24 Declassified: Trojan Horse 2d-3

by Marc A. Cerasini

  With hand signals, Jack issued the command for the shooters to assemble their weapons. Then he assembled his own.

  Jack opened the soft cloth bags he’d slung over his back during the long climb up the shaft. Carefully he unwrapped the barrel, the magazines, the sniper scope and the two receivers and stuffed the cotton packing cloths back into the bag. Quickly and efficiently, Jack assembled the 7.62mm Mark 11 Mod 0 Type Sniper Rifle System.

  The Mark 11 was a highly accurate precision semiautomatic rifle. Men who used it in the field dubbed it “an M16 on steroids.” Light, versatile and portable, the rifle could be broken down into two main sections, which made it perfect for an operation like this one.

  When Jack completed assembly, he shoved a magazine in place and flipped the control switch to semiautomatic. He had to hit at least two targets in rapid succession and wanted the fastest rate of fire possible.

  Near one of the auditorium’s rest rooms, Nina had just closed the brass grill behind her and smoothed her dress when a masked man appeared at the end of the marble-lined corridor. He spied the knot of women and hurried forward.

  “Hey, what for you do?” he bellowed in fractured English. The man slipped the black submachine gun off his shoulder, waved it menacingly.

  “Bathroom,” Nina cried, throwing up her hands. “We just went to the bathroom, that’s all.”

  The other women followed Nina’s lead, threw up their hands, started to babble.

  “Shuddup! Shuddup!” the gunman commanded. “Go back now. Back!”

  The masked man gestured them forward, down the long marble lined corridor toward the auditorium.

  As they approached the audience, Nina could hear the quiet murmur of the crowd. Another gunman who’d been guarding the doors stepped aside to allow Nina and the other women to enter the vast space. “In, in!” the armed man barked.

  “Okay, we’re going,” Nina replied.

  Immediately, Nina’s senses were assaulted. The interior of the auditorium reeked — an unsavory combination of stale air, fear sweat, and spilled blood. To move down the aisle, Nina had to walk past a pile of elegantly attired corpses, stacked like cordwood against a wall, rivulets of blood staining the lush carpeting. The muted roar of a thousand people talking, crying, sighing, whispering filled her ears.

  Once inside the auditorium, the women quickly dispersed, each subtly maneuvering to move as close to their respective targets as they could get. Nina had the farthest to go — from the back of the auditorium to the front row seats where international film star Abigail Heyer waited to blow herself and a thousand of her closest Hollywood friends to Kingdom Come.

  Not only did she have a long way to go, Nina had the toughest job. The other women only had to kill their targets, knocking the detonators from their hands and slitting their throats with hidden knives before the suicide bombers had a chance to set off the explosives. Nina had to stop Abigail Heyer from setting off her bomb without killing her. Nina was tasked with taking the movie star alive.

  2:43:16 A.M.PDT Chamberlain Auditorium Main Floor

  Carla bit down on the pink satin handbag. Her face was flushed, her skin coated with a thin sheen of perspiration. A whimper escaped her lips, which were pale and white. Dark shadows hollowed her eyes, her gaze seemed far away and lost in jets of agony.

  “Oh, Jesus. Oh, God,” Carla wailed.

  Teri Bauer kneeled on the floor, both hands grasping Carla’s arms to steady the woman. The contractions had started up again. Now they were less than three minutes apart. The baby was on its way.

  “You! American bitch. Keep her quiet!”

  Teri looked up. A masked man watched her from the aisle, just two empty seats away. He clutched a machine gun, the strap draped over his shoulder.

  Teri bit her lip. Carla howled again, louder.

  “Shut her up!” barked the gunman.

  Carla cried out just then, oblivious to the danger.

  Angrily, the man stepped forward. “I shut her up,” he grunted.

  Teri Bauer jumped to her feet, blocked the assassin’s way. Her knees trembled, but her veins were suddenly filled with burning ice and she refused to back down.

