24 Declassified: 08 - Collateral Damage Read online

  So who did control Kurmastan? And why did their leader have the compound destroyed, his followers commit mass suicide?

  The bound figure shifted, and a new stench curled Jack’s nostrils. The old man was lying in his own offal.

  “It’s inhuman. Not even an animal should be treated like this,” Jack muttered, moving to free the man. But as soon as he approached al Sallifi, the old man howled and lunged at him, raking the air with filthy claws. Jack cursed and stumbled back.

  He waited a moment for the man to settle down, then Jack took a cautious step forward. Al Sallifi charged again, snarling as he strained against the rattling chains that bound him to the wall.

  Knowing there was nothing more he could do, Jack quickly fled the bunker, into the smoke-shrouded afternoon.

  Outside, he heard the roar of turboshaft engines, the steady beat of helicopter blades cutting the air.

  The reinforcements had arrived.

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  Too impatient to wait for the strike teams, Jack headed back up the hill, through the ruined mobile home park, to the grove where he had left Layla Abernathy and Dani Taylor.

  6:49:57 P.M. EDT

  In the woods above Kurmastan Layla Abernathy watched the CTU helicopters circle above the blazing compound, before setting down in a cyclone of smoke and burning embers.

  She glanced at her wristwatch, wondering why Jack Bauer had not yet returned. Layla fished for the micro-binoculars on her belt, but before she peered through them, she glanced at Dani. The girl was squatting on the soft loam, legs folded under her. Then Layla recognized something shiny on the ground beside the girl, something that had fallen out of the pocket of her pants.

  “Is that Brice Holman’s cell phone?” Layla asked.

  Dani jumped as if startled, then snatched up the phone.

  “No, it’s mine.”

  “That phone belongs to Brice,” Layla insisted. “That’s what CTU was tracking when Jack found you.”

  She stared at the girl, her mind roiling. Holman could very well have the key to all this chaos locked inside that device. Digital recordings. Surveillance logs. Photographic images.

  Layla knelt down beside the teenager. “You have to give me that cell phone,” she said urgently.

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  “No!” Dani cried.

  “This is a matter of national security.” Layla reached for the phone.

  Dani screamed, and the two women struggled. Layla was petite, but better trained. In a few deft moves, she had the girl pinned to the ground.

  “Give me that phone,” Layla demanded. “I can’t let some moody adolescent jeopardize innocent lives.”

  Suddenly a shadow fell over the women. Layla looked up, just as a foot lashed out and struck her temple.

  Without a sound, Layla toppled to the ground and stayed down. Dani slid out from under her, looked up at the newcomer.

  “Mr. Holman!” she cried. “You’re alive.”

  Brice Holman stumbled, then slumped to the ground.

  “Barely,” he grunted, clutching his belly. Dani saw black blood seeping through his shirt.

  Dani threw her arms around Holman. He touched her arm reassuringly, then stared at the still form on the ground.

  “Judy warned me,” he said to the unconscious Agent Abernathy. “She was sure you were a mole. I thought it was Rachel Delgado, but I guess Foy was right . . .”

  Then Holman grunted and clutched his gut with both arms. “Won’t be long now,” he rasped.

  Another figure entered the clearing. Holman looked up, into the barrel of Jack Bauer’s Glock.

  “Who are you?” Jack demanded. “What did you do to Agent Abernathy?”

  Dani hurled herself between the two men. “This is Mr.

  Holman. The man who helped me!”

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  Bauer lowered his weapon. “I’ve been searching for you all day.”

  “You’re Jack Bauer? From the Los Angeles unit?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Forgive me if we don’t shake hands. I’m holding my guts in place at the moment.” Holman winced again.

  “Listen, we have to talk, Bauer, and fast. I don’t have much time . . .”

  “I’ll call the paramedics,” Jack said. “There’s a medical unit hovering around here somewhere.”

  Brice Holman took his cell from Dani Taylor’s hand and offered it to Jack. “Use my phone.”

