Cold Barrel Zero (11 page)

Caro sat back, and watched the dawn light streak across the sky. “It's too late. There are too many.” It was a nice bit of camouflage, but there were other ways to get Hayes and Byrne. They were only delaying the inevitable.

Riggs fumed as the trucks disappeared. He gripped the door handle so hard his knuckles went white.

“The girl with Byrne. Where is she?” Caro asked.

“The Island Colony Motel.”

Caro watched a pair of women in tank tops waiting at a bus stop, their bodies displayed for anyone to see. The weakness of the women in this country was their immodesty, their vanity. He weighed the knife in his hand. All Caro needed to do was draw a few lines across Byrne's girlfriend's face with a blade, and he would cooperate.

“Let's get her,” he said.

WE MET THE
rest of the team at a rally point about eight miles away. It was a 1980s motor home parked on an access road in an area of corrugated-aluminum shipping depots and factories. Half of the buildings looked abandoned.

Hayes's team had a decent trauma setup in the RV. I took care of Green's neck and splinted the broken fingers. He would live, but it would take months of physical therapy if he ever wanted to hold a fork with his left hand again, and he might never have the dexterity to insert an IV. His hands were his livelihood, his reason for being. The physical piece would be the easiest part to recover.

As I worked, I fell seamlessly into the rhythm of the team, but I couldn't get my mind off that box, the crate Hayes had stolen containing God knew what. I wasn't going all in yet. But I would do what I needed to get me and Kelly to safety.

I finished on Green, and before I could say anything, Hayes spoke. “Your wife, or girlfriend. Where is she?”

I borrowed a phone and checked my messages. When I gave it back, he removed the battery, then pulled the SIM card and cracked it into four pieces.

“Island Colony Motel.” I gave him the address. “Where are we?”

“Close to the border, maybe twenty minutes if we move now.”

We took a 1998 Honda Civic. Hayes didn't hotwire it. He took out a set of keys he called jigglers and rattled them around in the ignition until it started. I leaned forward in the passenger seat, willing the throttle down, but Hayes kept it at three miles per hour over the limit in the right-hand lane. We blended in with the flow of traffic.

“Thanks for taking care of Green.”

“Don't mention it.”

“You should have come with me to MARSOC.” That's the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, which had been carved out of Force Recon.

“That wasn't for me.”

“You ended up in shock-trauma?”

“Yes. The forward surgical teams. I wanted to be close to the battlefield, save who I could. Did you say Green was your
medic?
”

He nodded and picked up on my line of thinking. Medics were army.

“In MARSOC, after I got commissioned I ended up working with a lot of the Seventh Special Forces guys. We were all part of a joint task force. I got into backpacking with them, and I liked the SF crowd, the culture piece, the languages. It's more than just kicking in doors. So when they told me I should try for selection to the unit, I figured what the hell, it's just a long hike.”

A lot of people use the term Special Forces to mean any American commandos, but the proper name for that is Special Operations Forces. Special Forces refers to a particular U.S. Army unit with a specific mission: to go into foreign countries and train the locals to fight. Popularly known as Green Berets, they spend as much time cramming languages and geography as they do shooting and grappling. People say that they're anthropologists with guns.

They are one of the main sources for the army's elite counterterrorist unit, once known as Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, or Delta Force, then Army Compartmented Elements, then Combat Applications Group. They'd changed it again, but I hadn't heard the new name.

The guys in it never called it anything. They didn't talk about it, just spoke elliptically about “the unit.” I'd heard about Delta selection. Just a long hike, my ass. They take the hardest Special Forces and Rangers—elite units to begin with—and usually only a dozen or so from each two-hundred-and-forty-man class of candidates make it through. The weeding-out culminates in a forty-mile trek with a heavy load, back and forth over a mountain of sheer cliffs, bushwhacking for twenty-four hours straight with the instructors doing everything they can to torture you. It was open to all branches of the military, but going from the Marines to Delta was rare and insanely difficult.

“Army,” I said, and shook my head.

“I know, I know.”

I found myself trusting him, which scared me. I thought back to what the colonel had said:
He could turn you without your even knowing it.

