24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009) (6 page)

Nobody spoke for a moment. Neal broke the silence at last, saying, “That’s some story.”

Lobo said, “Every word of it is true. The proof’s in the pudding. Look around you. Where’d everybody go? If I’m lying, where’d they all git gone to? Tell me that!”

He looked Neal in the face, then Jack. “No answer, huh? I didn’t think so. Well, that’s about all of it there is to tell . . . Say, you boys wouldn’t happen to have anything to drink on you, would you? I was stone-cold sober last night and I’ll swear to it on a stack of Bibles. But I sure could use a drink right about now and I don’t mean the
non-alcoholic
kind, neither. Something with a kick to it. This talking is mighty thirsty work.”

Jack said, “Sorry, no.”

Lobo said, “Figgers. That’s my fool luck working against me.” He brightened. “Still, it was working for me pretty good last night, to keep me from getting tooken!”

Neal took a cigarette from the pack and put it between his lips. Lobo looked up hopefully, said, “You wouldn’t have a smoke to spare, would you?”

Neal gave him a cigarette. Lobo said, “Thank you kindly.”
Neal flicked on his lighter, holding the flame to the tip of Lobo’s cigarette until it got going, then lighting up his own.
Jack instinctively looked away while they were lighting up, to avoid totally
cancelling
out his night vision.

Jack said, “Didn’t you see the police searching the

compound all day, Lobo?”

“Sure, I seen ’em.”

“Why didn’t you come down and tell them what

you saw?”

“Mister, I make it a practice to keep as much distance between myself and the law as possible. I got no hankering to go back to the state hospital again so the doctors could treat me like I was sick in the head.”

Lobo took a long draw on his cigarette, exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Some of them cops had pretty mean faces, too. Could’ve been devil men for all I know. I sure wasn’t going to put myself in their clutches. I laid low until they packed up and went home and I stayed low until that pair that was dogging me in the hills got tired and went away, too.

“Even then I didn’t show myself for fear of the hog-faces coming back by night. It was getting late and the moon was low and they still hadn’t shown, so I took a chance on breaking cover and coming down into camp to see what I could scrounge up. I was getting powerful hungry, my belly was all twisted into knots. I made my move and that’s when you fellows showed up and turned on the lights. I ducked down among all them garbage cans to hide. I was afraid you was gonna search back there and I wanted to get away before you did only I made too much noise and gave myself away.”

Lobo smoked his cigarette down to the nub and tossed it away, the bright orange-red tip making a tiny splash of embers when it hit the dirt. He looked up at Neal. “Could I trouble you for another of them smokes?”

Neal gave him a fresh cigarette and held the lighter until Lobo got it going. Lobo said, “Much obliged. You fellows cops?”

Jack said, “No.”

Lobo nodded, as if confirming a previously held notion. “Thought not. Cops would’ve already been whomping on me, beating the piss out of me for drawing my knife, even though I was scared and just trying to defend myself.”

Jack said, “We’re government men.” Neal looked at him sharply, unsure of where Jack was going. Jack went on, “We’re part of a top secret outfit set up to investigate satanic crimes.”

Lobo cackled, “I knew it! Like the Men in Black.”

“We’re the Anti- Beast Brigade.” Jack was straight-faced, serious. “You’re an eyewitness to what happened here, the only eyewitness. We’re going to take you to a safe place where the devil men can’t get you and you can tell your story. You’ll also be able to get cleaned up and get a hot meal.”

“I ain’t so big for cleaning up but the hot meal sounds all right. You think maybe I could get me a drink or two?”

“I can’t make any promises but we’ll see when we get there.”

“You’ll put in a good word for me, won’t you? About that drink. After all I seen last night, I sure could use one!”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Let’s get out of here then. I don’t mind telling you that being bird- dogged by those two devil men day and night kind of got me spooked. I won’t mind putting some distance between me and Them.”

