by Joshua Hood
In an instant he was back on the beach, Jack running through the surf, his laughter rising with the tide, and Annabelle standing next to him. Her blond hair blowing in the breeze, soft brown hands wrapped tight around his. Hayes held on to the moment, seeing the world not as it was but the way it could have been, and then it was gone.
I’m sorry, buddy, he thought, letting the pain and loss roll over him, kick-start the rage in his heart until the river of fire was churning through his veins, and then he was through the gap, following the drainage tunnel under the wall. When he came up on the other side, Hayes was inside the compound.
He activated the FGEs, brought the H&K UMP45 up to his shoulder, and moved along the wall, staying in the shadows as he made his approach.
Hayes had been in Caracas for less than six hours, long enough to see the suffering down in the valley. The families on the streets, the lines outside the empty grocery stores, and the starving dogs on the street. Nothing like what he saw before him. While the rest of the city didn’t have running water or sanitation, the immaculate grounds on the far edge of the compound had built-in irrigation, and in the spray of the halogen security lights, the grass and gardens were a vibrant green.
But as Hayes edged closer to his target, it became obvious that Vega had been preparing for this meeting. Radiating out from the house was a fifty-yard dead zone where every blade of grass, tree, and shrub had been stripped from the ground, leaving a barren wasteland.
The scrape of a match followed by a flash of fire drew his attention to a guard leaning against a bulldozer five feet to his left. The man touched the match to the tip of the cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke into the air.
Looks like I found my ride, Hayes thought, pressing the push-to-talk on the front of his vest.
“You ready to punch this time card?” he asked over the radio.
“I’m sitting on G, waiting for O,” JT replied.
“Roger that, give me a ten-count, then go loud.”
“Ten . . . nine . . . eight,” JT began, his voice as even as a metronome over the radio.
Hayes tugged the KA-BAR from the sheath at the small of his back, the blade hissing free with the whisper of steel on leather. He crept forward, leading with the ball of his foot before rolling his weight into the step.
“Seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . .”
Hayes moved behind the guard, clamped his hand over the man’s mouth, and twisted his head to the left. In one solid stroke, he drove the blade deep into his throat, the arterial spray hot across the fabric of the balaclava.
The man’s body started to shake, a violent tremble that came with the realization that he was dying. Hayes held him close, waited for his knees to give out, and let him fall like a marionette with cut strings.
Hayes was just climbing onto the ’dozer when he heard the boom of the 50-caliber roll down the mountain.
He knew from the briefing that JT had loaded the Barrett with ten rounds of MK 211 high-explosive incendiary/armor-piercing ammo, or HEIAP. Inside each round was a layer of explosive zirconium powder and Composition A packed tight around a tungsten core, and when the bullet hit the junction box on the north side of the house at 2,800 feet per second, it exploded, tearing a ragged hole in the wall.
The halogen searchlights flickered, and darkness fell over the ground as Hayes jumped behind the controls and twisted the key. The bulldozer roared to life in a cloud of diesel. Hayes lifted the blade and shoved the stick forward, sending the earthmover clattering across the yard.
But the security floods didn’t stay off long, and Hayes was halfway across the lawn, trying to tie off the stick, when the lights blazed to life, illuminating a platoon of soldiers filing from the pool house.
“JT, he’s got a generator,” Hayes said, securing the control stick into the forward position. “Hey, man, the lights are back on.”
“No shit!” JT shouted. “Just give me a second.”
But Hayes didn’t have a second, because standing in front of him was a soldier with an RPG-7 on his shoulder.
Oh, shit, he thought, watching the soldier’s finger close over the trigger, but before he had a chance to shoot, the Barrett barked from the hill and the soldier’s torso evaporated in a pink mist.
“Owe you one,” Hayes said, diving free from the bulldozer.
He ducked his head, rolled over his shoulder, and came up in a crouch, the UMP45 chattering in his hand. Hayes stitched a burst across the closest target, scooped the blood-spattered RPG from the ground, and circled around the side of the house.
The thunderous boom of the Barrett rolled down the hill a final time, and just before the bulldozer plowed through the north wall of the house, the generator exploded.
“I’m moving to the exfil site,” JT said. “Clock is ticking.”
“Roger that,” Hayes said, his eyes drawn to a bay window with Colonel Vega standing in the den, surrounded by a scrum of soldiers trying to pull him into the next room.
Hayes snapped the RPG to his shoulder, ignoring the rattle of gunfire from his left, and mashed the trigger. The rocket screamed from the launcher and hurtled toward its target, but before it slammed through the glass, Hayes saw the soldiers shoving Vega through a door and into another room.
One of the men stopped and pointed toward the window, and then the RPG detonated, dousing the room in flame and black smoke.
Hayes sprinted to the left, the distant thump thump thump of an approaching helo telling him that Vega was heading toward the roof.
Hayes shucked the empty mag from the submachine gun and shoved a fresh one home on his way to the door, knowing that he was running out of time.
Just get to the roof.
He booted the door and found himself in the back corridor Izzy had drawn on the map. Hayes had two options: He could hook left toward the dining room and the grand staircase or brave the gauntlet of open doors lining the hall to his front and take the service stairs.
