Cold Barrel Zero, Page 23

  “It’s starting,” Hayes said. “Samael’s attack. He was waiting until he got the money back. They’re all on the ship?”

  “Yes. That’s the last thing Ward confirmed.”

  “Why is Riggs going along with Samael?”

  “I don’t know,” Hayes said.

  “Is there a way to take them down?” I asked.

  “We have the gear. The RHIB we picked you up in, the Drägers. It’s all cached. Foley. Foley saved us.”

  I looked out the rear window. A few of the homeless men and women were gathering, taking an interest in our presence.

  “There’s a way onto that ship?” I asked.

  Hayes nodded.

  “And off?”

  Hayes looked at me. “Unlikely. This is our last chance. We’ll leave everything out there. I can’t ask you to give that up. We’ve got a few caches left: money, IDs. Take it, Byrne, and run.”

  I took a deep breath, looked to Kelly, sitting in the passenger seat. I counted the stitches threaded through her skin.

  I was done running.

  “I don’t want you to have any illusions,” Hayes said. “This isn’t about clearing our names. If we fail, we’ll go down as terrorists, traitors, maybe even take the fall for whatever they’re planning. Even if we live, they may hunt us for the rest of our lives.”

  I hadn’t been living these past two years, just dying on the installment plan, trying to make things right. If we didn’t stop Riggs and Samael, a lot of people were going to get hurt. I could do some good here. If I was going to throw my life away, I might as well make it count.

  I watched Kelly rest. I would miss her. But I didn’t want to think about it too hard. I was exhausted beyond reckoning. In the end, it was selfish. I was going to find the man who had hurt the people I loved and take him down.

  “I’m in,” I said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and was about to speak when Moret turned with a Toughbook laptop in her hand. She held it out to Hayes. “You need to hear this,” she said. “They have your wife and daughter.”

  Chapter 42

  WE READIED OUR gear on the concrete floor of an abandoned boat works. We were just south of a lagoon, on land cut off by train tracks, about twenty miles from where we had picked up Hayes. The building smelled like low tide and decaying fish, but it had a fenced-off yard and a boat ramp that was cracking up but still serviceable.

  Hayes stacked ammo boxes and checked inside. It was green-and-white-tip .50-caliber ammunition—high-explosive incendiary armor-piercing rounds, each a half an inch thick and as long as my hand.

  I could tell something was off with him, had been ever since he heard about his family.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Not until I know they’re okay.”

  Going after his home was a tactic to destroy him, turn duty against family, distract him from his real target. It was working.

  “God forgive me,” he said. “This is where I need to be.”

  We would be wearing and carrying twenty thousand dollars’ worth of diving equipment—rebreathers, fins, dry bags—and had packed enough small arms for a squad: HK416 carbines, an SR-25 sniper rifle, MP7 submachine guns, and navy-spec SIG Sauer P226s that would have no problem shooting after being submerged.

  You could do a lot with sixty-eight million.

  “Foley.” Hayes looked over the gear and then shut his eyes. “He never let me down.”

  Moret zipped her sniper rifle shut in the waterproof bag, and then pivoted the .50 cal M2 heavy machine gun to the side so she could double-check its mount at the bow of the RHIB. She wore sunglasses to preserve her night vision. She wasn’t trained on the combat-diving rigs we were using, and as the best shot of us by far, we needed her watching over us on the .50 and the SR-25.

  Hayes and I finished loading the gear and climbed onto the RHIB, a thirty-three-foot-long fast boat with a turbo diesel. Kelly finished the radio checks and gave me a handheld unit.

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  I climbed onto the seawall and stood beside her.

  “I wish you were. You’ve saved my ass twice. But you’ve got a grade-two concussion. And we’re diving with closed-circuit rebreathers. You wouldn’t make it.”

  “Are you going to make it?”

