24 Declassified: 10 - Head Shot

by David S. Jacobs

  It was hot out here in the open, hotter still because of the flak jackets. Jack consoled himself with the thought that it was nothing compared to how hot things could get without the protection of the Kevlar vest if trouble happened. Shooting trouble.

  Shadows were short under a midday sun that stood almost directly overhead, pouring its rays straight down into the canyon. Sun- baked flats and rock walls threw back the heat. The CTU team all wore headgear. Frith and Sanchez wore baseball caps, Holtz and Bailey wore soft, shapeless fabric hats. Armstrong and Jack wore unmarked baseball caps that had been supplied from tac squad stores at Pike’s Ford. Jack’s headache had subsided in recent hours but the pounding heat made his temples throb, a portent of returning discomfort.

  The fence enclosing the bottom of the hill was old, rusted. It was hung with a number of no trespassing signs, all of which were nearly illegible due to being bullet-riddled by high-spirited sportsmen. Gaps opened in the barrier where whole sections had been trampled flat by dirt bikers and ATV riders, the tracks of whose vehicles had worn clearly marked trails up the sides of the bluff.

  The gate blocking the main access road was made of stronger stuff and stood solid and intact. It was secured by a length of padlocked chain. Both chain and lock were shiny and bright. Jack said, “They look brand-new, like they were put here yesterday.”

  Anne Armstrong said, “Maybe they were.”

  “But by whom?”

  The Explorer’s rear hatch was opened, revealing a variety of gear. There were hard hats and flash-lights, coils of rope, picks and shovels and other tools. Bailey pulled on a pair of work gloves, picked up a pair of bolt cutters, and went to the gate. He snugged the open pincers against one section of a link of shiny new chain and squeezed the handles. He had to put some muscle into it, his face reddening and veins standing out on his forehead.

  The section parted. He did the same thing to the other half of the link until it parted, too. The chain fell away from the gate. Holtz opened the gate all the way. Bailey stowed the bolt cutters and the work gloves in the rear of the SUV and closed the hatch.

  Jack and Armstrong got back into their vehicle, the squad men into theirs. The SUV climbed the main road up the long, low-angled slope, the pickup following. They crested the summit, rolling to a halt on a spacious, flat-topped expanse.

  Anne Armstrong radioed Central, informing them that the team vehicles would now be going out of service. Central acknowledged, their response scratchy with static. Armstrong said, “Radio reception is spotty here due to interference from the canyon walls and the mountains, Jack. Our portable handsets lack the power to send or receive messages to Central. The truck radio is stronger because it works off the vehicle’s battery, but even it’s barely adequate for communication purposes. The same goes for the SUV. So when we go out of service here, our outside comm is really closed down.”

  Jack nodded. They got out of the pickup. The tac squad piled out of the Explorer. The squad men shared one trait in common: ever-alert eyes that were constantly scanning the surroundings, always in motion, never lingering for too long on any one fixed point. The eyes of hunters. Jack recognized the behavior pattern because he was the same way.

  The top of the bluff was a rough oblong the size of several football fields put together, its long axis running north- south. Its western edge bordered the foot of a long, low ridge beyond which could be seen lines of wooded hills, rising in tiers to southern spurs of Mount Zebulon.

  The flat-topped mound was littered with remnants of what had once been a thriving mining town at the end of the nineteenth century. It didn’t fit in with Jack’s notions about a western ghost town. It looked more like a war ruin. Some of the buildings were made of brick or stone and might have been factories or warehouses. Others were rows of wooden frame buildings that had collapsed into heaps. Not a single structure was fully intact. One consisted of fragments of two stone walls that met to form a corner, another was a heap of plank board rubble with part of a stone chimney remaining. That was the pattern.

  The weed-grown site had been plucked, pillaged, and otherwise deconstructed by generations of vandals, looters, and troublemakers. No standing section of wall or foundation was without layers of spray-painted graffiti, no pane of glass was unbroken. Mounds of ashes and charred timbers marked the spot where houses had been burned down.

