24 Declassified: 10 - Head Shot

by David S. Jacobs

  The west bank stood at the bottom of a long, low slope that stretched for a hundred yards or so before rising into a high, rounded hill. The hill was taller but less steep and jagged than the one Jack had descended. It was dotted with stands of timber, unlike the opposite side with its scant sprinkling of low, scraggly brush. The far hill was crowned with an abundance of the shaggy blue-green foliage of pine trees.

  The hilltop provided the only real cover in the valley. It was a place where Jack could hide and shelter if he reached it before the green gas took effect, whatever that might be. He had little doubt that hostiles would come looking for him. The Silvertop strike force was unlikely to leave any surviving witnesses to the raid. And that was the optimistic view, assuming as it did that Jack would survive the green gas.

  He was alive now and would continue to act on that premise unless and until circumstance proved otherwise.

  The bank was a few feet above the creek bed. He hopped down off it, raising a splash in the shallow water. A scattering of silver droplets fell back to the surface in what seemed to be slow motion.

  Jack started across the creek, stepping carefully to avoid slipping on the smooth, rounded stones lining its bottom. Water milled around his ankles, rising to slop over his boot tops in mid-stream.

  He clambered up the side of the muddy west bank and began jogging across a long stretch of open ground that rose only a few degrees on its way toward the base of the hill. The green grass of the bank quickly yielded to short, dry, yellow- brown turf. It felt springy under his feet.

  He angled across the tilted flat instead of crossing it directly, making for a spot at the bottom of the hill that was in line with a clump of trees higher on the slope. He wanted to make use of what minimal cover was available as soon as possible.

  These first trees were about twenty yards above the bottom of the hill. Jack climbed to them. They were skinny pines about fifteen feet tall with a few sparse, forlorn-looking boughs. The trunks at their thickest were the width of a thin man’s leg. Jack grabbed one to help pull himself up.

  The wood writhed in his grip.

  Jack pulled his hand back, recoiling. He thought for an instant he’d grabbed a snake that was curled around the trunk and had wriggled away at his touch. He looked at the tree he’d grabbed and the ground surrounding it. He saw no snake. He circled the tree carefully, looking at its far side and the ground at its base.

  No snake.

  He held out his hand palm- up, the one that had done the grabbing, and looked at it. It was the hand of a stranger.

  Perhaps he’d never looked at it properly before. He stared at it. It seemed to swell and grow, then to dwindle and shrink.

  A fascinating phenomenon. He continued to watch it. The hand continued to expand and contract in size. He realized that the cycle of expansion and contraction was in synchronization with the beating of his heart. It was an awesome revelation.

  Awe turned into anxiety. He must be crazy to waste time staring at his hand when he should be climbing the hill as fast as he could!

  Jack turned his face toward the slope and readied himself to continue. He examined the ground ahead to make sure there was no snake there. It came up clean and he strode briskly forward, mounting the hillside at a quick pace. He made a point of not looking at his hands as he climbed.

  He was one-third of the way up the hill when he realized his error. He’d planned to use the trees for cover and here he was walking out in the middle of the open where anybody could see him!

  He shook his head at his own carelessness, changing course toward the right and another clump of trees. They had some waist-high bushes at their bases. He hurried toward them but slowed as he neared them, just in case they harbored snakes.

  There was a snake! He stopped short. No, it was only a dead tree branch.

  Jack stood still but the hillside kept moving. Solid ground seemed to flow like water racing uphill and away from him. Earthquake!

  They didn’t have earthquakes in Colorado, did they? He blinked and the illusion vanished. The earth was solid and motionless beneath his feet.

  Jack made the conceptual breakthrough: the illusion vanished. That’s all it was, an illusion. Unreal, like the other phenomena that had been bedeviling him throughout the climb.

  It was all in his head and the reason it was in his head was because the green gas had put it there. The green gas was a hallucinogen.

  The breakthrough was thrilling and alarming. Thrilling because it gave him a handle on the weird things that were happening to him. Alarming because of its implications.