  2:44:06 A.M.PDT Chamberlain Auditorium Mezzanine

  Peering over the edge of the balcony, Jack had already taken aim at the masked man seated center stage. The way the others deferred to him, and the way the man clutched his Agram 2000 in the crook of his arm—“Palestinian style”—told Jack this was their leader, Bastian Grost. Though the Serbian fugitive might prove to be a valuable prisoner, Jack decided he would not take the man alive. Victor Drazen’s killers had a knack for eluding justice. But Bastian Grost wouldn’t get away with anything. Not this time.

  Jack checked the digital clock inside his sniper scope. It was less than a minute before the strike. His grip tightened on the pressed Kevlar handle, his finger rested on the grooved steel trigger. As he prepared to fire, Jack’s attention was drawn to a commotion in the aisles. A gunman was gesturing wildly at a woman.

  Even from this distance he recognized his wife. Jack tensed when he realized it was Teri. He swung the Mark 11 away from his target, to level the barrel at this new threat.

  Squinting through the scope, he placed the crosshairs over the masked man’s forehead. As the seconds ticked down, Jack steadied his hand and held his breath.

  Five seconds—

  The gunman stepped into the aisle. Teri jumped to her feet to block him.

  Four seconds—

  “Leave her alone,” Teri shouted.

  The man raised an arm, poised to strike her down, possibly kill her with a blow from the butt of his machine gun.

  Three seconds—

  Jack pulled the trigger. The man’s head exploded.

  2:45:00 A.M.PDT Chamberlain Auditorium Main Floor

  Rifles seemed to pop all over the auditorium at roughly the same time, followed by supersonic cracks as the bullets warbled toward their targets.

  Everywhere armed men in black jerked wildly, or spun around, or threw their arms wide as 7.62mm rounds tore bloody holes through their flesh, bones and organs.

  One masked man, his skull shattered by a single round, flopped onto the lap of Chip Manning, still seated beside his agent. The dead man’s brains spilled out on the star’s Helmut Lang jacket.

  Tough guy Manning squealed like a little girl.

  Abigail Heyer jumped to her feet when she heard the supersonic crack. She’d been watching Bastian Grost, who suddenly flew backward as two bullets blew a massive hole through his chest, and the back of his chair.

  When the Heyer woman stood up, Nina Myers spied a plunger in her hand. It was black, about the size of a large hypodermic needle, and trailed two thin wires that flowed into her clothing.

  Nina leaped over a seat, grabbed the woman’s arm and twisted it backward until she heard the satisfying snap of bone. The actress howled, the plunger dropped from her limp hand. But Nina didn’t relent. She jerked the broken wrist upward, forcing Abigail Heyer to bend double. Then Nina brought her forearm down on the back of the woman’s neck, smashing her to the ground.

  Nina dragged the still struggling woman into the aisle, flipped her over and cut the dress away with the Gerber Guardian II double-edged knife she’d tucked into her garter. Under the shreds of designer clothing, Nina saw the white harness. She sliced the straps and yanked the prosthetic loose. The inside of the fake belly was stuffed with explosives.

  “Clear!” Nina cried at the top of her lungs.

  From other parts of the auditorium, she heard her words echoed several times. What she didn’t hear told the real story. There was no deafening thunder of a detonating bomb, and Nina knew CTU had won this round.

  “Go, go, go!”

  Captain Stone screamed the words into his headset. Not even a second passed before dozens of LAPD squad cars, armored vehicles, ambulances, fire trucks and emergency vehicles rolled out of cover and across the pavement to converge on the Chamberlain Auditorium. S
irens blared and dozens of emergency lights flickered like tiny red beacons.

  There was no way for Stone to know if Jack and his team had met with success or failure but it didn’t matter anyway. His orders were to move his officers in to surround the building at precisely 2:45 a.m., to open the fire doors they’d opened before, and enter the auditorium with maximum force, and that’s exactly what he did.

  Stone watched through binoculars as firemen opened the steel doors, then police and SWAT team units poured through the opening. He listened for a long time, waiting for an explosion, the sounds of a fire fight. Instead, a voice crackled over his headset.