  I ducked the question. “Before, you asked if there was another woman. There was someone. Someone I loved. She got hurt and I couldn’t save her. A lot of people close to me have died, died with my hands on them. It messed me up pretty bad. It’s why I kept running, kept people out.”

  “Their deaths are not your fault.”

  “But—”

  She put her hand on my shoulder and looked at me squarely. “You can’t live like that.” I could see the concern in her eyes.

  “I know that now.”

  “You can’t think it’s your fault.”

  “I know it in my head, but still—”

  She nodded. “Don’t believe it, Tom. You’re a good guy.”

  “I haven’t felt this way about anyone in a long time. I didn’t think I could. Until you. I need you to live, Kelly.” I handed her a case.

  She opened it. Inside there were two hundred thousand dollars and three passports. “Those won’t get you into the U.S. or Europe, but they will work everywhere else.”

  “You pushing me away?”

  “No. I need you to live. Someone needs to live. To get the truth out.”

  “But Tom, this is crazy—”

  “Please,” I said. “I need to do this. I made it out when so many others didn’t. Maybe this is why. They need me here.”

  She started to speak, then stopped, swallowed. I could see that she understood.

  “I want to fight. I’ll come with you.”

  “You’ll have your chance. Every badge in the U.S. is looking for you.”

  “You’re not a killer, Tom.”

  “Prove me wrong, then. Live through this.”

  I put my hand to her cheek and kissed her.

  “Go ahead,” she said, and put her hand over mine. “You’re not going to kill me, Tom. You can say it.”

  “I love you.”

  “Likewise.” She kissed me, then stepped back and slung her carbine over her shoulder. “I’ll see you soon.”

  I stepped into the RHIB.

  “We ready?” Moret asked.

  “Ready,” I said.

  She gunned the engines, and we took off toward the Shiloh. The reflected light from town glimmered and ran like mercury on the surface of the water. I watched Kelly recede in the distance, saw her climb into the truck, but soon the waves came, and it was all I could do to hold on as we launched off the back of a shoulder-high breaker.

  There are three ways to take a hostile ship: fast-rope down from a helicopter, throw caving ladders over the side and come over the gunwales, or blow a hole in the hull and enter through the breach.

  The first two were out. There was no helicopter. We didn’t have the numbers to shoot our way through the whole ship. Also, the men on board were simply hired guns who had no reason to doubt Riggs’s version of events. They thought they were doing the right thing, and Hayes preferred not to kill them.

  Even if we could somehow make it to the cell where Nazar was being held, Hayes would have to open it, and that would take time. He had walked me through the basics of the tool he would use to open the door. He needed two minutes, at least; an eternity in an operation like this.

  We had to find some way to hold Riggs’s men off without killing them or getting killed ourselves.

  Hayes had figured it out.

  “The water,” he said. “We’ll breach below the waterline and flood a compartment. The water will keep them out and give us time to work.”

  “Has that ever been done before?”

  “No. Since World War Two, there’s been only one mission with combat divers against a ship, during the invasion of Panama. This is definitely not SOP.”

 
; “Will it work?”

  “We’re going to find out.”

  We rode on in silence, Moret at the wheel of the RHIB.

  She called out three minutes, and Hayes turned to me. “If we get Nazar out, and I’m stuck behind, I want you to take her and head for shore.”

  “We’re not going to leave you behind.”

  “It’s not your decision. I need to finish this.”

  “We’re going to get her, and you’re coming home with us.”

  “You get Nazar, you go.”

  I watched him for a moment. Nazar could testify to what really happened at the massacre. Hayes still believed that the truth mattered. That people would do the right thing. That Riggs and corruption couldn’t win.

  “You have faith,” I said. “After everything.”

  “I don’t know anymore. But if I’m going to die, I’d like to die believing in everything I fought for.”

  As we rose and plunged over the swells, Hayes did a final check on my diving rig.

  It had been over a decade since I had used the Dräger rebreather. Dräger diving was one of those activities, like riding a motorcycle, where you wish you had a little less medical knowledge.

