Gibbs leaped to his feet. "McGee!"
All around him bodies were rising, some faster than others. Ziva was one of the fast ones, and she dashed toward the burning building. Jasper, despite his age, was right behind her. DiNozzo had more trouble getting his feet beneath him but he limped doggedly on, crutches forgotten in his haste. Gary Fielding, Dennis and Gloria jumped up and then gawked, waiting to be told what to do.
Gibbs obliged. "Get some fire extinguishers!" he yelled, hoping that others could hear better than he could. "You got a fire department?"
"You're looking at it," Jasper said grimly. "Gary, go git the fire truck. Dennis, go with him. Git the hoses hooked up. Hustle it, boys!"
"Fire extinguishers," Gibbs insisted. His hearing was coming back, and both ears were telling him that there was a bonfire crackling inside the police station. "Where are they?"
"First one's right inside the door. Second one's behind the clerk's desk," Jasper told him. "You can't go in there—"
Ziva was already darting up to the window, trying not to cut herself on broken glass or singe her eyebrows. "Gibbs!" she called out. "I can't see him!"
"He's in there," Gibbs said grimly. "He called me from that room. Look harder, Ziva." Gibbs noted DiNozzo trying to keep up. "DiNozzo! Stay out here. I don't need to be dragging you out, too. Keep the locals under control."
"Throw me one of the extinguishers, boss," DiNozzo insisted. "I'll work the fire from out here, through the window."
"You're on." Gibbs snatched up the first fire extinguisher that he saw from the wall just inside the government building, tossing it to DiNozzo.
The second extinguisher was exactly where Jasper had told him it would be. Gibbs grabbed that one, wrenching the clips out of the decaying wallboard and pulling the pin. It wasn't much, so he'd have to make it last.
Gibbs advanced, shooting the foaming spray at the licks of flame dancing across the reams of paper that scattered in the wake of the grenade. Closer! He had to get closer! He had a man in there, and dammit losing him was not going to happen!
There: that door. That was the one that led to the police station proper. It was hanging crazily on its hinges, fire crackling behind it. "McGee!" Gibbs yelled. "McGee!" He kicked the door down, the large plank of wood toppling off and falling onto a bed of flames, sending more fiery papers swirling. "McGee!"
"I can't see him!" It was DiNozzo, yelling in to Gibbs from outside, spraying whatever blaze he could reach through the window. The smoke was thick and black, making vision difficult. "Where is he?"
Gibbs coughed, the smoke setting his lungs aflame. Savagely, he sprayed another small blaze, dousing it but in doing so letting more smoke waft toward the ceiling. He coughed again.
"Gibbs!" Ziva was behind him, another fire extinguisher in her hands.
"Can't see him!" Gibbs coughed. "You?"
"There's his laptop," Ziva called, darting forward to rescue it. She yelped when she touched it. "It's hot. The plastic casing has melted!"
"Leave it," Gibbs ordered. It wasn't going anywhere. It was more important to find McGee. Dammit, the man had just announced that he'd found a picture of someone potentially very high up in al-Qaida, never mind all the money it would cost to replace an NCIS agent. No, all this hunting in this smoke-filled room couldn't possibly be because Gibbs cared about his team. Let them get one whiff of that, and they'd be all over him. No, Gibbs was pissed because McGee had the gall to announce that he'd found something vital to national security and then had the stupidity to be in a room with a live grenade.
Right. Smoke reddened Gibbs' eyes, and nothing else. He used them anyway, trying to peer through the darkness to find his agent.
"McGee!" Ziva moved to the far corner of the room, spraying the flames out to get through. "McGee!"
Water started pouring through the window, sloshing onto the floor in little rivulets, carrying burned and dying papers away toward the hall corridor. More water cascaded in as the group outside got the hang of where the opening was and did a better job of aiming their fire hose at the broken window. Little of the water got on top of the blaze, but the sheer quantity covered the floor and cut the fire off from its fuel source. Gibbs and Ziva switched their focus to the smaller smolderings higher up on top of the various file cabinets.