Hayes could blend in anywhere, win confidences, exploit them. He had the perfect look, mixed ethnicity, with features that would let him pass as a local all over the world.

I remember him talking about that with me and one of the corporals. I'd finally gotten up the nerve to ask him about his background. Even Hayes didn't know. He'd been given up for adoption as an infant but never found a permanent placement. He bounced around with foster parents, a new town, a new family, every few years. That must have been part of what drew him to Special Forces, his ability to slip from one culture to another. No wonder the guy was a chameleon. He'd never had a home. Never knew where he belonged. An outsider, he always had guys coming after him for fights, and it taught him how to hold his own.

We passed a speed trap. A police cruiser pulled out behind us and turned on its flashers and sirens.

Kelly sat down on the bed of room 220 at the Island Colony Motel. Her face was red from exertion. After being cooped up in the room all night, she needed fresh air. She didn't want to go too far, so she'd opted for hill repeats on the steep grade just down the street: a quarter mile at a 12 percent grade, over and over, a dozen times until her chest was heaving and every muscle on her body stood out in clear definition.

She checked her phone. She had been calling everyone she could think of who might be able to help, getting nowhere, trying to find out why they couldn't fly and where the hell Tom had gone.

No one had called. Where was he?

She went into the bathroom, showered, then wrapped herself in a towel. As she crossed into the bedroom, there was a knock on the door. The clock radio said six fifteen in the morning. Too early for housekeeping. She hoped there wasn't some problem with the deposit. She needed a base.

“Kelly Britten?” the voice said through the door. “I'm a detective with the San Diego Police. I'm sorry to bother you. It's about Thomas Byrne.”

She looked through the peephole. A man stood on the other side of the door, hands held loosely in front of him, eyes away. Kelly figured him for a detective. “What is it?” she asked.

“He's been hurt.”

“What?”

“Can I come in?”

“Jesus. Okay. But can you hold on a minute while I get dressed? And do you have credentials? Things have been a little crazy.”

He patted his pockets, then reached inside his jacket, where a pistol hung in a shoulder holster.

Hayes and I watched the cop speed toward us, then change lanes and pass us on the left. I sat back and tried to relax. We drove another three-quarters of a mile and exited the 5 onto a four-lane highway.

“So why is Riggs trying to kill me?” I asked.

“Don't take it personally. He's trying to kill all of us. He told you about those dead interpreters?”

I nodded. “Said you killed them.”

“How?”

“Gathered them up and executed them.”

Hayes said nothing.

“What did happen?” I asked.

He palmed the wheel through a right on red, took a turn through a shopping center, then checked the rearview.

“We were part of a joint task force. It was a mixed unit, and I handled an element of the advance force operations, the black Special Ops. Someone at Central Command decided that his protégé Riggs would look better to the promotion boards if he had a combat joint duty, so they rotated him in as a CO.

“Riggs had been a decent pilot but spent most of his career riding a chair. He'd never worked Special Operations before. That's fine. Normally, they all make the same mistake: overly complicated battle plans. They want to do everything with drones and Hellfires and helicopters, never get their hands dirty. Instead of listening to the men on the ground, they spend all their time glued to a video teleconference, micromanaging and getting micromanaged by the CENTCOM boys in Tampa.”

His eyes went to the mirrors again.

“But this guy was different. I don't know what kind of political cover he had—he was young for an oh-six—but he had decided he was Lawrence of Arabia. The CIA handled the black money. They'd bring in a C-130 with pallets full of cash. No accounting. Bundles went missing. Riggs was skimming, and we knew he was up to something with a few of the local clans and militias.

“He was taking meetings with the men who ran the borderlands. It was a tribe the colonial powers had cut up when they drew the boundaries, divided it among three countries. They controlled the high mountain passes. For two centuries, they'd been smugglers. It was in their blood. We didn't know what Riggs was up to; hopefully just making himself feel important, handing the cash out to the locals. That was fine. It would make our job easier.

“We didn't really care about him buying off tribes. We just needed a safe house near the border. We were barely ever there.”

“Riggs said he was your commander.”