Go with what you know, he thought, activating the infrared laser mounted to the top of the submachine gun, flipping the selector to full auto, and creeping forward.
A muzzle inched from the open door to his right. Knowing there was no time to acquire the target, Hayes swung the laser to the right of the frame, over the spot where he imagined the shooter’s body would be, and yanked the trigger. Thwaaaap, thwaaaaap, the submachine gun chattered on full auto.
Hayes hooked into the room, saw a target to his left, and stitched a burst into the man’s body before snapping right and dropping the wounded man with his second shot.
“The hall, he’s in the hall,” a voice yelled as Hayes moved to the door and yanked a frag from his kit. He tugged the pin free and let the spoon fly. One, two, three, he counted in his head, eyes locked on the door across the hall.
Hayes heard the men coming closer but knew there was no time to wait. He hooked the frag out the door and dashed across the hall.
“There!” But before the narco had a chance to fire, the grenade detonated in the hall with an echoing whooomp.
Go now.
Hayes was already moving back into the hall, through the cloud of smoke and the jumble of bodies writhing on the floor. He saw the stairs to his left and raced to the top, taking them two at a time.
He heard the helo coming in, the pitch of the deep chop of the blades cutting through the air, telling him the pilot was settling into a hover. Almost there, he thought, blasting the guard at the top of the landing on the run and then turning to his right, racing up the final set of stairs that led to the roof.
Hayes forced himself into a sprint, lowered his shoulder, and bull-rushed the door. The impact ripped the hinges free, sent the door skidding across the roof, with Hayes a half-step behind.
He launched himself through the doorway, ducked his head, and tucked into a roll.
Off to his right, the he
lo hovered over the roof, its skids a few feet short of touching down. Vega and his two soldiers knelt at the edge of the roof.
Hayes came up on one knee and held the laser steady over the cockpit. He knew the .45 ACP didn’t have the velocity to punch all the way through the thick glass, but he was sure they had enough ass to crack it, and that was all he needed.
Not today, he thought, mashing the trigger to the rear.
Thwaaaaaap.
The bullets smacked into the glass across the pilot’s face, and the moment he saw the canopy spiderweb, the man yanked the stick to the left and banked the helo clear of the house.
“Kill him!” Vega screamed in Spanish to the soldiers.
Hayes dumped the empty UMP and tugged the Ruger MK IV from the small of his back. The integrally suppressed pistol was an assassin’s weapon, virtually silent compared to the throaty chatter of soldiers’ AKs, and the recoil felt impossibly puny in Hayes’s hand.
But he’d been in the game long enough to know that in a gunfight it wasn’t the caliber that mattered, but the placement of the round. Which is why Hayes took his time.
He lined up his shots, ignoring the 7.62 slapping the roof around him, and with a smooth pull of the trigger sent a .22 crashing through the right eye of each of the shooters.
The men crumpled to the ground, and Hayes got to his feet as silence returned to the roof.
“Just you and me now,” he said, centering the pistol on Vega’s chest.
“Whatever they are paying you, I will double it . . . triple it,” the colonel begged, holding his hands in the air.
“Not everything is for sale,” Hayes replied, stopping three paces in front of Vega.
“Then take me in, let the courts decide what to do with me.”
“You still haven’t figured out how this works,” Hayes said, lining up the front sight on the man’s forehead.
“You would shoot an unarmed—?” Vega began, but the thwap of the Ruger in Hayes’s hand ended the question on his lips.
The bullet hit Vega in the center of the forehead and snapped his head back. The colonel took an involuntary step backward, his foot finding nothing but air, and then he was tumbling over the edge.
Hayes holstered the smoking pistol and stepped to the edge of the roof in time to hear Vega’s head bounce off the stone drive with the wet splatter of a ripe melon. He looked down on the man’s lifeless body and the pool of crimson spreading across the stone.
“You’re damn right I would,” he said, before turning back the way he’d come.
Hayes walked through the silent house and out the front door.
“On my way out,” he said over the radio.
“Roger that.”
Hayes eased down the steps and was about to pass Vega’s body when the chirp of a cellphone from the man’s pocket stopped him in his tracks. Hayes knelt beside the man, tugged the phone from his pocket, and flipped it open.
“What’s the status?” a man with a Texas accent demanded.
“Who is this?” Hayes demanded.
“This is Senator Patrick Mendez, who the hell is this?”
“Your worst nightmare.”
“Hayes?” the man hissed. “Is it safe to assume they are dead?”
“Not all of them,” Hayes answered, “but I’ll be seeing you soon.”
“Hayes, wait—”
But he’d already hung up.
57
CARACAS, VENEZUELA
Hayes squeezed through the rusted grate and moved toward the yellow glow of the IR chemlight that JT had left to mark the trail. From the culvert, Hayes moved laterally across the rock face, clearing the first hundred yards without any trouble. But twenty yards shy of the apex he was forced to bend double and claw his way over the loose shale and boulders that lined the terrain.
