So be it.
With a degree of fatalism, Georgi Timko sniffed the steaming mug of tea as if it were his last. Then he turned to face his assassins.
That’s when all hell broke loose—but not the way Georgi expected it.
Suddenly the tavern’s thick, glass block windows exploded inward in an avalanche of broken shards. On the ceiling, a light fixture shattered in a shower of hot sparks, plunging much of the bar into darkness. Two spider-webbed bullet holes cracked the smooth surface of the wall-sized mirror behind the bar. A third whizzed by Timko’s brow, to punch a hole in the stuffed buffalo head mounted on the wall.
A final shot smashed a gallon jug of Jack Daniel’s, and in the silence that followed, Georgi listened to the rich brown elixir drip onto the scuffed hardwood floor.
As the echoes faded, the patrons who’d thrown themselves under tables when the shooting started now stumbled to their feet. With angry shouts they crowded around the single exit as they all tried to escape the building at the same time.
11:09:47 P.M.EDT The parking lot of Tatiana’s
The punks were stunned into paralysis when Jack fired the Glock into the crowded tavern. Jack was careful to keep his shots high, far over the heads of the patrons inside.
Instantly, a dangerous horde of furious customers poured out of Tatiana’s. Jack dropped the empty Glock and held up his hands.
From the bar’s doorway, a biker with a long oily ponytail pointed at the gun-toting young men. “There they are! There’s the bastards shooting at us!”
The punks bolted, vanishing among the parked cars. Jack stood alone, hands raised. The bikers approached, not friendly.
“What the hell are you doin’?” one yelled. He drew a police special from his pocket.
Jack kept his arms raised, but if they searched him, they would find the other gun—and more. Suddenly a sustained barrage of automatic fire discharged inside the darkened tavern. Then the bartender burst through the front door, running full tilt for the street. He only made it a few steps before a stream of 9mm slugs chased him through the doorway, tearing bloody red holes in his back. The bartender staggered for a moment, then pitched headfirst onto the concrete.
When he saw that, the biker with the police special turned tail and ran, too, as yelling men and two screaming women in thongs and high heels stampeded. Engines roared to life all around Jack. Cars, trucks, motorcycles, until the noise drowned out the chattering guns.
Inside the tavern, the shooting continued. The automatic weapons’ fire was first met with single shots from a large-caliber handgun. Then Jack heard a familiar sound, easily recognizable from his service with Delta Force in Eastern Europe—the distinctive crack of a Soviet-style AK–47 assault rifle.
Jack found the choice of weapon intriguing. It also occurred to him that Dante Arete had sent the shooters inside that tavern personally. That might mean that the assassins’ intended victim was involved in whatever plot was unfolding. This person might even know something about the missile launcher, and the two men who had driven away with it. If Jack was really lucky, he might capture one of Arete’s assassins alive, and possibly find out where Dante was holed up.
So while fleeing vehicles sped away from Tatiana’s Tavern, Jack drew the Browning Hi-Power from his shoulder holster and moved cautiously toward the building.
11:28:58 P.M.EDT CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
Ryan Chappelle caught up with Nina Myers and Tony Almeida at Jamey’s workstation. Jamey was watching a map grid on her monitor. Dante Arete’s GPS beacon blinked intermittently. Meanwhile Nina was attempting to interface with the DEA’s database and Tony was tracing the license plates Jack had read off.
“We’ve finally heard from the FBI,” Ryan announced. “The New York office has issued an arrest warrant for Jack Bauer.”
Jamey exploded. “That’s crazy. What are the charges?”
“The murder of two federal marshals and the wounding of an FBI pilot. Aiding a fugitive to escape federal custody, one Dante Arete.”
“Ryan, that’s ridiculous and you know it,” Nina said.
“I’ll admit it sounds far-fetched,” Ryan conceded. “But Special Agent Frank Hensley survived the airline crash; he’s talking to his bosses and that’s his story.”
“Are there any other survivors?” Tony asked.
“Besides Jack and Dante Arete? Just the pilot, and he’s not talking.”
