24 Veto Power (27 page)

Jack did the math in his head. Twenty-three miles. It was high enough. “Goddamm it,” he growled. “We’ve been talking about rockets and experimental airplanes and they chose a fucking weather balloon. That’s it, that’s our target!”

Most of the room had caught up with him. Jack heard someone on the phone with Strategic Air Command, relaying target coordinates that would then be sent on to the pilots over Kansas. “How high is it?” he asked.

Jamey Farrell checked the radar screen. “It’s at forty-nine thousand feet, rising at a speed of ...five hundred feet per minute. ETA for the fighters is 8 minutes.”

Jack heaved a sigh. “Good. It’s only halfway to its detonation height. We’ve got time.”

“No we don’t!” Major Wilcox’s disembodied voice screeched in his ear like a scolding conscience. “Tell those fighters to haul ass!”

“What is it?” Jack asked.

“The max altitude for those F-16s is fifty thousand feet. That target is going to be out of range.”

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THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLAC
E
BETWEEN THE HOURS OF
8 P.M. AND 9 P.M.
PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

8:00
P
.
M
. PST Kansas International Airport (MCI), Kansas City, Missouri

“...and the skies over Kansas are quiet tonight, but it’s an ominous kind of silence, like the calm before the storm, interrupted only by the distant roar of jet fighters guarding against an unknown threat. This is Barry Wynn, FOX News, Kansas City.” Barry fin
ished in round basso tones. He was posed with his left foot slightly forward, his hips turned slightly sideways and narrowed to the camera, but his chest rotated forward. It made him look trimmer. His face looked grave but competent, and he kept his eyes focused on the camera lens.

“We’re out,” the cameraman said, relaxing and lowering his camera. “Nice work, Bare.”

Barry heaved a sigh of relief. “Thanks. I can’t believe it. I just did my first network piece. Screw that anchor position. This could take me national!”

8:02
P
.
M
. PST 45,000 Feet Above Kansas

“Mustang 1-9 to Command, requesting bogey dope.”

“Mustang 1-9, alter course to zero-three-two, throttle to full. Relaying the target to your computer now.”

Lundquist turned his joystick, the F-16’s fly-bywire controls responding like a dream. His radar screen shivered and reset, and he saw the tiny blip his system hadn’t picked up before. That was it? He wasn’t picking up any heat signals, no electronics...

“Command, can you tell me—”

“It’s a weather balloon, Mustang. Shoot it down. Over.”

Lundquist read the target’s altitude and rate of ascent and didn’t need to be told the obvious. “Roger. Mustang 1-9 going supersonic.”

8:05
P
.
M
. PST San Francisco Airport

Debrah Drexler walked away from the desk of her charter airline in frustration, reaching for her cell phone to make a call when it started ringing. The display flashed the number for her Washington, D.C., office.

“Drexler,” she said. “Did you guys know that flights were grounded?”

Juwan Burke said, “It just happened a few minutes ago, Senator. Do you have a television there?”

Drexler looked around. The charter service terminal wasn’t as large as the main terminals and gates at SFO, but was posh. There was a plasma screen set into the wall, currently broadcasting CNN. “Yes.”

“You should watch FOX right now.”

Drexler hung up. “Excuse me,” she said, walking back to the clerk at the counter. “Can you change that to FOX?”

The girl behind the counter made a face. “If you really want me to...”

She aimed a remote at the screen. The picture flashed and changed to FOX, and the sober image of Attorney General James Quincy appeared.

“. . . questions should be directed to Homeland Security more than Justice. But I can tell you this. My understanding is that the terrorists who’ve caused this crisis, if the threat is indeed real, have been in this country for months. In fact, the agents assigned to the case originally pursued them six months ago, but their investigation was hamstrung by legalities. I feel like I’m shouting at the ocean now, but if Congress can’t see why we need to pass the NAP Act now, I don’t know what they’re thinking.”

