24 Declassified: Death Angel 2d-11

by David S. Jacobs

  Jack locked eyes with the car’s owner. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said.

  He jumped into the driver’s seat, adjusting it to get some leg room. He threw the car into gear and drove away, a sudden right turn throwing several bags of groceries out of the open rear hatch to the pavement. Spilling melons and apples on the pavement. A quart container of milk broke open and splattered onto the street.

  Glancing in the rearview mirror he saw the woman still standing frozen in place, gaping openmouthed at her stolen car dwindling in the distance. It was a hell of a note when he had to carjack a housewife, but you did what you had to get the job done.

  Jack followed the course the young one had taken; ahead he saw a flashing glint of silver as the coupe rounded another turn onto the main drive out of the condo complex. He took off after it.

  8. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 P.M. AND 7 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

  6:07 P.M. MDT

  Skycrest Drive, Los Alamos County

  The silver coupe exited Ponderosa Pines, heading west across the mesa. The coupe moved out fast, the yellow station wagon following in hot pursuit.

  Jack Bauer was pleasantly surprised to find that the wagon was a pretty zippy model with good pickup and handling. It had a tall body mounted on a compact car platform, with automatic transmission and all-wheel drive.

  The chase picked up speed when the silver car broke onto the open road, the long flat straightaways and banked curves of the highway. Jack finally had an instant’s breathing room to fasten the safety harness seat belt. He sat leaning forward hunched over the wheel.

  It was early Saturday night, before most revelers had taken to the road in search of the evening’s entertainment. Traffic was light and there wasn’t a highway patrol car in sight. The silver car was leading him away from the suburbs, into the hills.

  Ahead, west, the Jemez Mountains bulked against the horizon. An orange-red sun grazed the peaks. Long shadows fell across the land. The mountains’ eastern slopes were purple. Blue-gray shadows pooled around the foothills, extending long fingers creeping east across the land. The sky was still blue; the spectral white half-moon floated in the west. Few cars had their lights on yet.

  Jack was aware of the airstream rushing past over the car; it forced the rear hatch down, slamming it shut. The engine whine shrilled higher as the motor wound out more RPMs, tires thrumming along the road. He was conscious of the weight of the gun holstered under his arm. He longed to get it into play but was unable to close the distance between his vehicle and the silver car.

  The coupe was the quicker machine. Jack had the station wagon crowding its upper limit. Over seventy miles per hour it started to shake. He regretted the absence of the Expedition. The SUV had muscle that would have allowed him to speedily overtake his quarry.

  The silver coupe was in a hurry. When a car was in its way it crossed the yellow centerline and passed in the opposite lane, forcing oncoming cars to get out of its way. It left a track of near-misses and narrowly averted collisions in its wake.

  Jack did no less; he was determined not to let the other get away. He changed up the routine by passing cars on the right, driving on the shoulder when he had to overtake them.

  The highway now ran through empty land. The pall softened the sharp edges of mountain peaks, blurred the open vistas, and deepened the gloom of oncoming dusk.

  A distinct smell of burning hung in the air: smoke from the fire in the canyon south of the Hill. It had thickened since Jack had earlier driven to Ponderosa Pines.

  The flat straightaway atop the mesa gave way to a series of foothills, the road curving and twisting between them. That was good. The station wagon couldn’t beat the faster silver coupe on the long stretches but could regain some of its lost lead in the curves.

  The jumbled hills and knobs featured many blind curves, causing Jack to frequently lose sight of the coupe. He always managed to catch up with it, though. The road forked; the silver car took the left-hand branch, the road curving hard to the southwest. The hills thinned and gave way on Jack’s left, opening a view looking south across the mesa’s edge to the canyon beyond.

  Churning, roiling smoke clouds poured skyward as if the canyon was a vent to infernal regions below. Gray-black smoke poured out of it ceaselessly. It formed a curtain across the southern horizon, veiling South Mesa from view. Lurid red and yellow glare underlit it. The flames were invisible, hidden in the depths of the valley below, but their glow suffused the towering piles of smoke.

