Dead Man Switch

by Matthew Quirk

  “I never believed what they said about you. Until now. Go ahead. You’ll burn for this.”

  Once, things had been simple for Hayes. There were commanders and rules of engagement, opposing forces and friendlies. But now he was on his own, and he understood the terrible weight of choice, of his own calculations of the greater evil, of trading lives like coins.

  “You don’t know me. What they put me through.” He cracked Burke in the mouth with the slide of the pistol and put his foot on his back.

  He wrapped his finger around the trigger and brought the gun before him, facing away from Kashani.

  He raised it, and pulled the trigger.

  The light blew out with a pop and a rain of glass. The room went black. But in his mind, Hayes could still see where each man stood. Kim’s Game. He ducked to the left and aimed the pistol at the first guard.

  Burke felt the hot glass scratch his neck as the lightbulb exploded, and he rolled onto his feet. The images came like strobes in the orange flash of Hayes’s firing pistol: one guard flinching back, struck by gunfire, then the other. Hayes sidestepped left to right, and six shots flared in the dark. Kashani spun with a pistol and shot. The muzzle flame reached out toward empty space and lit up Hayes behind him, his knife out.

  The dark returned. A body hit the ground. A flashlight cut through the room, then came the cinching and popping of the cords as someone cut Burke’s hands free, drawing the knife a half inch from the skin on his wrist.

  Hayes pulled the injured soldier’s arm over his shoulder and helped him up. He was dazed.

  “Burke,” Hayes said. “Sorry about the jaw. I had to sell it. Are you good to walk?”

  Burke fought back against the shock. “I think so,” he said.

  “I’m here undercover. I was trying to find out who he was working for, who wants those names.”

  Hayes aimed a flashlight that he’d pulled from one of the guards at the ceiling. “We’ve got to roll before they get backup.”

  Hayes grabbed Sanders’s sniper rifle and rucksack, and Burke took his carbine. They exited into the garage. There were two Pinzgauer 6x6s parked along the back wall. A Swiss-built mountain truck, the Pinz was an ugly green box on six wheels that could climb a 100 percent slope. Hayes and Burke took the cockpit seats, and Sanders, conscious but still unsteady, got in the back.

  Hayes gunned it up the ramp leading out of the underground garage. The vehicle rose high on its springs and was nearly airborne when it came off the ramp onto the long driveway.

  Burke pointed to the passes to the east.

  “We make it through there, and we’re out of the badlands.”

  Hayes watched the mirrors while Burke cycled through the radio he’d pulled from the room.

  “We could have killed you back there,” Burke said.

  “You couldn’t have known. No one in the command knew I was here.”

  Burke looked at the house. He didn’t see anyone coming.

  “You have a QRF?” Hayes asked. A quick-reaction force: a team of soldiers ready to come in to back up the smaller special operations units.

  “No. We have to get through the pass on our own,” Burke said. “There’s an extraction point ten kilometers out. But if we get there after twenty-one-hundred hours, we’re done. They won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  That was in an hour, and they wouldn’t survive if they were stuck here overnight. The notch in the mountains loomed closer and closer as Hayes fought the wheel. He looked through his side window. To call it a jeep track was generous; it was more like a goat path. It was so narrow, he couldn’t see road, just his side panel hanging over a ravine that dropped away two hundred feet.

  The snow grew thicker as they rose toward the pass, and the Pinz smeared through the turns, kicking debris off the cliffs.

  “Almost there, Sanders,” Burke said.

  The pass opened high to their right as the path curved toward it. The black of the peak gave way to a blanket of stars to the north, but weather was moving in fast from the other direction. Sheets of white snow blew across Hayes’s sight lines like static.

  Over the grind of the Pinz’s diesel, a deep rumble echoed through the pass. It loosed a curtain of snow high above them, and chunks of ice slammed into the side of the vehicle. Hayes forced the wheel toward the steep bank.

  “Get out!” Hayes said.

  “What?”