  His awareness snapped into focus with an almost physical lurch. He was Jack Bauer and he was experiencing the effects of exposure to a hallucinogenic gas. An airborne psychedelic whose effects were something like LSD only stronger.

  His training as an agent had included advanced courses in resisting hard interrogations. Drugs were frequently used to break a subject’s will and the trainees had been dosed with a variety of psycho-chemicals to strengthen their resistance and give them a sampling of the techniques that might be used against them in the event of being taken alive by the enemy.

  Now that Jack knew what was happening to him he could fight it. No, that was wrong. The drug had him in its sway and its effects could not be willed away, no more than a swimmer in the sea could will away a giant wave that was about to come crashing down on him.

  He couldn’t fight it but he could surf it, ride that wave out until it had spent itself and washed him safely up on shore.

  He looked back the way he came, across the valley to the ridge bordering Silvertop. The sky above it was blue, free of any taint of the green.

  The green was in his head now. He had to stay on top of the wave, maintaining his sense of self and purpose, stay flexible and adapt to whatever came his way until the drug worked its way out of his system.

  The creek wound its way through the valley bottom like a giant snake, sunlight glistening on its surface in countless myriad swirls.

  All illusion, the trick of a drugged mind.

  Jack pointed himself toward the hilltop and resumed his climb. It was not unlike escaping the tunnel after the dynamite blast. You took one step forward and then another and kept on doing it until you reached your goal.

  The weird physical and visual effects were Alice in-Wonderland trimmings on bedrock reality. A rock was still a rock and a tree was still a tree, even if the rocks were made of jelly and the trees were swaying, with their branches wriggling in snaky motion.

  The ground leveled out as he crested the summit of the hill. He was on a plateau, a wooded flat that spread out for miles in a sprawling pine forest. These were real pines, tall and towering with thick trunks and abundant foliage.

  The pine scent was heady, intoxicating. The edge of the forest was a solid wall but when Jack approached it the trees spread apart in a maze of paths and trails. Not manmade trails but game trails.

  He entered the woods. They were filled with pools of cool shadow and hot sunlit glades that alternated in a checkerboard pattern if one had the wit to see it. They were never silent but quick with life and motion: birds flitting, pine cones dropping, boughs creaking.

  Jack followed a trail into the depths of the forest. It wound through the trees, around mossy boulders, down into hollows carpeted with dead pine needles and up into rises that broke into columns of sunlight shafting through spaces in the canopy of trees. It was a place of mystery and enchantment where time lost all meaning. . .

  Somewhere, somewhen, somehow the scene began to stabilize and come back into focus. The initial, overpowering rush of the drug, a physical onslaught of raw sensation that sent Jack reeling among the big trees, reached its peak. The wave crested, broke, and ebbed.

  The trail went up a low rise and into a clearing, a broad grassy open area about fifty feet in diameter that was enclosed by a thicket of trees.

  Jack slipped through a wall of foliage to enter the glade. The grass was emerald-green, and ab
ove the treetops stood a circle of blue sky. It was an idyllic nook, like a woodland scene depicted in an illustration for a children’s storybook.

  He was well into the clearing before he realized he was not alone. There was a purposeful rustling motion in the bushes at the glade’s opposite end. Rustling and scratching.

  This did not come as a total surprise. He’d been aware for some time of noises of movement in the woods around him, but they’d been following in his wake. These noises came from the opposite direction, though: in front of him.

  He’d felt more bemused than fearful ever since the drug’s physical rush had lessened, and he felt no anxiety now as he moved to one side to investigate the source of the disturbance.

  He saw through a gap in the brush what first looked like a huge black dog. It stood on all fours, as tall at the shoulder as a pony and weighing between three hundred and four hundred pounds. Incredible beast!

  It wasn’t a dog, though, it was a bear. A bear with rounded ears and a muzzle-shaped face and fur so brown it was almost black. It was tearing at a fallen log with its front paws, clawing away rotted and pulpy wood to get at the grubs and insects that infested it.

