24 Declassified: Head Shot 2d-10

by David S. Jacobs

  It was a laborious, time-consuming process. The blocks of plastic explosives and the detonators had previously been stored in the fallout shelter below, an abandoned area whose existence was known only to a few. Reb and his crew had spent the night hand-carrying the blocks up the stairwell and through a secret door near the fuel tank area.

  They’d been planted on the undersides of the tanks.

  All three sets of charges were separately wired to a single master detonator-timer.

  This had been done to save time that would have been eaten up by fixing each load with its own individual timing device and to limit the exposure time of Weld’s team in the Level Two area.

  Three sets of wires fed into a trunk cable. Baranco was wiring the cable to the twin terminal posts of the master timer. It was set to go off at three o’clock in the morning, when an electric charge would pulse down the trunk cord and along the three separate sets of wires whose detonator tips would simultaneously explode all charges and blow the tanks and the great house above it to kingdom come.

  Once Baranco was done wiring and setting the master timer only one final task remained: to switch on the timer on a smaller charge attached to a crate holding the remaining BZ gas grenades. They’d been placed near a ventilator intake grille at the base of a metal conduit duct air shaft. The bomb would be set last but would go off first, at 2:50 a.m., ten minutes before the oil tanks blew.

  The green gas would be sucked into the ventilator intake shaft to circulate throughout every room in the mansion, spreading madness and chaos. The pandemonium would have time to reach a crescendo of artificially induced psychotic frenzy among guests and staffers alike before the bombs on the oil tanks blew. The sequence was designed to maximize the body count.

  The bombs would ignite a firestorm of volcanic proportions, spewing a flaming geyser upward that would scour the underground levels before rupturing the ground floor and fountaining a white-hot inferno throughout the great house.

  The devastation would be awesome, the casualties immense, and the repercussions catastrophic to the nation and the economies of the world.

  Reb Weld was looking forward to it. His only regret was that he wouldn’t be able to view the spectacle firsthand. Chaos and destruction were his delights. Why? Because that’s the way he was made.

  It wouldn’t be smart to stick around and watch the show, though, much as he’d like to. Or healthy, either. Not with that crazy green gas heralding the apocalyptic hellstorm.

  Baranco was the demolitions expert. That action was out of Weld’s league. He had to stand by, watch, and wait while Baranco worked his black art.

  It was necessary but Weld didn’t have to like it. He wasn’t called “the Rebel” for nothing. He resented taking a backseat to anybody, especially the so-called experts who knew more about a subject than he did.

  He’d always been that way, it was his singular defining trait. That and a mean streak as wide as a sixteen-lane superhighway.

  He couldn’t resist needling Baranco even as the bomb man was engaged in the tricky and delicate work of rigging the last fuel tank bomb. He did it because it was risky and pushed the edge, giving him a fresh jolt of the adrenaline he so inordinately craved. He was an adrenaline addict.

  He’d even considered pilfering a BZ grenade from the crated cache to take with him as a souvenir. It’d be a kick to get a taste of the gas itself and see what the head was like. The survival instinct reasserted itself, overpowering that compulsion for crazy kicks. A BZ grenade would be his ticket to the execution chamber should he be caught with it, especially after tonight.

  Baranco said, “I’ll get on with my work now if that’s all right with you, Reb.”

  Sarcastic bastard! Maybe there’d be a chance to cut him down to size later when his tasks were done. But not now.

  Weld said, “Go ahead, nobody’s stopping you.”

  Baranco kept pushing it. He was a needler in his own soft-spoken way, too. “I’d appreciate a little quiet while I’m fixing this last connection. If my hand should slip…”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  Weld said, “I’ll be quiet as a mouse. Not a peep out of me, Al.”

  “Thank you very much, that will be deeply appreciated.”

  Baranco set the pliers down in his pocket tool case and began unscrewing the knob at the top of the terminal, preparatory to winding the hooked end of the exposed copper wiring at the base of the post.

