Cold Barrel Zero (3 page)

IN THE BACK
of a box truck, Hayes laid two packets down on a steel shelf. The magnets inside clunked onto the metal. He picked up a simple Nokia cell phone, dialed a number, and placed it beside the devices.

Each packet was about the size of a hardcover book and had a Nokia bound to the top with electrical tape. The phones' plastic cases had been pried open, and a small piece of breadboard circuitry covered each keypad. As both phones rang, Hayes held the probes of a multimeter across the open wires and checked the current. It was plenty. He reattached the wires to the detonators and went through the continuity on the circuits one last time. Then he handed the packets back to Speed.

“Strong work,” he said.

Speed gave them a last once-over, kept one for himself, and handed the second to Moret. They stowed their packages in messenger bags and hopped out of the back of the truck. Two motorcycles were parked beside it. They climbed on. Green waited behind the wheel of a Nissan pickup, and Foley drove the Ford Taurus.

The bikes pulled out, nearly silent. The two other vehicles followed behind as they left through the gated entrance to the lot. The convoy disappeared around the corner, past a truck-repair depot that was closed for the night.

The box truck would stay behind for a few minutes. Cook stood guard outside. Ward was in the cargo area, leaning over a laptop on top of the communications rack. She handled comms and the tracking of the GPS in the packets. Hayes crouched beside her. He ran his finger over the gold cross embossed in leather on the cover of his Bible, then opened it and laid it on his knees.

His headlamp glowed red on the book of Matthew, the betrayal of Jesus. He read the passage where a disciple cuts off the ear of a servant of the high priest:
Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.

Hayes turned to the Gospel according to Mark, then Luke, then John. Only Matthew mentioned that line.

He thumbed back to the Last Supper and Jesus's instructions:
And he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.

The last verse he found with no trouble. The spine was creased and the pages seemed to open to it on their own. It was from Matthew:
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Hayes ran the back of his hand along his chin and read it again.

“More codes?” Ward asked.

He watched her for a moment before he spoke. “In a way. Reading, mainly.”

“Don't spoil the ending for me. We found the target. They're at the airport.”

“On the move?”

“Yeah.”

Hayes closed the book. He had waited years for this. It was vulnerable in transit. He had one chance.

“Execute.”

The armored truck rumbled along Sepulveda Boulevard, approaching the tunnel where the road passed under the runways of Los Angeles International Airport. The man at the passenger window reached his hand into the bag from In-N-Out Burger. He shoved three fries in his mouth as he gazed at the multicolored towers rising one hundred feet into the night sky around LAX.

“The loose ones are the best, man,” he said as they inched through traffic into the tunnel. He was the messenger. In a normal armored truck, he would make the pickups. The man in the middle was the guard; he would stand outside the truck with his gun drawn and provide cover. The driver would stay with the truck, the most lethal weapon any of them had. This, however, wasn't a normal truck. The selectors on their firearms went from single-shot to full auto. Only a handful of security companies in the United States were authorized to use those guns. Most of the ones who did dealt with nuclear facilities.

“Whoa,” said the driver as he stood on the brake. “Look lively.”

Horns blared. Brake lights lit the tunnel red. The Nissan truck in front of them slammed to a stop. It had brushed fenders with a Ford Taurus that was trying to change lanes. The drivers argued through their open windows, blocking the path ahead. Traffic stalled, hemmed in the armored truck on all sides. A plane landed on the airstrip overhead, and the screech of tires filled the tunnel.

“We're sitting in a kill zone,” the guard said. “Get around them.”

The messenger dropped the paper bag to the floor and lifted his MP7 across his chest. The driver twisted the wheel to force his way into traffic, but two motorcycles were coming up fast on either side, between traffic, splitting the lanes.

“Where the hell did they come from?” With all its armor, the truck had huge blind spots. But he hadn't heard a thing as they approached. The bikes' headlights glared in the side-views, blinding the three men in the truck.