  It was a popular site with the locals, judging by the remains of bonfires and the profusion of broken bottles and empty beer cans. Tire tracks from two-, three-, and four-wheeled vehicles overlaid the ground. The raggedy fence and gate below had proved no deterrent to the many who’d driven their machines up and down the sides of the bluff.

  Jack and Anne Armstrong each had a set of field glasses. The entire CTU team was equipped with headset communicators, miniaturized transceivers consisting of an ear bud with a flexible plastic frame that fitted around one ear, extending into a curving plastic tube the width of a pipe cleaner that terminated near the wearer’s mouth in a condenser microphone. They all now donned the transceivers, running a comm check to make sure each unit was properly sending and receiving.

  The receiver bud buzzed in Jack’s ear as he and the others sounded off. Audio quality was good, the signal strong and clear now that they were all grouped together. Whether it would remain so once they were scattered around the mound and no longer in one another’s line of sight had yet to be determined.

  Anne Armstrong addressed the group. “Watch your step. The town was built on top of the mine and is shot through with vertical air shafts. Some are boarded over and posted with warning signs, others are open holes in the ground that go down a hundred feet or more.”

  She had accessed the maps and diagrams of Silvertop’s inner workings that were archived in the computers at the Pike’s Ford CP and printed them out, bringing them along in a folder. They were crude and incomplete but workable as a rough guide to the sugarloaf butte’s underground world. They would be of little use, however, unless a starting point was first found.

  Sanchez said, “What exactly are we looking for?”

  Jack said, “Anything that might indicate the presence of some or all of Prewitt’s two dozen Zealots in the recent past or right now. For all we know, they could be holed up in some nest up here or nearby. Or down below, in one of the abandoned tunnels. Some of them could be watching us right now.”

  A ripple went through the others, causing the squad members to spread out so they wouldn’t be bunched up in one tight target group. Bailey said, “That’s a happy thought.”

  Holtz scanned the landscape and shook his head doubtfully. “It sure looks deserted.”

  “So did Red Notch last night but there were two killers there, and now a CTU agent is dead.” Jack paused to let that sink in before continuing. “Zealots might be using this as a base, a rendezvous, or a staging area. They might have stored hardware or vehicles here. They might have left a cell behind for security while the others moved on. They might have come here for some unknown purpose on Wednesday night and moved on.”

  Holtz said, “They might not have come here at all.”

  “It’s possible. But even then this won’t be wasted effort. If Silvertop comes up clean, that’s one possibility we can cross off the list and narrow the search perimeters in the hunt for Prewitt and his crew.”

  Anne Armstrong said, “A final word of caution. Silvertop is what’s called an attractive nuisance. It’s a hangout for high school kids and might also harbor squatters and hoboes. So if you see someone suspicious, make sure you know who you’re shooting at before opening fire. We don’t want to accidentally shoot some teens who came up here to get high or make out.”

  The team split up into two search groups, one consisting of Jack and Frith, the other of Armstrong, Holtz, and Sanchez. Bailey stayed behind to guard the vehicles and keep watch on the canyon below.

  Jack and Frith would start at the southern end of the hilltop and work their way north, Armstrong’s group would begin at the northe
rn end and work south. Jack and the squad leader crossed on a diagonal toward the southwest, a path that skirted the southernmost of the ruins.

  The air was still, with barely the breath of a breeze. The sun was moving toward its zenith. Jack hadn’t gone very far before breaking out into a sweat. His face was slick with wetness, and beads of perspiration trickled between his shoulder blades and down his back.

  Frith said, “What do you reckon our chances are of finding something?”

  Jack said, “I think it’s worth a look or we wouldn’t be out here. We’ve got a witness who saw Prewitt’s blue bus and some other vehicles heading for this vicinity around the time of the disappearance early on Thursday. There’ve been no reported sightings of the convoy west of Dixon Cutoff. The Zealots may not be here now but they might have been here and left evidence that’ll point toward where they went.”