  “Area secure. Repeat, area secure. The hostages are safe…”

  2:59:09 A.M.PDT Terrence Alton Chamberlain Auditorium Los Angeles

  Jack found his wife in the lobby. An emergency rescue team was wheeling Carla out on a gurney, with Chandra and Teri following close behind. As she rushed past him, Jack touched his wife’s arm and their eyes met.

  “Jack, Jack,” Teri cried, throwing herself at him. “I knew you’d come. I just knew it.”

  “It’s okay,” Jack whispered, holding her close. “You’re safe now.”

  For a long time they embraced, an island in a sea of swirling activity. Then Teri pulled back, tears dewing her face.

  “Is it over, Jack? Is it really over?”

  “Almost,” he replied.

  23. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 A.M. AND 4 A.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME

  3:09:10 A.M.PDT CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Jamey, Milo and Doris had taken control of the Cyber-Unit. It took all three of them to enter all the search parameters into Fay Hubley’s bloodhound program. Along with the names of the victims and players in the hostage drama — Bastian Grost, Nawaf Sanjore, Valerie Dodge, Hugh Vetri, Nikolai Manos — the names of their firms, companies, and institutes such as the Russia East Europe Trade Alliance, were also added to expand the search exponentially.

  Once the program was launched, there would be so much information to correlate, so many places for the computer to search, that virtually every other computer function at CTU had to be shut down or curtailed.

  “Ready?” Jamey asked when the programming was complete.

  “Go,” Ryan commanded.

  Jamey punched “execute” and they waited.

  Jack and Nina observed the search from Jack’s glass-enclosed office on CTU’s mezzanine while they waited for a security team to process their prisoner, Abigail Heyer. Nina had expressed skepticism that the process would yield results, but Jack was willing to try anything. Milo, Jamey, and Doris all believed it was possible that the computer, augmented by CTU’s random sequencer, would come up with some clues— perhaps even answers — but none of them would state categorically that the program would work.

  Only Tony Almeida, boots propped on a desk while he silently watched the process, truly believed Fay’s creation would find her killer. He remained cool when five minutes went by with no results.

  The single screen that should have displayed promising leads remained dark.

  Then, twenty-one minutes and six seconds into the process, the monitor abruptly lit up and the screen was filled with hundreds of possible clues. The operation was moving so fast Jamey had to step in and slow things down. In a steady stream, pertinent facts continued to emerge.

  The single link that united all the disparate threads was Nikolai Manos. The program revealed that one of Manos’s shell companies hired a very expensive mapping firm to survey public land in the Angeles National Forest.

  MG Enterprises, a Nikolai Manos-controlled shell company, paid for a series of deliveries of construction material to an area along Route 39—a road through the San Gabriel Mountains that had been closed to traffic for over a decade.

  Pacific Power and Light recorded two years of mysterious power surges and incidents of voltage theft from high-tension wires running through the same region of the San Gabriel peaks where the survey had been conducted.

  Three hikers and a pair of campers in an area near the spot where Ibn al Farad had been captured vanished without a trace over a fourteen-month period.

  Rangers in the Angeles National Forest reported strange lights at night.

  Unauthorized helicopter takeoffs and landings were reported to the FAA. A near miss between a light plane and an unauthorized aircraft was reported over that same area six months ago.

  A 1977 article from the National Spelunking Institute — now posted on its website — featured an unconfirmed report of a large network of caverns discovered in the San Gabriels. Subsequent expeditions failed to locate the caves. The last one mounted just eighteen months ago ended tragically. The team’s vehicle was found at the bottom of a ravine, everyone dead inside. The incident was judged an accident, at the time.

  Jamey Farrell kept narrowing the search until, at precisely 3:33 a.m., the program spit out a longitude and latitude in the San Gabriel Mountains, a threesquare-mile area just four miles from where Ibn al Farad was caught searching for his master.

  Fay Hubley’s program had nailed the Old Man on the Mountain.

  3:46:17 A.M.PDT CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

  Abigail Heyer was seated in an aluminum interrogation chair. Both hands were strapped to the armrest, the woman’s broken right wrist, swollen and purple, had been treated with no more care than her left. The woman had been strip searched, had endured a thorough cavity check, and all of her clothes, jewelry and personal items had been taken from her. She would not get the opportunity to swallow poison, like Katya or Richard Lesser.

