Death Angel (14 page)

The road emerged from where two hills crowded it on both sides. Something loomed up ahead, too close. A burning tree had fallen lengthwise across the road, blocking it. The wagon was almost on it; there was next to no time to react.

Jack whipped the car to the right, trying to go around it. There was too much tree and too little road. The treetop crowded the shoulder. Branches crunched under wheels. For an instant Jack thought he might make it but no such luck.

He ran out of road. Beyond the shoulder’s edge was empty space. No guardrail.

The station wagon went over the side. Its nose dipped, pointing downward. It plowed a furrow down the embankment of a shallow gully.

The gully’s north wall sloped at about a thirty-degree angle. Its bank was peppered with bushes and barrel cactus. The station wagon mowed them under as it careened twenty-five feet down to the floor of the gully. The wheels on the driver’s side left the ground. Jack feared the car was going to go into a roll. A heart-stopping instant and they touched down again.

The car came to a halt with a bone-jarring crash.

Jack took quick stock of himself. He’d taken a beating but nothing was broken. He unclipped the safety harness, grabbed the door handle, and put a shoulder to the door panel. Nothing. The fall had wedged it shut.

Jack threw his weight into it, slamming his shoulder against the door several times to no effect. He scrambled over to the passenger side, tried the door. It opened. He wriggled out, falling to the ground.

The gully was a dry watercourse, its floor lined with rocks. Ottoman-sized rocks, armchair-sized rocks, sofa-sized rocks. They lay on a bed of countless smooth, rounded, palm-sized stones, heaped in profusion. The gully ran roughly southeast, a meandering vein among the hills. The south side of the draw opposite the road was a steep incline fifty feet high. At the top were woods. They were on fire.

The light of the setting sun was muted by the smoke filling the sky. Deep twilight massed in the gully, except where it was dotted with hot embers that had fallen from the burning trees. They started little fires wherever they fell, speckling the cut with yellow tongues of flame.

The station wagon’s rear was tilted up off the ground, thanks to a big rock beneath it. Fluids dripped and dribbled from the undercarriage. Oil—and gas. A fuel line was broken. Gasoline puddled in a rock-lined hollow.

Up on the road the sedan had rolled to a halt well short of the burning tree. Jack crouched down behind the passenger side of the car, using it for cover. A few beats later, the silver car pulled up behind the sedan.

The sedan’s doors opened, disgorging its occupants, a half-dozen well-armed men. They had rifles, machine guns. The young one got out of the silver car and joined the others at the roadside overlooking the gully.

Jack needed a break, he’d be a sitting duck down here,
cover or no cover. They hadn’t seen him yet. He low-crawled away from the wagon, blanking out the pain of rocks banging elbows and knees, their jagged edges scoring his forearms and belly. He wriggled behind a refrigerator-sized slab of a boulder.

Dark figures stood outlined along the roadside, backlit by fiery woods dimmed by a shifting pall of smoke. Silhouetted shapes, their faces hidden: a band of blankly anonymous killers.

“He’s done,” somebody said.

“Probably broke his neck in the crash,” another said.

“I don’t see him in the car,” a third voice stated.

“Can’t see nothing from up here,” the first speaker said.

“Why don’t you go down and take a look, Larry?”

Larry told the questioner what he could go do with himself. “Why don’t you?” he added.

“Shut the hell up, all of you,” a new voice said. The voice of command—the boss. The others fell silent. “Somebody go down and check on him,” the leader said.

“I’ll go, Pardee. I owe him. I was there when the bastard got Ralston and damned near got me.”

“Okay, Nacio. Glad to see somebody in this outfit’s got balls. We’ll cover you.”

The one called Nacio started down the slope, pistol in hand. Firelight fell on his face, revealing the young one who’d been one of the shooters at Rhee’s apartment, the driver of the silver car.

Nacio climbed down sideways for better balance, walking on the edges of his shoes for traction, digging them into the side of the slope. He was craning, trying to see inside the car. “Hey, I smell gas—”

Jack fired twice, nailing Nacio with a pair of center shots. Nacio bent forward from the waist, plunging headfirst into the gully.

“Let him have it!” Pardee said. Jack fired a shot into
the pool of gas under the station wagon. The hot round ignited it.

Gunmen lined the edge of the roadside firing down into the gully. Pardee and his men opened up on the car, spraying it with lead. A tremendous fusillade, a hammering clamor. They hadn’t seen where the shots came from, didn’t know where Jack was except that he was somewhere near the car.

Rounds sieved the station wagon’s crumpled roof and sides, blew out the windshield and rear windows, and wreaked havoc on the interior. Jack huddled in the lee of the big rock slab. Slugs thudded into the side of the gully, sending up sprays of dirt and dirt clouds. Rock chips flew; wicked ricochets whined and spanged.

