24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009) (19 page)

Jack was mission-oriented, though, and the fear of failing to carry out his duty was far greater than any emotional dreads or apprehension could ever be. The confidence born of hard training and self-mastery asserted itself, narrowing his mental focus to the job at hand. He had to admit, though, that being a miner must be a hell of a way to make a living.

The trio kept on moving forward. There was blackness ahead, beyond the reach of their electric torches and hard hat lights; and blackness behind, the point of light that was the exit having long since been swallowed up by darkness. The three of them were encapsulated in a glare of artificial brightness from their electric lights that glided through the tunnel like a glowworm inching along a sunless pipeline.

Jack reminded himself that the more distant the exit, the closer they were to their objective. Twice more they came to junctions where side passages branched out from the main tunnel. Armstrong marked the rock wall with a green glowing arrow each time. The comm check at the
first such junction found Frith’s reply breaking up into a garbled word jumble of meaninglessness. The next comm check reduced Frith’s transmission to a crackling burst of static. They were out of communication with the outside world.

Walls remained upright, the ceiling unrolled seamlessly, and the tunnel floor continued rock-solid. Bailey had no need of the pry bar to probe doubtful patches of footing; there were none.

There was a change in the air now, a taint of rottenness that rode the current of cool air coming from deep within. It evoked another primal response, raising the hairs on the back of Jack’s neck. He knew that smell: it was the scent of death.

Bailey halted, causing the duo in his wake to also fall still. He said, “Whew! Get that?” Armstrong’s nostrils crinkled with distaste. “And how!”

Jack said, “It won’t be long now.”

They started forward. The darkness must have heightened their other senses because it was some time before they could make out a fuzzy patch of grayness far ahead. The reek of rot and decay had grown with every step and was quite strong now.

It was the herald of the vertical shaft and the mound that lay at its bottom. The trio hurried forward toward the light, drawn to it.

Bailey started coughing, deep hacking coughs that he managed to suppress with difficulty as they neared the end of their quest. Armstrong fastened the hook at the end of her flashlight to her belt, freeing her hands so she could tie a handkerchief over her nose and mouth.

Jack envied her the handkerchief; he wished he had one so he could follow her example. He breathed through his mouth as much as possible, panting as though he were on the final lap of a marathon.

Daylight loomed ahead, not much of it, but what little there was seemed neon- bright after the blackness of darkness through which they had come. The glare was minimized because the mound at the bottom of the pit reached almost to the top of the tunnel’s rounded archway where it met the vertical shaft.
The dirt and rocks at the top of the heap could be glimpsed through the narrow space left unfilled.

Bailey stopped short so suddenly that if Armstrong’s reflexes had been any slower she would have bumped into him.
The pry bar slipped from his hand, striking a hollow rattling sound against the tunnel’s rock floor.

Rage battled revulsion with rage winning, allowing Bailey to overcome a fit of gagging in order to choke out an obscenity. Armstrong reeled as if from a physical blow.

Jack knew what was coming, had known for a long time, having first guessed the truth up on the hilltop in what now seemed an eternity ago. He was taken aback by the extent of the devastation, though. The slaughter.

The mound was nothing more nor less than a mass grave, a heap of bodies piled high. Many bodies, male and female. The mound would have been higher except that some of the bodies had rolled into the tunnel. No doubt the same thing had happened at the other three tunnel mouths at the junction of the shaft.
The overflow had lowered the pile’s height.

The corpses had been thrown into the shaft and a mass of loose dirt and rocks and rubble thrown on top of them to cover them up. Enough dirt and debris had been shoveled into the pit to mask the atrocity when seen from the surface but not nearly enough to hide the pathetic remains when seen from below.

Armstrong said, “My God! How many of them?”

Jack said, “Twenty? More? Most of the Zealots, if not all. They’re not missing anymore.” He took a certain pride that his voice was able to maintain a steady, even tone. Something fell with a thud on top of the mound. It had fallen a long way and hit the dirt pile with a loud, thwacking slap. It sat there emanating a sizzling sound like bacon frying on a griddle.

It was a bundle of dynamite, sticks of dynamite held together by several loops of tape. The sizzle came from the length of fuse cord that curled out of one end of the bundle. A short length that grew shorter with every eye blink.

Jack grabbed Armstrong by the shoulders, picked her up bodily, and turned her around, giving her a shove that propelled her a half-dozen paces deeper into the tunnel. He shouted, “Run!”

Bailey was already in motion, spinning and leaping forward away from the shaft.

Armstrong ran, Jack close at her heels. She broke into a sprint, arms and legs pumping, rising on the balls of her feet, accelerating with a burst of speed.

Jack and Bailey were right behind her, running neck and neck. The tunnel was wide enough to accommodate both of them.

There was a chaos of pounding footfalls and their resounding echoes, a blur of hard hat lights and flashlight beams flickering over rock walls as the trio fled, racing to put some distance between themselves and the bomb in the pit.

The dynamite exploded.

THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 P.M. AND 2 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME

Shadow Valley, Colorado

Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Out of the bomb blast and into a firefight.
Jack Bauer, already brutalized by the effects of the explosion, now found himself in a raging gun battle with a ruthless strike force.

It was a blessing in a way. It meant that he was alive and now faced a foe he could come to grips with.

The wraithlike nature of the opposition, up to now as hard to get hold of as a fistful of smoke, had resolved itself into flesh-and-blood attackers who were trying to kill him and what remained of the CTU team.
Flesh could be made to bleed, and Jack ached for a reckoning with the enemy. He ached, period. But he knew it could have been worse. To ache is to be alive, and to live offers the prospect of a righteous revenge.

