24 Declassified: Head Shot 2d-10

by David S. Jacobs

  Jack jumped out of the hole in the barrier, bent almost double as he angled west across the ledge with the M–4 in his hands. His appearance took the enemy by surprise. He reached the point on the ledge above the ore cart on the next terrace down before somebody took a shot at him. It missed.

  Others recovered their wits and began popping away. Shots cracked, rounds whizzing through empty air around Jack to bury themselves in the hillside.

  The slope to the terrace below declined at about a thirty- degree angle. Jack jumped off the ledge feet-first, throwing himself over the side. He slid down the hillside like a runner sliding into home base in a race to keep from being tagged out. It was a long slide. He set off a mini- landslide of falling rocks and dirt during the descent.

  The ore cart lay on its side with its open hopper facing the slope. It was orange- brown with rust but the sides of the hopper were several inches thick and its base was about twelve inches thick, not including the undercarriage with its trucks and sets of grooved wheels.

  One of the duo on the west ridge was so provoked by Jack’s ploy that he rose up from behind a rock to point a rifle at him to line up a shot. Sanchez had been waiting for just such an opportunity and squeezed off a three-round burst, chopping the rifle-man before he could fire.

  Jack’s feet hit the ledge below and then he went into a roll, a shoulder roll that took him across the terrace toward the shelter of the ore car. Lines of lead zigzagged the slope behind him, kicking up dust and cutting down small bushes and scraggly dwarf trees growing out of the hillside.

  He scrambled into the hopper, thinking for an instant that it was the kind of shady retreat that a rattlesnake might prefer. If that was the case it would be too bad for the rattlers. He rolled to a halt, his shoulder slamming into the now-vertical bottom of the hopper. Happily the car was unoccupied by any other life form than himself.

  Jack pulled in his feet and hands, curling up inside the hopper so that no part of him was showing. The ore car vibrated with a metallic clangor as slugs began smashing into its underside. Wheels, trucks, and undercarriage proved a formidable shield, the rounds flattening themselves into lead smears against the cart.

  Shooting from below burst out with renewed intensity but a different target. Jack knew that that meant that Anne Armstrong was making her break. She was lightly armed and would be relying on the covering fire laid down by Jack, Frith, and Sanchez.

  Sanchez had the surviving shooter on the west ridge covered so Jack didn’t have to overly concern himself with that direction. He peeked around the east side of the ore car seeking targets. A shooter on the next ledge down huddled behind a stone wall three feet high, all that remained of a long-gone building. He had a machine pistol in each hand and was streaming lead at Armstrong as she dashed for the timber stack. A regular Two Gun Kid, thought Jack. Two Guns was pretty well covered and Jack’s chances of scoring on him were slim.

  A rifleman came into view much farther down near the bottom of the slope, springing up from behind a rock slab, exposing himself from the waist up. Jack triggered a short burst at him. The downhill angle was tricky and Jack’s rounds passed harmlessly over the rifleman’s head. It threw a scare into him and he ducked down out of sight behind the slab before Jack could correct his aim for a second try. But it stopped him from shooting at Armstrong for the moment.

  Two Guns seemed to take that as a personal affront and turned his attention toward Jack. He squatted behind the woodpile, gun hands resting on top of it as he turned to squirt bursts of lead at Jack, alternating between one machine pistol and the other. He had maximum firepower and minimum accuracy. The rounds flattened themselves against the ore car, sounding like someone was tap-dancing against it.

  Two Guns’s change of position put him in Jack’s line of fire. His head was raised above the woodpile so he could see what he was shooting at. Jack squeezed off a triple burst that blew apart the other’s skull above the eyebrows.

  Armstrong staggered, breaking stride. Had she been hit? She stumbled forward, falling behind the timber stack, dropping out of sight.

  How many of the enemy were left? Frith had estimated ten to start with. He and Sanchez had each bagged one before Jack and the others emerged from the tunnel. Frith had since tagged another at the bottom of the hill, Sanchez had gotten one of the duo on the west ridge, and Jack had just neutralized Two Guns.

