Knockdown
Page 16
CHAPTER 38
Barry didn’t know how long it had been since he passed out, but as his senses came back to him and he heard the train still clattering and rumbling past him at full speed, he knew it couldn’t have been any more than a few moments. A minute or so, maybe.
The length of time didn’t matter. The length of the train did.
Barry lifted his head, looked back along the tracks, and saw that a couple of dozen cars remained before the end of the train. He pushed himself to his hands and knees, shook his head for a second to clear some of the cobwebs from it, and then shoved to his feet. He broke into an unsteady run alongside the tracks, angling closer as the cars rolled past him.
Nearly all the cars had ladder rungs welded onto the side at one end or the other. Barry edged nearer and nearer until he could reach out and close his left hand around one of them. Calling on all his reserves of strength, he lunged forward. He flung his right hand up and grabbed the next-highest rung. With a grunt of effort, he heaved himself up so his feet wouldn’t drag as the freight car carried him along.
Knowing that freight trains, like any others, had emergency braking systems, as soon as he was stable on the ladder he studied the maze of couplings, cables, and hoses between the cars. Spotting a hanging chain with a metal label above it that read EMERGENCY, Barry leaned in, grasped it, and pulled as hard as he could. If that worked as it should, it ought to vent the pressure from the air brakes and stop the train.
Nothing. Barry grimaced, knowing that the terrorists must have sabotaged the emergency system somehow.
He wasn’t going to get any results here.
He climbed hand over hand, his arms and shoulders aching from the strain of supporting his weight. It got a lot easier when he was able to get a foot on the bottom rung. From there, he went on up to the top and rolled onto the car’s roof.
Lying spread-eagled on his belly, Barry stayed still for a long moment, catching his breath and letting the trembling in his muscles subside. Even though he was amazingly strong and vital for a man his age—or even one a lot younger—he had put in quite a few years on this earth, and no one could completely escape the ravages of time.
When he trusted himself to move again, he lifted his head and peered along the train toward the locomotive. There were quite a few cars between him and the engine. It would take some time, but nothing would stop him from getting there.
Jamal would believe that he was gone, Barry thought as he made his way forward. He’d think Barry was thrown off the train either to his death or at least left unconscious and far behind. He wouldn’t be expecting any more trouble between here and El Paso.
Barry crawled to the center of the car and rose to his feet. Jamal was in for a surprise, he thought as he trotted toward the locomotive.
The gaps between cars were narrow enough that Barry had no trouble jumping over them. He closed in steadily on his objective. By the time he finally reached the one directly behind the locomotive, he had shaken off most of the effects of being thrown from the train. His right knee still twinged a little. He must have twisted it when he landed, he thought.
He had been concentrating on what he was doing, so he hadn’t really looked ahead much. He paused now and glanced around to see that there were streets and houses and businesses on both sides of the tracks. The streets weren’t crowded, but they definitely weren’t out in the semi-desert anymore.
Barry lifted his gaze and felt a little shock go through him as he spotted a cluster of tall buildings in the distance with some mountains off to the left. That was downtown El Paso, he thought. The train had made good time from Las Cruces—and maybe he’d been unconscious a little longer than he had thought at first.
What it amounted to was that his opportunity for stopping the train before it reached the rail yard was dwindling with every second that sped past. He moved into action again.
The ladder was at the front end of the car, so he was able to descend part of the way and reach over to grasp the railing beside the walkway leading to the front of the locomotive. It was a long step from the freight car to that walkway, but he made it. He edged along the narrow metal walk.
Instead of an old-fashioned cowcatcher, modern locomotives had a small platform on the front with steps leading down on at least one side and sometimes both. That was where the door into the cab was located, too. Barry eased up to it and grasped the handle.
If Jamal had locked the door, Barry would have to try to get in through the broken windshield. Jamal would have plenty of time to shoot him if he did that, but he didn’t see any other option.
Barry blew out a relieved breath when the door handle moved slightly under his careful touch. Jamal believed he was home free. As far as he knew, he was the only person still on the train.
The door latch disengaged, and Barry eased it open. He didn’t think the door had made enough noise for Jamal to hear it over the steady thrum of the engine. Through the narrow gap, he saw the terrorist sitting in the engineer’s seat, watching the control board.
Jamal might not have heard Barry open the door, but with the windshield being broken out like it was, the door being open changed the wind patterns in the cab. Jamal noticed that. His head jerked around, and he twisted his body up out of the seat as Barry threw the door wide open and charged into the cab.
He slashed at Jamal’s neck, hoping to end the fight quickly, but Jamal raised his shoulder and took the blow there.
At the same time, Jamal’s right fist shot out and drove into Barry’s solar plexus. Barry grimaced and bent forward, but he managed to hook a left that caught Jamal on the jaw and knocked him back against the engineer’s seat.
Smooth as a cobra, Jamal brought his right leg up and snapped a kick into Barry’s chest. The terrorist seemed to be recovered from their earlier clash. The savage kick made Barry fly back toward the open door.
He wasn’t getting thrown off this train again. He flung his arms out at his sides and caught hold of the opening as he reached it. The muscles in his arms, shoulders, and back bunched as he used that grip to launch himself toward Jamal again. The two of them grappled, staggering back and forth in the close confines of the locomotive’s cab.
Jamal got one hand on Barry’s throat and the other on his face. His fingers hooked into claws and dug for Barry’s eyes. Barry got his right fist inside the circle of Jamal’s arms and brought it up in a short, sharp punch that landed under the terrorist’s chin and rocked his head back.