  The rebreather isn’t like regular scuba tanks, which contain a breathable mix of air. The Dräger recycles your own breath, filtering out carbon dioxide and replacing it with pure oxygen. It releases no bubbles, allowing for complete stealth, and is an eighth the size of scuba tanks.

  The largest tank on my back contained dry chemicals with the consistency of cat litter, primarily lime—a base that can be as caustic as acid but on the other end of the pH scale. That would absorb the carbon dioxide, and a small computer would add just enough oxygen to keep me alive.

  Hayes had given me a refresher on the apparatus, pointing to the different elements, while all I could think about were the scratches and dents and signs of age on it. The equipment looked like it had fallen off a truck.

  “That’s the diluent. Don’t touch it or you’ll die. And this is pure oxygen. Ditto. And this is the bailout. Lose that…you get the idea. And remember, you’re breathing your own exhaust.” He gave me a half smile. “So relax.”

  Or else I’d die, exhale too much for the Dräger to keep up. And if my regulator got knocked out of my mouth before I could seal it, water would rush through my loop, dissolve the lime, and pour into my mouth a slurry—known as a caustic cocktail—that was corrosive enough to eat through metal.

  Relax.

  And the Dräger was keeping me alive; forget about the real threats ahead.

  “One minute!” Moret shouted.

  We pulled our fins on and strapped our dive bags and submachine guns across our chests. They were over-the-beach modified MP7s and could fire even when full of water.

  Moret brought the boat to idle and loaded a strap of high-explosive rounds into the .50 cal. Hayes and I sat on the gunwale. He spat in his mask and wiped the inside.

  “You know why I gave you such a tough time, right?”

  “I just figured you were a hard-ass.”

  “Because you were the best corpsman—not just that, the best guy I had. And I wanted to push you. Byrne, you saved the rest of the squad at K Thirty-Eight. I would have bled out without you. You were our best shot then, and you’re our best shot now.”

  He slapped me on the shoulder.

  “Thank you, Doc,” he said. “Let’s roll.”

  He pulled his mask down and slipped backward into the water.

  Chapter 43

  THE MECHANIC WATCHED Bradac disappear among the morning commuters streaming toward Dupont Circle, then turned away and walked south on Connecticut.

  He stopped in front of a hotel lounge and stared through the plate-glass windows at the TV screen mounted over the bar.

  CNN showed standoff barricades going up around the White House, the Pentagon, the Capitol Building, and the New York Stock Exchange. Armored Humvees rolled into the downtowns of America’s cities, and soldiers with automatic rifles and German shepherds patrolled the airports and key transport hubs.

  The terror alert had gone out.

  He needed to keep moving. The Mechanic broke protocol and messaged Caro. They know, he wrote. How can they know?

  He was walking down P Street away from the crowds, through a quiet section of turn-of-the-century town houses, when the message came back.

  Because I told them. All is well. Proceed as planned.

  Caro put down his encrypted cell and leaned against the ship’s railing. Waves crashed into the side of the Shiloh’s hull.

  His deputies had painted the online networks with chatter warning of an attack. Why tip off the authorities? He wished he could explain it all to the Mechanic, but there was no time. There was the simple purpose of distraction, like the British had used against the Ottomans in the Sinai campaign. While the Americans ringed their landmarks with steel barriers and overmuscled police, they’d left their soft belly exposed, blinded themselves to their real weaknesses: sentimentality, overreaction.

  But Caro’s game was more complex. He had been planting the seeds for this moment for years. Every scrap of intel, every bread crumb he fed to Riggs—it all pointed to the wrong enemies. And after the bombs blew, and the Americans’ anger raged, it would overcome all reason, and they would launch themselves into attacks, into wars like those that had bled America in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was the only way to tear down an empire.

  All the while it would be his voice whispering in their ears.