  “Out! Now! Incoming!”

  Only Hayes had identified the source of the noise, but it became clear a second later. A helicopter, banking hard, crossed the pass and disappeared behind the far peak.

  “They’re circling back.”

  It was a Bell Cobra, an older American-designed and -built attack helicopter with a 20-millimeter Gatling gun and a weapon pod on either side.

  “We need to disperse and draw them in. Drop down the ridge ten or twenty feet. It’s our only shot.”

  He grabbed the sniper rifle, opened his door. “Take the M4,” Hayes told Burke. The carbine had a 40-millimeter grenade-launcher attachment under the barrel. “Hit the tail rotor or the pilots through the side glass. Wait for it to come over us. If they use the Gatling guns only, we might survive.”

  He left a blue light stick glowing in the cabin of the Pinz and climbed out. Burke and Sanders flailed down the snow on one side of the ridge. Hayes dropped six feet down the steep hill on the other and then cut wide across for cover. He dug in, the snow up to his waist, with a boulder between himself and the helo, then raised the rifle, snugged it hard against his cheek and shoulder, and took aim.

  The chugging blades grew louder and louder. He watched the white snow blown by the rotor wash come at him like a band of storm clouds.

  Hold…hold…hold.

  The helicopter swept overhead, the rip of the Gatlings tearing the night in two as they shot up the Pinz. Hayes heard a low pock as Burke launched a grenade. The helo banked and flared to avoid it, and as it slowed, Hayes put one round, two, three, into the tail rotor. Fluid blew out in a spume, and from the other side of the ridge, Burke sent a hail of bullets through the Plexiglas into the cockpit.

  It spun as it came over, out of control, losing precious altitude in that thin air. Hayes dove for cover. The ground shook, and he knew the helo was down.

  He put his leg forward and postholed it in the deep snow. Another blast shook the hillside, and before he could even register relief at having taken the helicopter, the snow beneath his feet fell away. He dropped with it, clawed against it, but the whole hillside was liquid now, pouring into his mouth and down his shirt, tilting him over. The mountain peaks spun in his vision as he rag-dolled down, helpless.

  High up, near the pass, a red light filled the night. A boom echoed along the range, but it was lost to him as blows came to his head and his body kept falling. He didn’t know how long he tumbled, but it seemed like forever. And then he hit, and he was buried in a bank of snow.

  His hands shot to his face and he clawed away the powder. Snow can melt and refreeze around the face, asphyxiating the avalanche victim in what’s known as the mask of death. After he cleared the snow from around his head and shoulders, he started to dig himself out.

  He hauled himself out of the bank, and after the dizziness passed, he was shocked to feel okay. His pack was six feet above him on the steep slope. The snow was too deep to walk in normally, so he crawled up, gaining only inches as he dragged the snow on top of him. He took time to pack down the powder and then tried to stand. His leg crumpled, and he fell to the side. He tested that leg again, putting weight on it, and it collapsed under him once more. Between the cold and the adrenaline, he felt no pain, only the queasy sense of his limb bending the wrong way. He’d torn something.

  The driving snow scoured the exposed skin of his neck and cheek, becoming heavier and heavier until it was a whiteout. The flakes flew past him, down and to the left, a shimmering curtain so total that vertigo set in, and he couldn’t fight the feeling that he was flying up and away, as if the snow were
still and his body was in motion.

  He shut his eyes, and the wind closed around him; snow drifted to his chin, spilled down his collar, filled his ear.

  His first movements only dug him in deeper, but then he climbed deliberately, raising himself with his good leg and driving his bad knee into the steep snow to brace himself for another step. Remaining calm was the only way to survive. When he reached the pack, he pulled off part of the frame and two nylon straps and splinted his knee as best as he could.

  Hayes had spent a lot of time in the mountains, and every fifteen minutes or so the blood flushed his face and hands—the hunter’s response, an acquired physiological reflex to keep frostbite at bay.