  The international star wore an orange prison jumpsuit and nothing else. She stared straight ahead, unblinking, but Jack believed she knew he was right there, on the other side of the one-way mirror.

  “Break her, Jack. Get her to confess.” Tony Almeida still wore his undercover clothing — black jeans, sweatshirt stained with blood, steel-tipped cowboy boots. His unshaven face was ravaged by fatigue, his eyes haunted. Jack knew Tony blamed himself for Fay Hubley’s death. Jack knew because he’d been in Tony’s situation himself, more than once.

  Nina, still wearing the spangled dress, gazed impassively at the woman in the chair. It was Nina who’d brought Ms. Heyer back to CTU for interrogation. The woman had demanded her lawyers — plural, she had a team of them — and was denied. The actress went silent after that, not even answering Dr. Brandeis’s queries about her condition.

  The doctor requested time to set her broken wrist— Jack vetoed that. Then Dr. Brandeis asked permission to administer a painkiller. Jack nixed that too. Brandeis did not ask to witness the interrogation. He already knew the answer.

  Jack studied Abigail Heyer through the glass, his jaw moving. Nina touched his arm, leaned close and whispered, “The crisis has passed, Jack. Let the doctor take care of her. Hold her here until she’s willing to talk.”

  Jack gently shook off Nina. “This ends now.” He swiped the keycard that dangled from a strap around his neck and entering the soundproofed interrogation chamber.

  The woman refused to acknowledge his presence. Jack placed a metal chair in front of her, sat down. Still she resisted his gaze.

  There were a number of ways to extract information, Jack knew — torture, drugs, sleep deprivation, the threat of death.

  But such techniques wore the prisoner’s will down over time, and Jack was nearly out of it. Hasan had to be stopped. Now. They were never closer to the man than at this moment, and might never get this close again. He had to extract the confirmation he needed from his prisoner as quickly as possible.

  Yet Jack knew in this case physical threats would also fail because Abigail Heyer was willing to blow herself up for Hasan, so she was not afraid of death. Which meant that he had to hit her fast and hard— with something she did fear.

  “Hasan is dead,” Jack began. Despite herself, the woman winced.

  “We knew about his hideaway — that place in the mountains. Five minutes ago we blew it
up. Everyone inside perished. We’re assessing the damage now. I can show you the man’s corpse, when we find it.”

  “Hasan will never die,” Abigail Heyer said, a half-smile brushing her full lips.

  “You may be right.” Jack nodded. Now was the time to take the chance, make the leap. “Hasan, as a symbol, an ideal, might never die. But Nikolai Manos, the man who called himself Hasan, is dead. I killed him.”

  Jack studied the woman’s face. He watched her calm, controlled demeanor crack into a thousand tiny splinters. He saw a black void open up inside of her and swallow the woman whole.

  Jack watched Abigail Heyer’s reaction, and he knew.

  24. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 4 A.M. AND 5 A.M. PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME

  4:55:01 A.M.PDT Over the Angeles National Forest

  Jack had called in every resource he could find for this raid. Chet Blackburn’s overworked Tactical Unit would lead the strike, but elements of the FBI, Captain Stone’s LAPD SWAT team, the California National Guard — even State Troopers under the command of Captain Lang — had been tapped.

  Now a dozen helicopters circled the mountain, while CTU specialists used deep ground imaging to locate the hidden entrances to Hasan’s no longer secret underground lair.

  “We found two exits, both covered now,” Chet Blackburn told Jack, shouting to be heard over the noise of the beating blades. “All the elements are in place. We’re ready to go once you give the word.”

  Jack Bauer nodded, activated his headset. “Begin the assault. ”

  4:59:17 A.M.PDT Under the Angeles National Forest

  Hasan’s anger was a physical force that battered everyone and everything around him.

  Nawaf Sanjore followed a trail of smashed furniture and broken glass, to the deepest region of his master’s underground headquarters. He found several acolytes cowering in front of a steel door.

  “Is he inside?” the architect asked.