The flames were dying, but leaving more smoke with their passing. Gibbs coughed savagely, saw more than heard Ziva cough as well. Where the hell was McGee? Nobody was going to able to breathe in here. If the grenade hadn't gotten him, the smoke would.
Gibbs tried to use his brain; a difficult task with the lack of oxygen. McGee was in this room. He'd called Gibbs from here, wanted Gibbs to see what was on his laptop. McGee's laptop was still here, melting under the heat. Could McGee have gotten out?
No. McGee would never have left the room without his laptop. That just wasn't going to happen, and especially not with one of bin Laden's favorites staring out at them from the screen. No, McGee was in here, and Gibbs was going to find him!
Think like McGee, Gibbs ordered himself. A grenade has just crashed through the window. I'm McGee; I look at it. I recognize it. It takes me a moment longer than Ziva or Gibbs, but I recognize it. I don't panic, because that has been trained out of me at Quantico. I start to grab the laptop—I am McGee, after all—and then the grenade goes off. What next? If the blast had killed the agent, Gibbs realized, then the body would still be on the floor and Gibbs would have stumbled over it.
No body. The only thing Gibbs was kicking out of his way were pieces of broken chairs, shredded by the grenade blast. There weren't any dismembered arms and legs, any hunks of a cadaver lying on the floor, roasted flesh sizzling on shattered bone. Where the hell was McG—
There. The closet. Sliding doors, both trying to slide off of their tracks. Charred scorch marks on the outside, but the flames hadn't eaten their way through. Close enough for a blasted body to crawl to, in order to hide inside and hope that help would arrive in time.
Had it? Had help arrived before the smoke suffocated the agent inside the closet, as it was threatening to do to the two searchers?
"Ziva!" Gibbs pointed to the closet, and doubled over, coughing. He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket—a decent linen cloth, not some stupid little piece of tissue paper, and covered his nose and mouth. It didn't help much, but it was better than nothing. Reminded, Ziva pulled her blouse up over her own mouth, looking like some gigantic turtle.
Gibbs was the first to reach the closet. The wood was hot, and he used his sleeve as a mitt to haul it back. The large slab came completely off of its tracks, falling backward at them. Gibbs jumped out of the way.
Bull's eye.
There, crumpled in the closet, wedged between three boxes of paper on one side and a dead and dusty copier on the other, was Tim McGee. Eyes closed, face blackened with soot, hand fisted beneath his chin; if the circumstances hadn't been so dire, it would have looked sweet.
It wasn't sweet. It was life and death. It was national security. It was the remnants of a scene after a terrorist had tossed a grenade with intent to kill and maim.
Rescue—or recovery? Gibbs couldn't help himself. He reached for the pulse in the neck, whole-heartedly panicking when he couldn't find it. No, there it was, faint but still present, so fast that his seeking fingers could barely feel it.
"Gibbs?"
"He's alive." That was step one. Nothing could proceed without that: alive. This wouldn't be one of those 'hunt down the criminals without any clues' sort of case, because their top witness was still alive. They didn't have the picture, not unless McGee could somehow resurrect it on his burned-to-a-crisp laptop, but they had McGee and that was good enough. Gibbs slipped his hands underneath his agent's arms, lifting him bodily out from the closet. McGee was limp, his head lolling back. Ziva grabbed the dangling feet, taking her share of the weight. Together they manhandled him out of the smoke filled room.
Jasper and Gloria met them in the corridor, the locals both wearing heavy fire gear, the SCBA masks covering their faces. "You got 'im?" As if it weren't obvious.
"Let's get him out of here. Handle the fire," Gibbs ordered. "You got oxygen on your rig?"
"Yup. Need a hand?"
"I need that laptop rescued," Gibbs growled, trying not to cough. "Make it a priority."
"You got it."
Taking too long. McGee needed oxygen, the sooner the better. Gibbs didn't need the man's brains to stay smoked; he had better uses for the man and his tech talents. Gibbs halted Ziva. "Go ahead and set up the oxygen," he ordered.