  That made five. Frith’s estimate might have been off because Jack thought that there were more than five shooters still in play, maybe six or even seven. It was hard to tell for sure because they moved around a lot while rarely showing themselves for more than a brief blur of motion and a burst of gunfire.

  Say six shooters remained. Six versus five CTU members. Three of the CTU team had heavy fire-power, the other two had pistols. Pistols were for close quarters combat, not much good in this kind of fire fight. Jack was a crack marksman with a handgun but he knew their limitations in such an encounter. There was also doubt whether Bailey would be effective at any range. He’d looked weak, shaky, on the verge of passing out. The bomb blast had inflicted serious damage on him, maybe internal injuries, maybe a concussion, maybe both. He needed medical attention as soon as possible.

  Jack didn’t know if Anne Armstrong had been tagged or not. There was no sign of her behind the timber stack but then there wouldn’t be whether she’d been hit or not. The smart way to play it was to keep the foe guessing until the optimal moment for intervention.

  Three CTU shooters versus six, maybe seven of the enemy. Not bad odds. Jack meant to do what he could to improve them.

  Now Sanchez showed himself at the west side of the tunnel mouth. He immediately ducked back in, taking cover. The attackers opened fire, shooting at where he’d been. Jack scanned the landscape. He thought there were seven shooters left.

  The shooting stopped almost as soon as it started as the foe realized that Sanchez’s ploy had only been a feint, a ruse to draw their fire to force them to reveal their position. A knot of two or three of them were clustered on the ledge below Jack’s, behind a massive old boiler that nestled in a collapsed framework of thick-beamed trestles and cross braces. The cylindrical boiler lay on its side. It was fifteen feet long and six feet wide. It and its shattered frame provided plenty of cover.

  Sanchez’s move had exposed their presence but failed to lure them out from behind their cover. But the gambit was a double- feint. Frith ducked out of the eastern side of the tunnel a few beats after the shooting stopped. He ran for the timber stack.

  Pistol fire cracked from behind the stack. Arm-strong had made it and was still in the game, firing steadily to help cover Frith. A succession of shots popped as she emptied one magazine, almost immediately following it up with another volley from her other pistol.

  Gunfire blazed from three places around the boiler, tearing up the hillside, trying to intercept Frith before he reached cover. That was the heaviest concentration of firepower. Triggermen opened up from three other separate spots on the slope.

  A seventh man was on the west ridge. He took advantage of Sanchez’s momentary absence to step out from behind his rock and train his weapon on the back of the running Frith.

  Jack was ready for him. His burst cut the other down before he could fire. The shooter staggered backward, bumped into a boulder, and pitched forward headfirst. He looked like he was taking a bow. He kept on going, rolling and tumbling down the ridge. The ridge was steeper than the Silvertop bluff and he picked up a fair amount of speed on his way down, arms and legs flailing until he hit an outcropping and bounced off, falling straight down to land in a heap at the foot of the ridge. He was motionless after that.

  One down, six to go. Jack withdrew into the ore car’s protective shell an instant before drawing heavy fire from the attackers. The ore car shuddered, raining a shower of rusty flakes down on Jack. But it held, impervious and bulletproof.

  The crack of an M–16 told him that Frith had reached the timber stack and was responding in kind. Bullets
spanged against the boiler and splintered timbers, quelling the onslaught from the three gunmen sheltering behind it. Armstrong’s pistol chimed in, cracking away as she fired.

  Sanchez’s M–4 barked, adding its voice to the chorus. The other three shooters spread out among the rockfalls east of the boiler returned fire.

  Sanchez would be making his move next. His firepower joined to Jack’s would make a potent and lethal anchor for the western half of the planned crossfire. Frith’s M–16 backed by Armstrong’s pistols would supply the eastern component. Together they could begin clearing the slope of the rest of the enemy.

  Shouting sounded from below. Jack couldn’t make out what it was but it sounded like someone giving orders to the others, perhaps to unleash a counter-strike of their own.

  He squirmed around in the hopper, changing position to cover the boiler and points east. He was shaggy with fallen rust flakes from head to toe. They dusted him like a coating of orange snowflakes. He ejected an empty clip and inserted a fresh one in the M–4.