A thin blue flame overspread the surface of the puddle of gas. The fuel ignited with a whoomping sound. Oil from the broken crankcase helped fuel the fast-growing fire. Yellow flames tickled the car’s underside, touching the fuel in the broken fuel line, sending a line of fire back into the gas tank.

The gas tank blew, blowing the doors off and sending the trunk lid sky-high. The gully shook from the shock waves. The trunk lid came down like a flying guillotine not far from Jack.

One of the roadside gunmen leaned too far over the edge and fell into the gully, tumbling down the slope. He landed heavily in a thicket of brambles that had been set ablaze by flaming gasoline. His clothes caught on fire. He jumped up, frantically beating at himself in a futile attempt to put out the flames that swiftly turned him into a human torch. He rolled around on the ground, burning like a Yule log, trying to extinguish the hell that engulfed him.

The infernal brightness of the fireball dimmed dramatically after the initial glare. The car hulk burned steadily. Jack picked off another roadside gunman, tagging him in the side and knocking him down. The others dodged back from the edge, out of the line of fire.

Jack made his break. The cover was better going east, deeper into the gully. It did not run straight but twisted right, left, right again. Jack dodged behind the next boulder in line, got his feet under him, and dove for the shadowed safety of a nearby rock pile. Bullets tore up the terrain around him.

“There he goes!”

Jack scrambled in a low crouch, bent almost double. He dodged behind the blind corner of a rock outcropping. More slugs tore where he’d been.

The gully twisted and turned. Jack zigged and zagged from cover to cover, working his way eastward into the darkness away from the light. Shouts sounded from above, footfalls pounded pavement trying to keep track of him.

The gunmen were pacing him. They must have jumped the burning tree in the middle of the road to follow him on foot. Jack had to move forward, hoping that the terrain would cooperate and conceal him from the hunters long enough for him to break clear.

7:05
P.M
. MDT
Saddle Ridge, Los Alamos County

Firebombing the station wagon regained the initiative for Jack Bauer. It gave him a window of opportunity; a narrow one, but by putting the heat on his foes—literally—it took the heat off him, if only for a moment.

When the gas tank blew, the fireball was dazzling; Jack was careful to look away to prevent being temporarily blinded by the glare. A series of explosions brought the fire blast to its peak. It exhausted itself quickly, dwindling and dimming, but Jack was already on the move, taking advantage of the distraction.

Stones rattled and clinked beneath his tread. Noise from the burning car and the greater blaze beyond provided some masking for his footfalls.

Hot yellow-red firelight streaked the scene, fitfully illuminating it. The restless glare was in constant motion, flowing, shifting, and ever-changing. The effect was kaleidoscopic, disorienting. Objects cast multiple moving shadows.

Apart from the burning station wagon, the smoke from the big blaze was mostly higher up, streaming above the top of the gully walls. Leaving the gully floor relatively untouched.

That was a help. Smoke inhalation could be as dangerous as naked flame. Suffocation is no less lethal than incineration.

Jack’s options were few. The sedan had contained six men. Nacio in the silver coupe brought the total to seven. Nacio was dead now; so was the gunman turned human torch. A third man shot on the roadside was either dead or disabled—either way, he was out of the fight.

That left four. Four hostiles armed with rifles and machine guns. Jack had a pistol and plenty of ammo: five spare clips in the pockets of his denim vest. The hunters had him outnumbered and outgunned. Their rifles were accurate from a long way off. Lethal well beyond the range of his pistol.

Their small machine guns made up in firepower what they lacked in accuracy. They could spray the general area he was in with a pretty good chance of hitting him. He needed to work in close for the pistol to be effective. Even then, one against four was bad odds.

This was one time where flight beat fight. Keep moving; force the pursuers to spread out. Isolating the enemy increased the chances of taking them out one at a time. If he could get hold of one of their rifles or machine guns, so much the better; he’d have something with which to hit back hard.

Or maybe he could lose the hunters, give them the slip. Live to fight another day at a time and place of his choosing.

This chain of reasoning came to him in a split second. He was a pro. Trouble was, the hunters were pros, too.

The gully turned southeast, bending away from the roadside. A racket sounded as one or more of the gunmen slid down into the gully behind Jack, blocking any retreat toward the west.

Two men—he could hear them calling back and forth to each other, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying. They were working their way toward him. One had a flashlight, its beam lancing through the gully.

The many twists and turns prevented the light from falling directly on Jack, picking him out. But the beam was getting closer, its glare brightening behind blind corners as it neared.

Two in the gully meant two more on the roadside. Jack considered climbing the north bank and tackling the two up top. But the cover there was nonexistent, the firelight would outline him.