  He continued up the slope but knew he wasn’t going fast enough to warm himself. And as the minutes turned to hours, the cold moved from outside in. The shivering began, crescendoed into a violent tremble, rattling his teeth in his skull. His muscles numbed and tightened, refused to obey. And even his brain slowed down, the thoughts of survival running in frantic, confused loops.

  He didn’t know how far he had traveled. The world was a white sphere. All he wanted was sleep. There was no ridge, no extraction point, no helicopter, only the fog of his breath turning into ice on his skin.

  It didn’t make any sense to work so hard when he could just sit down. He stopped and stared into the blizzard. He hadn’t thought about how beautiful it was. He let his mind drift into the white.

  And he was home in Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The night was a chorus of insects, and the room was drafty, but the comforter was white and thick with down. He pulled his wife, Lauren, to him in bed and held her tight. The stupor closed in. He welcomed it. The pain disappeared. His body disappeared, bit by bit. He felt warm…so warm…and he let the peace take him.

  On the opposite side of the ridge from where Hayes had fallen, a U.S. Air Force pararescue jumper and a combat controller—members of the two elite specialties of that branch—had found Burke and Sanders.

  They immobilized Burke’s head and neck, strapped him to the backboard, and hauled him through the door of the helicopter. He had fallen far enough down the valley that they had been able to see his signal panel—a square of fabric that shines like a beacon when viewed through infrared optics—from the extraction point.

  “Turn on the lights,” Burke said, staring at the interior of the helicopter. Pain stabbed through his skull. He had slammed his face on a boulder as he and Sanders slipped down the ridge after Kashani’s helicopter exploded.

  “Don’t worry about the lights, Burke. We’ve got you.”

  “And Sanders?”

  “We have him. He’s alive. Was there anyone else?”

  “Hayes—he went the other way. Might have fallen into the other valley. He could have made it.”

  Burke heard the radio chatter fill the helicopter. The voices, like the pain, seemed to be coming from a room at the end of a long hallway. They had given him something, probably morphine. He brought his hand near his face. His eyes were open. He just couldn’t see anything.

  I’m blind, he thought, then he heard the combat controller’s voice: “This man is going to lose his sight, probably die if we don’t pull out now.”

  “We have to go back,” Burke said.

  “The command wants us out of here. If we’re caught in this country, it’ll cause an international crisis. We don’t have stealth. And the visibility’s going to zero. We’ll all die if we don’t pull up.”

  “Hayes is out there,” Burke said. “We have to get him.”

  But no one answered. The engines revved up and drowned out every other noise.

  Hayes drove his good leg down into the snow on the far side of the ridge, his brain barely functioning. One thought had broken him out of his trance: They want the names. The enemy was coming for Hayes’s people at home, where they slept, where their families slept. He thought of his daughter, pictured her standing backlit at the end of the hall, needing him to do a last check under the bed. He had to go on, to warn them.

  The world reduced to left foot, right foot. How many times had it come down to this, him exhausted past all reckoning and relying on simple will not to stop? In the end, he was a good soldier not because of any heroics, but because he refused to die and never stopped trudging toward his goal. And there was no pain anymore, even as he watched his knee twist strangely in the splint, the snow dragging him back a foot for every two he climbed.

  He checked his watch. One minute until the extraction. The exposed skin on his wrist was red and waxy white with frostbite.

  Left, right, left, right. He moved like a windup toy, like this was all he had done for his whole life, like it was all he would do forever.

  Rotors echoed below him. He stepped toward the edge of the snowfield and realized he was at the lip of a cornice, hanging over a hundred-foot fall at the top of the ridge. He could see the helo moving through the blizzard below like a shadow.

  He pulled an infrared panel he had taken from the pack, then dropped it. He put his hand down on it, but he couldn’t close his fingers. The extremity was like a block of wood, and the wind hauled the panel down the cliff, turning it over like a falling leaf as Hayes shouted at the rising aircraft.

