Cold Barrel Zero Read Online Free PDF Page A

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