Knockdown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  The man who had spoken opened fire. Since Gretchen’s gun was in her hand already, he must have figured her for the bigger threat. The suppressed pistol barked a couple of times, the reports no louder than polite, restrained hand claps.

  Gretchen reacted swiftly to the threat, though, and was moving already. Unfortunately, in this narrow canyon between railroad cars, there wasn’t much of anywhere to go. All she could do was dive headlong to the ground and hope the man’s shots would go over her.

  The bullets sizzled through the air where she had been an instant earlier. The Glock in her hand went off twice, the blasts a lot louder than those from the suppressed weapon had been.

  Her aim was better, too. Both slugs punched into the gunman’s chest and rocked him back. He took a couple of stumbling steps, tripped over the rail, and fell between the tracks in a loose-limbed sprawl that testified he was either dead already or mighty close to it.

  The other two terrorists had guns in their hands, as well, and they were getting ready to leap down from the flatcar. Jake drew his gun with smooth, practiced speed and brought it up to squeeze off two rounds.

  One of his bullets smacked into a crate on the flatcar, but the other thudded into the second man’s body as he jumped down. The impact twisted him in midair. He cried out and landed in a tangled heap of arms and legs.

  Jake couldn’t tell how badly the man was hurt, but he seemed to be out of the fight, at least for the moment. Jake swung his gun toward the third terrorist.

  Obviously facing more dangerous opposition than he had expected, this man caught himself before leaping off the flatcar. He flung himself backward and rolled over the pile of lashed-down crates. Jake caught a glimpse of his face before he dropped out of sight, though, and recognized the worker in the hard hat who had stopped him a short time earlier.

  That meant the terrorists had infiltrated the workforce at the freight yard. Jake wasn’t surprised. Saddiq and his associates would want men on hand to keep an eye on things and make sure the attack went off as planned.

  Jake heard gravel crunch under the third man’s feet as the guy jumped off the flatcar on the other side. A long step brought him to Gretchen’s side. With his gun in his right hand, he reached down with his left and caught hold of her arm.

  “Are you hit?” he asked.

  “No, I’m all right.”

  When he heard that, he lifted her to her feet almost effortlessly. She was a solidly built young woman, not model-skinny and waifish like many of the female cops and special agents on TV and in the movies who threw around men twice their size with apparent ease.

  “Don’t manhandle me—” she started to say angrily, but before she could finish, Jake gave her a hard shove that sent her sprawling to the ground again.

  In a continuation of the same move, he darted in the opposite direction and raised his gun. A bullet went past his left ear, through the space where Gretchen had been a heartbeat earlier, and whined off one of the freight cars behind them. Jake had caught a glimpse through the gap between cars of a man drawing a bead on them and had reacted instantly.

  Jake returned fire, aiming through the same gap the terrorist had used to fire at him and Gretchen. He heard a yelp and thought he saw blood spray in the air, but wasn’t sure.

  Somewhere not far away, rapid footsteps slapped against the ground. Several people were rushing in this direction, but were they cops or freight yard workers checking out the shooting—or more members of Lashkar-e-Islami hurrying to protect their plan?

  The sound of angry voices exclaiming in a foreign language that wasn’t Spanish answered that question for Jake. He thought the men were speaking Pashto, although he wasn’t an expert on Middle Eastern languages.

  If it was Pashto, that meant the men were from Pakistan or Afghanistan, which had that language in common. Also, that would tie in with the earlier organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was where they believed the Army of Islam had its origins.

  Those thoughts flashed through Jake’s mind in a heartbeat. At the same time, he muttered, “Sorry for the push,” to Gretchen, who scrambled back to her feet.

  “No need to apologize for saving my life,” she said as she lifted her gun. “Sounds like more trouble coming.”

  “Yeah.” The gaps between the freight cars were too small for a human being to slide through, so climbing over those three flatcars was the easiest way into this artificial canyon.

  The other terrorists must have seen the man Jake had shot through one of those gaps because they didn’t rush blindly over the load on any of the flatcars. Instead, a man stuck his head up, saw Jake and Gretchen, and yelled in alarm. He ducked down, thrust a gun over the crate behind which he crouched, and opened fire.

  “Move!” Jake said as he grabbed Gretchen’s arm again. He broke into a run along the tracks as more of the terrorists started shooting.

  As long as the men stayed behind the cover of the crates, though, they had a limited field of fire, and that narrow angle didn’t include Jake and Gretchen hurrying along between the rails.

  Gretchen jerked her arm free from his grip and said, still running, “You’re awfully free with your hands!”

  “You mean while I’m saving your life? Don’t be so blasted sensitive about it!”

  “I’m not—” She stopped in mid-argument as she glanced over her shoulder. “Here they come!”

  She wheeled around and started shooting at the men who were now climbing over the crates and leaping to the ground. Muzzle flame stabbed from their guns, splitting the gloom in the narrow corridor between freight cars.

  Jake would have joined in with Gretchen, but at that instant, he caught a glimpse of movement in the corner of his eye and turned his head to look along the rails and up to the top of a freight car several yards farther along the string to the left.

  A man crouched there, trying to draw a bead on them. Jake didn’t want to find out whether he or Gretchen was the target. He whipped up his own gun and stroked the trigger. The ambusher’s head jerked as the bullet blew a fist-sized chunk out of his skull. He fell backward, out of sight.

  “They’re climbing on the cars!” he called to Gretchen.

  Her fire was too accurate for the terrorists to stand against. When one of them pitched to the ground, drilled cleanly, the others clambered back up on the flatcar and used the corner of the freight car directly ahead of it as cover while continuing to snipe at her and Jake.

  Meanwhile, Jake twisted swiftly from side to side, snapping shots at the tops of the cars wherever a terrorist poked his head up. He advanced at a deliberate pace while Gretchen backed away from the threat in the other direction.

  They weren’t quite battling back-to-back—but almost.

  Then a shot roared to Jake’s right. He felt the hot breath of a slug as it passed close beside his cheek.

  Jerking around in that direction, he realized that one of their enemies had fired through another gap between freight cars. Jake sent a bullet sizzling through that same narrow space, then an instant later heard the wind-rip of a bullet passing his ear from the left.

  The terrorists were on the other side of the string being assembled on the siding to the left of the rails—and hidden by the cars to the right. And they were still coming up from behind, with Gretchen trying to hold them back.

  All of which, Jake thought bleakly, meant that they were surrounded . . .

  CHAPTER 35

  Barry’s Kenworth was far from the only truck heading north on Interstate 10 this early morning. After the beating it had taken during the running fight over in New Mexico’s Bootheel the day before and the camouflage job Big Mike had done on it, the Z1000 didn’t stand out that much.

  The highway made the northward jog from El Paso to Las Cruces before turning almost due west and continuing in that direction all the way to Los Angeles. It was a vital conduit for traffic along the southern border, so there were plenty of trucks for Barry’s to blend in with. He made good time and reached Las Cruces before t
he sun was very high in the eastern sky.

  Trains didn’t stop here on a regular basis anymore, freight or passenger, but the tracks that passed next to the old depot were still in use, with a number of BNSF freights rumbling through every day.

  The depot itself had been converted into a railroad museum by the city, Barry had discovered by doing some research on the computer during the drive up here. The voice-controlled software made it almost like working with a human assistant.

  He hadn’t been in touch with Jake since they’d split up, and he wondered how his nephew was doing with his part of the job. Barry had every confidence in Jake. The boy was a natural at this kind of work, although now and then he tended to think too much instead of trusting his instincts. But if anybody could stop those terrorists from blowing up the tracks in the El Paso freight yard, it was Jake.

  Barry found the old depot. The museum was closed this early in the morning, not long after seven o’clock. With its tan walls and red-tiled roof, it was a charming example of Spanish-style architecture, but Barry wasn’t really interested in that right now. He pulled into the parking lot next to the museum and looked through the fence that ran along the back of the lot.

  On the other side of that black metal fence were the two sets of railroad tracks that carried trains back and forth through the city.

  The fence wouldn’t be hard to climb. It was only about five feet tall with black metal pickets, each of which came to a point on top, but not a sharp one. There was no barbed wire. No security system sensors that Barry could see. It was designed mainly to keep kids and animals from wandering out onto the tracks, and it would do that job just fine.

  It wouldn’t keep Barry out, though.

  He put on a blue jean jacket to help conceal the fact that he was carrying a 1911 .45 and the Browning Hi-Power. In the early morning, the air had enough crispness in it that the jacket didn’t look out of place. And he was an old guy. Old guys got cold easily, he thought with a wry smile.

  He got out of the truck, locked it, and leaned on the fence to study the situation before climbing over. He looked around for some way he could stop the freight train coming through shortly, some excuse to explain why it had to be held up here instead of continuing on to El Paso.

  There were several electronic signal boards along the tracks, but he would have to get into the BNSF computer system to activate them.

  He glanced toward the old station building, then looked again. The old flag signal was still there at the edge of the small platform where passenger trains had stopped in times past. That wasn’t surprising, since the building was now being used as a railroad museum. Barry went along the sidewalk behind the building. It turned into the old platform. The signal pole stood at the edge of it, next to the tracks.

  The “flag” was actually a wooden bar painted red that could be raised or lowered depending on whether a train passing through was requested to stop. Under past conditions it had been operated by an electric motor so all the stationmaster had to do to control it was push a button.

  There was a manual control mechanism still in place, though, consisting of a metal pole in a roller bracket that ran up the side of the signal post. That pole worked a lever at the top of the post. Would it still function? Barry took hold of the pole and pulled down on it. The lever at the top moved and raised the flag until it stuck straight out horizontally in the STOP position.

  Would the engineer see the signal? If he did, would he be curious enough to stop? He might radio the control center in El Paso and ask them what was going on.

  Of course, it was possible Jake might have dealt with the threat there already and it was all right for the train to proceed. But until he knew that for sure, Barry was going to do his best to stop it here.

  If he could do that, he carried several different sets of identification, in several different names, and one of them ought to be enough to convince the engineer to cooperate.

  For the most part, his real name carried no weight, he reflected wryly, because to the world at large, Barry Rivers was dead and had been for more than three decades. And “Barry Rivera” was just a shadow man, a rumor, someone that no one could say existed for sure.

  He didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself than he might have done already, so he stood next to the old depot’s rear wall and waited to see what was going to happen. He wasn’t sure when, exactly, the freight train was supposed to pass through Las Cruces, but if it was going to arrive on schedule in El Paso, it had to be soon.

  Sure enough, Barry had been standing there less than five minutes when he heard a rumble in the distance. He knew that if he went out there on the tracks and pressed his ear to the rail, like someone in an old Western movie, he would be able to “hear” the train approaching.

  His muscles tensed as he spotted the train coming toward him. Would the engineer even notice the old flag stop, or would he just barrel on through? If the train didn’t stop, Barry would have to run back to the truck and try to get ahead of it somehow. He might find a crossing somewhere down the line and block it with the truck . . .

  The train began slowing. Barry didn’t relax yet, though. The engineer could still change his mind.

  The train gradually came to a halt with the engine next to the old station, the freight cars seeming to stretch out endlessly behind it. There was a gate in the black metal fence, but it had a padlock on it. Barry climbed over without much trouble and went to the steps leading up to a small metal platform attached to the front of the engine.

  The engineer opened the door leading into the cab and said, “Mister, what are you doing here? You can’t be here.”

  “Problem down the line in El Paso,” Barry said. He moved forward confidently, and just as he expected, the engineer gave ground and let him step into the cab.

  The cab had two well-upholstered seats in it, the one on the right for the engineer while the conductor sat on the left. Each seat had a large instrument panel in front of it below the big double windows. The engineer’s console had a lot more gauges and dials on it, enough that Barry thought it resembled the cockpit of an airliner. In fact, the whole cab reminded him of that. A good engineer, like a pilot, had to be able to watch a dozen readouts at once.

  The conductor had swiveled his chair toward the doorway where Barry stood. He frowned and said, “We haven’t heard anything from BNSF. Mister, you’d better identify yourself.”

  His hand moved toward a pocket on the side of the seat. He might have a gun in there, or some other sort of weapon like a Taser.

  “Take it easy,” Barry said. He lifted both hands, palms out. “I’ll get my ID.”

  The engineer had both hands clenched into fists, ready to swing a punch if he needed to. Moving deliberately, Barry reached inside his jacket and slipped a leather folder from a pocket. He flipped it open to reveal a badge and an identification card with his photo on it.

  “I’m an inspector for the FRA,” he said as he held out the bona fides. The ID was actually from the Department of Transportation, rather than the Federal Railroad Administration, but since the FRA was part of the DOT, that was plausible enough.

  The conductor frowned dubiously, though, and shook his head.

  “I didn’t know the FRA had inspectors,” he said. “Not ones who hang around old abandoned stations, anyway.”

  “And use old-fashioned flag signals,” the engineer added. “Something fishy’s going on here. Jamal, get on the radio to El Paso.”

  The conductor reached for a microphone hanging on the console in front of him.

  Barry said, “Listen, we have credible evidence of a terrorist threat to the freight yard in El Paso. According to information we’ve uncovered, a group known as Lashkar-e-Islami plans to derail this train when it reaches that freight yard. You’ll be between two other trains being assembled on sidings, and if you go off the rails, it’ll cause all sorts of havoc.”

  The engineer grunted and said, “If you ask me, you’re the one who’s off th
e rails, buddy.” He turned his head. “Jamal, you got El Paso yet—”

  The engineer obstructed Barry’s view of the conductor. Otherwise, the conductor never would have gotten the gun out of the pocket on the side of his chair without Barry seeing what he was doing. Barry heard the suppressed snort of the shot, though, and saw the engineer’s eyes widen in shock and pain as the bullet struck him in the back of the head.

  Letting his instincts guide his actions, Barry ducked down and to the right so the engineer’s body, still on its feet but bound to collapse any second, shielded him from the conductor’s gun. He rammed his shoulder into the dead man’s belly and drove him back against the conductor.

  He wasn’t in time, though, to stop the conductor’s left arm from lashing out, grabbing a lever on the engineer’s console, and shoving it forward.

  The locomotive lurched forward and started rolling down the tracks toward El Paso.

  CHAPTER 36

  The jolt of the train starting up again wasn’t enough to throw Barry off balance. He kept pushing against the luckless engineer’s body, pinning the treacherous conductor in his seat. Barry reached past the engineer, sliding his hand under the dead man’s arm, and tried to get hold of the conductor’s wrist.

  The man’s murderous actions hadn’t taken Barry completely by surprise. It only made sense when he was actively battling terrorists from the Middle East that he’d notice the conductor’s dark hair and skin when he stepped into the cab. Although Barry had taken the man for Hispanic at first glance, the engineer calling him “Jamal” had set off further alarm bells in Barry’s brain.

  Even so, he hadn’t been able to save the engineer’s life, and the train was picking up speed.

  He clamped his fingers around the killer’s wrist and shoved the gun aside as the man fired again. Barry heard the slug spang! around the cab but wasn’t sure where it hit. It hadn’t drilled him, and that was all he cared about at the moment.

  Holding the gun away from him, he elbowed the corpse aside and grabbed the killer’s throat with his other hand. The man’s left arm was pinned momentarily, but he worked it free and hammered a punch to the side of Barry’s head. The blow packed enough force that Barry was knocked to the side for a second. The conductor shoved the dead man off him. As the engineer’s body slumped downward, his legs tangled with Barry’s. Barry’s feet went out from under him, but he hung on to the killer’s throat and hauled him down, too.