In the darkness, all he could taste was his own tainted blood. They had trained together, and that was how the five members of his team had died, inseparable from each other and their task. What should have been simple was ultimately an epitaph: expect the unexpected. Somewhere, wrapped in the remains of their arrogance outside that building; constructed centuries before and cemented with the souls of thousands before them, a vital cohesion had crumbled and fractured. The youngest, Craddock, had panicked, unprepared for the scale of the ambush that confronted them in the dirt and rubble from the explosion. Franklin and Ashwood had been taken by a sniper, both falling within his sight, dead before the dust had settled.

He and Frazier were pinned, unable to do anything except sit and panic as Chester was hauled out of his position, carelessly dragged across from the doorway at the side of the building and summarily executed. The bullet that travelled through his brain came to lodge in a piece of timber not six inches from them, apparently unimpeded on it's travel through everything that Grant Chester had been. At that moment he thought of Kim, how she would cope without a father. Teri was stronger than him and she would survive, in time she would maybe even come to forgive her husband for what he had become, the life that was now inescapably his.

They had lain until sundown, waiting for their moment, and when it had come they were away without incident, escaping the carnage to communicate their success. They were taught to forget: overlook the families left behind, the four dreadful letters to be sent to the kin. Funerals without bodies, promises of a life taken in the defence of freedom and honourŠ they had both stopped thinking, concerned only with their mutual survival and in the moment when Frazier had tripped a wire on their return to the rendezvous everything slowed and stopped. It didn't matter. They had been destined to fail, all of them to die to ensure the destruction of an individual whose ideals were no better than any of the other madmen who had killed and maimed on this continent since the beginning of time. As long as Victor Drazen has been eliminated, all this sacrifice was worthwhile.

It took a moment for him to realise he wasn't dead, that the terrible smell of burning flesh and uniform wasn't his but what remained of Frazier. In the silence of the Serbian forest, in the cold dark of a March night, Jack Bauer realised for the first time just how human he was, and that death had seen his face but passed by. He would live another day, but only just. As the whump whump from the Retrieval Helicopter's rotors filled his ears with noise he lay motionless, looking at the stars, waiting for someone else to save his soul, as he was now incapable of anything but fear.

He would remember this Nightfall forever.