“On paper. But mostly we were out working in denied areas on our own or taking commands that came from the Pope—the head of JSOC. I met Riggs face-to-face only a handful of times.”

“You were on an infiltration mission?” I wanted to find out what he had been doing, what they had brought back with them, what was in that box.

“That's right.”

“What were you after?”

He smiled. “You should have done intel, Byrne. Our job was simple. There was a very bad guy working in the region. We were operating autonomously in the wild for months on end. We had developed our own intelligence stream on him, and he was about to get his hands on a very dangerous item. We had to stop him.”

“What was it?”

“Something you don't want falling into the hands of a lethal nonstate actor.”

A terrorist.

“Al-Qaeda? Islamic State?”

“No. Our target was an altogether more frightening guy. Among Western intelligence agencies, he's known as Samael. The name comes from an archangel in Jewish lore, the seducer, accuser, and destroyer, the angel of death. Literally it means ‘poison of God.' The Mossad were the first to speculate that this man existed.

“He has an intelligence background, but no one knows if he has a sponsor or if he's freelance. His fingerprints are on a variety of operations and militant groups: Lebanon, the Af-Pak border—”

“Afghanistan?”

“The campaign of strikes against our forward bases. He provided weaponry that could beat the anti-rocket defenses. Really did some damage. Camp Halo, FOB Storm King, Camp Dagger, Mustang. Rolled back the whole front.”

“Dagger.” The blood on my hands. The dead woman. Samael had been behind it.

“Yes. But there are no reliable photos of him. He can come and go as he pleases, could waltz through JFK if he wanted to. Some people think he's been made up to justify intelligence spending, keep the black budgets fat, a bogeyman to replace bin Laden.”

“Do you?”

He shook his head.

“I've seen him twice. We learned he was trying to acquire a certain kind of weapon, was in the last stages of the deal, taking delivery from dissatisfied scientists employed by a hostile nation. Our plan was to enter that nation, do a long incursion in denied territory, and stop him. We'd chased him halfway around the world. If we were discovered behind enemy lines, it would have been considered an act of war, triggered a regional conflict or worse.

“So we go. It was a hard slog in a denied area with no support. We went through the mountains, high altitude. We had one sleeping bag, and when a guy went hypothermic we would load him in it until he could talk again. It was a tough route. The enemy figured no American would survive it, so they left it unguarded. We neutralize the package. Kill a few guys. Lose some skin but nothing too bad. The hard part is over, and we're on our way back through the high desert to the safe house, hot food, and a shower. I was finally going to get to go home and see my daughter.

“And then we were ambushed. The bad guys had good infantry maneuver. We close and kill the enemy. A group of them get away. From the dead and what they left behind, we find out they have brand-new American M4s. They have clean American hundred-dollar bills in shrink wrap. Worse, they had our routes and extraction points. We hadn't given anyone our extracts. I lost one of my sergeants. We're good, but, frankly, I can't believe we managed to fight them back. We get within a hundred meters, and I see their leader.”

“Samael.”

“Yes. And I finally understood how he had been able to live so long as a ghost. He has blue eyes and can easily pass for Western European.”

“Where is he from?”

“We don't know anything about him for sure. There are rumors. That he joined the fighters when he was a child, not as a soldier but as a
haliq.
”

In the borderlands, in the second generation of war, there are no women. The men live in the mountains and the most powerful among them take younger boys as lovers—
haliqs,
they call them, or “beardless boys.” They treat them like spoiled little princesses. It's the strangest goddamn thing I've ever seen, these bitter old warlords, eyes and fingers missing, courting and cooing over these boys, who act like high-maintenance mistresses, wearing kohl eyeliner and dancing for the fighters' entertainment in the middle of a war zone.

“One of the more over-the-top rumors has him killing the warlord and taking his place. Whatever happened, he disappeared from the view of our intelligence agencies. It's so simple: we'd been searching for a foreigner, and we never found him because he looked like one of us.”

“But how did he find you?”

“Someone from our side was helping Samael. At the end of the ambush, we came under heavy mortar fire. Visibility went to zero. A sandstorm came in hard, scoured the paint off our vehicles. He got away.