Lobo rose, standing up. His sudden movement undoubtedly saved Jack’s life. Shots cracked; Lobo pitched forward, slamming into Jack, knocking him off his feet.

Jack was still holding Lobo’s knife in his right hand and he twisted sideways to keep Lobo from impaling himself on the blade as the other lurched into him. He needn’t have bothered because Lobo was already dead, killed by that first shot. But things were happening too fast for Jack to make sense of it all.

They both fell tumbling in a tangle of limbs to the mess hall’s wood- planked porch. Jack lay on his left side, with Lobo sprawled half across him.

Jack glanced up in time to see the top of Frank Neal’s head explode, spraying blood, bone, and brain matter. It meant instant neural extinguishment, the cessation of all thought and reflex motor action. The body dropped like a stone.

A bullet hole showed in Lobo’s upper back between the shoulder blades, marking the shot that had brought him down. His dead weight pinned Jack to the boards. Jack let go of the knife and started wriggling out from under him.

Lobo’s body spasmed violently under the impact of a second round thudding into it. The shot had been meant for Jack but hit Lobo instead. Jack clawed out his pistol.

Two figures stood in front of the men’s barracks north of the mess hall, barely a stone’s throw away. One had a rifle and the other a handgun. A patch of gun smoke like a small, puffy ash-gray cloud hung in mid-air in front of the duo. The rifleman stood with the weapon held at his shoulder, swinging the barrel to get a clear shot at Jack.

Jack fought down the urge to jerk the trigger, squeezing it instead several times to place a couple of rounds into the rifleman’s middle.
The rifleman went over backward like a tin duck in a shooting gallery.

Jack and the rifleman had had fairly clear firing lines on each other.
Jack had been fortunate in that Lobo had been unlucky enough to stand up in time to catch that first bullet that had been meant for Jack. No such luck for Frank Neal.
The rifleman had tagged him with a head shot. Jack and Lobo had gone crashing down to the planks together, and Lobo had caught the rifleman’s hasty third shot.

The rifleman had done all the damage; his partner must have been more of a spotter and backup. Now he returned fire with the handgun, loosing a fusillade in Jack’s direction. Neither he nor Jack had much in the way of sightlines on each other.

He had a semi-automatic pistol and he must have pumped out a dozen shots. He made a lot of noise, but none of the rounds came close to Jack. He shot out a mess hall window and punched holes in wooden walls, spraying a lot of wood chips, splinters, and sawdust. He was less interested in getting his man than he was in covering his retreat.

He ran north, angling his flight to put the men’s barracks building between him and Jack. Jack raised himself up on his elbows, wiping the back of his free hand across his eyes, trying to clear them of the blood that had sprayed his face when Lobo had been tagged. He got his feet under him and hunkered down beside Lobo, feeling his neck for a tremor of a pulse. He knew it for an exercise in futility but went through the motions anyway, confirming what he’d been certain of, that the man was dead. That first shot had done for him, the one that had been meant for Jack.

Neal lay on his back, face upturned to the night sky. It was like the top of his head had been scooped out with a shovel. The rest of his face below the brow line didn’t look too bad. Jack knew Neal had put the truck keys in his front pants pocket but he couldn’t remember which one so he patted them both down, feeling the keys through his right front pocket. It’s not so easy to pick a dead man’s pocket. Jack knelt beside the corpse, twisting his hand at an odd angle to get it inside Neal’s pocket. Neal’s body was warm with the life that had just been let out of it.
Jack’s fingers fastened around the keys and fished them out.

A figure darted out from between the women’s barracks and the blockhouse holding the generator. The rifleman’s partner. He could have done some mischief if he’d thought to disable the Toyota, but the only thing on his mind was escape. He burst out into the open, running east across the oval toward the front gate.

It was a long shot for a pistol, too long, so Jack didn’t even bother trying. He started north, double-timing it. Caution and curiosity compelled him to pause to give the rifleman a quick onceover, drawing him to a halt beside the body.

