly. Did some spear too.”

  Hayes reached down and threw open the door.

  “Remember, we need them alive,” he said and jumped onto the gravel as the truck came to a stop. They hauled out the ramps. Cook climbed on one of the bikes inside the truck. Hayes rode behind him in order to keep his hands free.

  “Did you hear about the dog that does magic?” Cook asked Hayes.

  “Things are bad enough without your jokes.”

  “It’s a Labracadabrador.” He smiled and flipped down the night-vision goggles on his helmet.

  “I can’t believe I actually missed you, man.”

  Moret straddled the other bike. Speed looked like he was going to complain about sitting behind a woman, but after one glare from Moret, he let it go and climbed on.

  They were dual-sports, essentially street-legal dirt bikes with high clearance and long-travel suspensions. Cook started the engine. It never failed to impress Hayes. The bikes were electric, with baffled motors, nearly silent. He’d first used them in Kunar. Cook and Moret flicked switches for the headlights. Nothing happened. The lights were infrared, visible only through the NVGs. To anyone else, the bikes were blacked out, invisible.

  “Block the road,” Hayes said into his radio.

  Behind them, Foley pulled the Taurus across both lanes. He’d fastened an Oversize Load sign to its bumper and clapped a flashing amber dome light onto the roof. The road switchbacked up the mountains. The armored truck had gone around a steep curve and was on the far side of the ridge above them, proceeding slowly up the grade. Two miles ahead, Green pulled his pickup across the road and put his flashers on. The armored truck was cut off.

  The two bikes took off straight up the ridge. They would come over it through a gully to avoid being silhouetted against the sky as they approached the truck. The landscape glowed green through their goggles.

  All Hayes could hear was the rush of the tires and the wind past his ears. They ran through a slot between two peaks and closed in on the armored truck from its blind spot at five o’clock. The country was more open than Hayes had expected. He was glad to be silent and unseen.

  The safe standoff distance for the IEDs was two hundred and fifty meters, but Hayes’s crew needed to get closer before they blew. They would be vulnerable to gunfire until they were in the dead space around the truck, almost touching it, which would make the firing angles from the gun ports impossible.

  Hayes pulled out a cell phone as they bounced along the chaparral. He’d been in trucks hit with these kinds of explosives before. They were a twenty-first-century update to the sticky bomb. One had blown the legs and genitals off a radioman beside him. There was no time to think of the men inside the truck. Blow the IEDs, race to the dead space. That was all.

  He lifted the phone and pressed the green Call button. The screen read: Call 1 … dialing.

  Flames flared twelve feet out from the rear tires of the armored truck. Hayes watched the pressure wave spread across the ground, driving a wall of dust and flattening the scrub until it smacked him in the chest as hard as a phone book.

  Both motorcycle drivers accelerated, half blind from the flying sand. The bikes rocked back as the electric motors gave instant torque. They had six seconds to get inside the dead space.

  A truck tire rolled toward them. Fire trailed from the rubber as it wobbled and then jumped end over end. Cook swerved around it, banked the bike hard. The armored truck plowed the asphalt as it dragged its back end and came to a stop at the edge of the highway.

  They curved in through the smoke onto the road. Before the men inside the truck could react, all four members of Hayes’s squad were standing in the dead space, feeling the heat from the blast.

  Muzzles flared through the gun ports in three-round bursts of automatic fire. The bullets came within feet of the team outside but couldn’t reach them. The rear-wheel-drive truck had been reduced to a stalled prison. The men inside were at Hayes’s mercy.

  Speed walked to the back of the truck in a crouch, then stepped on the bumper and started laying explosives along the four hinges of the rear doors. They were linear-shaped charges, thick strips of C-4 explosive fixed to a long V-shaped piece of copper about an inch wide. The open end of the V pressed against the plate steel.

  Only one shooter inside the truck continued to waste rounds firing at them
. He was probably too worked up to know better. Speed paid no mind as he finished his task. The explosives would deform the copper and send it shooting out at twenty-two thousand miles per hour, essentially squeezing it into a liquid razor that would slice through the metal before the explosion had a chance to melt the copper. He plugged two detonators into each charge, then stepped down and tossed the wires to Hayes, crouched alongside the truck.