He kept moving east along the gully. About fifty yards ahead of him, a second flashlight beam speared down from the roadside. It was stationary, lighting up the floor of the cut beneath it. Anyone moving into the zone of light would be a nakedly exposed target.

Jack was bottled up between the light ahead and the hunters closing in behind him. He knew how he’d work it if situations were reversed and he was up top trying to flush out a quarry. He’d post a man on the road midway between the light wielder covering the gully on the east and the duo working their way from the west. The man in the middle would guard against any attempt by Jack to go over the top on the roadside.

No doubt Pardee would figure it that way, too, and act accordingly.

Now Jack’s best chance was to lie low, letting the two
on the gully floor approach until they were within point-blank range to neutralize their superior firepower and then ambushing them. Risky, yes, but changing conditions were shaving his slim options still narrower.

He looked around for a place to hide, something, anything, to better his odds. A shift in the firelight revealed something that had gone unnoticed by him: a cleft opened in the gully’s south wall. Until now that bank had been too steep to scale but the seam spelled opportunity. The seam was lined with loose rocks, most of them the size of a man’s head.

Jack holstered his gun to leave both hands free. He started climbing. The rock pile was tricky. He had to place his feet carefully to keep from falling or dislodging any rocks that would give away his position.

He clambered up the cleft. It was deep, full of sheltering shadows. Twenty feet up the rock pile ended but not the cleft. A fallen tree lay wedged lengthwise in the seam, one end jammed against the top of the rock pile. It must have come uprooted at some time from the top of the bank and tumbled into the cleft.

It lay head-down; it was about twenty-five feet long, with a trunk three feet in diameter. Its branches were leafless, its bark was weathered, deeply grooved. Having fallen upside-down, its base was on top at the uppermost end. It mushroomed out into an umbrella shape made of gnarly roots.

Jack used the tree as a stairway, scaling it to the top of the root ring and ducking down the other side. Snaky roots extended all around in a sunburst corona about six feet in diameter, providing Jack with plenty of cover.

He was high enough on the south slope to look down on top of the gully’s north bank and the roadside. A man lay prone on the edge of the bank, shining a flashlight into the gully. A rifle lay on the ground beside him on his right side. No one else was in sight on the road.

A hundred yards west lay the tree that had fallen across the road, blocking it. Parked on the far side of it stood the sedan, empty, its lights dark. Fire was closing in on it, burning through the brush on the north side of the road. The flames were less than a stone’s throw from where the bushes crowded the roadside; gray smoke came wafting out of them.

Much of the valley between the Hill and South Mesa was ablaze. Wind blew north and east, whipping the fire in that direction.

Jack looked down into the gully. Its twists and turns hid the hunters working eastward along the floor toward him but the glow of their flashlight beam was visible and brightening.

The rifleman staked out at the east end of the gully was in an area as yet untouched by the blaze. Screens of smoke streamed across the open space.

Farther east, a pair of pale, ghostly white orbs floated into view out of the haze. They resolved themselves into the headlights of an approaching vehicle. It crept forward at a pace of a few miles per hour.

A figure rose out of a ditch on the north side of the road between the fallen tree and the rifleman watching the east end of the gully. Jack hadn’t even seen the ditch, not to mention the lurker crouching inside it.

The lurker wore a wide-brimmed dark hat and wielded a small machine gun secured by a shoulder strap and held level in both hands. “Hey, Milt! Come on back here,” he shouted.

“Okay, Pardee!” the rifleman replied. He held his rifle in one hand and the flashlight in the other. He trotted back to Pardee, Pardee strolling to meet him.

Jack itched to open fire on him. He was a dead shot with a pistol, but at this distance it would be a waste of bullets.
All it would do was betray his location and nullify his one advantage.

Pardee was still a faceless man, but the harsh twang of his voice was already indelibly imprinted on Jack’s brain. No forgetting that voice. Jack promised himself that sometime he’d come face-to-face with its owner and look him in the eye right before silencing him forever. Sometime soon.

Assuming he got out of this fix with a whole skin. An assumption that was about to become even more of a long shot.

Pardee met up with Milt the rifleman. He took Milt’s flashlight and set Milt to watch the stretch of road he, Pardee, had been covering. Pardee hustled over to Milt’s previous vantage point. He went to one knee and shone the flashlight into the gully, systematically scanning it with a powerful beam that lit up the gully floor like a spotlight. Satisfied that his quarry was nowhere in sight, he stood up and stepped back well clear of the road’s edge.

The vehicle from the east was still approaching, creeping along. Pardee stood in the middle of the road facing it, holding the flashlight at waist-height. Pointing it toward the vehicle, he switched the beam on and off in a pattern: three-one-two.