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  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE

  BETWEEN THE HOURS OF

  7:00 P.M. AND 8:00 P.M.

  EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME

  7:04:49 P.M. EDT

  In the woods above Kurmastan Hunterdon County, New Jersey Flickering flames still rose from the ruined town. In the debris-strewn streets, helicopters idled and armed silhouettes moved through the billowing smoke. Down in the valley, the shadows deepened—the sun would set in an hour or so.

  Jack used mini-binoculars to watch the medical team move among the mobile homes. Following his GPS signal, they were making their way up the hill to perform triage on Director Brice Holman. After personally examining 170

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  the man’s ravaged abdomen, Jack didn’t think they would make it in time.

  Sprawled on the ground, head cradled in Dani Taylor’s lap, Brice grinned, but the amusement never touched his pain-ravaged eyes.

  “Turns out a pitchfork can kill you as dead as a nine-millimeter,” he grunted.

  Also on the ground, Layla Abernathy groaned and stirred, but her eyes didn’t open. Jack ignored the traitor.

  He had secured the woman’s wrists and ankles with flex ties, so she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Brice Holman’s intense gaze locked with Jack Bauer’s.

  “Twelve trucks, Bauer. All of them with the Dreizehn Trucking logo,” Holman said ominously. “Between eighty-five and a hundred fanatics aboard them. If the forces are divided equally . . . Hell, you do the math, Bauer. I’m too damned tired. But I have lots of intelligence inside that phone. The access code is Bin 666 Charlie seven—that’s the word seven spelled out in letters, got it?”

  Jack nodded. Holman relaxed, slumping against Dani Taylor. The teenager had never left his side, even when Bauer exposed the deep puncture wounds and tried—

  vainly—to staunch the bleeding.

  “Listen, Bauer, these trucks are packed with deadly cargo. Guns. Ammunition. Explosives. Maybe chemical and biological weapons, too. One truck left the compound early this morning. The rest later, maybe the early afternoon. They fanned out in all directions . . .”

  Holman winced against the pain. When he spoke again, his voice was weaker, his tone more urgent. “You’ve got to stop them. Send out a nationwide bulletin, alert all C O L L AT E R A L D A M A G E 171

  Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Track them down. Use satellites. Raid truck stops and diesel fuel dumps—whatever it takes.”

  Holman groaned, and fresh blood stained the bundled cloth he clutched to his guts. “It’s up to you now, Bauer.

  There’s no one else who can stop these terrorists. Nobody but you.”

  Bauer nodded. “I’ll stop them, Holman. I swear it.”

  The medical team arrived at that moment. They dragged a protesting Dani aside, then began to work over the man.

  Bauer stepped to the edge of the hill and tugged Holman’s cell out of his pocket, dialed up CTU New York.

  “O’Brian here.”

  “It’s Jack, Morris. Prepare to receive data.”

  “Ready.”

  Jack punched in Holman’s security code, located the intelligence cache, and pressed the send button.

  Behind him, Jack heard Dani sobbing. A paramedic appeared at his shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Agent Bauer,” the woman said softly. “
We did what we could, but Director Holman lost too much blood. He’s gone . . .”

  7:18:50 P.M. EDT

  Security Station One

  CTU Headquarters, NYC

  Morris O’Brian downloaded the contents of Brice Holman’s cell phone. After opening the files in his briefcase computer, he copied the data, bundled it with the infor-172

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  mation retrieved from Judith Foy’s cell, then forwarded complete data packages to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley; FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C.; and CTU Los Angeles for further analysis.

  He also sent them the cleaned up audio of the mad, rant-ing speech by Ibrahim Noor, which was picked up from Holman’s cell phone and processed at CTU New York.

  Then Morris went to work analyzing the photographic images shot by Deputy Director Judith Foy at Newark Lib-erty Airport that morning.

  Thanks to Chloe’s alarmingly titled e-mail—a false alarm as it mercifully turned out—Morris had been able to retrieve Agent Foy’s intelligence data, which had been sent as an attachment.