  Hayes plugged the wires into his detonator, then crawled under the passenger-side gun port and stepped out a dozen feet in front of the truck, fully lit by its headlights. He normally used a smaller trigger, but tonight he’d picked a multiline unit with a key and a red button. Theatrics mattered for this one.

  The driver hit the gas again. What was left of the rear axle and differential ground uselessly against the road. The damaged metal tore against itself and shrieked. Next to the truck, Cook and Speed helped boost Moret onto the roof. The noise and shuddering from the drivetrain succeeded in covering the sound of her movements as Moret dragged herself along the top of the vehicle until she was over the cab.

  Hayes lifted the detonator into view, pointed to the doors, and mimed an explosion with his hand. He turned the key and raised his right hand, fingers outstretched to start the countdown.

  First five, then four.

  The men in the cab watched him. He could see them talking, still composed despite the explosion. The man in the middle reached down—for a heavier weapon, Hayes guessed. The other two lifted their MP7s. He wished they hadn’t. They were readying for an assault. He wanted them alive. He’d spent a lot of time with Speed working through the charge calculations and precisely splitting sticks of M112 to avoid juicing the guards. Killing them would have been much easier, but it would muddy Hayes’s message, and the message was all that mattered in unconventional warfare.

  Little Bill’s mouth dropped open as he locked eyes with Hayes, his old instructor.

  Hayes held up three fingers.

  Hands on doors inside the cab. He could tell by their eyes, the way the muscles in their faces tightened: they were coming out fighting.

  He tapped the radio mounted on his shoulder.

  “Moret, get the bang ready. Doors are opening.”

  He raised two fingers, holding it for a long count to buy time as Moret took a grenade off her vest, pulled the pin, and held the spoon.

  The doors opened. Moret let the spoon fly, tossed the grenade in the cab, and rolled back across the roof of the truck just as all three men inside jumped out, guns ready.

  White light filled the cab as the explosion deafened them. The concussion grenade hit with enough force to disorient them for ten seconds. The driver, blind, kept moving, then tripped and fell hard. Little Bill leaned back against the truck and crumpled, hands over his ears, while the messenger staggered in a half circle, groping for the shotgun he had dropped.

  Cook, Speed, and Moret rushed them and had all three guards facedown on the ground with flex cuffs biting into their wrists before their senses returned. Hayes’s crew knelt on the men’s backs and dug pistols into the bases of their skulls.

  “I tossed the keys, assholes,” the driver said. “You’ll never—”

  Hayes hit the detonator. The hills flashed bright as midday. As the crack echoed, quieter with each distant canyon, the rear door fell off the truck and shook the ground.

  “That won’t be a problem,” Hayes said. He radioed to Ward to bring the box truck.

  The guard was talking nonstop between panicked breaths. “Is this? Are these the goddamn guys? We’re dead. We’re—”

  “They’d have killed us already if they wanted to,” the driver said. “You’ll wish they had.”

  Little Bill said nothing. He watched Hayes with hate in his eyes.

  “Just calm down,” Hayes told them. “Hey, Bill, you all right?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “You know who I am?” Hayes asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That’ll save time. You notice you’re all still alive.”

  “Am I supposed to thank you for not killing me?”

  Hayes knelt next to him. “No. Just tell your boss: We have what we need. The past is coming for him.”

  Less than three minutes had elapsed since the first explosion. Ward arrived in the box truck and backed it up to the armored vehicle, out of sight of the captives. The team ran the ramps straight across and rolled the crate out of the wrecked truck.

  Hayes radioed Foley and Green to pull back the traffic-control points. Foley had detoured one car without incident.

  The ramps flexed under the thirteen-hundred-pound weight of the shipment. Once it was in the truck, Ward and Hayes pulled a copper mesh over the crate to block any GPS or RFID signals. Hayes pulled the vinyl wrap signage from the side of the box truck, leaving it white, and swapped its stolen plates for a new set. With the crate inside, there was barely room to stand.