  Sparks and embers rained upward, yellow-red-orange flakes of flame, a blizzard of them soaring up the thermals. Air flickered and rippled from heat waves.

  The silver car slowed as it neared a crossroads. It flicked its headlights on and off several times as it went through. The station wagon flashed through the intersection.

  A dark sedan sat waiting at the mouth of a thin dirt road coming down from the north. It was filled with men with guns. It powered out of its lurking place, churning up a plume of dirt and loose gravel. It slewed on to the paved road, tires yelping, biting as they gripped pavement.

  The sedan arrowed after the station wagon, coming up fast, coming on strong.

  Uh-oh, Jack said to himself. The old squeeze play.

  He got the picture. While he was chasing the silver car, it had been leading him into an ambush. With its greater speed and maneuverability it could have shaken the wagon’s pursuit. Instead it had lured him into a trap. The driver had played cat and mouse with him, staying out of reach but not losing Jack. He must have used his cell to call for help. Backup.

  Here it was in the form of a sedan filled with hostiles. The newcomer was big, powerful; it ate up the distance between itself and the station wagon.

  The silver car was slowing, looking to box Jack in. That was okay, there was plenty of highway for maneuvering. Red brake lights flashed on as the coupe suddenly braked hard, sliding sideways into a controlled drift, laying down curved rubber streaks on pavement.

  It jerked to a halt, standing at right angles in the middle of the road. The driver scrambled over the seat and jumped out of the passenger side. The young one. He put the car between himself and the oncoming station wagon. He rested his gun on the roof of his car and pointed it at Jack, opening fire. The shots went wild except for one that went through the windshield. It passed through the car, punching an exit hole through the rear window. The windshield was ventilated by a half dollar — sized hole but otherwise remained intact.

  Jack whipped the station wagon to the right onto the shoulder, around the rear of the silver car, and away. The young one kept firing; some slugs tore into the car’s left rear fender.

  The sedan followed, threading through the slot. The young one jumped into the coupe and took off after it.

  Spear points of flame rimmed gun muzzles that jutted through the sedan’s open windows. The station wagon’s rear window totally disintegrated, spraying the back of Jack’s head, neck, and shoulders with broken glass. Safety glass, fragmenting into cubes. They stung like being peppered with rock salt from a shotgun — but it beat being sliced to ribbons by jagged-edged shards.

  Jack ducked down lower in his seat, working the wheel so the station wagon wove a bullet-dodging course on the roadway ahead. Slaloming back and forth across the centerline. Sharp curves in the road forced him to change tactics to stay on course.

  The sedan crowded up from behind. Jack was in a tight spot. The smaller-engined station wagon’s slim lead was fast melting.

  A hundred yards ahead on the left loomed a dirt road. A farm road or ranch road. It was secured by a triple-barred gate. Jack worked the brake, feathering it, turning the wheel to put the wagon in a controlled slide. Controlled being a relative term.

  He had a heart-in-mouth moment as the scenery rushed up sideways on the right side of the car. Tires squealed, laying rubber. If one of them burst it was all over. The sharklike sedan came at him on his left side.

  With a bump and a jerk the wagon
slid to a halt, pointing at the three-barred gate. Jack stomped the gas, charging the barrier. It was secured by a padlocked chain fastened to the gatepost and posted with a NO TRESPASSING sign.

  The station wagon crashed the gate. There was an instant’s gut-churning resistance. The wagon front’s leading edge crumpled, headlights shattering, hood buckling.

  The machine darted downhill along a rutted dirt path. The dirt track ran down a wooded hillside covered with pine trees. Trees on both sides of the road interlaced overhead, forming a canopy. Beneath them was premature dusk. Pine-scented gloom. The road ran through it like a tunnel.

  The way was not straight but curved to follow the contours of the slope. It bent right, then left, then right again. Jack had to slow his descent due to the many blind corners. A smashup against the trees and his run was over. Sometimes the grade was so steep that he all but stood on the brake pedal.

  He was not alone. The sedan full of gunmen had also taken the plunge. The silver car followed behind.