  A mini version of the bear, a cub, stood nearby watching its parent take apart the log. The adult lifted a front paw swarming with insects to its snout, licking them off with broad swipes of its tongue and swallowing them down.

  It could have been a scene from a TV nature special, a charming vignette of animal life in the wilderness.

  A twig snapped somewhere behind Jack, sounding loud in the sudden stillness. The big bear froze. The cub was the first to notice Jack. It made a cute bawling cry.

  The big bear turned its gaze toward Jack. It growled. The growl was low, muttered, and reverberant. It touched something in Jack that must have been hardwired into the human brain since caveman days, triggering a sense of full- body fear.

  The bear growled again, snarling, baring gleaming yellow-white fangs all curved and dripping fat gobbets of saliva. Its fur stood on end, electric with sudden menace and aggression. It lunged forward, charging.

  Jack jumped to one side at the same instant that a gunshot sounded, detonating in the glade like a thunderclap.

  The bear changed course on a dime, swerving to meet this newly perceived threat. It whisked past Jack toward the other side of the glade.

  Two men stood there, crouched in postures of fear and stupefaction. One was a broad-shouldered hulk with a platinum-blond crew cut. The other was short and round- faced with a stubbly beard, dark eyes, and a slack- jawed, gaping mouth. The latter held a leveled rifle with smoke curling from its muzzle.

  The image of the duo was engraved on Jack’s brain with the clarity of a photograph. He could see the platinum-haired man’s cold blue eyes and the jagged scar that split his left eyebrow. He could see the short man’s dark eyes bulging like black olives stuck in the sweaty white pudding of his fear- ridden face. He realized the bullet had been meant for him but had missed because of his sudden lunge to avoid the charging bear.

  The bear went for the short man. He fired again but too late; the bear was on him and he was bowled over backward, the gunshot zipping harmlessly through the trees.

  The bear knocked him to his back on the ground and tore at him with tremendous swipes of its clawed front paws, ripping him apart as it had done to the log but with much greater ease.

  He screamed, “Oh Gawd, Reb, help!”

  Reb, the man with platinum hair, did not help. He was too busy running at top speed in the opposite direction.

  Jack came to himself again. He knew who he was, where he was, and what he had to do. He got the hell out of there. Fast.

  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 P.M. AND 4 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

  Silvertop, Colorado

  Some people love a mystery. Dirk Vanaheim hated them. It was a trait he’d had since boyhood days. He was intensely irritated by unsolved crimes, locked room murders, unexplained disappearances, and the like. He took them as a personal affront. He had no belief in supernatural intervention in human events. Every crime must have a solution, it was only lack of information on the players and the scene that prevented its solution.

  This aspect of his personality had served him well in his chosen profession in the fields of first counterespionage and currently counterterrorism. He had risen to the number two post of Assistant Special Agent in Charge of CTU/DENV. He now had the responsibility of securing and managing the crime scene at Silvertop.

  He was thin with lead-colored hair worn brushed straight back from a high forehead. It lay on his scalp like a metal skullcap. A long face featured a pair of horizontal eyebrows over deep-set eyes with dark rings around them. The ever- present fatigue-born rings had deepened during the run- up to the Sky Mount Round Table. They could only worsen as a result of his having to handle the Silvertop mess. He had the feeling that before the Sky Mount conference was done he’d look like a raccoon.

  Silvertop mess? Debacle was the word for it. Five CTU agents were dead and a sixth missing. This was more than a crime scene, it was a battlefield. The forensics team from CTU/DENV had arrived to do a thorough examination of the Zealots’ blue bus in Silvertop’s ghost town. They had discovered a chaos of carnage on the bluff’s south slope and the grounds below it. Special Investigator Anne Armstrong and three members of the tac squad, Frith, Sanchez, and Bailey, were dead. CTU/L.A.’s SAC Jack Bauer, here on temporary duty, was missing, as was tac squad member Holtz. The corpses of a half-dozen unknown assailants had been found strewn about the south face along with the CTU dead. The bodies of the unknowns had been left mutilated to thwart a quick identification.

