Marc A. Cerasini
24 Declassified: Operation Hell Gate
This novel is dedicated to the men and women on the front lines, at home and abroad, who fight the war against terror every day.
People who spent their lives in bureaucracies were typically afraid of breaking rules. That was a sure way to get fired, and it cowed people to think of tossing their careers away. But…James Greer had given him all the guidance he needed: Do what you think is right.
Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.
Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.
After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, a division of the Central Intelligence Agency established a domestic unit tasked with protecting America from the threat of terrorism. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., the Counter Terrorist Unit established field offices in several American cities. From it inception, CTU faced hostility and skepticism from other Federal law enforcement agencies. Despite bureaucratic resistance, within a few years CTU had become a major force. After the war against terror began, a number of early CTU missions were declassified. The following is one of them…
PROLOGUE
That’s the way Jack Bauer rationalized the debriefing. The mission was over, the field work ended, the split- second, life-and-death decisions made. Now the bureaucratic mind needed its cushion of explanations, its round of second-guessing. The fact that it was Richard Walsh conducting the after-action interview made it significantly more bearable.
Where the typical middle manager was mired in keystrokes, speakerphones, and PDF attachments, hobbled by continual rounds of mind-numbing review meetings, Walsh was ex — Army Special Forces and a former field agent who’d bellied up to a desk but never lost his edge. Governed not by cover-your-ass double-talk but conviction and ethics, he was the sort of rare good man who made Jack feel his efforts were worthy.
“Take a seat, Special Agent Bauer.”
Walsh had flown in this morning from D.C. He sat behind the conference table next to a portable tape recorder and two microphones. The square block of monitors in the center of the table were black, which meant that all surveillance and recording equipment in this room had been deactivated. What Jack was about to say was sensitive enough to be deemed highly classified. Walsh and his superiors wanted sole control of any recordings — and, ideally, any interpretations of said recordings.
Jack entered the briefing room and closed the door. Immediately the outer office sounds of computers, phones, voices, fax machines, and footsteps were muted by the soundproof grates on the walls and ceiling. Jack sat at the opposite side of the table from Walsh, but he didn’t lean back. He didn’t relax.
Walsh slid one of the mikes across to him, then opened a blue plastic folder and rested his arms on the table. Tall and powerfully built, he wore a gray suit that seemed snug at the shoulders, the red striped silk tie knotted too tightly under a prominent Adam’s apple. Walsh’s manner was remote, calm and professional, his walrus mustache a throwback to ghosts of law enforcers past.
For a long moment, Walsh silently scanned the files with sharp blue eyes that, in Jack’s experience, missed nothing. Though he was in his late forties, the man’s face appeared older. Creased by age and anxiety, it remained characteristically expressionless under sandy-brown hair sprinkled with gray. Superficially, Walsh had the innocuous look and manner of a government bureaucrat, college professor, or youth counselor more than an operative in America’s newest antiterrorist organization. But the reality was Richard Walsh had been all of those things — and the closest thing to a mentor Jack had ever known.
Walsh had been the one to bring Jack into intelligence work in the first place: first through a thirdparty invitation to join the Army’s elite Delta Force, later as a recruit in this newly created and still controversial Counter Terrorist Unit. Jack had long suspected CTU owed its existence to Richard Walsh’s vision, though the origins of the organization, a domestic unit within a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, were highly classified.
There were those at CTU who thought Jack Bauer even physically resembled Walsh — minus the arched eyebrows, bushy mustache, and thirteen extra years of hard-earned experience. The similarities were there. Both had the same sandy-blond hair and unsettling gazes. On the other hand, Richard Walsh lacked Jack Bauer’s outlaw tattoos — a few gained in undercover work; most part of Jack’s personal roadmap. And Bauer lacked Walsh’s practical patience and easy diplomacy.
Though not conspicuously charismatic, Walsh exerted a stalwart moral authority that manifested powerful sway in D.C., where his opinions and expertise were respected on both sides of the political aisle. Walsh was no political animal, but he’d spent enough time inside academia and the Beltway to develop dexterity in greasing the bureaucratic wheels when necessary.
Jack, by contrast, had never read a business book in his life or lay awake at night contemplating personal techniques for managing up. Yet he’d developed a solid reputation as an effective, galvanizing leader who employed the kind of under-fire problem solving that defined a Special Forces officer. Some of Walsh’s higher-ups at Division, however, worried that he was a loose cannon — and this latest mission hadn’t dissuaded them from that notion.
“Let’s go,” said Walsh without preamble. He activated the tape recorder. “Special Agent Richard Walsh, Administrative Director, CTU, Los Angeles, debriefing Jack Bauer, Special Agent in Charge of CTU, Los Angeles.”
Jack leaned forward, spoke clearly into the microphone. “On June 3, CTU’s Los Angeles office received an anonymous tip through a phone call to our public phone line. The caller, a male, warned us of what he believed was an imminent plot to shoot down a cargo plane as it approached Los Angeles International Airport.
“This phone call, a recording and transcript of which is attached to File 1189 in Kernel 19A of CTU’s intelligence database, was both detailed and specific, citing the time, date, and location of the attack. I immediately issued an alert—”
“Almeida stated there was a thirty-minute lag between the call and the alert in his debriefing.”
“Ryan Chappelle ordered Jamey Farrell to put a recording of the call through a voice stress analyzer in an attempt to determine the veracity of the caller.”
“The result of the analysis?”
“Inconclusive at the time. I determined on my own authority that the threat was credible enough and I took appropriate action. A Counter Terrorist Unit Special Assault Team was dispatched to LAX under my command. It