  And then his head exploded. Jack Bauer had been standing on the top landing of the fallout shelter stairway with one hand gripping the back of the collar of the shirt that he’d scrounged up at the Mountain Lake substation to replace the garments that Griff had cut off Pettibone. Pettibone had to look normal to deceive his accomplices, or as normal as he could look even when fully clad. Jack’s other hand gripped the SMG.

  Griff and Rowdy crouched a few steps below him, ready to spring into action. Rowdy had been convinced of the inadvisability of bringing along the riot gun and had stowed it aside at the bottom of the stairwell for retrieval later. The bikers were armed with SMGs and a few handguns and knives were also tucked away on their persons.

  Jack said, low- voiced, urgent, “Go!” He prodded Pettibone in the kidneys with the tip of the weapon to reinforce the command.

  The door opened outward onto the landing. Pettibone gripped the doorknob, turned it, and pulled it toward him. The door accessed a tiny vestibule with another door at the opposite end. That door opened on to a Level Two walkway overlooking the sunken area where the fuel tanks were located. The sunken area was five feet below floor level with sets of stairs at each corner and bordered by a waist-high rail fence.

  The far door was wide open. Jack hustled Pettibone through it, following at his heels. Griff and Rowdy were a pace or two behind.

  A man on the walkway was starting toward the vestibule at the same time. He was Loogan, one of Weld’s men. He’d been posted to secure the exit and had heard the sound of movement behind the inner door. He was advancing on it as Pettibone, with Jack behind him, came rushing out.

  Loogan fired, his silenced SMG sounding a whispered stutter as it loosed a burst into Pettibone’s middle. Pettibone fell back, writhing against Jack as the slugs tore into him. His last conscious act in this world was to serve as an unwitting, unwilling human shield for Jack Bauer, catching the full measure of Loogan’s triggered slugs.

  Jack got his gun hand free and returned fire, stitching Loogan up the middle of the chest. Loogan dropped, his weapon clattering against the walkway. The telltale sound was lost in the vastness of the space, drowned out by the background noise of throbbing pumps and creaking pipes.

  Jack eased Pettibone to the floor and stepped around him. Pettibone’s popping eyes stared sightless and unblinking as he sprawled inert on the walkway.

  Griff and Rowdy came barreling out of the vestibule. Jack held a finger to his lips, signaling for silence. The bikers halted, charged up, kill- ready. The walkway overlooked a long side of the sunken floor, running parallel to the long axis of the nearest tank.

  Jack said in stage whisper, “I’ll go down here and come on them from under the tank. You go around and pin them from opposite ends.” They nodded.

  Jack clambered over the guardrail and dropped cat-footed to the sunken floor five feet below. Griff and Rowdy were in motion, scrambling in opposite directions, hustling toward the corners of the tank pit.

  Jack slipped across the space to the first tank with shadow stealth. The rigging under the tank was a webwork of black metal beams, braces, and diagonals. The underside of the tank was held suspended in its steel cradle about four feet above the floor. He ducked under the outside rail and began moving forward in a crouch, bent almost double, picking his way through the labyrinth of the undercarriage.

  He went as fast as he could but his progress seemed maddeningly slow, with time measured out in every pounding heartbeat. His whole body quivered in anticipation of a shout, a shot, or a scream that w
ould alert his prey to the fact that they were being stalked and hunted.

  The steel net let light pass through it screened through a tangle of black beams. He stepped over some, ducked under others. The swelling curve of the cylindrical tank pressed downward as he neared midpoint, forcing him to drop to hands and knees to proceed. He banged his knees, barked his shins, bruised his elbows, and bumped his head in his hurry to gain ground.

  The ceiling lifted as the midpoint was left behind and the tank curved upward. The smell of fuel oil was thick in his nostrils and mouth; he could taste it. The layers of cross-bracing between him and his goal thinned, allowing him to see more of the gap between the tank he was under and the one in the middle.

  Silhouetted forms flashed ahead and to the right of him. The rise and fall of voices made themselves heard over the pounding of his own pulse that throbbed in his eardrums. Jack forced himself to slow down though it was torturous to fight the overpowering urge to rush into battle. The setup was all- important and he had to be in the optimum position before cutting loose. A misstep could be fatal not only to him but to hundreds of innocent lives.