  Green pulled up in the Nissan truck. After they loaded the bikes into the bed, the team split up among the three vehicles and drove deeper into the mountains. They left the three men trussed by the side of the armored truck. The explosions were bound to draw attention. It wouldn’t be long until someone came by.

  There was no backslapping among Hayes’s squad. As they drove off, it was like the raid had never happened. They took separate routes, then reconnected in a valley forty miles away, at the end of a long service road between groves of almond trees.

  The team gathered at the back of the box truck. Desert air blew dry and cool. Moret rubbed her shoulder. It had been banging against the crate the whole drive.

  “I give,” she said, shining a light over the customs form stapled to the raw pine. “So, what is it, some kind of artifact?”

  Hayes had kept the details to a minimum as they organized the op. Cells were the safest way to operate, here at home, behind enemy lines. They all trusted him absolutely. They deserved a look. And to be honest, Hayes wanted to see it too. He pulled back the mesh, then wedged his knife in under the top of the crate, pried back a corner, and worked his way up the lid. Ward helped him pull the top off with a squeal of nails against wood. He lifted some of the packing.

  “Is that ivory?”

  “Bone.”

  Speed was resting, slumped against the bulkhead. The others crowded in.

  Hayes reached down and lifted the inner lid. They stared at it for a moment.

  Green turned to Hayes. “Holy shit.”

  “Sell your cloak and buy a sword,” Hayes replied, and he ran his hand over the shipment. “Now the real work starts.”

  Chapter 6

  COX SCANNED THE images of the burned-out armored truck once more, cursed under his breath, then shut his laptop. He had set up in an office on the second floor to run the search for Hayes and his team. While he worked the phone, assistants ferried in faxes and scans and couriered CDs full of data: old pay records, state rolls, unit rosters, vouchers from the adjutant general’s office. By that evening, stacks of files were piled high and rising on his desk.

  He put his coffee down on top of a sheaf of papers. He picked up the phone and started calling night-action desks in and around Washington. He began with the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, and the DHS and added what names he could find to the watch lists.

  Barnard appeared in the doorway. Cox waved him in and finished his call.

  “I need to get to California,” Cox said, “but I found some more names for the local police and FBI to check out. They’re former teammates and friends of Hayes, and one’s an old mentor. He may go to them for support. Many are former Special Operations, so we’re telling law enforcement to use caution.”

  “You think they would help him after everything he did?”

  “They might. Hayes has a way of bringing people under his spell.”

  Barnard looked down the list while Cox lifted his cup and sipped the cold brew.

  “This guy’s a doctor now,” Barnard said. “He hasn’t worked with
Hayes in more than a decade.”

  Cox pointed farther down the page. “Look at the commendations. He killed nine enemy in ten minutes with a back full of shrapnel and saved Hayes’s life. A few years ago he left the navy and for all intents and purposes disappeared. Let’s be careful with him. He’s not just some white coat, and he’s staying a couple hours away from the site of the truck bombing.”

  Barnard looked at the name, stained by a ring of coffee: Thomas Byrne.

  Chapter 7

  I WAS GUILTY of many things and had been waiting to fall for a long time. But I never expected it to be like this.

  I eased the door handle down and entered the room without a sound. The lights were off. She was still asleep. I was exhausted and covered in sweat but felt the best I had in years. I crossed the carpet, opened the bathroom door, and stepped onto the cold tile when I heard her voice calling from behind me.

  “Where did you go, Tom?”

  I turned. My eyes adjusted to the dark, the morning sun barely filtering through the shades.

  “For a run. I couldn’t sleep.”

  Kelly mumbled, “Mmm-hmm,” then rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow. I thought she’d nodded off until she spoke again.

  “You never sleep.” She turned over, opened one eye, and ran her hand through her hair. “Bad dreams?”

  She pulled the sheets up to her chin, then fell back asleep. I looked around the room and there was the other woman. She had green eyes, like Kelly’s, and like Kelly she was young and strong and beautiful. Her eyes were open, as peaceful as if she had just woken from a long sleep, but her body was a shambles.