“Just my luck, getting killed for an empty truck.” The messenger slid a metal tab to his right and rested the muzzle of his submachine gun in the gun port.

The pickup's reverse lights lit up, and it backed toward them. “He's going to hit us!” the guard shouted.

The Nissan's bumper stopped a foot from the front of the armored truck just as the motorcycles passed on either side. The one on the left swerved around the pickup as it shifted into drive and pulled ahead. The driver of the Taurus shouted a few more curses at the Nissan as it drove off, then he continued on as well.

The traffic eased, and the armored truck went with it, out of the tunnel. The messenger kept his gun up, his eyes darting around.

“Relax, dude,” the driver said. “Shut the port. We've got run-flats and armor good up to fifty-cal.”

The messenger let his gun fall to the end of its sling, then lifted the manifest that detailed what they were supposed to be picking up.

“A coffer?” He turned to the guard. “What is that?”

“I think it's like a dresser or a trunk.”

The driver pulled through the airport gates and drove along the tarmac. He glanced at the manifest, the photocopied bill of lading written in a language he couldn't understand.

“I thought it was a safe.”

A squad of armed guards waited around the plane. The messenger laughed as he saw them and the weapons they were carrying.

“This better be some dresser.”

He reached down for the paper bag between his feet, but by now the fries were cold.

The cost of security on an armored truck is dead space. The narrow, high windows blind those in the cab to anything that comes close alongside. The convex mirrors bolted onto the side-views help, but in the tunnel they had been blinded by the bikes' headlights. As an added measure, Green in the Nissan pickup had distracted the guards by nearly reversing into their front bumper. There was no way that anyone inside the truck could have seen the motorcyclists attach the devices to the rear wheel wells.

THE BOX TRUCK
parked outside the cargo terminals. A blue vinyl sign on its side read
A&S Fire Protection Systems.
Hayes jumped out, pulled a ramp down from the rear, and waited. The cargo offices were closed. He looked through an open gate to the runway. The perimeter security was a joke.

Two headlights appeared at the end of the access road. Speed and Moret cruised toward the truck on their motorcycles and drove straight up the ramp into the back. Moret pulled her helmet off and let her hair down. It flowed past her shoulders.

“Both wheels?” Hayes asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“They never stopped, never checked,” Speed said. “We're good.”

Foley drove up in the Taurus, the Nissan pickup right behind him, as Hayes lifted his spotting scope and watched the armored truck enter the cargo area through a gate a quarter of a mile away. It cleared security and parked beside an Emirates SkyCargo plane, a triple-seven freighter. The ground crew parked a scissor lift beside the hold and began to unload it.

Hayes examined the guards. He noted the MP7s on slings, pistols on chest rigs, stances at once relaxed and commanding. They looked like operators, not ten-dollar-an-hour security. His scope passed over the guard who stood outside the armored truck, then he brought his attention back and fine-tuned the focus.

“Hmm. Little Bill,” Hayes said.

“Is that ironic?” Moret asked. None of the guards looked like they weighed less than two hundred pounds.

“No. His dad's also Bill. I oversaw his SERE course at Swick. He's former Special Forces. Good guy; twenty-four with four kids when I met him.”

Hayes would have preferred more easily rolled opponents. He did have the advantage of having designed a lot of their training. He could account for them, and, most important, they would recognize a detonator when they saw one.

Thirty minutes later, the ground crew rolled a crate onto the lift, lowered it, then loaded it into the back of the armored truck.

Disguising the shipment was good tactics, but when you do the low-value, hide-in-plain-sight trick, you have to go all the way. When Hayes worked with the Secret Service on presidential security overseas, he had a chance to watch the Brits do it right. Americans would never settle for less than a sixteen-car package for the president, while the Royal Protection Branch liked to shuttle the queen around London in an unmarked Vauxhall sedan. These men didn't have the nerve to go that far with tonight's shipment. It had gone regular cargo out of the Emirates, but the extra security on the ground stateside gave it away.

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.