Fic: Eternal Father, Strong to Save (Chapter 8)
Eternal Father, Strong to Save (Chapter 8)
Author: thecrystalkey
Summary: Jack Bauer has been framed for the murder of a navy petty officer. Local NCIS calls in the best of the best, Jethro Gibbs.
Spoilers: Season 5 of 24, Season 2 of NCIS
Disclaimer: See Chapter List.
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“Jack, it’s Chloe.” The analyst’s voice was a welcome interruption to the comm. silence.
“Go ahead.”
“I’ve got satellite coverage of the area. Only one of three NSA satellites covering that sector has infrared. I’m going to have to reposition it to see the whole compound. How’s your position?”
“It’s fine. For now. How long is the repositioning gonna take?” Jack fully expected it be to be the usual ten minutes; while he didn’t want to wait that long, he’d learned over the years that you couldn’t get faster satellite coverage if the system was busy.
“No one’s fighting me for it for once,” she said, echoing his thoughts. “So it should only be a couple of minutes.”
“Copy that. Is there any way for you to identify Mike from the satellite feed?” In the conference room they were using, Jack’s quiet voice rasped out over the intercom. Chloe had it coming through her earpiece as well, feeding only Jack’s half of any conversation through the conference room speakers, Jack wouldn’t be able to hear any of the others unless she un-muted the phone’s microphone.
Chloe made a face and replied without missing a beat of her rapid typing. “Sorry, Jack. If he had his cellphone we could track the chip but otherwise…Infrared doesn’t distinguish between good guys and bad guys.” She paused in her typing for a moment, watching the satellite image as it repositioned. McGee was watching her every command over her shoulder, following her movements with rapt attention.
She narrowed her eyes at the screen and entered a new set of commands, bringing up the blueprints of the building and laid them over the satellite image. “What I can do is get you to a window,” she offered. She hit another button and the image changed, going from mostly opaque black to varicolored blotches of light, the most prominent being a number of moving orange-colored ones. “I’ve got blueprints of the main building laid over the satellite feed. If you can tell me where he is in the building I might be able to isolate his heat signature, then I could keep track of him.”
“You’re sure?” Jack asked.
“Well, not a hundred percent, but unless you have any better ideas, it’s all we’ve got.”
“Okay.” Jack said. “We’ll do it that way.”
“Fine,” Chloe agreed. She pulled up a magnified view of the area around Jack and put it in the bottom right corner of the screen, filling the top half of the remaining screen with an overall view of the compound. She selected the lone figure hiding in the bushes and tagged him as Jack.
“Okay.” She let out her breath. “There’s a patrol about ten feet to your left, looks like a group of four. They’ll cross in front of you and will meet a group of five coming the other way. They’ll pass each other about five feet to your right. You’ll have a limited window to move without being seen. When I tell you to move, go about three feet to your left, there’s a creek bed that should give you some extra cover. Follow it downhill.” She paused a moment, counting down in her head to the moment the patrols passed each other. From Jack’s observations these patrols wouldn’t stop to talk to each other but it was a good bet that their attention would be on each other rather than the surrounding area. “Move. Now.”
Keeping one eye on the labeled figure of Jack she pulled up a third window to fill the bottom left quarter of the screen. It took advantage of a little known secondary use of this particular satellite, its ability to pick up radio signals. The signals from the compound were on scrambled channels but the program she’d pulled up should be able to unscramble them eventually.
The NCIS agents in the room were following Jack’s progress on the big TV she’d hooked a line out to from her laptop; except McGee, whose eyes were glued to her screen.
“Is that their radio signals?” the young agent asked.
“Yeah,” Chloe agreed, “it’s scrambled. I’m working on it.”
Her eyes never left Jack’s progress on the screen except to check the positions of the continuously moving patrols. Ignoring the conversation in the background since none of it was directed at her, she talked Jack down the creek bed and through a zigzag path around and between the series of overlapping one- and two-man patrols that made up their inner perimeter.
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“Boss,” McGee looked up from O’Brian’s screen to meet Gibbs’ eyes. “I think I can unscramble those radio signals faster than the program Agent O’Brian is using. It’s on my laptop.”
“You’re supposed to be watching her,” Gibbs said. “Can you do both at the same time?”
“No, Boss,” McGee said, slightly exasperated. “But she’s not gonna have time to do anything but pay attention to those satellite feeds until Agent Bauer and Mr. Seldler are out of there. This could help them get out alive and you already agreed that needs to happen.”
