24 Declassified: Head Shot (2009) (7 page)

Jack was a veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, and while the bulk of his term there had been spent on the SWAT team, he was no stranger to hot pursuit driving. No matter what the locale, a road’s a road, and he was a quick study.

The fugitive had been handicapped by having to flee Red Notch on foot, scrambling down the hillside and across the road to reach the place where he’d hidden the sedan. That had cut down considerably on his lead. He was trying to increase it now, while Jack labored to whittle it down.

The scenery shot by in a blur. The river lay east of the road, to the right of Jack’s northward course. A thin line of trees stretched along the top of the embankment. Gaps in the tree line afforded glimpses of the river and the terrain beyond it, a long, shallow slope slanting upward for several miles to the ridgeline. The river was about an eighth of a mile wide and flowed southward. It looked fast, frothy and churning with latent power.

The sun was a long way from rising but the sky was lightening in the east, fading from purple- black to royal blue.

This predawn effect was suddenly negated as the pickup truck left Red Notch behind. The notch was just that, a gap between the mountains. The looming bulk of Mount Nagaii appeared to the north of it, a towering rock rampart that rose up and up to dizzying heights. The mountain blocked the low-hanging moon in the west, shutting off the moonlight and throwing the river valley into deep shadow.

A positive result was that the thickened darkness caused the sedan’s taillights to stand out more brightly, a pair of hot red dots gliding above the winding roadway.

Jack switched on his high beams, expanding his view of the road ahead. It was a help at the speed he was traveling. There were no crossroads or intersections as far as he could see, no place where the sedan could turn off in another direction.

Events had happened so quickly that Jack hadn’t dared risk losing a precious second to the distraction of communicating with Central. He could do something about that now that he was settling into the rhythm of the chase.

The mobile comm unit mounted on the dashboard was a variation of the standard model used by CTU/ L.A., so he could work it without too much trouble. He switched it on, its power light brightening to a glowing green bead.

He steered with his left hand, holding the hand mic in his right. He thumbed down the transmit button, said, “Central, this is Unit Three. Over.”

Central acknowledged the transmission. Civilian and military police authorities generally use a numerical code system as a kind of verbal shorthand for their radio communications. A “ten-ten,” say, means that the unit is going temporarily out of service.
Other number codes stand for such things as robbery in progress, shots fired, officer down.

CTU wasn’t the police and except for specialized operations, such as those carried out by tactical strike forces, relied on plain speaking and the technological sophistication of their hardware systems to ensure the security and privacy of their communications.

Jack spoke into the hand mic. He had to shout to be heard over the sound of the engine as it ground out the RPMs necessary to keep pace with the sedan. “This is Agent Bauer. This unit was attacked by two shooters at Red Notch. Agent Neal is dead. So is a civilian informant we discovered at the site. One of the shooters is dead, too.
His partner is fleeing north in a dark-colored sedan along the road at the foot of Red Notch.
I don’t know the name of the road but it runs west of a river.”

The dispatcher started shouting too, out of excitement. He identified the road as Nagaii Drive. Jack said, “I am in pursuit of the vehicle. The driver is armed with a handgun. He may have other weapons. We’re about five miles north of Red Notch and proceeding northward.”

The dispatcher had all kinds of questions about the incident that he wanted answered right away. The road started shifting into a series of tricky S-curves that required Jack’s undivided attention. The sedan had widened its lead while Jack was talking. He signed off, took hold of the wheel with both hands, and concentrated on driving.

The road snaked around outcroppings and concavities of the mountain, an undulating ribbon unwinding at high velocity. Anxiety gripped Jack each time the sedan’s taillights whipped around a curve and out of sight, lessening only when those two red dots came back into view.

Jack drove with one foot on the gas pedal and the other poised above the brake pedal. He put more weight on the accelerator. The engine noise wound up to a higher pitch. He glanced at the temperature gauge on the instrument panel. The needle held steady at the midpoint between the two extremes, right where it was supposed to be. That was good, the engine wasn’t running hot.

The chase had been run on the flat with no real downgrades or slopes to speak of. The road skirted the base of the mountains, avoiding even the foothills. That was okay with Jack, he had his hands full keeping up the pace on this course. The road was bare of all but these two vehicles, the sedan and the pickup truck.

Jack sat hunched forward over the steering wheel like a jockey leaning into the saddle. His skull pounded with a splitting headache, the king-sized killer headache of all time.

No mystery about that. It was the altitude.
Jack came from Los Angeles, he was a flatlander.
But Denver was a mile above sea level and the Red Notch area was higher than that. He wasn’t acclimated to the elevation.
The experts said that flatlanders should take it easy for their first day or two in the heights to avoid altitude sickness.
It wasn’t a matter of conditioning, a trained athlete from the lowlands was as likely as an overweight, lazy layabout to suffer ill effects from initial exposure to the rarefied air of the mountains.

Jack’s head felt like a railroad spike was being hammered into the center of his skull between the twin cerebral hemispheres. Then he remembered Neal with the top of his head shot off. Jack decided he was damned lucky to have a head to suffer headaches with. He’d tough it out, let the adrenaline rush of the hunt help power him through it.

The curves started to smooth out, flattening into a long straightaway.
Jack floored the gas pedal. The pickup shook from the engine vibration, but it was manageable. The engine roar almost but not quite drowned out the transmissions of the frantic dispatcher at Central as he kept firing off demands for an update on the situation.

The situation was that Jack was closing in on the sedan. It was only a couple of hundred yards or so ahead, and the gap was steadily decreasing. Whatever the sedan had under the hood, it lacked the muscle of the pickup truck, and that lack was inexorably telling.

