24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009) (22 page)

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 snowfl
akes. 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-shave
n face wielding an assault rifl
e 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 fi
red 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 fl
esh 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.

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 su
dden, jarring shocks and the fl
ailing 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.

L
obo 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?

Most CW gases are invisible, odorless, and tasteless. The green gas was none of these. It was something outside Jack’s experience of chemical weapons. Its high visibility, taste, and smell suggested that at least part of its purpose was to terrify, as the mustard gas of World War I had panicked troops into abandoning their trenches and retreating when they saw its characteristic yellow cloud approaching their position. Mustard gas was an irritant, not necessarily fatal, doing its work by attacking the eyes, the tender membranes of the nose and throat and the lungs of its victims. Tear gas, a milder variant on the same principle, is often used for crowd control.

Jack was experiencing none of the symptoms of an airborne irritant. The green gas was not an irritant, then. What was it?

A nonlethal weapon for crowd control? It was unlike anything he’d ever heard of in the arsenals of the military or law enforcement agencies of any nation in the world. A nauseant? He didn’t feel sick. Knockout gas? He was wide awake. His limited exposure might have cut down the gas’s effects in either of these two cases. The stuff could be slow-acting, by nature or by dosage, its effects delayed while it continued working on his system.

The chain of reasoning flashed lightninglike through Jack’s mind.
He wasn’t just sitting there while he puzzled it out, either. He’d been in action from the start, on his feet and moving.

He’d landed on the east bank of a shallow creek that ran north-south along the center of the bottom of a valley. Both banks were thatched with thick, dark green grass, perhaps because of their proximity to the water. The greenery stood in contrast to the short, dry, yellow- brown turf that matted the rest of the valley.

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.