  The sedan’s headlights flashed on, glaring high beams. Jack kept his lights dark. Despite the smoky murk there was enough daylight to see by.

  The road wound into a series of S-curves. Sometimes its loops brought the station wagon in close proximity to the sedan, with only a belt of timber between them. That timber was his lifeline. The dense-packed trees screened him from the bullets sprayed at him by the sedan’s occupants.

  As he descended the gloom deepened. Banks of smoke rose through the trees, stinging his eyes, smelling of burning. Jack steered as much by intuition and instinct as by sight. He had to slow down to guard against crashing.

  The station wagon was taking a beating on the rough road. Its all-wheel drive helped maintain traction, but the machine was not designed for too-rugged off-road motoring. The same applied to the sedan and the silver coupe, though. The wagon was slightly better suited to the terrain than its pursuers.

  Stones thrown up by the wheels cracked against the undercarriage. The rutted road made the car feel like it was shaking itself apart. The steering wheel shuddered in his hands, fighting him, trying to break his grip.

  Low-hanging branches beat against the wagon’s roof and sides. Jack was tossed around by the rigors of the road. If not for the seat belt he would have been pitched headfirst through the windshield.

  The road straightened out for its final descent down the slope. At the bottom lay a flat. The twisty course had worked to his advantage, allowing him to gain some lead on the pursuit. On the flat the powerful sedan would eat up his lead. Then its guns would eat him up.

  The dirt trail went from the tilted vertical to the horizontal. The wagon was on the flat. The sedan swooped down on the level and tore off after him. The silver car was close on the sedan’s tail.

  Fifty yards of hurtling forward motion took Jack out of the woods. The wagon broke into bare, open country; a sprawling plain. The road ran straight across it due south through a landscape dotted with boulders and cacti. The flat lay in the immense trough of the valley between the Hill and South Mesa.

  Fire from the demolished meth lab had earlier raced south down the arroyo, spreading into Coyote Canyon and beyond. The rugged terrain was choked with masses of dry brush that should have been regularly trimmed and cut back. Such preventive maintenance costs money. The last time the brush had been thinned was almost a decade ago in the disastrous Cerro Grande fires. Years had gone by with no follow-up. Years in which the economy had collapsed into recession and worse. No money could be found in the county budget for brush cutting and clearing, for building firebreaks and firewalls.

  Now it was the peak of summer. Brush, grass, weeds, and carpeted pine needles all wrung dry of every drop of moisture had become ideal tinder. Kindling for an overdue conflagration. What man had failed to fix, nature was now remedying.

  The blaze was part forest fire, part prairie fire, and all inferno. Of its origins Jack Bauer knew nothing. Its results were in full view as he raced south across the flat. A firestorm raged throughout the valley between the Hill and South Mesa. Its progress was not uniform but diverse, spreading by fits and starts across the terrain.

  The valley was a patchwork of fire and unburnt land. Many square miles of the valley’s wooded north slope were a raging hell. Sections were ablaze to the east and west of the flat where the station wagon was harried by its pursuers. Smoke blotted out the low-hanging sun into a ball of blood shrouded by swirling gray-black clouds.

  The way south across the flat was open, smoky but free of fire. The ground might have been some rancher’s grazing land, but if so it was bare of cattle now. The fire would have stampeded them elsewhere.

  The sedan was closing the gap between it and the wagon. Ahead, the end of the dirt road was in sight. The flat rose in a low slope to a flat-topped ridge bordered by a wire fence strung on fence posts. The road terminated in a three-barred gate similar to the one Jack had crashed at its opposite end.

  The station wagon plowed into the gate and smashed it open, batting it back on its hinges. It gave onto a two-lane blacktop road running east-west. Fire and smoke were thicker to the west. Jack made a snap decision and made a left-hand turn. The wagon slewed into a curve on the pavement.

  Jack manhandled the wheel, whipping it around, feathering the brakes at the same time. The wagon skidded, the road’s right bank rushing toward the passenger side of the car. The tires bit, digging in. The car straightened out, heading east.