“The FBI keeping him under wraps?”
Ryan flashed his displeasure. “He’s in a coma, Tony.”
Almeida bristled at Chappelle’s tone. “Hold on a minute, Ryan. You sound like you believe the FBI’s version of what happened.”
“I don’t believe and I don’t disbelieve anything. I’m waiting to be convinced—”
“But you heard what Jack said. He’s innocent and you know it,” Nina argued.
“I don’t know anything,” Chappelle replied. “Until another witness steps forward, what happened is open to interpretation. What happens next is up to you. You’re going to have to convince me that what Jack Bauer said is true—”
“Convince you?”
“Yes, Tony. Convince me. Because I’ll be the one who has to turn around and convince the Secretary of Defense that Jack Bauer hasn’t gone off the deep end.”
11:34:27 P.M.EDT Tatiana’s Tavern
Georgi Timko cowered under a table; another toppled on its side served as scant protection against the 9mm bullets whizzing around the room. Still clutching the warm cup in his fist, he gulped reflexively, scalding his tongue.
From somewhere inside the shadowy tavern, lit neon blue from the sign outside the shattered window, old Yuri was still plugging away at the remaining assassins. The ancient AK–47 rattled, muzzle flash bright. Georgi could hear spent cartridges bouncing on the floor following each carefully timed burst.
Georgi smiled, remembering the surprise on one assassin’s face when the old man who begged for pennies at the door suddenly pulled the assault rifle from its place behind a loose wall panel. Before anyone could react, Yuri stitched a bloody line of holes up the gangster’s chest with an opening burst—hey, not so “toothless” after all. The dead man still lay where he fell, head askew, eyes staring blankly. The Uzi he had brought with him lay just out of Georgi’s reach.
Another Uzi fired, the burst shattering what remained of the mirror, which came crashing down behind the bar. Georgi hugged the dirty floor, cursing his laxity in not wearing a firearm, or fetching one when the four assassins first stepped into his establishment. Instead he trusted his employees to handle things. Now Nicolo was dead and Yuri was cornered, though the old man was still fighting valiantly. Poor Alexi had not fired a shot in a long time, and Georgi feared the worst.
He shifted his position in an effort to reach the Uzi on the floor. His movement elicited a burst of fire that chewed up the floorboards and shattered a chair near his head. Yuri answered the shots with a burst of his own, drawing the assassins’ fire away from his boss with the last of his ammunition.
Georgi Timko cursed. He wanted to protect such loyal men, but feared he’d already cost them their lives. Only luck or a guardian angel could save them all now.
11:41:09 P.M.EDT Tatiana’s Tavern
Jack Bauer had slipped to the back of the tavern and used a metal Dumpster to get a boost to the flat tar roof. He waited until he heard shots. Then he peered through the skylight, into the darkened tavern. By the blue light of the neon exterior, he counted three shooters—someone moving right under him was using the AK–47. Arete’s men, the two left standing, fired 9mm Uzis from behind splintered pool tables. Jack saw three other shapes from his vantage point— two on the ground, the third sprawled across a table. A pair of those men were Arete’s; Jack recognized them from their dusters. The third was unknown to Jack, and most likely dead.
Jack ducked away from the skylight, leaned against the satellite dish while he contemplated his next move.
He had to capture at least one of
Arete’s men alive. The only way to get information fast was a rough interrogation of the suspects. He was certain he could quickly break any of Arete’s punks—if they had any useful information.
Jack also wanted to speak to the person or persons Dante Arete sent his hit squad to assassinate. Jack didn’t always subscribe to the dictum that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but right about now he could use an ally on this coast to make up for the deficit of CTU support he was facing. And if Arete wanted someone dead, it was probably because he knew something that could hurt the gang leader. Jack wanted a part of that as well.
In the tavern below, a short burst from the AK–47 was followed by a hollow click on an empty magazine—the shooter was out of ammunition. Arete’s men knew it, too. Like shadows in the blue neon glow, they slipped out from behind the pool tables and moved to flank the defenseless man.
