Henderson checked his watch. “Less than eight hours.”
Anything can happen in four minutes. The terrorists, whoever they were, could have killed Santiago a dozen times over. Or it might not even be Santiago. The people from the Volvo might not even be terrorists.
But Jack Bauer ran as if his daughter’s life depended on it. More shouts drifted down from above. He didn’t wait for Ozersky or Mercy. He plunged down into another dell, then sprinted up out of it into moonlight again. The path leveled out and the sound of rushing water grew louder.
Voices called to each other in Farsi and a moment later several shots rang out. Jack guessed that the terrorists had tried to dispatch their victim quietly, but had failed. Now they were resorting to gunfire. He saw several muzzle flashes in the distance.
Jack stopped, took a deep breath, raised his weapon, and waited. A moment later there was another muzzle flash. Jack leveled his sights behind the flash and pulled the trigger twice. He heard one cry of pain and several shouts of alarm. He’d given his position away, but now the terrorists had to divide their attention between their victim and him.
Jack moved to the inward side of the path. Trees lined the path from here to the waterfall he could hear ahead, but they were scraggly trees with thin trunks. They offered more concealment than cover, but he would take what he could get. Jack moved from tree to tree, silent now because his quarry had gone silent.
The victim, however, was making a lot of noise. “Help! Help!” he shouted. “Whoever’s out there, they’re trying to kill me! Help!”
Keep yelling, Jack thought. Cover the sound of my movement.
He moved up to the next tree and stopped, listening. He could see nothing, nor hear any threat, but some sixth sense told him he’d covered enough ground. The ambush would be somewhere in this range. That’s where he’d have put it.
Someone sobbed in the darkness, and Jack’s muzzle swung there like a magnet to a steel plate, but he didn’t fire. It was the man he’d put down. Don’t reveal your position to kill a man who’s already dead.
Footsteps behind him. Ozersky and Mercy were coming. They would draw fire. Jack prepared himself.
He heard Ozersky’s heavy footsteps and Mercy’s labored breathing. They’d get shot in the dark if the terrorists were any good.
Thunder and lightning erupted under the trees as the two gunmen opened fire. The minute their rounds went off, Jack found them. Jack emptied his magazine at them, and then all firing ceased. Smoothly he ejected the magazine and slid another one into place. As the snap of the slide gave his position away, he moved forward and crouched low.
“Help!” someone yelled from near the water. “Help me!”
Moans and whimpers rose up from the ground. He could hear something shuffling or rolling back and forth in the dirt. Jack moved forward quietly. Shreds of moonlight turned the area deep gray, and in the gloom he saw two figures lying on the ground, one motionless and the other twitching and sobbing. “Search them,” he whispered into the darkness behind him, and moved on. He passed the third body, the one he’d shot from long range, and kicked the gun from the corpse’s hand.
“Help me!” The waterfall was just ahead.
He couldn’t see it well in the moonlight, but from what he could tell, the falls consisted of one short cascade from the ridge above into a wide pool, then another much higher fall into the gorge below.
“I can’t hold on!”
The voice came from the darkness of the gorge. Jack pulled out his flashlight and shined it downward.
“Pico Santiago!” Jack yelled, his voice nearly blending with the rush of falling water.
“Help!”
Santiago was there, halfway down the gorge, clinging to a ledge by his hands. Jack guessed what must have happened. The terrorists had caught up with Santiago and tried to kill him quietly. He struggled and broke free. When they pursued him, he had tried to escape by climbing down the gorge. It had been a brave and stupid thing to do. There was no way to climb down that cliff at night. Santiago had fallen or slid, but had been lucky enough to catch himself on an outcropping of rocks and bushes.
“Hold on!” Jack shouted. “I’m coming down for you!”
He didn’t know what else to do. Besides, he could be as brave and stupid as the next guy.
“Jack!” Mercy called out, following the beam of his flashlight. “Wait for the helicopter. They’ll be here soon.”
“He’s not going to last,” Jack said, half to himself. The flashlight had a cord, which Jack looped around his neck. Then he held the light between his teeth and started to climb down. He chose a path above and just on the waterfall side of Santiago, so that he would land on the man if he fell. Unfortunately, that put him closer to the water, so the rocks and plants he grabbed for handholds were slippery.
“I can’t hold on!” the man yelled.
“You hold on, you son of a bitch!” Jack yelled.
“My hands…” the man moaned.
“It’s not about you!” Jack yelled down at him, dropping the light from his mouth and letting it swing. He was still twenty feet above, and the going was slow. “You hold on because people are going to die if you don’t!”
“Agh!” one of Santiago’s hands slipped away from its hold. He was clinging by one hand.
“Hold on!” Jack inched downward, foot by foot. He willed Santiago to be stronger, to hold tighter. But in the end it was not Jack’s will but Santiago’s that was most important, and Santiago’s broke. His other hand slipped, and Jack watched him fall away from the beam of the flashlight with a short cry.
19. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 1 A.M. AND 2 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Christopher Henderson was convinced his headache was permanent. He’d started the day worried about nothing more than crowd control at the Federal Building and what he’d thought of as Jack Bauer’s overeager attempt to find a terrorist needle in a haystack. Now he was co-managing a crisis of global proportions with Ryan Chappelle while Jack Bauer left a trail of bodies from one end of the city to the other.
No sooner did they have forensics teams at one location than Bauer was calling from another, asking for more cleanup.
Jamey Farrell was in his office giving him a summary of the most recent information they had gathered. Her voice was hoarse from talking, but otherwise she was fresh. “The two shooters who attacked Jack on Sunset Boulevard this afternoon were definitely ETIM. We had them on a watch list, but they were never identified near any hot spots until the shooting, and they were too low a priority for surveillance. The one who survived the fight with Jack has been cooperative, but he doesn’t know much more than we know.”
Henderson nodded. “With Marcus Lee dead and Kasim Turkel out of commission, I’d say ETIM is back to low-priority status. What about the others?”
“Frankie Michaelmas is dead, Bernard Copeland is dead. Jack met up with two shooters at the Earth Café. Both of them are dead, but we do have information on them.”
“Go,” Henderson said, focusing in.
“They have nothing to do with ETIM as far as we can tell. They’re both Iranians who immigrated here in ’92 and ’94, respectively. We have files on them, shared with the FBI, but they’re scant. One was interviewed after the truck bomb at the World Trade Center in ’93, and both were interviewed after 9/11, but in both cases the evidence pointed toward Saudis rather than Iranians, so they weren’t pressed. Their files were kept active because they were known to attend a mosque run by a fairly vocal cleric named Ahmad Moussavi Ardebili, but they’ve never made a peep otherwise.”