  The helicopter spun and nosed down to the south, leaving Hayes in the snow and the dark. He was a black dot on a ridge, just a shadow against countless more mountain silhouettes extending back toward Afghanistan. And over the wind and diesel grind, of course no one could hear his voice.

  Chapter 3

  SAMUEL COX SAT behind a desk in a cramped West Wing basement office, signing a letter. Though a brigadier general, Cox almost never wore a uniform. He was Hayes’s handler and a special adviser to the secretary of defense. He had no formal portfolio, and his real job wasn’t on any org chart: he made problems go away. It was in that capacity that he had come to serve as the link between Hayes and the command.

  He had borrowed this office, down the hall from the Situation Room, to help coordinate the rescue of Hayes and the other men. He had been working nonstop for twenty-four hours and was waiting for a callback from the CIA station chief in Islamabad.

  He looked at the personnel photo of a smiling Army Ranger, twenty-four years old, who had died in North Africa the week before on a classified mission against human traffickers that Cox had helped run through the Joint Special Operations Command. He put the photo to the side, then took off his glasses and placed the signed letter in his outbox. It was addressed to the man’s wife, the next of kin. Cox always wrote them himself. He could offer no details, only his grief, and he knew that wasn’t worth much.

  As he shut the file folder, a man with close-cropped silver hair stuck his head in the doorway. Cox stood.

  “Any word on our guys, Sam?”

  “We got the recon team out of Pakistan, sir. It’s all deniable. Sanders is still in surgery. Burke will live. Probably never see again. Hayes is still missing.”

  Cox checked his watch. Hayes had been out there for nearly twenty-six hours. Most men would be dead from exposure after one night in those mountains.

  “Have you called the family?”

  “I know the wife. We gave her word that he’ll be out longer than we expected. But she doesn’t know anything about the mission. There’s no sense in worrying her any further until we know if he’s alive or dead.”

  “Whatever you decide. I’m going to the residence. Let me know if anything changes.”

  “I will, sir. Is Elizabeth back from school?”

  “Yes. She’s upstairs. Cramming for finals.”

  “Give her my best.”

  “Do you want to come up for dinner?”

  Cox looked at the phone. He had work to do here.

  “Of course.” The visitor turned and started up the steps to the main hallway through the West Wing.

  Cox could hear the Marine guard at the top of the stairs. “Good evening, Mr. President,” echoed down the marble hall as Cox seated his
glasses back on his nose and dialed up the regional Joint Special Operations commander for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Chapter 4

  LAUREN HAYES, JOHN Hayes’s wife, raised the hammer and gave the nail a tap, then swung it back and drove the nail in its full length. Tap-crack, tap-crack, tap-crack. She finished laying in the trim on the second floor, letting the task fill her mind so she wouldn’t look at her phone every five seconds. She had worked a twelve-hour shift at the hospital and would pick up Maggie from her aunt’s house in the morning. But even after a day that long, she couldn’t sleep, not until she heard her husband was safe. Something was wrong. She could tell, could read between the lines of the bullshit call they had made to her.

  She and Hayes had started building this house together.

  “I always come back,” Hayes had said before he left.

  He was two weeks late. This was going to be the first time he would be home for his daughter’s birthday. It was in five days. And this wasn’t like the other operations, when he was part of a special mission unit. There were no other wives holding vigil, stacking food high on counters and in the freezer. There was no chaplain on watch.

  Hayes was working alone now. When he was here, the phone would ring, showing all zeros, and he would go meet with some shadows in suits who had come down from Washington.

  Tap-crack. Tap-crack.

  The phone rang and it shook her like a close blast. She missed the nail and split a long piece of molding.

  She walked to the phone. The caller ID showed all zeros.

  “Hello.” The hammer hung down by her side.

  “Lauren? This is Samuel Cox.”

  “Is he alive?”

  Chapter 5

  HAYES WOKE, AND the past two days felt like a dream. He had been in and out of consciousness, and all he could remember was a doctor standing over him in scrubs and a few of the words he had spoken: “Warm and dead.”