  Now Morris worked with the surveillance photographs on his screen, using the CTU known-terrorist database to analyze facial features for a match. Within fifteen minutes, he’d come up with a potential equivalent.

  He called up the personnel file of the known terrorist and his alias and made a closer comparison. Suddenly Morris’s angular face broke into a grin of triumph.

  “As the old lady at the church bazaar said— Bingo! ”

  “Pardon me?” Peter Randall called from the next station.

  “Never mind, back to work,” Morris said. “Nothing to see here, mate.”

  Morris placed the two photographs side by side for a final eyesight comparison. “Got you,” he whispered.

  The man posing as Canadian structural engineer Faoud S. Mubajii, from Montreal, Quebec, was really a Saudi Arabian scientist named Said al Kabbibi.

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  Morris scanned the man’s file. Kabbibi’s list of known terrorist affiliations was as long as the degrees after his name. According to the database, Kabbibi was a doctor of medicine, Harvard; a doctor of pharmacological sciences, MIT; a doctor of biochemistry, Berlin University, who hung out with members of the PLO, the Taliban, and the Republican Guard in Iraq.

  Back in the 1980s, Kabbibi was so well known inside the intelligence community that he had an official handle:

  “Biohazard Bob.”

  As it turned out, Kabbibi had dropped out of sight for more than a decade. The last time anyone saw him—

  anyone being agents of Britain’s MI–5—Biohazard Bob Kabbibi had been a guest of Saddam Hussein, the current dictator of Iraq. The scientist apparently resided in some opulence, inside a villa near an Iraqi army base on the out-skirts of Baghdad.

  Not coincidentally, that villa was less than a kilometer away from a state-of-the-art biological warfare facility.

  7:28:51 P.M. EDT

  Carlisle, Pennsylvania

  Luddie Kuzma rolled his vehicle into a remote spot on the edge of the sprawling truck stop parking lot. He powered down the window and cut the engine. The night was more comfortable than the afternoon, but it was warm and becoming humid. Still, Luddie welcomed the fresh air streaming through the window after hours spent with a rattling air conditioner.

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  Massaging his neck, Lud savored the silence—at least he did until a trailer truck rumbled past his van and rolled to a halt, air brakes hissing in protest.

  He watched as the man in the passenger seat jumped out and helped guide the big truck into a parking spot between a moving van and an Ethan Allen furniture truck.

  He noted with interest that the newcomer lacked backup alarms—as annoying as those beepers were, they were also a requirement in most states. The vehicle had a small logo that Lud strained to read.

  D r e i z e h n Truc k i ng

  The license was local, too. The vehicle was based in New Jersey.

  Yawning, Lud forgot about the truck and glanced at the illuminated dial of his plastic sports watch. Not even eight o’clock yet, and it’s already been a long day—too long to get right back on the road.

  Lud tilted his seat back, stretched out his legs. At five foot three, and nearly two hundred pounds, he was built like a sandy-haired fireplug. But nine hours behind the wheel would wear out anyone’s knees, even a midget’s.

  At fifty, Luddie was the oldest livery driver in the Allegheny–Lehigh Valley Medical Alliance.

  Today he hauled a kidney from Allegheny County Hospital to Easton Medical Center. He hadn’t a clue where the organ came from, or who the lucky recipient would be.

  But that was par for the course. Luddie was only a driver.

  It was none of his business. He’d delivered the organ to C O L L AT E R A L D A M A G E 175

  Easton General on time, earned his three hundred bucks plus gas, and now he was on his way back to his dinky apartment on Pittsburgh’s South Side, home since the wife divorced him two years ago.

  Lud balled up the empty bag of Bon Ton pork rinds and tossed it into the trash bag on the floor. With a contented sigh, he released his seatbelt and shoulder strap, pulled his Pittsburgh Pirates cap over his eyes, and settled back. In seconds he was snoring . . .

  The loud bang of a metal door shocked him back to consciousness.

  Startled, Lud bolted upright, momentarily disoriented.