It had been a lucky break that the bundle of dynamite had landed on top of the pile instead of rolling down its side to fall into the tunnel. That had been the second lucky break, actually. The first had been that the bundle survived the long fall without detonating the blasting caps and triggering off the sticks of TNT on impact.
Dynamite is relatively stable; it’s the blasting caps that are fluky, fickle, and chancy.
It was blind fate that had caused the bundle to hit the mound in such a way as to avoid touching off the caps. The soft dirt at the top of the heap must have cushioned the fall to prevent premature detonation.

The fuse had been short but long enough to give the trio precious time for a good running start. Time? Time had seemed to stand still during that nightmare interval of mad flight away from the shaft.

More luck: the shaft and the pile of bodies at its bottom had absorbed most of the force of the explosion. What got through was devastating enough.

The blast came like the Trump of Doom at the End of Days, rocking all creation with a shock wave that mingled light, heat, and noise in a rush of pure force. Jack was lifted up and catapulted bodily by a senses-shattering pressure that wiped everything blank.

He came to in a howling torrent of darkness. The darkness was incomplete, lacking the utter black of totality. He saw as much as sensed a whirlwind of smoke and dirt streaming over him. That he could distinguish gradations in the murk meant that at least one light was still working.

It wasn’t his. His hard hat lamp had gone dark and the flashlight had fallen from his hand. He was unsure whether he even still wore a hard hat.
He felt around the top of his head but numbed fingers and stunned senses were unable to feel the difference between his skull and the protective headgear.

Some of the murk thinned as reality returned with each heartbeat. He was on his hands and knees and a light dangled back and forth, swinging pendulum-like in front of his face. Was it the sun? The moon?

Hands were tugging at him, hooked under his arms and urging him to his feet. The chaos was strangely silent, drowned out by the ringing in his ears. The picture came into tighter focus. The shining globe waving before his eyes resolved itself into the lens of a blazing flashlight. The lens was cracked but the beam still shone.

The flashlight hung from where it was hooked to Anne Armstrong’s belt, hanging down from the side of her hip. She was crouching over him, trying to help him stand up.
He knelt on the tunnel’s rocky floor, smoke and dust roiling all around him.

It was hard to breathe in the murk- laden air. Mouth and nostrils seemed filled with dirt. He coughed, choked, spat, managing to clear his throat. It helped him draw a breath, then another.

Armstrong’s face was close to his, weirdly under-lit by the flashlight’s glow, her eyes wide and staring, her features harsh and angular. Her mouth was moving but Jack was unable to hear what she was saying due to the roaring in his ears. More imperative than words was the pull of her hands urging him upward.

He said, “I’m all right!” He mouthed the words but couldn’t hear them. He reached out with his right hand, touching the tunnel wall. He braced himself and rose to his feet, lurching into a half crouch. A wave of dizziness overswept him and he stumbled sideways, bumping his head against the wall. A chinstrap throttled him; that’s how he realized he was still wearing his hard hat.

He got his back against the wall and stood there with legs bent at the knees until the dizziness passed.
Armstrong tilted the flashlight at her hip so that it shone at a forty-five-degree angle.
It was pointed at something to Jack’s left and behind him. His gaze followed the direction of the beam.

It shone on Bailey, crawling forward head-down on his hands and knees. He was bareheaded, having lost his hard hat in the blast. The view wavered as banks of dust and smoke rolled by. Bailey raised his head, looking up when the light hit him. The whites of his eyes stood out in a dirt-smeared face. Blood trickled from his nose and the corners of his mouth. He lowered his head and continued crawling forward.

Jack staggered to one side of Bailey and Armstrong the other. They each took hold of an arm and tried to lift Bailey to his feet. Jack could barely stay on his own. He tottered, almost falling before managing to right himself. A fall would be disastrous; he was unsure whether he’d be able to get back up. He spread his feet wider for balance; it helped stabilize him.

He and Armstrong somehow managed to get Bailey up and standing. Bailey got his arms across their shoulders as they propped him upright. Arm-strong tilted the baton flashlight level so that it shone forward, pointing the way ahead.

The dust and smoke clouds were drifting away and ahead of them, seeking an exit at the far end of the tunnel, wherever that might be. They must be going in the direction opposite that from which the blast had come. That was the way the trio must go, too.

That was good. Jack’s sense of direction was scrambled and he would have been just as likely to go the wrong way as not. The streaming airborne debris was a signpost showing the way out.

The three agents started forward. Jack and Arm-strong had to half carry, half drag Bailey at the start. Each lurching pace forward was a win. Jack’s thoughts flashed back to Army days, to forced marches with full field battle gear where trainees were pushed to the limits of endurance and beyond, to prepare them for combat conditions that would demand that one must march or die. There had been times later during his term of service when that became literally true and survival depended on the ability to put one foot forward and then the other, slogging along until you were all used up and continuing to keep on going after that.

Now as then he concentrated all his thoughts and energies on forward motion. The passage became a torturous nightmare, a seeming treadmill to oblivion. But he kept on going, reaching down deep somewhere to find something to pick up those feet and put them down.

Bailey began carrying more of his own weight. That helped. Jack was in top condition, and his tremendous endurance began to reassert itself. That helped more.

Armstrong kept the flashlight hooked to her belt. That was smart, keeping it safely tethered so as to avoid having it slip free from a betraying hand to fall and shatter, blacking out their sole source of light. Jack had his pocket flash but he didn’t know if it still worked. It took all the energy he had to continue moving ahead and propping up Bailey; there was none for checking on the pocket flash, not when Armstrong’s light served their purposes. She needed to be able to use her right hand to tilt the light to point the way, so Jack did what he could to shoulder more of Bailey’s weight to enable her to do just that.