Debrah felt something inside her wither.

8:07
P
.
M
. PST Santa Monica

Nina Myers decided it would have been easier to track down a ghost.

While the boys were playing with their toys back at CTU, she and Jessi Bandison had taken on the grunt work, pursuing the mysterious Frank Newhouse. Jessi had been poring over Newhouse’s CIA file, checking it for any loose ends. For the last hour, Nina had kept in touch with her by telephone while she tracked down leads pulled off the fingerprints. She’d gone back to the condominium and interviewed the maid and the maintenance workers. All three recognized a picture of Frank from his CIA file, all three knew him only as Pat Henry, owner of the condominium, and said he was rarely there. That was it. Almost all the other sets of fingerprints were dead ends. That was the frustrating aspect about having fingerprint or DNA evidence. To catch someone with biometrics, the person had to be in the system.

Meanwhile, her quarry’s life as Frank Newhouse was full of information, but none of it was helpful.

“I can’t find anything on him that doesn’t check out,” Jessi had confessed a half hour earlier. “The CIA record is pretty much what you’d expect. We had the FBI investigate all his points of contact, but he’s not there.”

“Has the CIA run down any more information on this Babak Farrah? The one who was supposedly his Iranian contact?”

“Nothing more than we’ve got already.”

Nina tapped her knuckles on the steering wheel. She didn’t believe this; it wasn’t logical. Frank Newhouse might have fooled the Greater Nation idiots easily enough, but no one could make this big a play with the United States government without making at least some mistakes. There was a loose end somewhere, and Nina was determined to find it.

“What about the guy Jack brought in, Farid something. Has he been interrogated?”

At her desk at CTU, Jessi looked around. Every eyeball she sought was glued to a computer screen. “I don’t think so.”

“Get someone on it. He knew this Farrah, maybe he’s a lead.” Nina pulled up in front of an apartment building off of Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica. “I’m at my next stop, Jess, one of the possibles on that partial print. Call me if Farid gives up anything.”

Nina hurried out of the car, wanting to get this over with. She had already burned through the likely leads and was now working on the unlikely. Forensics had pulled a partial print off a white tub Newhouse (or whoever he was) had used to make a bomb. The problem with a smudged print was that, even if the subject was in the database, it might not match. Jamey Farrell had run a program that brought up possible matches, but there were more than two hundred names in Los Angeles alone. On a hunch, Nina had broken the list down into names on L.A.’s West Side. She had no real reason for doing this other than her gut. The Frank Newhouse who worked with the terrorists seemed to prefer downtown and East Los Angeles, since that Newhouse had worked with Farrah, Farid, and Julio Juarez, and had rented an apartment for the terrorists near USC. But the other Frank Newhouse owned a condo (under the name Pat Henry) on the West Side.

One of the names on her possibles list was for Matilda Swenson. Nina reviewed her rap sheet, such as it was. Matilda was a pretty blond, younger in the mug shot but she’d be thirty-six now. In fact, Nina noticed, today was Matilda’s birthday. She was an artist who’d been busted twice. The first time was in ’94 for marijuana possession. This was hardly an indictment, but it was enough to get her into the system. What intrigued Nina most, aside from her West Side address, was the second arrest. This was for disturbing the peace during the recent World Bank conference in Los Angeles. Apparently, Matilda didn’t much appreciate the centralization of power. In that one line, Nina heard the faint echoes of Brett Marks’s Greater Nation platform.

Nina climbed the steps to number 204 and knocked.

8:09
P
.
M
. PST 49,500 Feet Above Kansas

“Approaching maximum altitude.” Lundquist heard the voice of Sam Amato, his wingman, in his ear. Sam’s voice was steady and professional. But behind it, Lundquist sensed the danger Sam was feeling.

“Roger.” He looked at his readouts. He was right under the target, then past it. He banked hard left and came around, lifting his nose up. He couldn’t see the balloon in the dark, but his radar could. It was more than fifty-one thousand feet and climbing.