"Gibbs?" Ziva's eyes were huge above her makeshift filter of her blouse.
"Go." Gibbs called upon muscles honed not only in the gym but in certain parts of the world best left to the imagination and hoisted the tall agent over his shoulder. No response from McGee, not that Gibbs had expected one. This position would allow for faster forward movement, with the added benefit that Ziva would have the oxygen mask ready for the smoke victim, and right now what Gibbs really wanted was to see those eyeballs staring up at him from a soot-smudged face saying, 'boss?'.
Damn. McGee was heavier than he looked. Because the man was so often behind a desk, staring into a computer, Gibbs tended to forget that the agent worked out as much as any of them, and that he too had been through a rigorous self-defense course at Quantico. Heavy muscles lived inside that frame. Gibbs fought to keep his feet under him, struggled to hustle it out of the burning building.
Steps. Three steps to ground level. Gibbs reached for the rail to help balance himself, keeping the other hand on his team member. Ziva was already by the fire truck—yeah, the locals had driven it all the way from the fire house one block away—with plastic tubing in her hands that Gibbs presumed was laden with oxygen. DiNozzo was there, too, letting Dennis and Chief Fielding play with the heavy fire hose that was pouring water into the burning room through the broken glass. If the laptop hadn't been destroyed by the fire, Gibbs thought, then it surely would drown in the water. It was a goner.
Gibbs carefully lowered McGee to the ground, DiNozzo grabbing the unconscious man by the shoulders and helping to position him more comfortably against DiNozzo's own chest. DiNozzo himself took advantage of the situation to sit down onto the ground to rest his leg. Ziva pushed in with the oxygen mask, applying it to McGee's face and turning the dials to start the flow.
"McGee?" Gibbs couldn't wait. What would the director say if McGee died and there was no clue as to who that al-Qaida guy was? Worse, what would Abby say to him if she found out that he'd let her favorite computer geek die out here? Gibbs leaned over to put his mouth next to McGee's ear. "McGee, wake up."
"Huh?" McGee suddenly came to life, sitting up only to be followed immediately by a spate of coughing. Wheezing came after that.
Ziva pressed the mask to his face when McGee tried to claw it off. "Water," she demanded. "Tim, try to slow your breathing."
"Try…ing…" More coughing, more wheezing. He couldn't stop.
"Here." DiNozzo shoved a cup of liquid into Ziva's hand. She held it to McGee's lips, preventing him from gulping as he wanted to do.
"Slowly," she instructed him sternly, pulling the cup away and replacing it with the oxygen mask. "Breathe slowly."
McGee coughed again. "My…laptop."
"Gone," Gibbs told him. "The fire got it."
"I—" the words dissolved into another spate of hacking, trying to inhale the precious oxygen. DiNozzo held his fellow agent securely, for the man would have fallen to the ground if he wasn't already sitting on it.
"Don't try to talk," Ziva scolded McGee, holding the water to his lips.
McGee sipped gratefully, the liquid soothing his soot-lined throat. "Boss—" More coughing interrupted him. Ziva pulled the water away, afraid that he would spill it.
"Listen to her, McGee," Gibbs told him. He searched McGee's face, trying to convince himself that his agent would be all right. Good points: breathing. Bad: eyes still rolling back into his head every time he coughed--which was frequently. Gibbs doubted that the man would be able to walk without help. However, the information in McGee's soot-stained brains was vital. Gibbs pressed forward. "We'll do the talking. You just nod. Got it?"
McGee nodded, letting his head fall back against DiNozzo's chest. "I found this data—"
"Shut up," Gibbs said a little more forcefully. "Didn't you listen to me, McGee?"
"Yes, bos—" McGee clamped his mouth shut, but not before another spasm of coughing seized him.
Gibbs waited impatiently, then tried again. "Don't talk, McGee," he ordered once more. "You found this data stick with your laptop. You never saw it before; you didn't recognize it as belonging to you. That right? Just nod," he directed.
