With a shrill cry she jumped to her feet and threw herself against Griffin Lynch. She slammed against his legs with her full weight. Surprised by her sudden move, Lynch dropped the Uzi as he reached for a steel cable — and missed.
With an expression of shocked surprise, he tumbled over the edge of the bridge.
Her own momentum carried Caitlin across the shed’s roof. Now she dangled precariously over the black water. Gunfire rattled around her as Caitlin tried desperately to crawl to safety. Someone jumped onto the roof, grabbed her. Caitlin rolled onto her back, looked up — into the murderous eyes of Omar Bayat. The man pointed his Uzi at her breast — then his head exploded, showering Caitlin with hot blood, brains, and bone shrapnel. The headless corpse spilled over the edge to vanish in the yawning black currents below.
Caitlin whimpered, tried to wipe the gore from her face. Then strong hands grabbed her, pulled her back from the brink. A moment later, she was clutching Jack Bauer.
“We have to move!” he cried.
More gunfire spattered the metal support beams around them. Jack pushed Caitlin along the catwalk, toward Astoria Park.
“We can’t leave, Jack!” Caitlin cried. “Those men are going to shoot an airplane down.”
“No they won’t!”
To Caitlin’s surprise, Jack pushed her onto the train tracks, forced her down on the wooden ties between the rails. “Stay here,” he hissed. “And no matter what you hear, don’t move.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but Jack was already gone.
Jack ran back toward the missile launcher and the men clustered around it. He was stopped by a sustained stream of automatic weapon fire. Bullets twanged off the steel beams, eliciting sparks. Jack saw Taj at the tripod, aiming the missile launcher at the fast-darkening sky. The Afghani was mere seconds away from pulling the trigger.
He knew he had no hope of reaching the terrorists before the missile was fired. Nor could he get a clear shot — every time Jack tried to aim, his movements were met with a hail of bullets. Jack looked up, at the bridge supports rising over his head. He was searching for a way to get around the shooters, to flank them. Then he spied the electrical wires strung along the tracks.
Of course!
The trains that ran across Hell Gate Bridge were electric, not diesel-powered. Thousands of volts moved through those live wires. A second peek told Jack that the Afghanis were all standing on the steel catwalk. He jumped up, rolled across the railroad tracks to land on his back. Lying across the wooden ties, Jack aimed the.45 at the wires and emptied the magazine.
The wires didn’t snap until he’d fired his last shot. Jack watched as the live wire dropped onto the catwalk. The blue flash was so bright, Jack had to shield his eyes. He smelled ozone and heard screams as thousands of volts coursed through the Afghanis, causing their bodies to jerk convulsively before they burst into flames. The tripod was also electrified, and carried the current to the Long Tooth missile launcher. One of the two missiles exploded in its tube, adding to the fiery chaos.
A moment later, the noise died away as safety breakerscut thepower to thecables, andthe span wasonce again plunged into darkness. Jack rose, ran along the tracks to Caitlin. The woman sat up at his approach, rubbed her eyes. Jack helped Caitlin to her feet.
“Oh god, Jack. Is it over?”
Jack opened his mouth to speak, then his eyes went wide. He pushed Caitlin to the side, and she heard two shots. She saw Jack fall, his gun discharging once as he went down. She whirled to find Frank Hensley behind her. The man’s legs were braced, he clutched a weapon in his hand, but his eyes were clouded, and he seemed to sway in the wind.
Then Caitlin saw a hole in the center of Hensley’s chest, the spreading stain. The man opened his mouth and black blood oozed out. Slowly, he sank to his knees, then pitched forward, sprawling across the tracks.
Caitlin heard a moan, saw Jack stumbling to his feet.
“Jack, are you hurt?”
“He clipped me, but I’m not dead yet.”
Caitlin ran to him, draped Jack’s good arm over her shoulder and wrapped her own arms around him.
“Let’s get you to a doctor,” she said.
“Don’t need a doctor,” grunted Jack. “What I need is a good night’s sleep.”
Arm in arm, they limped across the bridge, toward the distant shore.
EPILOGUE
After Jack Bauer wound up his part of the debriefing, the conference room was quiet for a long moment. Finally, Richard Walsh spoke. “Talk about Frank Hens-ley. Has your team come up with anything?”
Jack leaned back in his chair, finally relaxing now that the whole of this mission was out of him. “Hensley was a mole.”
“Can’t be, Jack. No mole could get past the FBI’s screening process; their background checks are legendary.”
Jack shook his head. “I had Nina contact the Pentagon, retrieve Hensley’s military records. Tony went over it all, discovered that Hensley’s pre-Iraqi records, including his fingerprints, had been tampered with— probably by another mole somewhere in the Pentagon. We went back even further, discovered that when Hensley was a teenager, he was fingerprinted for a security assistant’s job at a local department store in Morgantown, West Virginia. We accessed those old prints and compared them with the fingerprints on file in the FBI’s personnel office.”
Jack met Walsh’s incredulous stare. “The prints didn’t match. The man who went to war in Desert Storm and the man who came back to America were not the same.”
“999?” Walsh guessed.
Jack nodded. “The real Frank Hensley was a true war hero. He was captured by the Iraqi forces during Desert Storm and taken to Baghdad. We know that for a fact. What happened after that is speculation, but we suspect he was tortured and murdered by 999, Iraqi’s secret special operations service. They likely extracted enough personal information from Hensley to replace him with one of their own. His parents were no longer living. Some plastic surgery and a standoffish attitude after the war would have helped him make the transition back into civilian life.”
“But he had a wife?”
“Not until after the war. He met and married a woman whose father was a Federal judge. That alliance would have helped him into the FBI. Over the years, Hensley forged more alliances, and not with more judges. He began to make deals with the criminals he was supposedly investigating. But the big payoff he promised Felix Tanner and Fiona Brice, the Lynch brothers and Dante Arete, it was all a lie. The plot to blow up airliners to extort money was really just a mask for Hensley’s real mission to down the CDC airplane and unleash a pandemic on New York City and most likely the entire Northeastern seaboard. From what Caitlin told us about what she overheard, Taj and the Afghanis were in on the real plot, and were willing accomplices.”
“And Dennis Spain, Senator Cheever’s aide?”
“He disappeared. The FBI is looking for him, but. ” Jack turned his palms to the ceiling. “Nothing so far.”
“And the Senator’s in the clear?”
Jack frowned. “Not with me.”
Walsh nodded. With thumb and forefinger he smoothed his walrus mustache. “And what about that anonymous tipster? The one who triggered this whole mission with the events at LAX? Ever get an ID?”
“That one was easy. A voice analysis of the tape message proved the man’s identity conclusively — it was Georgi Timko. It seems Georgi’s brother was a HIND helicopter pilot in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. His chopper was shot down by insurgents; Georgi’s brother died in Afghan captivity. I guess Timko felt he had some unfinished business with Taj and his followers. ”