  The valley was thick with smoke. Not thick enough for him to hide in, to lose his pursuers. He couldn’t shake them. He fishtailed back and forth over the centerline, abruptly weaving and switching lanes to avoid gunfire from the pursuing sedan.

  The road ahead sloped gently upward. At the top of the ridge the ground was dotted with a number of low mounds and hills, the road winding through them. Beyond lay a fork in the road.

  The right-hand branch drove a long, straight road through level ground. The left wound into a cascade of stepped ridges. The left-hand branch offered a better chance of escape, slim though it was.

  The station wagon punched through a low-hanging smoke cloud into the hills of the left fork. Fire had found a foothold here, thrusting an arm down from the valley’s burning northern slope.

  Jack coughed, choking, eyes tearing. He wiped his forearm across his eyes to clear them. The hillside on his left was on fire. He could feel the heat from it. Yellow sparks like hordes of fireflies spiraled up through churning smoke. Visibility was poor. Trees lining the left side of the road formed a row of torches. Trunks and branches were dark skeletons wreathed in yellow and red flames.

  The road emerged from where two hills crowded it on both sides. Something loomed up ahead, too close. A burning tree had fallen lengthwise across the road, blocking it. The wagon was almost on it; there was next to no time to react.

  Jack whipped the car to the right, trying to go around it. There was too much tree and too little road. The treetop crowded the shoulder. Branches crunched under wheels. For an instant Jack thought he might make it but no such luck.

  He ran out of road. Beyond the shoulder’s edge was empty space. No guardrail.

  The station wagon went over the side. Its nose dipped, pointing downward. It plowed a furrow down the embankment of a shallow gully.

  The gully’s north wall sloped at about a thirty-degree angle. Its bank was peppered with bushes and barrel cactus. The station wagon mowed them under as it careened twenty-five feet down to the floor of the gully. The wheels on the driver’s side left the ground. Jack feared the car was going to go into a roll. A heart-stopping instant and they touched down again.

  The car came to a halt with a bone-jarring crash.

  Jack took quick stock of himself. He’d taken a beating but nothing was broken. He unclipped the safety harness, grabbed the door handle, and put a shoulder to the door panel. Nothing. The fall had wedged it shut.

  Jack threw his weight into it, slamming his shoulder against the door several times to no effect.
He scrambled over to the passenger side, tried the door. It opened. He wriggled out, falling to the ground.

  The gully was a dry watercourse, its floor lined with rocks. Ottoman-sized rocks, armchair-sized rocks, sofa-sized rocks. They lay on a bed of countless smooth, rounded, palm-sized stones, heaped in profusion. The gully ran roughly southeast, a meandering vein among the hills. The south side of the draw opposite the road was a steep incline fifty feet high. At the top were woods. They were on fire.

  The light of the setting sun was muted by the smoke filling the sky. Deep twilight massed in the gully, except where it was dotted with hot embers that had fallen from the burning trees. They started little fires wherever they fell, speckling the cut with yellow tongues of flame.

  The station wagon’s rear was tilted up off the ground, thanks to a big rock beneath it. Fluids dripped and dribbled from the undercarriage. Oil — and gas. A fuel line was broken. Gasoline puddled in a rock-lined hollow.

  Up on the road the sedan had rolled to a halt well short of the burning tree. Jack crouched down behind the passenger side of the car, using it for cover. A few beats later, the silver car pulled up behind the sedan.

  The sedan’s doors opened, disgorging its occupants, a half-dozen well-armed men. They had rifles, machine guns. The young one got out of the silver car and joined the others at the roadside overlooking the gully.

  Jack needed a break, he’d be a sitting duck down here, cover or no cover. They hadn’t seen him yet. He low-crawled away from the wagon, blanking out the pain of rocks banging elbows and knees, their jagged edges scoring his forearms and belly. He wriggled behind a refrigerator-sized slab of a boulder.

  Dark figures stood outlined along the roadside, backlit by fiery woods dimmed by a shifting pall of smoke. Silhouetted shapes, their faces hidden: a band of blankly anonymous killers.

  “He’s done,” somebody said.

  “Probably broke his neck in the crash,” another said.