McGee nodded, closing his eyes wearily. Ziva gave him another sip of water.
"You didn't get around to looking at it until just before the grenade hit," Gibbs mused. Another confirmatory nod. "You opened up the files, right?"
"It was encrypted—" Cough, cough.
"Shut up, McGee. You can give me the details later," Gibbs said. Ziva stopped the coughing with more water, waiting until the man was able to continue. "You opened up the file, and you saw a picture of someone, someone who fit the profiles that we're all not supposed to use: dark-skinned, wearing middle eastern clothing. Right so far?"
Nod. Safe this time; no coughing.
"Now, there had to be something that led you to believe that this was al-Qaida," Gibbs continued. "Let me guess: writing, something captioning the picture, right?"
"I think it was written in Arabic—"
The 'whack upside the head' was barely tough enough to rustle McGee's hair. "I said: don't talk. Listen." Gibbs went on. "You saw Arabic writing, or something similar to it, underneath the picture. You remember any of it?" Carefully calm.
McGee nodded.
Even more calm. "You think you could write it down?"
Another nod, this one not so certain.
"Paper." DiNozzo dug out his omnipresent pad and presented it.
Gibbs took it, holding it in place for McGee to work on. "Write."
It didn't take long. McGee, unfamiliar with the letters, couldn't remember much, only a line, possibly not even that much. "There was more, boss—" more coughing.
"I'll bet. Ziva?" Gibbs handed it over. "You recognize it?"
Ziva studied the paper. "Arabic," she confirmed. She frowned. "McGee, are you certain of what you have written?"
McGee shook his head, protecting his throat: no.
"How about this?" Ziva sketched something underneath his original sentence, something that at first glance looked identical but wasn't. "Could this be what you saw?"
Definite: yes.
Ziva looked back at her boss. "Gibbs, this is important."
"Why am I not surprised?" Gibbs grumbled. "What?"
"Have you heard of Jameel al-Hamid?"
There was a stark sixty seconds of horrified silence.
DiNozzo broke it. "Are you saying that McGoggles here saw a picture of al-Hamid? The Hormuz Hacksaw himself?"
Ziva was dead serious. "Yes, Tony. The man that no one has seen, the mastermind behind half the terrorist cells in Europe, and one of the most wanted men in the world, dead or alive. Preferably dead, so that no one can rescue him."
"No one knows what he looks like," Gibbs muttered, more to himself than anyone else, horrified thoughts whirling in his brain. "At least, no one in Western intelligence. Ziva, are you sure it's him?"
"If you're asking if I'm certain that McGee saw a picture of al-Hamid, then no, I can't be sure. If you're asking if I'm certain of what this sentence in Arabic says, then: yes, I am certain. It speaks of his lineage, that he was born in Tehran and then educated overseas."
"Anything else?"
"It is only one sentence, Gibbs, but it is worded as though written by an educated man."
"Was there more, McGee?" Gibbs demanded. "More sentences? Just nod."
McGee nodded.
"Can you remember any of it?"
This wasn't a nod. It was a shake of the head: no. It was accompanied by a look of utter self-loathing, that the junior agent couldn't retrieve this incredibly important piece of data.
No one told him, 'it's okay, McGee,' just to make the man feel better because they all knew that it wasn't okay. Jameel al-Hamid, the Hormuz Hacksaw, was thought to be personally responsible for the deaths of over sixty intelligence agents throughout the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, and believed to be running an operation that could lay claim to at least one hundred localized attacks and had killed more than a thousand innocents. Almost nothing was known of the man except that he was brilliant—and that he had sworn to bring down Western Civilization.
There were some who believed that the man didn't exist, that it was a distraction perpetrated by a group of several individuals. Upper level intelligence disagreed; there was a certain flair to the attacks that spoke of one man. No one knew what the man looked like, and there was no one who could identify him outside of a loyal group of followers. All the Westerners who had knowingly seen the man were dead.
Except for NCIS Special Agent Timothy McGee.
They broke off the discussion when Dennis approached, a burnt object in his arms. "I'm sorry, Tim," he said, holding it out.