  The three shooters among the rocks concentrated their firepower on the timber stack. Those beams had the dimensions of railroad ties and there was a waist-high cube of them. The rounds could chip away at them but Frith and Armstrong were safe behind them, though their weapons were stilled for the moment while they took cover.

  One of the shooters behind the boiler fired an assault rifle at Jack, snapping shots at him each time he stuck his head out from behind the ore car looking for a target of opportunity. A second shooter was trading bursts with Sanchez. The time was not yet right for Sanchez to make his move.

  There was a lull in the gunfire directed at Jack. He’d been peeping out from behind the side of the hopper looking for a shot. He now changed tactics, unexpectedly popping up from behind the top of the overturned car.

  He sprang up just in time to see a third shooter who’d been sheltering behind the boiler do the same. The other was a big man with a platinum- blond crew cut and clean-shaven face wielding an assault rifle with a tubular attachment underslung to the bottom of the barrel.

  Jack knew it for a grenade launcher. He swung his gun muzzle toward its wielder but the man with the platinum hair fired first, instantly dropping out of sight behind the boiler.

  The grenade launcher went off with a thump, a hollow crumping sound. It was immediately followed by a burst fired at Jack by the shooter behind the boiler who’d previously been busy trying to nail Jack.

  Jack had seen the shooter take aim at the same time that the man with the platinum hair ducked. Jack dropped behind the hopper, a hot round smacking the hillside behind him.

  The grenade described a tight lobbing arc, hitting the slope between the tunnel mouth and the timber stack. It bounced off, falling like ripe fruit on the ledge. It detonated not with an explosive blast but with a juicy wet splat like a fat pumpkin dropped from a height to smash apart on hard ground.

  Masses of green fog erupted from it, blossoming, expanding into a monstrous cloud that squatted and heaved across the upper ledge.

  The cloud was the color of mint mouthwash, a harshly unnatural green that was shot through with myriads of tiny iridescent yellow-green particles. The cloud seemed almost as much liquid as gas, like the smoke that comes boiling off dry ice.

  The green fog that Lobo had told of, the toxic cloud that fell on Red Notch. Jack shouted, “Poison gas! Run! Run!”

  He was up and running as he shouted. He didn’t have to worry about the enemy because they were running, too, fleeing down the slope and onto the flat for all they were worth. He couldn’t run downhill because they would get him. He couldn’t go up because that’s where the green cloud was massed.

  He ran across the ledge toward the western ridge. He ran all-out, sprinting, legs pumping. The landscape zoomed past him. There was nothing wrong with his hearing now, the huffing of his lungs, the creaking of his gear and the pounding of his footfalls all reverberating in his ears.

  Jack could hear the green cloud, too. It made a hissing sound suggestive of the effervescence of a freshly opened bottle of pop.

  He did not look back but he couldn’t help looking up. The western arm of the cloud raced along with him, lazily uncurling itself to overspread the ledge above. Streamers and tendrils extended from its underside, slithering off the rim of the ledge and reaching downward.

  The viscous, semi-liquid nature of the stuff worked in Jack’s favor. It drifted down the hillside but slowly, lazily, its buoyancy keeping it afloat. It rolled across the upper ledge but took its own sweet time doing so, sometimes pausing to curl in on itself and thrust upward to climb the hillside, only to resume its inexorable westward thrust.

  Jack’s ledge ran out and then there was the steeper slope of the western ridge. Jack jumped on to it and began scaling it toward the top. He now heard only the beating of his own heart pounding in his eardrums. His heaving lungs burned, his limbs felt heavy, leaden.

  The footing was treacherous and he fought to keep from slipping. He grabbed the trunks of small bushes growing on the ridge and used them to pull himself up. He scrabbled at rock outcroppings to haul himself higher.

  He could see the ridgetop. A gauzy green tendril brushed the back of his hand. He jerked it away, his flesh tingling from the contact.

  Jack kept moving solely by instinct. The summit was a dozen feet away — but the green cloud was already there. A thin curtain of it shimmered above him. He held his breath and scrambled upward on his hands and knees.