  He hoped with all his being that Rowdy and Griff were taking similar pains. No outcry or outburst had sounded as yet so perhaps they were. Jack couldn’t wait for them to shoot a move, though; he had to seize and keep the initiative.

  The trio came into his view, grouped in the open area between the tanks and a dozen paces to his left. He crept forward, inching closer.

  Reb Weld with his signature platinum- blond crew cut stood a half a head taller than his sideman, a chunky character with a brown rooster-tail haircut. They both stood watching a third man who knelt hunched over on the floor with the master timer in one hand and the exposed copper wiring of the trunk cable bundling all three detonator wires to the different sets of charges in his other hand.

  Jack Bauer went down on one knee, resting the silenced muzzle of his SMG in the V made by the intersection of two cross-braces to steady his aim as he lined up the sight posts on the skull of the explosives expert. He set the selector to single shot for better accuracy and rechecked his alignment to make sure he was on target.

  Weld was bickering with the demolitions man. The expert was saying sarcastically, “Thank you very much, that will be deeply appreciated.”

  Jack squeezed the trigger.

  A single cough sounded simultaneously with the top of Al Baranco’s cranium flying apart. The explosives expert’s head was haloed by the corona of pink mist indicative of a brain being blown to pieces.

  A perfect head shot, drilling the brain, switching off all neuro-muscular reflexes and reactions, ensuring that Baranco would cease to exist without so much as a twitch.

  Things happened fast after that.

  Somewhere on one of the walkways there was a startled outcry of pain, a stuttering exchange of gunfire, and a scream.

  Al Baranco dropped. Reb Weld and Graham recoiled from the stinging spray of disintegrated bits of bone and brain matter that had spattered them when the slug fragmented Baranco’s head above the ears.

  Jack flipped the selector to autofire. Graham stood between him and Weld. Jack fired a burst that chopped Graham. Graham threw up his hands over his head and shrieked as the legs were cut out from under him.

  Reb Weld was quick! He dove forward away from the gunfire, going into a roll and tumbling out of it before Graham hit the floor. He leaped to his feet and lunged sideways, gaining the cover of one end of the oil tank behind him for protection.

  Jack snaked out from under the tank, standing upright in the gap between the tanks. Graham lay rolling around on the floor, beating his hands against the upper thighs of his now useless legs as if they were on fire. Jack stood over him, firing a quick burst into Graham’s chest. That switched Graham off but Jack put a few more into his head to be sure.

  Reb Weld was racing toward the wall at the end of the sunken floor when Griff popped up at the railing of the walkway above. Both men opened fire at the same time.

  Griff missed but Weld didn’t, tagging the biker twice. Griff went over backward. Weld tossed back his head and gave a rebel yell of exaltation as he reached the wall and jumped up grabbing for the guardrail.

  Jack’s burst caught Weld in the back in midair. Weld fell back, crashing to the sunken floor. The SMG fell from his grip and went skittering away from him, out of his reach. Weld rose on his elbows, a bloody smear marking the floor where his back had touched it. He reached for his waistband, clawing at the butt of a gun tucked in the top of his pants.

  Jack advanced on Weld, methodically spraying him with autofire. Weld flopped around as the bullets ventilated him.

  He weltered in his own gore, tiger-striped with blood. He raised the back of his head off the floor, neck muscles cording and quivering from the strain of trying to see who had done him in.

  Griff rose to his knees on the walkway, clutching the rail to keep from falling while he watched Weld’s finish.

  Jack moved so Weld could see his killer. Weld’s eyes widened, then narrowed as he recognized the CTU agent he’d come face-to- face with in the clearing on Pine Ridge before fate had taken a hand by intervening in the form of a charging bear.

  He mouthed the word, “You!”

  Jack Bauer said, “The Hellbenders send their regards.”

  He delivered the coup to de grâce to Reb Weld:

  A head shot.