The vehicle responded with two toots of its horn. They rang with a jaunty tone. The vehicle blinked its high beams in a two-one-three pattern.

The machine eased forward, taking shape out of the smoke, materializing into a pickup truck. Its headlights caused Pardee and Milt to cast long, weird shadows across the road, shadows whose eeriness was increased by the palls of smoke rolling over them.

The pickup halted; four men piled out of the rear hopper. They, too, were armed with rifles and machine guns. The driver stayed behind the wheel.

Pardee started barking out orders to the newcomers. His words were drowned out by a mechanical drone, the sound of a low-flying plane. It came from out of the south, flying north over the valley.

It was a big aircraft, a propeller job the size of a cargo plane. It was coming in so low it might have been making a strafing run. Red and white lights flashed on its wings, body, and tail. Pardee and company stopped what they were doing to watch.

The plane’s path took it over the eastern front of the firestorm eating up the north slope. It was a tanker plane. Its mission was to drop not bombs but water, tons of water.

It dumped its cargo along the leading edge of the blaze to retard its forward progress.

Mission accomplished, it banked east and then south, flying toward South Mesa. It vanished in the clouds, leaving behind a long droning tail of dwindling sound.

Jack Bauer didn’t stick around to see the show. While the plane did its water dump, he was climbing. The cleft played out; it was steep going the rest of the way to the top. He had to climb on hands and knees.

His foot slipped, sending some rocks down the side of the bank. The rocks bounced off some other rocks and knocked them loose, too. They went clattering down the hillside.

The rock fall happened just as the two hunters who’d been working their way east along the gully rounded a turn and came below him. One of them shouted something. Gunfire opened up.

Jack tore at some exposed roots and bushes that were growing out of the side of the hill and used them to haul himself up over the edge. He threw himself flat on the ground.

Rounds ripped into the hillside and slanted overhead to clip the upper boughs of the trees on top of the south bank.
No point now in subterfuge; Jack might as well take advantage of the opportunity. He drew his gun and squirmed around on the ground, reversing position.

He peeked over the edge of the gully. The two shooters were directly below in a pocket where the gully widened at the foot of the cleft.

One of them was trying to climb up the cleft. He was in too much of a hurry; rocks flew out from under his flailing feet. He made no headway; he was in danger of falling. He stopped climbing and took up a stance, bracing himself, swinging his machine gun up and firing at the top of the slope where Jack was looking down at him.

His partner on the gully floor shouldered a rifle, angling for a shot around the machine gunner at Jack.

Jack opened fire. It was like shooting straight down into a well. He tagged the machine gunner with a couple of rounds.

The gunner fell backward on top of his partner. There was no room in the tight pocket below for the rifleman to get clear. The two fell sprawling in a tangle of limbs. The dead machine gunner pinned the rifleman to the ground. The live man struggled to get out from under the corpse.

When he got clear, he was drilled by three quick blasts from Jack’s pistol. Then there were two corpses on the gully floor.

The rapid-fire exchange was over in a few heartbeats. It stung the rest of Pardee’s crew into action. They spread out on the roadside, firing in Jack’s direction.

He was already up and gone, zigzagging toward the burning woods. The gully’s south bank crested on a wide level ridge top covered by a pine forest. An open space about twenty yards wide lay between the lip of the gully and the edge of the trees. Jack went in deep enough to take himself out of the line of fire of the triggermen below.

He paused, crouching, taking stock of the situation. The
shooting had stopped, only because Pardee’s crew was coming for him. He ejected the spent clip from his gun, inserting a fresh one and jacking a round into the chamber.

The sun had set behind the mountains. Black night was offset by firelight, the lurid red glare waxing and waning according to which way the winds blew the smoke. To the west, the ridge and the valley below was a seething inferno.

He made his way east across the belt between the woods and the gully’s edge. The terrain presented plenty of brush, dry weeds that came up to mid-calf level, clumps of prickly pear cactus that had to be skirted. Windborne embers set weedy patches of ground ablaze.

Jack suddenly ran out of ridge top. The land began to slope downward. He halted to survey the scene.

The sky was a panoramic backdrop of streaming smoke clouds rising to the heights, glowing with red-yellow-orange highlights from acres of blazing prairie and woodland. The ridgeline was not all of a uniform height. It took a sudden, dramatic dip, forming a saddle-shaped gap several hundred yards wide.

Jack now stood on the western rise of the saddle. He scanned the landscape laid out below him. The gully bent away from the ridge, winding northeast, its walls widening and dwindling to become a shallow crack snaking across a flat at the base of the slope of the saddle. The road roughly bordered it on the north. A long, gentle slope broken by boulders and stands of timber rose to the low-lying gap of the saddle ridge.