The shooter was middle-aged with a lanky runner’s physique. He had short wavy hair, bushy eyebrows, and a mean face. His expression was one of intense irritation, as though he was
extremely annoyed at having been shot dead.
He wore no flak jacket, no bulletproof vest.
Jack’s rounds had shattered his chest, one penetrating the heart, negating the need to deliver a coup de grâce to the head.

His weapon was a hunting rifle, a scoped thirty ought-six. A standard telescopic sight, not a night vision rig.
Jack snatched up the weapon, shouldering it, but the fleeing gunman was already below the crest of the rise.
He put it down and got moving, running to the Toyota.

The triggerman was unknown to Jack, a stranger. No mean feat, since Jack’s access to information as SAC of CTU/L.A. made him cognizant of most of the top pro shooters currently active in the milieu.

He must have been one of Lobo’s devil men, part of the team that’d been searching the hills for him. The other half of the duo was fleeing the compound. That much of Lobo’s story had been true. And the rest?

Jack reached the pickup truck, jumping behind the wheel and starting it up. He made sure to fasten his seat belt harness, he was going to need it. He drove east, fast, toward the front gate.

Neal knew the area and had said there were no roads into or out of the sandstone piles west of the compound. The two killers couldn’t have driven into the compound without having been seen by the CTU agents. Therefore they must have parked their vehicle outside the front gate and entered on foot.

Jack tore across the short axis of the oval, making a beeline for the exit. He paused for an instant at the edge of the top of the slope, scanning the landscape. There weren’t too many places where another vehicle could be. It had to be on the access road or the blacktop road, or parked somewhere just off either road.

A pair of headlights flashed on behind a clump of brush on the shoulder on the east side of the blacktop road, north of where the access road met it. A dark-colored boxy sedan emerged from behind a screen of foliage. Jack thought it might be a Subaru from the quick glimpse he got of it, but that was only a rough guess. The sedan fishtailed along the shoulder and onto the blacktop, flashing north along it in a big, big hurry.

Jack took off after it. He first had to get to the bottom of the hill. He toyed with the idea of saving time by quitting the road and plowing straight down the hillside but discarded it. A big enough rock could bust a tire or an axle and stop the pursuit before it got started.

The pickup’s nose tilted downward as he began descending the dirt switchback road, whipping the steering wheel left and right, standing on the brakes at times, sliding into some of the hairpin turns, whipping through others, laying down fat, feathery plumes of dust as he powered his way down the dirt track.

A couple of heart-stopping instants threatened to see the pickup truck go sailing off the edge, but each time luck or skill or both saw him through, enabling him to thread the twisty course in a speedy blur.

There was a bounce and then a liftoff at the bottom of the slope as all four wheels left the dirt road. Jack felt like a paving stone had been dropped into the bottom of his belly.

A timeless swooping interval came to an abrupt end as all four wheels touched down on the pavement of the two-lane blacktop. The vehicle bottomed out, banging its underside on the roadway with a bone-jarring thud that set Jack’s teeth to rattling, but the shocks absorbed the impact and the tires held up without any of them suffering a blowout.

The wheels bit, gaining purchase, squealing as Jack whipped the steering wheel around to make a hard left, then burning rubber as he stomped the gas pedal and the machine bulleted northward, taking up the chase.

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 A.M. AND 6 A.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

Nagaii Drive, Colorado

The road ran north-south, hemmed in by a river on the east and mountains on the west. It ran not in a straight line but in broad, sweeping curves molded to the contours of the river valley.

The pickup truck’s engine was well-tuned and possibly customized for speed; there was a lot of power under the hood, as Jack was happy to discover. It handled well on the curves, too.

The sedan ahead knew it was being chased and was doing its best to widen the distance between it and its pursuer. The driver had an advantage over Jack in that he presumably knew the terrain, while to Jack it was all unknown territory.