  “The area was covered yesterday by search planes. They didn’t turn up anything.”

  “As an old GI ground- pounder, I believe there’s no substitute for on-site recon to see things the flyboys might have missed.”

  Frith grinned. “I’ve got to agree with you there. I’m ex-infantry myself.”

  Jack said, “I’m also a firm believer in taking the high ground.” He pointed to the ridge at the western edge of the bluff. “That should be a good spot for surveying the terrain.”

  Bare dirt gave way to weeds that soon reached mid-calf height. Frith said, “Watch out for snakes.” Jack looked to see if he was kidding. Frith was dead serious. He said, “Rattlesnakes like to prowl the tall grass for field mice and other varmints.”

  Jack was careful from then on to keep an even warier eye on the ground he trod. Ten minutes’ hiking put him and Frith at the foot of the western ridge. It was a short walk to its low, rounded summit. The far side of the ridge dropped steeply into a deep hollow with a thin trickle of a creek running along the bottom. A higher, more heavily wooded slope rose on the other side.

  Jack and Frith stood on the near side of the ridge, below the ridgetop to avoid skylining that would more readily reveal their presence. They faced east toward the ruins on the bluff. Jack took off his sunglasses and slipped them in the left breast pocket of his jacket. The jacket was thin but it still added to the oppressiveness of the heat. He would have liked to have shucked it off but it held his spare clips and loose rounds, and it was worth putting up with a little additional discomfort to have the extra ammo ready to hand. He reminded himself that compared to summer in Baghdad or the Sudan—he’d gone on missions in both—this was brisk, crisp weather.

  Sweat stung his eyes and he wiped them against his sleeve in the crook of his arm. The field glasses hung from a strap around his neck. He tilted back the lid of his cap, raised the binoculars to his eyes, peered at a row of ruins, and adjusted the focus, sharpening it to clarity.

  He mentally divided the landscape into grid squares and methodically scanned them one by one, working his way along the line of structures from south to north. He saw empty window frames with weeds growing behind them, blackened timbers that were the skeletal remains of a house’s framework, ash heaps, and piles of rubble. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, no deviation from the pattern of abandonment and neglect.

  Jack said, “Nothing.” He removed his cap, freed the binocular strap from around his neck, and handed the field glasses to Frith. “Maybe you’ll spot something.”

  Frith scanned the scene, studying it long and hard. “Nope.”

  “Let’s try it a little further to the north.”

  They went north along the ridge. Jack contacted Anne Armstrong via his transceiver headset. She reported that so far her results were negative, too.

  Jack and Frith halted some fifty yards north of their first position. Jack pointed the optics at a new section of the scene and resumed his methodical grid square survey of the ghost town.

  More of the same unrolled itself through the twin lenses until he came to the shell of a long, shedlike structure whose long axis ran east-west. Its short, western wall was mostly intact but slanted inward at a forty-five-degree angle. The part of its north wall he could see was also tilted inward at an acute angle. The southern side was no wall at all but a heaped- up woodpile that was holding up a section of the collapsed roof.

  There was something vaguely off and out of place about the ruin’s outline that caught his attention, prompting him to give it a closer study. The roof, what there was of it, which wasn’t much, was broken into sections that stuck out of the heap at odd angles.

  There was a hole in the south side of the roof. It was covered with what looked like a canvas tarp. The fabric was a tan, sandy-gray color. It would have been hard to see from ground level on the bluff, and even from the elevated vantage point of the ridge, he had to look twice to make sure what he was seeing.

  He looked a third time and still saw it. He handed the field glasses to Frith. “Take a look at the roofline on the south side and tell me what you see.”

  Frith peered at the shed, the lower half of his face impassive below the binoculars. He fiddled with the focus knob and looked some more. “There’s a covering on the roof . . . a tarpaulin of some sort.”

  Jack said, “Who puts a tarp on an old ruin? Somebody who wants to hide something inside, maybe.”