Jack balanced over the skylight, reloaded his weapon. He shot through the glass and dropped into the middle of the tavern. Jack landed in a crouch in front of a startled gunman. The man raised the Uzi and Jack fired, blowing the top of his head off.
Jack ducked under a broken table and rolled as the other man fired on him. The shots kicked up splinters from the floor.
“Give up and I won’t hurt you,” Jack cried. He was answered by another burst—which also ended with an empty click.
Jack leaped to his feet and leveled his weapon. The man in the blue duster looked up fearfully, then let the weapon fall from his grip.
“Step forward and I won’t—”
Suddenly shots filled the tavern as a long burst tore the man in the long coat to bloody pieces. Jack whirled to find a heavy-set man facing him. The man instantly dropped the Uzi and threw up his arms when his eyes met Jack’s.
“You must help me,” Georgi Timko pleaded. “That son of a bitch over there shot my friend. I ...I think he’s dying.”
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 12 A.M. AND 1 A.M. EASTERN DAYLIGHT TIME
12:01:00 A.M.EDT CTU Headquarters, Los Angeles
On his way through the command center, Tony
Almeida fell into step beside Captain Jessica Schneider.
“Where are you headed, Captain?”
“The same place as you.”
Tony stopped and faced her. Nina had summoned the CTU Crisis Management Team to Doris’s workstation. As far as he was concerned, the CTU team didn’t—and shouldn’t—include an entity from the DOD.
“But you’re not part of the Crisis Team,” he informed her.
“I am now, Special Agent Almeida. Nina Myers just notified me of the security clearance upgrade.”
Tony looked away. “RHIP,” he muttered.
Captain Schneider fixed her blue eyes on him. “You are correct. Rank does have its privileges. But is it really my rank that bothers you?”
Tony glanced to his right and left. “It’s not your rank,” he said quietly enough to keep their conversation private. “It’s your relationship to a powerful member of the House Ways and Means Committee.”
“A person can’t control the situation she was born into. But let me assure you that no strings were ever pulled for me....I earned the rank and responsibilities I hold.”
She whirled and stalked away before Tony could make his meaning clear. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about the woman’s career trajectory. It was her direct line to another branch of government that gave him indigestion. If Captain Jessica Schneider decided to pass judgment on what and how they did things at CTU Los Angeles, she could pass that judgment on to her father, who wielded plenty of influence via his position on a Capitol Hill oversight committee. So why didn’t Nina get that?
Tony continued on alone across the command center floor. He arrived at the Crisis Team meeting to discover a crowd silently watching the young Korean-American woman stretching in her cubicle. Her back turned to the spectators, Doris—head tilted on her long neck—was balanced on the tips of her toes. With balletic grace, she dipped to one side then the other, blithely unaware she had attracted an audience. When she finally stretched her arms high over her head, spun around, and opened her eyes, she found the others watching. Scattered applause followed. Doris, blushing, put her arms to her sides and dropped back down to the soles of her bare feet.
“Sorry. I was sitting so long I kinda needed to stretch . . .”
Nina had watched with arms folded and a look on her face as if she were indulging a child. Now that Tony and Captain Schneider had arrived, she was ready to begin. “Miss Soo Min, apprise the group of what you’ve uncovered.”
“Right,” said Doris. She knocked her shoes off the chair and slid into it, then tapped the keyboard.
“Getting the data off the chip was actually, like, a whole lot easier than I thought it would be. Whoever programmed this used the same algorithm the South Koreans use in their toy computers—the stuff they make for their kids. I worked on this kind of program in my uncle’s toy factory in Oakland, so I recognized the pattern immediately. The encryption overlay that the North Koreans tried to hide the data behind was very basic, too. It was almost too easy to break, even without an encryption protocol, which I brought with me and downloaded from my own PC . . .”
While Doris babbled on, the large HDTV monitor sprang to life and a half dozen data windows appeared. In each display box, the digital representation of a different type of aircraft appeared. The image shifted so that each individual aircraft was displayed from various angles, followed by an image composed of its heat signature.