The sky was lightening. A trestle bridge spanning the river came into view on the right. A gap opened opposite it on the left, where Mount Nagaii ended. It was a crossroad that cut Nagaii Drive at right angles. A handful of buildings stood at the junction.

The bridge was a railroad bridge, inaccessible to vehicular traffic. Railroad tracks stretched from the west end of the bridge, crossing Nagaii Drive and continuing into the gap between Mount Nagaii and a mountain to the north of it.

The tracks that crossed the road at right angles were sunken, the twin rails inset in slotted grooves in the asphalt. There were no cross ties. A black-and
white-striped bar and a set of signal lights marked the crossing. No train was using the line so the signal lights were dark and the barrier gate was raised to permit free passage.

A small town was clustered around the crossing. Town? It wasn’t even a village. A hamlet, maybe. There were a gas station, a diner, a strip lined with a couple of convenience stores, a post office, and a handful of houses.

The sedan blew through the crossing with no slackening of speed. The pickup truck did the same, flashing over the sunken railroad tracks with nothing but a slight change in pitch in the whirring drone of the racing wheels on the roadway to mark their presence.

Jack glimpsed in the corner of his eye a tiny café fronting the east side of the road. A police car stood parked beside its north wall, facing the road at right angles.
Its lights were dark, but he could make out what looked like two figures in the front seat.

He passed them doing about eighty, eighty-five miles per hour.
He’d been going faster but had slowed down a hair just to be on the safe side when crossing the railroad tracks. They proved to be no obstacle, so once he’d cleared them he pushed the pickup back up to ninety.

There was a pause while the occupants of the police car woke up or got over their stupefaction at seeing a high-speed chase zip right by them. Then the police car swung out of the lot into the northbound lane, turned on its headlights, switched on the emergency flashers of its rooftop light rack, and took off after the sedan and the pickup truck.

Jack glanced in his
rear-view
mirror, seeing the police car’s light rack flickering bright blue and white. They looked bright and happy, like party lights. They were a long way off. The sedan was much closer, the gap between it and the pickup truck closing up.

Telephone poles lining the roadside went by in a blur. Road signs whipped by so fast there was no time to read them.

The road started to slope upward, beginning a long gentle incline that curved slightly to the west, rounding the southernmost limb of Mount Zebulon, the next peak north of the gap beyond Mount Nagaii.

Jack was so close to the sedan that he could make out the outline of the driver’s head and shoulders. How to take him? He’d like to take him alive if he could, but at these speeds that would be a tall order. He didn’t intend on getting killed himself trying it. The pickup was bigger than the sedan, had more muscle. He could run him off the road, if it came to that. If he came alongside the sedan, he could shoot him. The fugitive had a gun, too, though, and Jack didn’t fancy the idea of trading shots with him at ninety miles an hour. No, best to bull him off the road. If the other should survive the crash, so much the better.

The sedan was nearly at the crest of the long incline. A peek in the
rear-view
mirror told Jack that the police car was still a long way behind.

The sedan topped the summit, disappearing down the other side. The hilltop zoomed ahead, and for a split second Jack was looking down at the far side of the slope.

There was a village at the bottom of the hill. There wasn’t much to it but it was a metropolis in comparison to the whistle-stop at the railroad crossing. A bridge spanned the river here, too, but this one was for cars and trucks.

A strip of stores lined both sides of Nagaii Drive at the village’s center. Jack guessed that was what passed for Main Street, the business district. A dozen or so two- and three-story brick buildings were grouped around both sides of the main drag. A couple of blocks of one-family houses stood on the west side of town.

The intersection of Nagaii Drive and the road to the bridge formed a square, complete with traffic lights.
The lights fl
ashed amber.

A police car came into view in the western arm of the crossroad, rolling eastbound toward the square, its emergency lights flashing.

The sedan got there first, flying through the intersection and continuing north on Nagaii Drive.
The police car halted, partially blocking the square.

A second police car appeared, coming from the east branch of the crossroad, rolling west.
Its flashers were on, too.
It halted in the middle of the square, nose to nose with its twin, the two of them forming a roadblock that walled off Nagaii Drive.

Jack was in a tight spot. He thought about driving up on the sidewalk and swerving around the roadblock, but the sidewalk looked too narrow to accommodate the pickup. It didn’t look doable even if the sidewalk had been wide enough, not at the speed he was going. At that speed it looked suicidal. He wasn’t sure that even without trying any fancy tricks he could stop in time to avoid crashing into the roadblock.

The cops must have thought so, too, because they jumped out of their cars and hustled to the sides. There were two of them, one per car. One was c
arrying what looked like a rifl
e. Jack’s calculations were carried out in split seconds. They weren’t so much calculations as reactions. He knew that if he stomped on the brake pedal the brakes were likely to seize up and cause him to lose control of the car. He pumped the brakes instead, manhandling the steering wheel to minimize the inevitable slide.

The tires howled, leaving twin snaky lines of burnt rubber on both sides of the street’s painted yellow centerline as the pickup shimmied, fishtailed, and skidded.

The machine slid sideways a good part of the way down the hill, leading with the driver’s side. Multiple collisions would have been inevitable if any cars had been parked on either side of the street. Jack needed all the space on both sides of the street to wrestle some kind of control into the pickup.

It was close, very close. The pickup skidded sideways toward the twinned police cars, lurching to a halt less than six feet away from them. The engine stalled out.

The radio still worked, though. Every now and then it squawked out another frantic, near-unintelligible query from the dispatcher at Central.

Jack felt like he’d left his stomach somewhere back on the downgrade, probably at the point where he’d first started working the brakes. The stench of burnt rubber and scorched brake linings was overpowering, stifling. He felt like he could barely draw a breath.