Tim?
McGee was beyond such discriminations. The lips moved, even though the words didn't whisper past the seared flesh of his throat: "My laptop."
DiNozzo too stared at the blackened box, one small nubbin of plastic melted into an M.C. Escher painting wannabe. "How about the data stick? That's where the original data was stored, right?"
"Gone." Dennis pointed to the side of the laptop, indicating a small jutting of plastic that had almost vanished. "Fried."
"Roasted," Ziva corrected grimly, "along with our asses if we don't get this information to higher ups."
No one commented on the concept of Ziva correcting someone's English colloquialism; not under these circumstances.
Gibbs put things together. "The murdered man in the Philadelphia hotel—I'm guessing that he had something to do with this, maybe even was the one who put that data stick thing in McGee's bag. He knew that NCIS was conducting a seminar there, and stuck it in McGee's bag as the most convenient and safest place he could find on short notice. I wish we could get hold of the Philadelphia police," he complained. "We need to know more about the man that was murdered."
"I can do that," Dennis piped in. "We can call Philly. They're a big squad; they run patrols all night long. Up here, we just rotate call with a cell phone."
Gibbs wasn't impressed with the dedication of the Starksville police. "And what do you do when cell service doesn't work?"
"Hasn't happened."
"How do you know?" Gibbs asked pointedly. "Cells aren't working at the moment, especially not with the storm rolling in."
"We've been doing okay. Nobody's complained yet."
"I am," Gibbs told him. "How do you expect to get through to Philadelphia right now?"
"The phones—oh." A look of chagrin crossed Dennis's face. "Right. Can't get through on the landlines right now, either. Phones got all burned up." He paused to think. "We could probably walk over to Mary's place, see if she'll let us use her phone. She might still be awake."
Gibbs didn't bother with a reply. There were more important things to be concerned about, more items that he was connecting the dots to in order to form an unpleasant picture. "I think we can safely assume that our friends with the grenades believe that we've found the data stick and that we've looked at it."
"Not necessarily." A cough interrupted McGee's words. "It was…" cough "under a pass code—" cough.
"Don't bet on it, McWishful Thinking." DiNozzo shifted the man so that they both could sit up. "I'd say that the grenades are a big hint that they've given up trying to repossess their data stick and will settle for total destruction of you."
"Me—?"
"Not just McGee," Gibbs stuck in. "All of us, DiNozzo. They can't be certain that McGee didn't show the picture to the rest of us. Now they're going to try to remove any possible means of getting that picture back to Washington. Step one was to eliminate the laptop and the data stick so that McGee couldn't even email it back. Step two will be to eliminate us." He jerked his thumb up at the sky. "This storm coming in to prevent the cells from working is just a piece of luck for them."
"Probably telling themselves that Allah is smiling upon them," DiNozzo grumbled. "Anybody got any ideas on how we convince 'em otherwise?"
"Let's do it by staying alive, DiNozzo." Gibbs stared out into the night. Smoke was still escaping through the broken window of the police station, even though the flames were extinguished. They could all hear Jasper Figgerworth bellowing instructions to Chief Fielding and Gloria, trying to save what they could of the bombed-out police station. There were three streetlights illuminating the center of 'town' along with the borrowed stadium lights and they showed all too clearly the devastation the grenades had wrought. The silver SUV—a victim of the first grenade—was now simply a blackened hulk of shredded metal and melted plastic, barely recognizable as something that was once road-worthy. A chunk of the fender had been tossed some ten yards away, lying in the street to tear up the tire of anyone so foolish as to try to pass through town. The police station wing of the 'government building' looked worse, with long fingers of sooty scorch marks crawling upward along the brick walls. Gibbs didn't want to think about how much damage had been done inside: this local department still ran on paper, and much of that paper would have been burned in the bonfire. Trying to recreate the case files would be nearly impossible.
You did this, whispered the guilty thoughts in his brain. You brought this here. You brought the outside world with all its horror to this sleepy little town and gave it a wake up shove into the New Millennium. Proud of yourself, Gibbs?
