was run off the road by a truck, and he reported the license plate of one of the vehicles registered to the paper factory in Kurmastan. A minute after receiving that initial report, the truck stop where the squad car was wrecked blew up — multiple bombs with many estimated casualties.”
Jack cursed.
“A nearby tank farm went up, too,” Morris continued.
“Now half the town of Carlisle is burning.”
In the ruins of Kurmastan, Jack blinked, faced the blazing factory again. He tried to imagine an innocent American town reduced to this smoldering inferno around him.
Then Jack caught his breath.
“Did you say Carlisle?”
“You got friends there, Jack?”
“That’s the home of the new Special Operations Tactical Training School, part of the Army War College. Ryan Chappelle is lodging at the barracks right now. He’s in the middle of a nine-week training seminar on counterterrorist tactics.”
“No wonder it was so quiet in the L.A. office,” Morris quipped.
“Are you tracking that truck now, Morris?”
“I am,” Morris replied. “After the blast, I positioned a satellite over that section of Central Pennsylvania, and homed in on the bloody bastards.”
Anticipating Jack’s next request, Morris called up the location of the training school on his monitor. He whistled.
“Good instincts, Jack-o. That truck is making a beeline for the SOTTS. It should arrive in half an hour or so.”
“Alert the school, warn them what they’re up against.
And see if you can reach Ryan personally.”
“I’m on it, Jack,” Morris replied. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he entered the codes to send out the dispatch.
In Kurmastan, Jack felt the heat from the smoldering ruins. “They’ve struck first,” he said softly. “Before we could stop them.”
“We’ll get them,” Morris insisted. “We’re using highway surveillance cameras to check license plates. Every state and local police department has been alerted. Dr. Guilling has arrived here in New York. He’s shifting satellites over the eastern seaboard. It’s only a matter of time—”
“Did you say Dr. Guilling was in New York? I thought Ted was at Langley,” Jack said.
“The new director brought him along. In fact, nearly everyone has been replaced with the interim director’s people. They marched in here like a conquering army and swept the place clean.” O’Brian chuckled. “It’s a wonder I kept my job.”
“I’m boarding a helicopter now,” Jack said. “Locate those trucks, and relay their coordinates to me as soon as you get them.”
As soon as Ryan Chappelle got the warning from CTU, he alerted the rest of the men in his barracks that they were about to be attacked — for real. The men immediately sprang into action.
“If this operation is successful, it will be the fastest ambush ever mounted in the history of counterterrorist operations.”
The speaker was Joe Smith. Like the other instructors at the counterterrorism seminar, Smith was an active duty special operations soldier. and the name he was using was an alias.
“If it doesn’t work, we’re all going to be in trouble for raiding the armory without proper authorization,” said William Bendix. The tall African American had the body of a pro wrestler and a shaved head. He wore a utility vest, sans shirt, and a briefcase-sized magnetic mine was slung over his broad back.
“As senior officer, I’ll take responsibility. If this is a bust, it’ll be my neck under the hatchet.”
Smith spoke with quiet authority and a southern drawl.
He clutched a Heckler & Koch UMP.45 with a twenty-five-round magazine in his large hands, and several concussion grenades were hooked to the belt of his black denim pants. A big man, he had stained his face and hands with shoe polish that rendered him nearly invisible in the darkness. Smith crouched behind a decorative stone fence, watching the well-lit road that led from the front gate at the bottom of the hill, right up to the main building.
“This whole thing sounds loco to me, man,” said Ben Johnson, a Hispanic standing close to Smith. “Mad cultists driving trucks of death? Come on. Someone at Langley must have had an Austin Powers moment to feed us that kind of intel.”
His teeth white against a face streaked with dark paint, Johnson held a Colt Commando in his scarred fist.
“You’ve got it wrong. The threat is real,” protested Ryan Chappelle, the Regional Director of CTU Los Angeles.
“You heard about the blasts in Carlisle, and you read the alert that came over the military wire. And I spoke to one of my operatives, personally. This intelligence is solid—
from one of my best agents. Though I don’t like Bauer personally, his job performance is—”
“Bauer? Are you talking about
“That’s correct,” Chappelle replied. “Jack was Delta Force before he came to CTU… Perhaps you knew him.”
Eden flashed Chappelle a feral grin. “Nope. Never heard of no Jack Bauer. And, for the record, Delta is an
The men around Chappelle chuckled. Ryan frowned, not understanding why the others were laughing.
“Yo, check the gate,” the man named Moe Howard called from his position near a bronze statue of colonial hero Robert Rogers, the founding leader of America’s first special ops unit, back in 1756.
Joe Smith squinted in the distance. “I see lights. Looks like a truck. Let’s see what the driver does.”
Martin Eden raised night vision binoculars. “It’s an eighteen-wheeler with a long trailer. Logo’s too small to read from here. D… R… something. Wait a minute!
The truck just smashed through the front gate. Now
“Take position, everyone,” Joe Smith commanded.
A half-dozen men fanned out down the hill, vanishing in the shadows among the trees and brush of the landscaped hillside.
“What do you want me to do?” Ryan Chappelle whispered.
“You came here for some hands-on counterterrorism experience, so I’ll hand you this.” Joe Smith thrust a Glock into Ryan’s limp grip. “If I point at something and say
‘shoot there,’ you do it. Otherwise stay out of the way.”
Ryan chewed his lip and gave the man a nod.
The truck was rumbling up the hill now, close enough for Ryan to hear the growl of its diesel engine. He tucked the gun in his belt and lifted his micro-binoculars.
Under the streetlight, Ryan thought he saw a dark figure dart into the roadway beside the truck. If it was one of the special ops men, he was gone before Ryan could be certain.
Suddenly Chappelle was blinded by a yellow flash — an explosion that blew the back wheels off the trailer. The cab kept moving, dragging the tottering cargo bay with it, until a second explosion went off under the engine block. That blast blew off the front tire, shattered the truck’s windows, and sent the engine cover flying into the air.
“The squids were right,” Martin Eden said in the tone of a professional evaluating a new product. “Those magnetic mines blew the hell out of that truck. I’d love to see what they do to a boat.”
On the narrow road, the semi’s blasted cab came to an abrupt halt when the axle dug into the asphalt. Then its trailer jackknifed, and the whole rig tumbled on its side, breaking in half as it smashed a section of the stone fence.