Hayes took his time, knowing that one misstep would send him tumbling down the hillside, and by the time he made it to the top, his shirt was wet beneath his plate carrier. He paused to catch his breath and savor the breeze that rolled over his body, sending chills up his bare arms. The cool salt air drew his attention north, toward the inky black shadow of the Caribbean Sea.
He was making his way to the flat finger where JT had set up the landing zone when the distant hammer of automatic rifle fire rolled up the incline. Hayes turned, expecting to see a line of army vehicles curling up the drive that led to Bella Vista, but the compound was still and quiet as a grave.
“Things are getting bad down there,” JT said, emerging from the shadows, a pair of night-vision binoculars in his hand.
Hayes flipped up the FGEs and pressed the binos to his eyes.
Down in the valley a large mob was gathered outside a burning building, and figures clutching machine guns and RPGs were firing at a target on the far side of the street.
“Is that the armory?” he asked, a sick feeling welling up in his guts.
“Yeah,” JT said as a flurry of tracers zipped across the street into the mass of soldiers blocking the road.
Fucking Vega, he thought.
“Hey, we did our part,” JT said, clapping him on the shoulder.
Hayes wasn’t so sure, but the approaching buzz of the helo told him there was no time to dwell on the matter.
Waters brought the Mi-17 into a hover and Hayes ducked his head against the downdraft, waiting for the dust and dirt to settle before hustling to the helicopter. He followed JT inside, and by the time Hayes had closed the door and lowered himself into the troop bench, the Russian-built helicopter was airborne.
Waters pivoted the helo north and Hayes waited until they were over the Caribbean Sea before leaning his head against the skin of the helo. The adrenaline of the operation had long since worn off and Hayes was bone tired—worn thin like a pat of butter spread over too much toast.
He closed his eyes, the helo’s vibrations lulling him into the meditative state that came after every mission. For a moment, his mind was as calm and still as the endless black sea that seemed to stretch out forever.
So much death. Deano, Martha, Ford, Cole. And for what?
A tap to the leg tugged Hayes from his thoughts. He opened his eyes to find JT leaning in, the helicopter’s radio headset in his right hand.
“Shaw,” he mouthed.
Great, Hayes thought stuffing the Bose headset over his ears and clicking the transmit button.
“Yeah?”
“You want to tell me why I’m getting shit from Senator Mendez at zero two hundred?” Shaw demanded, his voice still ragged from sleep.
“I think you dialed the wrong number,” Hayes said. “Callers looking for the psychic hotline should hang up and dial 1-800-I-Don’t-Give-a-Fuck.”
“Do you have any idea the penalty that comes with threatening a U.S. senator?” Shaw growled.
“You worried about your job, Levi?”
There was silence on the other end of the line, but when Shaw finally spoke, his voice was ice cold. “Fine, have it your way. Waters is under orders to fly you to Antigua, where an Agency plane is waiting to bring you back to the States.”
“You had your chance to play the boss back in Caracas,” Hayes said. “If memory serves, you took the coward’s way out.”
“Adam, I am warning you, if you are not on that plane—”
Shaw’s threat fell on deaf ears because Hayes had already ripped the headphones from the wall jack and tossed them across the helo.
“What was that all about?” JT asked.
“You trust me, right?” Hayes asked.
“Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
Hayes nodded and got to his feet. “Just want you to know that I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” JT frowned. “What are you sorry fo—”
Before he could finish his question, Hayes had tugged the MK IV from his waistband and crac
ked JT across the side of the head with the suppressor.
“For that,” he said as he grabbed his unconscious friend by the shirt to keep him from falling out of his chair. Hayes buckled him in and then headed for the cockpit.
By the time Waters realized who was standing beside him, it was too late.
“What’s our position?” Hayes asked, noting the nervous look in the man’s eyes when he glanced up at him.
“Here,” Waters said, pointing at a spot on the map.
“I’m going to need you to make a detour,” Hayes said.
“You talked to the boss,” Waters said, “so you know I can’t—”
“I’ll make it easy for you,” Hayes said, bringing the pistol up and aiming at the radio.
He pulled the trigger, the MK IV silent beneath the whine of the turbine. The only sign that Hayes had fired was the smell of gun smoke in the air and the smoke coiling from the hole in the radio.
“You’re fucking crazy,” Waters yelped.
“That’s not nice,” Hayes said, looking out over the canopy and seeing lights off to the east.
“Now, I’m guessing those lights off to the east are Curaçao,” he said, tapping the map strapped to the pilot’s thigh with the suppressor. “All I need you to do is get me close.”
“Fuck it,” Waters said, banking the helo east.
“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” Hayes stuffed the pistol back into his waistband.
He walked back to the cargo door and tugged it open.
“Low and slow,” he yelled.
Waters flipped him the bird but inched back on the throttle and dropped the Russian helicopter down until all he could see was the dark black of the water.
“Catch you on the flip side,” Hayes yelled. Then he jumped.
* * *
—
According to the U.S. government, it should have been impossible for Hayes to travel from Curaçao to the United States without a valid passport. But Treadstone had trained him well, and ten hours after slogging onto shore, Hayes was back in the States.