Gibbs glared at him a moment then he nodded. McGee made to go get his laptop which was out in the office area.
“Not you,” Gibbs growled. “You stay put. DiNozzo, get McGee’s laptop.”
Tim held himself back from telling his fellow agent not to drop his computer, since that would only be an open invitation to Tony to play at dropping it. And then he’d probably actually drop it, which wouldn’t help anyone. Instead he made a face and went back to his current job, watching Chloe O’Brian work.
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Kate watched everything from the edge of the room. Gibbs and Buchanan were giving most of their attention to the big screen, watching Bauer’s progress; McGee was focused on Agent O’Brian and her screen; DiNozzo was out finding McGee’s laptop, and Kate herself was splitting her attention between Agent O’Brian and the big screen.
O’Brian was focused intensely on leading her friend through the minefield of patrols to get him into the compound’s main building and she also seemed aware of what was going on in the room around her. But unless a question or comment was addressed directly to her, she ignored them.
Kate had watched a half-dozen similar operations carried out in MTAC in her time with NCIS but had never seen it done by less than an entire team of people. It usually involved at least two field agents, more often an entire team of four or five, and a number of tech people like McGee running the computers. And the whole circus was always run by a senior field agent like Gibbs or the Director who talked the active team through it. Watching an operation this complex being run with a retired field agent by a single tech on her home laptop was…just a little surreal.
But since Bauer was almost at the building and hadn’t yet been spotted, they were obviously a highly effective team. And that made it even more surreal. Kate had heard the stories about Jack Bauer from the other secret service agents when she’d been protecting the president; but the only one who knew the man personally, Aaron Pierce, had refused to talk about him.
So she’d put most of it down to over-exaggerated shop talk. She’d figured the legend could never live up to the man; that nobody was that good, or that ruthless, or would be willing to pay that high a price in what he did for his country. Being willing to take a bullet was one thing, being willing to shoot people you knew or risk the lives of your loved ones was something else.
It was becoming more and more obvious that the trust she’d already noted Chloe O’Brian placed in Bauer was returned equally by the semi-retired field agent. If she said stop, he froze in place instantly, and any other command O’Brian gave was as quickly obeyed. She thought about McGee trying to lead Tony or Gibbs through something similar and couldn’t see it working. A simple field op was one thing, approaching a suspected terrorist’s lair or whatever, but there was a hell of a lot going on in that compound for one person to keep track of much less lead another person through.
Then Tony was back in the room with McGee’s computer held triumphantly over his head only to be on the receiving end of a pained look from the probie. McGee grabbed the laptop quickly, while attempting to look like he wasn’t trying to get it away from Tony as quickly as possible. The young agent set his laptop up next to Chloe’s and was quickly on-line. With barely a sideways glance and only a single phrase of technobabble, the audio program appeared in McGee’s screen and disappeared from O’Brian’s. Then McGee was working quickly at his own screen, sparing only the occasional glance at the big one.
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Following Chloe’s directions Jack got himself in place just outside an upper level window whose placement concealed him from every approach except through the window itself. He took a moment to catch his breath as he took a quick initial look through the window. There were two levels to the warehouse, the upper one surrounded by a wide, dimly lit catwalk. He wouldn’t be able to go in through this window because the walkway itself offered no concealment, but it was a good vantage point for conning the interior of the warehouse.
The lower level of the warehouse was bounded on its long sides by a series of box cubicles a single story high. The ceilings of the cubicles came up to the bottom of the walkway.
“Chloe, I’m looking in the window. I count twelve currently in the main room. There are rooms of enclosed cubicles lining the long sides, do you have those on the building plan?”
“Um, give me a second.” There was comm. silence for a moment. “Got ‘em. They were a later addition. Not in the main plans.”
“They’re probably the best place to enter. Find me an empty one and I can get in undetected.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said. There was a pause. “Uh, Agent Gibbs wants to know if you can get pictures of the hostiles on your phone.”
Jack held up his phone and snapped a couple of photos but between the distance and the layer of glass, they weren’t worth the memory they took up.
“That’s a negative,” he replied. “Too much distance. I should be able to get some once I’m inside.”
“Okay. I’ve got an entry route for you. Ready?”
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Review. It does a body good.
Chapter 9.