  Griff had caught two slugs, one in the right side and the other in the left shoulder. He draped his arms over the bottom rail to hold his upper body upright while he stared down at a torn and bloody carcass that used to be Reb Weld.

  He held out a red hand to ward off Jack when the latter moved to help him. He managed to choke out a few sentences between gasps and stifled groans.

  Griff said, “I’ll make it — Rowdy must’ve ran into trouble — check on him… The big slob was never any good without me.”

  He added after a pause, “I’ll stay here and enjoy the scenery.”

  Rowdy had run into trouble. He sat on the opposite walkway, back propped upright against the wall. His right arm was at his side, outstretched at the elbow, his hand wrapped around the grip of a still- smoking SMG. His midsection was a red ruin of an anatomy lesson. His left hand held his insides back from tumbling out.

  Incredibly he still lived, awareness in his eyes as Jack went to him.

  A body lay nearby, twisted in the angular contortions of violent death: the last member of Reb Weld’s elite hit team. He lay facedown, reaching for a crate of BZ gas grenades that lay inches short of the fingertips of his clutching hand. A shiny sheet-metal, square-sided length of duct conduit piping was bolted vertically to the wall above the crate, its scooped- mouth bottom covered by a metal grille and hanging two or three feet above the top of the grenade-laden box.

  It was the intake port of a ventilator air shaft. Jack Bauer could feel the suction of air currents being drawn upward into its mouth and away through the piping to be carried through the precincts of the mansion above ground.

  Jack moved the crate a man’s length away from the intake port. A wad of C–4 plastic explosive was wedged into the bottom of the crate, wires trailing up from it and over the side waiting for a timing device to be attached. He gingerly disengaged the tip of the detonator cord from the puttylike mass, disarming it and setting the cord a safe distance away from the crate.

  He hunkered down beside Rowdy, leaning forward to catch the big biker’s last words. Rowdy said, “Bad luck — he got me before I could get him. Thought I was dead… got a big surprise when he found out I wasn’t…”

  His tired eyes cut a glance toward the BZ crate. “Guess you found what you wanted, dude…”

  He breathed something that Jack was barely able to make out: “Valhalla is calling— ”

  His last breath.

  Jack Bauer defanged the plastic explosives rigged to the fuel tanks, pulling the detonator cords, gathering them up, and depositing them in a safe place on the walkwa
y. He went to see what he could do for Griff. Griff was sitting up, holding a wadded bandana against the wound in his side and using it for a compress.

  He said, “Rowdy…?”

  Jack said, “He got his man before he died.”

  Griff nodded. “He went out Hellbender style then.”

  “That he did. I’ll get help. Don’t shoot any of my people when they come down here to secure the site.”

  “I’ll try not to.”

  Jack opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, Griff said, “That’s a joke, man. Just pulling your chain… go do what you have to do, I’m okay.”

  Jack started to walk away. Griff called after him, “Kill ’em all!” Jack turned, said, “I’ll do my best.” He moved on.

  He went to a stairwell that accessed the next level. He found a morbid surprise at the foot of it. Two bodies lay there where Weld and his crew had put them, undoubtedly intending to come back and carry them topside to the surface and plant them somewhere on the grounds to be found and scapegoated in the aftermath of the horrific hellfire that turned out not to be.

  They were the cadavers of Abelson Prewitt and Ingrid Thaler, the grandmaster of the cult of the Zealots and his faithful second- in-command. The bodies were cold to the touch — icy — frozen.

  Another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.

  Jack Bauer loaded a fresh clip into his SMG before beginning the long, wearying climb upstairs to the surface.

  Don Bass exited a side door in the mansion, hurrying along a flagstone path that curved through silent, nighted gardens toward the guesthouse that served as the command center for the Brand Security Agency cadre overseeing the corps of uniformed and plainclothes guards now on duty on the graveyard shift.

  Sleep and the security chief were strangers. Bass’s wavy hair stood out in tufts. His eyes were red embers buried deep in hollow, purple- bruised sockets. His movements were stiff-legged, zombielike as he forced himself to scurry at quick time toward the guesthouse turned guardhouse.