With his nose still pointed up, Lundquist selected AIM-9N Sidewinder missiles and, just like in a video game, guided the small square pointer right over the target. “I can’t get good tone,” he said. “Switching to guns.”

“Forty-nine thousand, eight hundred feet,” Sam warned.

“Roger. Pull back to forty thousand, Sam. I got this one.”

“Bobby—”

“Don’t worry,” Lundquist said with a laugh, “you think I’m going to let anything go wrong right before my kid is born?”

Sam Amato didn’t laugh. He broke right and tipped his nose to the ground.

8:10
P
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

No one spoke. Jack watched the screen as the fast-moving blip representing the F-16 pulled right on top of the smaller, slower blip that represented disaster.

8:11
P
.
M
. PST 50,400 Feet Above Kansas

Lundquist felt his engines lurch. They’d been chuffing at him for the last ten seconds. He ignored them. He came up underneath the balloon, and when the crosshairs of his 20mm Gatling guns fell across the blip on his screen, he opened fire.

8:12
P
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

Jack Bauer held his breath as the two radar blips came together briefly, then broke apart. One of the contacts—the F-16—fell away. The other vanished.

“Target destroyed.”

The room erupted in cheers. Hands slapped Jack on the back and shook his arms. Kelly Sharpton, his hands still bandaged, threw his arms around Jack in a friendly hug.

8:12
P
.
M
. PST 50,200 Feet Above Kansas

The F-16 bucked slightly like a startled horse. Then the engines cut out all together. Jets feed on air, which is why the ceiling for most fighter jets is fifty thousand feet. To go higher than that, you need a rocket.

Lundquist had been flying nose up. When the power cut out, the F-16 tipped backward, and he found himself upside down, his plane flat on its back as it fell back toward home. He didn’t panic, but he did feel annoyed. He was a captain in the United States Air Force and this was his airplane. He was not about to have it scratched up by something as stupid as a lack of oxygen.

Lundquist initiated his relight procedure. Every display in his cockpit twinkled like Christmas. Then he felt the familiar rumble under his feet and heard the deep-throated roar of the engine behind him, and he grinned.

The grin fell away from his face the next instant when something clanged through the guts of the F-16. Lundquist knew immediately that it was foreign object damage, and he thought ironically that the only foreign object up this high was the goddamned thing he’d been shooting at. His engine groaned at him. “Command, this is Mustang 1-9,” he said calmly. “I’ve got FOD to the engine.”

Alarms went off like klaxons all around him. “My compressor is—shit!” He knew what was coming next and he hit the eject button. Small explosive charges popped the canopy off his plane, and a half second later his seat was blown out of the cockpit. At the same time, the F-16 turned into a ball of fire that enveloped him. He blew into the careening canopy and slammed his head, helmet and all, into the Plexiglas.

As the world went dark around him, Bob Lundquist wondered if it was a boy or a girl.

8:15
P
.
M
. PST CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles

The entire staff of CTU Los Angeles watched in silent horror as the F-16’s radar signature plummeted toward the ground.

“Eject, eject,” someone whispered.

The radar screen gave no sign that he ever ejected.

“Oh my god,” Jamey Farrell whispered. “That pilot...”

They listened over the intercom as a control tower in Kansas tried to raise the F-16. The words “Mustang 1-9... Mustang 1-9 . . .” until the words became a lament.

Jack allowed himself a moment of silence, a moment of remorse. Then he steeled himself. He had sent men to die, and had watched them die, before. He reminded himself why that man had died, what he had died for. Then he said hoarsely, “Tell the other pilot to confirm the target is down.”

Jamey Farrell looked at him as though he was a monster. “Jack, that pilot . . .”

“Tell him!”

Someone relayed the query, which was relayed to the second F-16 pilot, Sam Amato, who confirmed.

Jack nodded in satisfaction. “Nice job everyone,” he said resolutely.