Cold Shot (22 page)

Jon’s voice took on a southern accent as he repeated the words. Kyra had never heard him talk that way but it sounded oddly natural coming out of his mouth. “And then he told me something that I never forgot. He said, ‘Don’t you never point that gun at anyone unless you’re gonna kill him, ’cause there are two kinds of people in this world . . . those who’ve killed people and those who haven’t. Once you become the former, you cain’t never go back to being the latter.’” Jon pulled out the gas stove and closed the toolbox. “I’m glad you didn’t join that group.”

“Did you ever kill anyone? When you were in Iraq?”

Jon avoided her gaze as he set the stove up. Kyra could tell he didn’t want to answer the question. She was surprised when he did. “Mari and I were assigned to Task Force North in ’06,” he finally said. “We spent time hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi together . . . worked the case for a couple of years, taking apart insurgent networks. I found some evidence that the Iraqis were smuggling munitions through a Syrian border town and shipping the goods to a transit point in al-Yusufiah . . . right in the middle of the Triangle of Death. The Rangers and Delta Force launched a raid on the place . . . big fat mansion right in the middle of this dirty little town. We were on a rooftop doing overwatch when things went pear-shaped. A couple of mortar crews started dropping rounds on the teams. The sniper team near us took a round. I grabbed their rifle and found that first crew on top of a mosque. Then I put a .50-caliber in one of them . . . hit him center mass. The round must’ve punched right through his heart. His body seized up for a second when the bullet went through him. It left a hole big enough for me to see daylight through the scope.”

He stopped talking and ran his hands through his hair. Kyra had been with him long enough to know his body language.
This hurts,
she knew, but she didn’t say anything. Maybe he needed to get it out.

Jon started again after a minute. “I didn’t even think after that. I shot his partner in the face and watched his head bust apart like a fat melon. I guess their friends didn’t like that much. They zeroed us . . . put a round on the roof behind us, missed us by a couple dozen feet. Mari was on her feet when it hit. The shock wave would’ve blown her off the roof if I hadn’t grabbed her. It was five stories down.”

“Knight in shining armor, Jon,” Kyra said. “She didn’t stand a chance after that.”

Jon fiddled with the gas stove, screwing a fuel canister to the intake. Kyra watched his face. Jon had always been a hard target, even for her, and she wondered how Kathy Cooke had ever cracked that wall. Kyra read body language like most people read English but her partner still was a cipher most days. But today, this morning, she saw pain in his eyes. “She’s not the kind to settle down. Mari hung around Langley for a couple of years, punching her tickets at headquarters until she got offered her first chief-of-station post. I was done with the field, she wasn’t, and that was that.”

Kyra nodded. “You were a pretty good shot with that rifle last night. It’s at least a half mile from the hill down to the base,” she offered, trying to shift the subject to something less painful for him.

“Not that good . . . but good enough, I guess. It helped to have a big scope,” Jon demurred. He smiled at some memory. “My father made me practice on his old M1 Garand for hours, dry-firing in the living room. He always said, ‘You gotta be able to focus on that target, ’cause when the bad man is on the move, that cold shot might be the only one you get.’”

“What’s a cold shot?” Kyra asked.

“When you fire a rifle, the barrel heats up and expands. The more rounds you fire, the more it expands. That expansion causes each bullet to wobble a little bit more and the gun gets a little less accurate each time you fire,” Jon explained. “Doesn’t matter at close range, but over a long distance it can make the difference between a hit and a miss. So ‘when the bad man is on the move,’ you might only get the first round you shoot when the barrel is cold. Miss that and the target gets harder and harder to hit each time you pull the trigger. Doesn’t help that he knows you’re shooting at him then either.” Jon finished setting up the stove and set it on the tailgate. “Where’d you learn to shoot? Did the Agency teach you?”

Kyra rested her head on her knees and stared at the man for a long minute. “You know I grew up near Charlottesville? A little town on the James River called Scottsville?” she asked.

“You’ve mentioned it.”