  Green mist enveloped him, its touch like cobwebs against his bare flesh. His tortured lungs could withstand no more; he gasped for breath. The mist was cool and damp, he could taste it in his nostrils. Its scent was part medicinal, part chemical.

  Jack Bauer threw himself over the ridgeline and down the other side. The far side was steeper than the near one. It was covered with weeds and a layer of short, dry, colorless grass. He tumbled downward, falling, sliding, rolling, the world pinwheeling around him.

  12. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2 P.M. AND 3 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

  Pine Ridge, Colorado

  Jack Bauer wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and the green cloud. He didn’t fight the fall, he went with it. It was no straight drop, of course; no man could have survived that. It was a skittering, sliding tumble that he helped along as much as possible down a fifty-degree-angled, weed- and brush-covered slope. His descent slowed at times, not often, but sometimes, and when it did, he did what he could to speed up the process, scrambling and rolling, anything to keep moving downward.

  He had no time to think during that frantic downhill slide. He was too busy trying to keep from breaking his neck or anything else. Extensive martial arts training in judo had trained him in handling rough, violent falls but this was a marathon ordeal. Jack reacted by reflex and instinct, dodging rock outcroppings and darting toward open, weedy spaces. Everything zipped by him in a blur that was punctuated by sudden, jarring shocks and the flailing of thorny bushes as he tore through them. He took a brutal pounding.

  The downgrade began evening out, becoming less steep, slowing his plunge in the process. He slammed to a halt on a level piece of ground.

  He lay on his back, gasping, panting. His head swam. His motion had stopped but the world kept moving, wheeling past him in a dizzying whirl. He shut his eyes for a few beats, and when he opened them the world had caught up with him and stopped moving, too.

  Jack felt like he’d been worked over from head to toe. His heart hammered, his pulse raced. Above was blue sky and a yellow dancing sun. He took several deep breaths. His ribs ached but nothing felt broken. They were particularly tender on his left side where his gun in its shoulder holster had banged against them.

  He still had his pistol. That was something. The M–4 was long gone. He couldn’t remember if he’d had it with him when he went over the ridgetop or if he’d dropped it before then. The ammo pouch with its extra clips for the weapon was still with him,
its strap tight against his neck as though trying to choke him. He got his fingers under the strap and tugged it to give himself some breathing room.

  There was a chemical taste in his mouth and the back of his throat. The realization of it gave him a surging jolt of adrenaline that washed away the last of his stunned confusion and brought his awareness into sharp focus.

  The green cloud!

  Jack sat up, the action tormenting his aching body and forcing a groan from him. He’d been exposed to the gas externally and internally; externally where it had touched his skin and internally from the whiff of it he’d breathed before he escaped it.

  Had he escaped it? He looked up and to the east, scanning the ridge. Its summit was several hundred feet above him, part of it obscured by the scalloped edge of green cloud. The cloud had crept a few dozen yards down the near side of the slope but its progress was arrested as though it had snagged itself on the jagged crest.

  The stuff was heavier than air but not much. Its viscous quality had kept all but its westernmost arm penned on the far side of the ridge. The still air of high noon had since been replaced a slight breeze blowing out of the west that buffeted the cloud, pushing it back. The gas was thinning out, too, dispersing itself into the upper air.

  Jack quickly calculated the icy equations of survival. His depended on the nature of the unknown substance to which he’d been exposed.

  Was it poison gas or a nerve agent? Lethal gas had to be inhaled to do its work, while a nerve agent could kill on contact with the skin. Modern varieties of either could kill by exposure to a single microscopic particle, but he’d both breathed and been touched by the green gas. He was still alive, though, the prime factor in his high-speed mental calculus.

  The bodies he’d seen in the mine shaft bore the marks of death not by gas but by violence. Some had been shot, some had had their throats cut, others had bloody, broken bodies. Corpses don’t bleed.

  Lobo had said that the Zealots at Red Notch had been exposed to the green cloud. One could deduce from that that its purpose was not to kill. What was its purpose?