  For months he had warned Riggs and his circle of such an attack, had railed against U.S. complacency. When the bomb hit, it would only cement his rumors as truth, and he would lure them toward quagmire and bloodshed.

  Caro looked to the Shiloh’s bridge, where Riggs was standing behind glass, thirty feet overhead. He might be able to decipher Caro’s role in the bombing. He was the only one who knew all the details of their collaboration.

  Kasem had already executed Riggs’s men and taken the money. Caro stepped inside and began to climb toward his target. Within the hour he would kill Riggs himself.

  Chapter 44

  AFTER THE LONG ride to the Shiloh, action came as a relief. Riggs had anchored in the wind shadow of the Catalina Islands. To conserve our oxygen tanks, we approached the ship by turtlebacking: swimming on the surface, on our backs, with our gear and guns rigged to our bellies.

  We moved through the darkness by dead reckoning. I had forgotten the terror of the open ocean at night, with swells and currents dragging us back and nothing but cold black water for miles. Hayes carried the attack board, a mounted compass and watch used to navigate on combat swimming missions. Its tritium hands gave off the faintest green glow.

  We stopped one mile off the starboard side of the Shiloh, far enough out that the crew wouldn’t be able to see us. We switched to our regulators and let the air out of our buoyancy vests. Once we had dived to eighteen feet, we continued underwater.

  I could hear and feel the ship well before I saw it. Its turbines churned and pulsed the water. As we moved closer, I could see a shadow, a deeper black, and then I recognized the outline of the hull.

  “Expect it when you least expect it” was a combat diver motto. They would wait for the killing hours before dawn, for bad weather, for their targets to take cover and grow bored, and then they would strike.

  Our plan was to disable the ship first. Then we would breach the hull below the waterline, flood a compartment, and enter. We had four charges to lay down. Two on the driveshafts just forward of the propellers would immobilize the Shiloh. Two more shaped charges would cut two holes through the hull in the compartment that contained Nazar’s cell, fill it with water, and give us a way in.

  We started with the explosives on the props, which were the easiest to place, satchel bombs full of C-4 on a remote RF detonator. We came around the stern twenty feet underwater, then rose to six feet. The diffraction of moonlight allowed us to read the vessel’s name, reflec
ted upside down on the surface of the water. I followed as Hayes dived into the black. We had no lights, so he went by feel, counting the riveted panels on his way down.

  He returned one minute later, materializing out of the lower depths, and gave me the A-OK. We cruised in shallow water up the port side of the ship, then Hayes signaled for me to stop. He had one shaped charge lashed to his gear bag. I had the other.

  We found the seams in the hull we would use as guides, about twenty feet apart, then dived down. I counted the steel plates by feel in the blackness as we descended. My respiratory rate was elevated, but acceptable. The silence, the dark; it was strangely peaceful, but that wouldn’t last.

  My explosives for breaching the hull were on a two-foot-square metal frame. Each side was a linear-shaped charge, and the corners were hinged so that I could carry it collapsed flat as we swam.

  I opened it. The corners clicked tight. When the long strips of explosive blew, they would shoot copper against the steel of the hull, slicing a neat hole. In theory, at least.

  I laid the frame against the hull, easing the magnets down to avoid any noise. As soon as I placed the charge, I started to float up. My buoyancy was off from dropping the weight. The light filtered through the water as I neared the surface.

  I reached around to my vest and vented. The bubbles rose. If the guards on the ship saw them, they would know we were here.

  With my buoyancy neutral again, I dived down, lost in the blackness. Running a hand along the body of the ship to orient myself, I found what felt like my seam and swam back to my charge.

  A hand closed on my shoulder. I threw my arm out, but the hand squeezed—two short, two long—and I realized it was Hayes. That was one of our signals. I don’t know how he found me in that obscurity. He checked my explosives rig and double-primed it.

  We swam under the hull, running the double-stranded detonation cord out behind us. As we sank into the depths, I could feel the pressure building against my chest. We crossed under and began to rise on the starboard side.