“Everyone out there hunts, even the girls. The first day of deer season, half of my school was always off in the woods. I had a boyfriend when I was fifteen . . . cute guy named Matt. He took me on one of his hunting trips and gave me one of his twenty-gauge shotguns.” Kyra looked around at the forest. “I was so anxious to shoot that gun that I pulled the trigger on the first animal I saw. There was a raccoon up in this pine tree, and I lined up on it and shot it. But it didn’t drop. It turns out that I’d crippled it and it just hung there off this branch.” She stopped, realized that tears were starting to flow. She wiped them off with her sleeve, then turned away from Jon and looked off in the woods. “After a few minutes, I guess it just got too weak and fell to the ground. It still wasn’t dead. It tried to crawl away from me, but it couldn’t use its back legs. Matt had heard the shot and finally showed up. I was shaking so bad that he had to put it down for me.”

Kyra turned back, looking at Jon and away from the trees. “I know it’s not the same as shooting a man, but I never wanted to shoot another living thing after that. But I signed up with the Agency and they put a gun back in my hand down at the Farm. I got comfortable with them again . . . even got back to where I really liked them. I told myself that shooting that dumb animal had freaked me out just because I was a kid and now I wouldn’t have any trouble pulling the trigger on someone if I had to.”

“And then you had Carreño on the floor,” Jon said. He was no good at reading body language, but he didn’t need it to know what was running through the woman’s head.

She nodded. “That man almost got me killed. I’ve got a scar on the back of my arm two inches long because of him. I hate him more than I’ve ever hated anyone, and for one second, I really wanted to put him down. I couldn’t do it.”

“There’s a difference between killing someone because you have to and killing him because you want to,” he said. “You decided not to murder a man. That doesn’t make you weak.”

“Then what does it make me?” Kyra said.

“It makes you someone with a conscience. As long as you’ve got that, you can always get righteous again if you go off the road,” he said.

Kyra sat in the truck bed, legs pulled to her chest, pondering that. Jon had the water boiling on the stove before she finally spoke again. “I think the op is done,” she said.

“I think you’re right. Which makes it all somebody else’s problem now,” Jon said. “What’re the options on the food?”

Time to change the subject?
Kyra rifled through the Meals-Ready-to-Eat that she’d found in the truck cab behind the driver’s seat. “There’s not much here that looks like actual breakfast . . . just some MREs. Pork rib or chili with beans is as close as it gets.”

“Pork rib. You really don’t want me to eat the chili.”

Kyra pulled the plastic pouches out of the box.

U.S. Embassy

Caracas, Venezuela

Jaime Reyes slowed his car and exited the freeway onto the side road that led to the Colinas de Valle Arriba
district. He enjoyed this part of the drive the most. The rest of Caracas was nothing special. He’d seen far prettier cities during his twenty-two years with the State Department and not many worse. Buenos Aires was a particular favorite, even if it wasn’t truly the Paris of South America as it had once been called. But Caracas was fast becoming the Pyongyang of the continent, he thought—a crowded city filled with unfinished construction projects, crumbling infrastructure, and violence that the government wouldn’t acknowledge. Almost twenty years of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution had taken it on a downhill slide from a modern municipality to second-world status, fast falling to the lower rungs on the ladder.

But it was his last assignment before retirement and for that he wasn’t sorry. Reyes had had his fill of traveling and living abroad, of learning new languages and cultures. He hadn’t had to do that for his assignment to Venezuela . . . the real reason he’d taken it. He already spoke the language, understood the culture, which wasn’t much different from the rest of the continent. He could handle everything but the food. He was tired of fighting the food. His intestines weren’t as resilient as they’d once been and he was having too many disagreements with his stomach about what constituted a good meal these days. It was time to go home for good, to spend some time with his daughters. His oldest was about to make him a grandfather for the first time, his ex-wife had abandoned the family for the bottle, and he wanted to be there when his grandson came into the world.

Reyes made the last turn off the main road onto the trail that led to the embassy—

What—?
Reyes slowed the car to a stop. The group of men was standing in front of the embassy gate, crude signs in hand, mostly sheets with crude letters painted by hand. Several were yelling at the Marine embassy guards standing inside the compound.
Stupid protesters,
Reyes thought. They must have come in response to the news broadcast from last night.
Like we had anything to do with that.
Don’t blame us when your own people let a bunch of thugs come into your country and shoot your own.