  He glanced at his watch and realized he’d been sleeping for about twenty minutes. Then he looked around for the source of the sound.

  It was the vehicle from Dreizehn Trucking. The double cargo doors were wide open, and several men were crawling around inside.

  “What the hell are yo’uns doing?” he muttered suspiciously.

  For a moment, Lud thought he was witnessing a robbery in progress. But when he discerned the deadly nature of the hauler’s cargo, he realized the truth was even more nefarious.

  In the dim light of the trailer’s cavernous interior, Lud saw a wall lined with fully stocked weapon racks—machine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, boxes of grenades—

  the kind of stuff Luddie Kuzma had handled in Vietnam.

  There was more. A black youth aboard the truck started handing down bricks of plastic explosives wired to timers.

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  Lud ducked lower in his seat, scanned the parking area around him. Fifty yards away, he spied another man on his knees, using duct tape to connect one of the bombs to a tanker truck full of gasoline.

  Heart racing, Lud pondered his next move. If he started his engine, or even made a move, they would spot him—

  and he realized with mounting panic that all the men were wearing sidearms, too.

  Before he could decide on a course of action, Lud saw a figure loom in his rearview mirror, heard the click of a bullet sliding into its chamber.

  He turned, looked up—

  7:48:37 P.M. EDT

  Carlisle, Pennsylvania

  Vernon Greene strode across the parking lot, toward the cargo bay of the Dreizehn truck, the gunmetal-gray USP

  Tactical still smoking in his right hand.

  “I found some cracker sleeping inside that van. Didn’t you scope the place first?” he demanded.

  The man in the truck shrugged, handed down another bomb to a youth, who clutched it to his chest as he raced away.

  “My boys clipped two guys sleeping in their trucks and some bitch in a Caddy. So what if they missed that one.

  You got him, right?”

  Greene unscrewed the silencer and tossed it inside the trailer.

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  “Tell your boys to step it up. We’re leaving in five minutes.”

  Three minutes later, the last of the men returned to the truck and piled inside. Vernon Greene closed the door behind them, then hopped into the cab.

  “Y
ou ready to hit the big target?” he asked.

  The driver nodded, nervous sweat beading his leathery skin. “I can get us to the U.S. Tactical Training School in twenty minutes.”

  “Go,” Greene commanded. “Let’s get scarce before this place blows sky-high.”

  The diesel engine roared, belching smoke. One minute later, the Dreizehn truck rumbled down the exit ramp and away from the sprawling truck stop. The driver ignored a red light and swung onto the main road. In the process he clipped a Pennsylvania State Police car and turned the vehicle completely around.

  The trooper behind the wheel couldn’t give chase—the front of his car was shattered, and he had an injured partner to deal with—but he immediately used the radio to report the Dreizehn truck, and its plate numbers, to the State Police barracks less than a mile away. He also requested an ambulance.

  While the driver tried to revive his partner, the world exploded around him. Ears battered by the noise, bathed in an eerie orange glow, he watched as a dozen explosions rocked the truck stop, one after the other. The diesel pumps blew in a stupendous blast, sending a roiling, burning mushroom cloud into the darkening sky.

  Then the gasoline pumps erupted, spewing burning 178

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  liquid upward like a blazing fountain. Diners and staff hurried to the windows to view the commotion—just in time to die as bombs placed at each of the food court’s four corners brought the entire structure down on top of hundreds of customers and employees of a dozen different fast-food chains.

  Then a gasoline tanker that was rolling toward the police car exploded. The tank leaped into the air and split asunder, sending thousands of gallons of burning gasoline spilling down the ramp like a river of volcanic lava.

  Behind the wheel, the state trooper threw up his hands to protect his face as a fireball streaked toward the windshield of his crippled vehicle. The window exploded into tiny, cutting shards. Then the billowing flames engulfed the car and filled the interior, instantly incinerating the two occupants.

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  THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE

  BETWEEN THE HOURS OF

  8:00 P.M. AND 9:00 P.M.

  EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME