that go that high!”
Wilcox couldn’t have stopped Jack Bauer in his tracks more suddenly if he’d slapped him across the face. “Nineteen miles, well, they…I mean, they stole the fucking thing, they’ve got to have a plan. ” He trailed off, furious with himself. He must be getting tired. He hadn’t even thought of that.
Sharpton filled the silence. “Something must go that high.”
“Sure,” Wilcox answered sarcastically. “The Space Shuttle. Rockets. ICBMs go that high. The theory you’re referring to, this whole Kansas idea, originally comes from the idea of bursting a nuclear missile over Kansas. Nuclear missiles go a lot higher than airplanes.”
“A rocket, then,” Sharpton said.
“Okay,” Wilcox said condescendingly. “So your guys who just stole an EMP device now plan to fly to Kansas and steal a rocket?”
It sounded unbelievable, of course. Only the military had access to high-altitude rockets, and breaking into a military base would be a major terrorist activity in itself.
“It doesn’t have to be a rocket.”
Jack practically leaped at Brett Marks, who was standing in the door way. “What are you doing here. Get out!”
“They released me, Jack,” Marks said. He was dressed in a pair of gray sweats and sweat shirt with the generic “FLETC” across the front. “That was the deal.”
“Letting you eavesdrop on our conversations sure as hell wasn’t!” Jack glared at the uniformed guard behind Marks. “Get him out of here!”
Brett stepped back toward the guard, offering no resistance. “I’m gone, Jack. But it doesn’t have to be a rocket. You ever heard of the X Prize?!” The security guard led him away.
“What’s the X Prize?” Sharpton said. “I think I’ve heard of that.”
“Oh.” It was Major Wilcox, his disembodied voice suddenly hesitant and thoughtful in the speaker box. “Hey, that’s possible.”
“What is?” Jack asked impatiently.
“The X Prize. It’s a prize being offered to any private company that can build a reusable spacecraft. It’s five or ten million dollars to the winner. A lot of private sector scientists are taking it seriously. There are some designs on the board that might work.”
“Could these guys build one?”
On his end of the phone, Wilcox hesitated. Jack stared at the speaker box, growing more frustrated by the moment. He felt like a dog chasing its tail. He was in charge of this operation, but he didn’t feel confident in it.
“It’s next to impossible,” Wilcox finally said. But the self-assured, acidic tone had disappeared from his voice.
The computer room at CTU was full of people, but it was silent as a graveyard. Programmers sat at every terminal, analyzing data. Field operatives watched and waited anxiously. Jack paced back and forth behind the lines of analysts studying their screens. He was missing something. There had to be something.
Chappelle was nearby, leaning over Jessi Bandison’s shoulder. “Why are there still blips on the radar screens?” he asked. “Isn’t all air traffic grounded?”
Jessi nodded. “We’re getting relays from Strategic Air Command, ground-based radar in Kansas, and AWAC radar planes over Kansas. Those two blips there are fighters out of Lackland. Those and those, the slow-moving ones, are high-flying flocks of birds. It’s spring. They’re all heading back north for the summer.”
“Mustang 1–9, maintain your current pattern and wait for further instructions,” Lundquist heard in his earpiece. He was no longer talking to the controllers back at Lackland.
“Roger, Command,” he replied.
Lundquist made his second pass over Kansas City, so high that the entire metropolis was no bigger than the tip of a glowing cigar. His radar screen was empty. He hadn’t been briefed on the nature of his target, or its purpose. He didn’t need to know. He read everything necessary in the tense voices of his commanders back home. Something was amiss. There was some danger present in the prairie skies. Well, he knew his duty. No one was messing with his country, not before, and certainly not now that he had a baby on the way. Lundquist banked right and angled for his third pass.
“Maybe they’re not planning it yet,” Sharpton wondered aloud, back in the computer room with all the other watchers. “Maybe they need time to prepare.”
“Fine by me,” Jack said. He was wondering if they’d gotten lucky. If Kelly was right, the terrorists had lost the initiative. CTU could keep planes flying over the Midwest indefinitely, while ground teams tracked down their airplane and, eventually, the terrorists.
“Chappelle, do you think we should—” He looked around for Chappelle. The Director hadn’t left the computer screen. He watched it, his eyes barely blinking, while he chewed his thumbnail absentmindedly. When he heard Jack call his name, he glanced up and motioned Jack to come over.
“Look at that image,” the Director said. “It’s about the only one left in all of Kansas.”
The image was just a dot, moving with incredible slowness across the radar screen.
“Yeah?” Jack asked.
“It’s moving really slow,” Chappelle explained. “In fact, I’d say it’s not really moving at all. At least not left to right. But it is going—”
“Up,” Jack said in a horrified whisper.
Up. It was going straight up. Jack’s face turned as white as a sheet. “A balloon. A weather balloon. They put the bomb on a weather balloon.”
“What?” Kelly drawled, not yet comprehending.
“Patch Wilcox in here! Everybody be quiet!” Jack yelled. The crowd of analysts, so silent a moment before, now responded to his reaction with murmurs of confusion.
“He’s on,” Jamey Farrell said, tapping the speaker button on a nearby phone.
“Major, how high can a weather balloon fly?” Jack asked.
“Stand by,” the Air Force officer said.
Jack watched the tiny dot. “Not much time, Major.”
“I’ve got it here. Most weather balloons reach heights of about ninety thousand feet. Some can reach heights of 120,000 feet.”
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.”
18. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 8 P.M. AND 9 P.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
“…and the skies over Kansas are quiet tonight, but it’s an ominous kind of silence, like the calm before the