  Vanaheim was grateful that the forensics team had arrived after the battle was over and the victors had departed, otherwise the body count would have been far greater. CTU/DENV’s ranks had already been decimated as it was.

  Further investigation had revealed the presence of tac squad member Holtz on top of the bluff near the team’s vehicles. He’d been shot through the head by a high- powered rifle. It was a black day for CTU/ DENV and for the entire unit as a whole.

  CTU/DENV chief Orlando Garcia had assigned Vanaheim the task of securing the site and the situation. Vanaheim and an eight-man tac squad had raced to the site. CTU/DENV’s people were already spread thin by a variety of duties connected with protecting the Round Table conference. The most recent losses had only exacerbated the problem. Vanaheim was faced with a delicate situation in controlling the site with the limited number of personnel now available for him to draw on.

  CTU’s original mission charter specified that one of its goals was closer cooperation and sharing intelligence with other agencies. All government agencies are traditionally turf-conscious and jealous of their prerogatives, none more so than those involved with the national security sector. The CIA/FBI rivalry is well- known. The events of 9/11 had fostered a greater sense of unity of purpose between them as well as with the Department of Homeland Security. But this mutual amity and concord had its limits.

  SAC Garcia had been quite specific: “Those are CTU dead out there. This matter is going to remain in our hands until the perpetrators are found and brought to justice.”

  Vanaheim was not without other auxiliary support to draw on. The U.S. Army had become involved due to certain features of the Red Notch incident. Army Intelligence officers who had a close working relationship with the CIA, CTU’s parent organization, had been called in to help. They were able to supply much-needed manpower required to secure and properly investigate Silvertop.

  Shadow Valley had been cordoned off. Its sole entrance where the canyon opened on Dixon Cutoff was closed and guarded by an Army Military Police detachment. The MPs were dressed in civilian clothes but their weapons were Army- issue M–16s, M–4s and sidearms. The Army, too, wanted to minimize its footprint in the affair where possible. The entrance was also guarded by a covert fifty- caliber machine gun nest, a precaution prompted by the unknown e
nemy’s use of heavy firepower. MPs in Humvees patrolled the valleys to the east and west of the canyon to contain and detain unauthorized personnel.

  The Sky Mount area had been declared a no-fly zone for the duration of the conference. Now Shadow Valley and environs had been added to the restricted list. Any snoopy reporters who somehow got wind that something big was cooking at Silvertop would be unable to overfly the site to satisfy their curiosity.

  The south face of the bluff swarmed with activity. Teams of forensics experts and special investigators went about their business of methodically cataloging the carnage. The criminalistics crews included CTU/DENV agents working in conjunction with their opposite numbers from the MP’s Criminal Investigation Division, CID. They took photographs, diagrammed the disposition of bodies on the slopes, made plaster moulages of tire tracks left by vehicles at the scene, and collected a wide variety of evidence, all of which were properly sealed and labeled in protective envelopes. It was too early yet for the bodies to be bagged, tagged, and taken away, but that, too, would eventually be part of the process.

  Vanaheim was also able to draw on the resources of the Denver field office of the ATF. They had a dog in this fight, too. ATF agents Dean and O’Hara had been among the first casualties of the Red Notch incident. Vanaheim was working closely with ATF Inspector Cullen, now also present at the site. The two were much of a type: grim, hard, sour- faced man hunters.

  They were on top of the bluff, where investigatory efforts also continued. The mass casualties on the south face had absorbed the lion’s share of resources, but important activities also continued on the summit. Holtz’s corpse was being examined by several specialists while a second group was covering the blue bus.

  A handful of persons stood clustered around the mouth of the air shaft near the collapsed shed. They included Vanaheim, Cullen, and several of their administrative aides. They stood close to the edge—but not too close. A thin film of brown dust rose steadily from the hole.