the bushes at the glade’s opposite end. Rustling and scratching.
This did not come as a total surprise. He’d been aware for some time of noises of movement in the woods around him, but they’d been following in his wake. These noises came from the opposite direction, though: in front of him.
He’d felt more bemused than fearful ever since the drug’s physical rush had lessened, and he felt no anxiety now as he moved to one side to investigate the source of the disturbance.
He saw through a gap in the brush what first looked like a huge black dog. It stood on all fours, as tall at the shoulder as a pony and weighing between three hundred and four hundred pounds. Incredible beast!
It wasn’t a dog, though, it was a bear. A bear with rounded ears and a muzzle-shaped face and fur so brown it was almost black. It was tearing at a fallen log with its front paws, clawing away rotted and pulpy wood to get at the grubs and insects that infested it.
A mini version of the bear, a cub, stood nearby watching its parent take apart the log. The adult lifted a front paw swarming with insects to its snout, licking them off with broad swipes of its tongue and swallowing them down.
It could have been a scene from a TV nature special, a charming vignette of animal life in the wilderness.
A twig snapped somewhere behind Jack, sounding loud in the sudden stillness. The big bear froze. The cub was the first to notice Jack. It made a cute bawling cry.
The big bear turned its gaze toward Jack. It growled. The growl was low, muttered, and reverberant. It touched something in Jack that must have been hardwired into the human brain since caveman days, triggering a sense of full- body fear.
The bear growled again, snarling, baring gleaming yellow-white fangs all curved and dripping fat gobbets of saliva. Its fur stood on end, electric with sudden menace and aggression. It lunged forward, charging.
Jack jumped to one side at the same instant that a gunshot sounded, detonating in the glade like a thunderclap.
The bear changed course on a dime, swerving to meet this newly perceived threat. It whisked past Jack toward the other side of the glade.
Two men stood there, crouched in postures of fear and stupefaction. One was a broad-shouldered hulk with a platinum-blond crew cut. The other was short and round- faced with a stubbly beard, dark eyes, and a slack- jawed, gaping mouth. The latter held a leveled rifle with smoke curling from its muzzle.
The image of the duo was engraved on Jack’s brain with the clarity of a photograph. He could see the platinum-haired man’s cold blue eyes and the jagged scar that split his left eyebrow. He could see the short man’s dark eyes bulging like black olives stuck in the sweaty white pudding of his fear- ridden face. He realized the bullet had been meant for him but had missed because of his sudden lunge to avoid the charging bear.
The bear went for the short man. He fired again but too late; the bear was on him and he was bowled over backward, the gunshot zipping harmlessly through the trees.
The bear knocked him to his back on the ground and tore at him with tremendous swipes of its clawed front paws, ripping him apart as it had done to the log but with much greater ease.
He screamed, “Oh Gawd, Reb, help!”
Reb, the man with platinum hair, did not help. He was too busy running at top speed in the opposite direction.
Jack came to himself again. He knew who he was, where he was, and what he had to do. He got the hell out of there. Fast.
13. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3 P.M. AND 4 P.M. MOUNTAIN DAYLIGHT TIME
Some people love a mystery. Dirk Vanaheim hated them. It was a trait he’d had since boyhood days. He was intensely irritated by unsolved crimes, locked room murders, unexplained disappearances, and the like. He took them as a personal affront. He had no belief in supernatural intervention in human events. Every crime must have a solution, it was only lack of information on the players and the scene that prevented its solution.
This aspect of his personality had served him well in his chosen profession in the fields of first counterespionage and currently counterterrorism. He had risen to the number two post of Assistant Special Agent in Charge of CTU/DENV. He now had the responsibility of securing and managing the crime scene at Silvertop.
He was thin with lead-colored hair worn brushed straight back from a high forehead. It lay on his scalp like a metal skullcap. A long face featured a pair of horizontal eyebrows over deep-set eyes with dark rings around them. The ever- present fatigue-born rings had deepened during the run- up to the Sky Mount Round Table. They could only worsen as a result of his having to handle the Silvertop mess. He had the feeling that before the Sky Mount conference was done he’d look like a raccoon.
Silvertop mess? Debacle was the word for it. Five CTU agents were dead and a sixth missing. This was more than a crime scene, it was a battlefield. The forensics team from CTU/DENV had arrived to do a thorough examination of the Zealots’ blue bus in Silvertop’s ghost town. They had discovered a chaos of carnage on the bluff’s south slope and the grounds below it. Special Investigator Anne Armstrong and three members of the tac squad, Frith, Sanchez, and Bailey, were dead. CTU/L.A.’s SAC Jack Bauer, here on temporary duty, was missing, as was tac squad member Holtz. The corpses of a half-dozen unknown assailants had been found strewn about the south face along with the CTU dead. The bodies of the unknowns had been left mutilated to thwart a quick identification.
Vanaheim was grateful that the forensics team had arrived after the battle was over and the victors had departed, otherwise the body count would have been far greater. CTU/DENV’s ranks had already been decimated as it was.
Further investigation had revealed the presence of tac squad member Holtz on top of the bluff near the team’s vehicles. He’d been shot through the head by a high- powered rifle. It was a black day for CTU/ DENV and for the entire unit as a whole.
CTU/DENV chief Orlando Garcia had assigned Vanaheim the task of securing the site and the situation. Vanaheim and an eight-man tac squad had raced to the site. CTU/DENV’s people were already spread thin by a variety of duties connected with protecting the Round Table conference. The most recent losses had only exacerbated the problem. Vanaheim was faced with a delicate situation in controlling the site with the limited number of personnel now available for him to draw on.
CTU’s original mission charter specified that one of its goals was closer cooperation and sharing intelligence with other agencies. All government agencies are traditionally turf-conscious and jealous of their prerogatives, none more so than those involved with the national security sector. The CIA/FBI rivalry is well- known. The events of 9/11 had fostered a greater sense of unity of purpose between them as well as with the Department of Homeland Security. But this mutual amity and concord had its limits.
SAC Garcia had been quite specific: “Those are CTU dead out there. This matter is going to remain in our hands until the perpetrators are found and brought to justice.”
Vanaheim was not without other auxiliary support to draw on. The U.S. Army had become involved due to certain features of the Red Notch incident. Army Intelligence officers who had a close working relationship with the CIA, CTU’s parent organization, had been called in to help. They were able to supply much-needed manpower required to secure and properly investigate Silvertop.
Shadow Valley had been cordoned off. Its sole entrance where the canyon opened on Dixon Cutoff was closed and guarded by an Army Military Police detachment. The MPs were dressed in civilian clothes but their weapons were Army- issue M–16s, M–4s and sidearms. The Army, too, wanted to minimize its footprint in the affair where possible. The entrance was also guarded by a covert fifty- caliber machine gun nest, a precaution prompted by the unknown enemy’s use of heavy firepower. MPs in Humvees patrolled the valleys to the east and west of the canyon to contain and detain unauthorized personnel.
The Sky Mount area had been declared a no-fly zone for the duration of the conference. Now Shadow Valley