The men spotted his car and a number of them started to move toward him, sticks in hand. Reyes stared at them, decided they meant business, and put his car in reverse. He hit the gas, and only then looked in the rearview. He tried to slam the brakes but was a second too slow and the car hit one of the men who had formed up behind him, knocking him to the ground. Reyes heard him scream in pain, genuine or not he couldn’t tell. The rest of his comrades began screaming and cursing and banging on the car. The men from the gate reached his vehicle and joined their fellows. Reyes locked the doors.

Get out of the way!
He gunned the engine, hoping to scare them into moving. They didn’t move, so he put the car back in drive and let it jerk forward, hoping that would frighten them. The crowd jumped back, not to the side, angrier than before. One of them produced a baseball bat, put it to his shoulder, and swung, connecting with the right-front headlight and smashing it out.

The crowd got in close now, rocking the car. Reyes went for his cell phone, trying to call embassy security for help, but fumbled it and lost it under the seat. He leaned down in desperation trying to find it—

—and heard the loud
crunch
as the
caraqueño
with the bat shattered the driver’s-side window. Glass exploded into the car, striking his face. Reyes sat up on reflex and then the men’s hands were clawing at him, pulling at his seat belt. One of them, a teenager, leaned into the car, reaching across him, trying to unbuckle the belt. Reyes punched him in the face, bloodying the boy’s nose, then grabbed his hair and smashed his face against the shattered window frame. The boy yelled out in pain and retreated, only to be replaced by another, this one smart enough to unlock the door. It swung open and then there were a half-dozen hands ripping at his clothes and trying to pull him out. Someone’s fist connected with his own nose and pain exploded from his sinuses backward into his head and he saw stars. Stunned, he felt blood pouring out of his nose onto his suit, and then someone did manage to unlock his belt and he felt the mob pull him out onto the concrete. He tried to curl up, but a foot connected with his head and his ears started to ring louder than the Spanish and English curses being thrown as fast as the blows.

Then someone else screamed in pain, the yells and curses taking on a sense of panic, and the attack stopped. Reyes managed to open an eye and saw . . . boots. Strong hands grabbed him under the armpits and he heard someone shouting Spanish orders in a bad accent at the crowd. The Marines from the gate had come out, guns drawn. One of the protestors was on the ground, someone who had been foolish enough to take a swing at one of Marines and been made to eat asphalt for his trouble.

One of the guards lifted him up. “Can you walk?” he asked.

Reyes nodded, groggy, and the Marine shifted to support the older man and they jogged as fast as the consular officer’s weak legs would allow. The other Marines fell back in a line between them and the crowd advanced forward as fast as the Americans were retreating. Then they were inside and Reyes heard someone slam the gates shut behind him.

•    •    •

Marisa ran through the lobby doors, following the small crowd that had run down from the upper floors of the embassy. She finally broke through into the large foyer, pushing aside some of the gawkers who’d assembled to watch the scene. A man was sitting on the bench, clothes torn, a blood-soaked rag being held to his nose by one of the Marine guards.

“What happened?” she asked a second Marine standing over the bleeding civilian.

“We’ve got a mob at the gates . . . attacked him in his car. They pulled him out onto the street. Would’ve beat him to death if we hadn’t gone out for him.”

“How big was the mob?”

“No idea,” the Marine replied. “A few hundred, maybe, but getting bigger by the minute. Buncha cockroaches, coming out from everywhere, faster than I could count.”

“Where’s the local security?” she asked.

“What local security?” the Marine replied. “That buncha morons are probably getting paid off by the local cops. Wouldn’t be the first time the government paid some gang to take care of their dirty work.”

Marisa turned and ran for the stairs.

•    •    •

The crowd outside the perimeter was large, maybe a thousand bodies by Marisa’s estimate, but it could’ve been more. The Marines were holding them back with a show of force but she didn’t know whether they had permission to fire or even if their weapons were loaded. The mob was raucous, bordering on chaotic, and the screams and curses were audible even from this distance. Young men were burning U.S. flags, others were heaving bottles over the fence, a braver few were grabbing the gates and trying to shake them off the hinges. No doubt more than a few of them were Bolivarian militia, the civilian forces that the government called out when it needed some intimidation while keeping its own hands clean. A few others might have been from the armed gangs that ran the slums in the 23 de Enero neighborhood . . . maybe La Piedrita, maybe the Tupamaros. She hadn’t seen any guns in the crowd, but she was too far away to tell.