Not true. Gibbs knew that. He'd been ordered here, had cleaned up the mess the locals had made of Petty Officer Johnson and had cleared the name of her best friend. It had been a good day's work, and he could be proud of that. It wasn't his fault that a murder victim in Philadelphia had slipped a data stick into McGee's things before he was caught and killed by his 'employers'. It wasn't Gibbs's fault that the terrorists probably tortured that information out of the murder victim so they knew where to look for their missing data stick.
But it would be his fault if any more of these townsfolk got hurt over this. That woman, the one who had been taken hostage in her mini-van—his fault. If they'd handled it better—if Gibbs had handled it better—then maybe she wouldn't be in the hospital, her husband looking for help with the daughter.
That would be stopping as of now. Those terrorists were after Gibbs and his people, and Gibbs would be damned if he would let any more of these good people wander in between the combatants.
He looked at his people: battered and bruised, but still not willing to let those terrorists have their way. DiNozzo: limping and hurt, dark smudges on his cheek where the smoke had gotten a little too close, holding his teammate in his arms so that McGee wasn't lying on the ground. Ziva: no one could see the hatred burning in her eyes because the Mossad agent knew how to bury her feelings until it was time to let them spill forth. She had dealt with this type of enemy agent all of her life, and she wouldn't quit now. And McGee: the only intelligence agent alive who knew what the Hacksaw of Hormuz looked like. They needed to get the man back to D.C., back to civilization where they had facial recognition programs and sketch artists to pull the information out of McGee's brain before some two bit terrorist killed him.
They had overstayed their welcome. It was time to leave. Gibbs turned to Dennis. "Go get Jasper."
"I can help—"
"Now." Gibbs spoke quietly. He didn't have to raise his voice. Dennis fled.
Fielding might have been police chief, but Jasper Figgerworth was the one worth talking to. Jasper's whole demeanor had changed in the walk across the street from where the police station lay smoldering. This was no longer a little bit of entertainment in a sleepy little town. This was serious. "Special Agent Gibbs?"
Gibbs kept it soft. "We're leaving, Jasper. Spread the word; those terrorists will hear about it sooner rather than later. They're keeping tabs on us."
"They are, at that." Jasper wasn't fooled. "You'd do best to wait until daylight. The storm's less than an hour away, and the roads will flood at the first drop. Me and mine will keep watch."
Good people. "There's no good place to rest here, Jasper," Gibbs told him. "The only defensible place was your police station, and look what happened there. No, we need to get the hell out of Dodge, and take our troubles with us. You've got townsfolk to protect."
Jasper frowned, not liking what he heard but too honest to disagree. "You're heading back to D.C.?"
"Unless you can think of a better place."
"There's only two ways out of Starksville," Jasper said. "Three, if you want to hoof it down the mountain. Wouldn't recommend that."
"Hoping to get back home a little faster than shank's mare."
"You're not going to get out the way you came," Jasper continued. "Mudslide. Happens every now and again. Barney Miller, over the next hill, called in shortly before all this nonsense started up. He's a bit west of here, closer to the storm. Said it already took out the road up by him. No getting out along that route."
"And the other way out?"
"It's chancy, with a storm coming over the hill," Jasper admitted. "You got a couple of bridges that are like to flood, along with a good few sections of road lying a bit low. You'd best hurry." He eyed the sedan that the four had arrived in. "You sure you want to try it in that boat?"
"Agency rental," Gibbs admitted. "Insurance'll cover it. You're going to have enough trouble with your budget without adding the loss of a vehicle to it."
"What trouble?" Jasper never cracked a smile. "I plan on billing your department, Gibbs. We gave your petty officer room and board for a couple of days."
"Go ahead," DiNozzo invited grimly. "I wish you luck with The Undead. They're tighter than my Aunt Gladys with the books."
Gibbs ignored them. "Let's load up, people. Jasper, I'll ask you to go over the map with me. We'll pull out in fifteen."