Dozens of aircraft were on display—all civil aircraft used in the West—passenger airliners, cargo craft, even research, firefighting, and weather monitoring aircraft were included in the chip’s extensive
database.
“What is all this?” asked Jamey Farrell.
“This is all the data I downloaded from the memory stick,” said Doris. “There’s nothing left beyond some random data strains here and there I have yet to decrypt. I’ll continue working on them though; maybe I’ll find something important.”
“What exactly are we looking at?” Milo asked.
“It looks like a pretty thorough civil aircraft registry,” said Tony.
“Real thorough,” said Doris. “This software can recognize dozens of specific types of European, American, and Japanese aircraft by profile and heat signature, IFF frequencies, radio frequencies, you name it. And there’s even a program to compress and download the necessary data into some other system which interfaces with the memory stick through the USB port—”
“That would be the computer guidance system inside the anti-aircraft missile itself,” said Captain Schneider. “Once programmed and fired, the missile can guide itself to the target with the data downloaded from the memory stick.”
Nina’s face was tight with tension. “With this device at their disposal, terrorists could pinpoint and down any aircraft they wanted to. They—”
Captain Schneider raised her hand. “Not quite,” she interrupted. “The effective range of a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile is very limited. A civil aircraft at its normal cruising altitude would probably not be at risk. A target aircraft would have to be flying at a fairly low altitude—as it is when it takes off or lands—for a Long Tooth missile to be truly effective.”
“That explains why the terrorists were at the airport,” said Tony. “They wanted to maximize their chance for success.”
“But it doesn’t explain their choice of target,” Nina replied. “There was absolutely nothing aboard the cargo aircraft Dante Arete’s gang was aiming at to warrant a shoot-down. It was a standard, cargo-configured 727 packed with overnight mail and packages. The cargo was checked after landing and cleared by National Transportation Safety Board screeners under our supervision.”
“Maybe the shoot-down was supposed to be symbolic. Maybe the terrorists wanted to send a message,” said Jamey.
“Or
maybe it was a test,” said Tony. “Maybe they wanted to see if the target recognition system really worked as advertised before they went after their real target.”
Nina tucked strands of her short black hair behind an ear. “Whatever Dante Arete’s goal, we know that with this technology, he and his accomplices have the ability to target specific aircraft, even in the crowded skies over a busy airport.”
Nina faced Captain Schneider. “I’m turning the actual memory stick over to you next. Take it apart and put it back together, reverse-engineer the thing, trace each individual component to the original manufacturer or melt them down to their base minerals. I want you to do whatever it takes to find out where this device was made and where the maker got the parts.”
Captain Schneider detached the memory stick from the data port it had been plugged into. She placed the device inside a static-free Mylar envelope and headed back to the Cyber Unit.
When she was gone, Tony confronted Nina.
“What are you doing giving Captain Schneider a spot on the Crisis Team? She’s not an agent; she’s a computer engineer. Captain Schneider doesn’t have any field experience and she isn’t even a member of CTU.”
“We needed her expertise,” Nina replied, still staring over Doris’s shoulder at the images crawling across the HDTV screen.
Tony shook his head. “I don’t accept your explanation. What does Chappelle have to say about all this?”
Nina rose to her full height, faced Tony Almeida. “Ryan Chappelle is on a conference call to Washington. He’s working to control the damage, which is pretty important right now. That means he has no time to monitor the Crisis Team, so he left that task to me. In case you’ve forgotten, Jack left me in charge, too, so I’m handling the situation. My way.”
12:11:18 A.M.EDT Tatiana’s Tavern
Georgi Timko cradled his friend’s head in his bloodstained hands. Jack ripped away the ragged flannel shirt to check the downed man’s wounds. Jack could see the man had taken three shots—to the chest, the shoulder, the abdomen. The shoulder wound was not life-threatening. It was impossible to tell how bad the abdominal wound was, but the largest injury was a sucking chest wound. When Jack tried to plug the hole and allow him to breathe, the man gasped, choked on the blood that shot up from his flooded lung and flowed from his mouth.
24 Declassified: 01 - Operation Hell Gate Page 6