  Frith lowered the field glasses and looked at Jack. Jack said, “Let’s go see.”

  He took the field glasses and slipped the strap on around his neck. He and Frith started downhill, angling toward the shed. Jack said, “Let’s make sure it’s not a false alarm before alerting the others.”

  Frith nodded, said, “Right.” He’d been carrying his M–16 so that its barrel pointed at the ground; now he held it level but off to the side. Jack reached inside his jacket to give his gun butt a little nudge, adjusting it in the holster so it would come free easier if he needed it in a hurry.

  They came down on the flat and made for the shed’s southwest corner. Each step closer made it more evident that a tarp was fixed to part of the roof. Its tan, sandy color was much like the terrain at the top of the bluff—surely no coincidence. The ground around the shed was churned up with a lot of tire tracks, ruts, and broken earth.

  Frith suddenly made a wide detour around a patch of ground. Jack froze, said, “Snake?”

  Frith shook his head, showed a toothy grin. “Bear scat.”

  Jack took a closer look. The ground was littered with animal droppings. A sizable pile, not human. He said, “You can tell they’re bear?”

  Frith said, “Hell, yeah. I grew up in these parts and I live here now. The bear population has been allowed to grow until now they’re a real nuisance. They’re not afraid of humans and they like the taste of people’s garbage better than the food they can forage in the woods.”

  Jack joked, “I’m warning you in advance. Zealots and killers are one thing but if I see a bear, I’m running.”

  “Won’t do you any good. Bears’re fast. They can run faster than you can.” Frith eyed the pile with an outdoorsman’s discernment. “The spoor’s at least a day old so we’re probably in the clear.”

  Jack noticed that they were both talking in low, hushed voices. He said, “I’ll tell you this: it wasn’t a bear that put that tarp on the roof.”

  They continued onward, closing on the shed. Planks in the tilted west wall were cracked and splintered at about midbody height and bore fresh gouges and scrapings. The ground on the west side of the shed was noticeably torn up.

  The south wall was a massed rubble of broken boards and beams. The edges of the canvas tarp hung down over the top of the pile. Football-sized rocks had been placed along the rim to hold it down and pin it in place.

  Jack said, “I want to see what that tarp is covering up.” The heaped rubble on the south was too unsteady to climb. The east side, the building’s front, was in similar condition, a junk pile.

  The long north wall looked more promising. The northwest corner of the shed was its most intact section. Part of th
e roof there was solid. Much of the wall was broken into slablike sections. There were a couple of empty window frames but the roof had fallen in, blocking a view inside.

  Jack tackled the northwest corner. He took off the field glasses and set them down. He pulled his hat down tight on his head. A beam end protruded from the wall at about chest height. Jack hung on to it with both hands, testing it with his weight. It seemed solid enough.

  Frith gave him a boost, allowing Jack to scramble up the side of the tilted wall and stand on the beam end. Jack reached up, grabbing the overhang of the roof with both hands, steadying himself. He chinned himself up to the top of the wall, booted feet scrabbling against the boards. He grunted and panted as he heaved his upper body onto the roof.

  The wood creaked and groaned under him, giving him a bad moment, but it stayed in place. He got his feet under him and rose into a half crouch, ready to jump clear at the first sign of an imminent collapse.

  He could see where a line of nails the size of railroad spikes had been hammered into the wood along the edge where the roof had broken off and fallen in. They anchored the near end of the tarp in place. They looked new. He really wanted to see what was underneath that tarp.

  He dropped to his knees and lay prone on the roof. It seemed solid underneath him. He thought that if it had held the weight of whoever drove the nails it could hold his weight. He bellied his way to the edge.

  The tarp was tough and nailed down tight. If he only had a knife . . . But the tarp wasn’t nailed down on the south side of the shed, it was held in place by rocks. He clawed at the canvas, trying for a hand-hold. The tarp sagged in the middle, there was some play in it. He grabbed a double handful of a fold in the fabric and started pulling it toward him.