Jamal let out a strangled cry of pain as blood gushed over his lips. He had been panting for breath as he struggled, and Barry’s punch had caused him to bite all the way through his tongue.
The pain and shock galvanized Jamal. He twisted and slammed Barry against the control board. The edge of the console cut into Barry’s side just below his ribs. He brought up his arm and hit Jamal under the chin again, this time with his elbow. More blood flew, not from a fresh wound but from the crimson lake that had filled Jamal’s mouth.
With a little gap between them now, Barry had room to hook a left into Jamal’s ribs. He followed that with a right to the chest that knocked Jamal back a step. Jamal caught his balance and swung wildly at Barry, who ducked or blocked all the blows except one, which clipped him on the side of the head just above his left ear. That one packed enough power to make Barry’s head spin for a second.
Jamal tried to seize the advantage and crowd in, throwing a flurry of wild punches as he did so. Barry hunkered down, absorbed the punishment, and let Jamal get close enough to land a right in the terrorist’s belly. Barry’s fist sunk almost all the way to the wrist.
Jamal’s breath gusted foully in Barry’s face as he bent over from the blow. Barry chopped down on the back of his neck and knocked him to his knees. Jamal tried to ram his head into Barry’s groin, but Barry pivoted out of the way. There wasn’t room in the cab to swing a full-fledged spinning side kick, so he settled for just pulling his leg back and then kicking Jamal in the back of the head.
Barry turned to the controls. He glanced through the windshield and saw that the train was rolling past downtown El Paso now. The freight yard was only a mile or so away. He needed to start slowing down if he was going to stop the train in time.
Not one hundred percent sure that he was doing the right thing, he grasped a handle and pulled back on it. The sound of the engine changed slightly. He thought it had throttled down, but he couldn’t tell right away if the train actually slowed any. He eased the handle back more.
That was doing it, he told himself. He felt a slight but perceptible change in the train’s speed, but it wasn’t enough. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he hauled back hard on the handle. That might cause problems he couldn’t deal with. So he wouldn’t risk that unless he had to, he decided.
Jamal kicked him in the side of the knee. Barry yelled as his leg buckled. The wiry little terrorist was nothing if not resilient. Barry had thought he was out cold this time.
Instead, Jamal scrambled up, leaped past Barry, and shoved the handle forward again before Barry could tackle him and knock him away from the controls. They rolled over on the cab’s floor but couldn’t go far before they ran out of room. Jamal pinned Barry against the wall and peppered his body with punches.
Barry grabbed him by the throat. Blood still welled from Jamal’s mouth and splattered down on Barry’s wrists. Barry surged up and banged Jamal’s head against the metal plates of the floor. Jamal didn’t even seem to notice. He was completely in the grip of his frenzied hatred now. He wouldn’t stop fighting until he was unconscious—or dead.
Barry got his feet under him and surged upright. He hauled Jamal up with him, grimacing from the effort. Jamal kept flailing at him, but the blows were feeble and ineffectual now. Barry staggered out onto the platform, forcing Jamal ahead of him, and rammed the man’s back against the railing. He felt as much as heard the crack as Jamal’s spine broke under the impact.
Jamal turned into deadweight. He crumpled into a senseless heap on the platform. Confident that his enemy was finally out of action, Barry turned back toward the cab, intending to try again to slow down the train, when he heard a sudden blast and looked ahead to see a ball of fire, maybe half a mile away, in the middle of what he recognized as a train yard.
Jake hadn’t been able to keep the terrorists in El Paso from setting off at least that one explosion, Barry realized, and from the size of it, that was enough to have damaged the tracks. And he knew he couldn’t stop the train in the distance he had left.
But he could slow it down as much as possible and maybe minimize the damage. He leaped into the cab, grabbed the handle he had been using earlier, and hauled back on it as hard as he could. Something screeched and the train lurched heavily—but kept going.
Up ahead, a chain-link fence stretched on both sides of the gate into the freight yard. The gate was open—not that it would have stopped the train anyway. Barry stood on the platform until the locomotive cleared the gate, then jumped.
CHAPTER 39
Jake had gotten chewed out many times while he was in the army, but few if any of those dressings-down had been as vehement as the butt-blistering he was getting from Walt Graham right now.
“And the worst of it is, I put my own career on the line for you more than once,” Graham concluded, evidently having run out of profanity. He had been stalking back and forth in the office of the Special Agent in Charge of the El Paso branch of the FBI, but now he stopped, pushed back his coattails so he could rest his hands at his waist, and glared at Jake and Barry as they sat in uncomfortable chairs in front of the desk. “Clearly, being an irresponsible cowboy runs in the family.”
“Some of us might consider that a compliment, Walt,” Barry drawled.
Graham looked like he was about to explode again. He was a large, burly black man with graying hair and one of the deepest voices Jake had ever heard. He controlled his anger with a visible effort, propped a hip on the corner of the desk in the borrowed office, and said, “You’re both lucky you’re not in jail right now.”
“What would the charges be?” Barry asked. “Minimizing the loss of life and damages in a terrorist attack and apprehending more than a dozen terrorists?”
“You didn’t apprehend them. They’re all dead.”
Barry shrugged.
“They didn’t want to surrender and come along peaceably.”
“Barry’s right about one thing,” Jake said. “It could have been a lot worse.”
That was certainly true. Only the one charge of C-4 had detonated in the freight yard, and Barry had slowed the train enough that when it reached that damaged section of track, its derailing hadn’t been as violent as it would have if it had been going faster. Several of the freight cars directly behind the locomotive had gone off the rails, as well, but the other cars hadn’t all piled up behind them.
It was a big mess, in other words, but none of the freight yard workers who hadn’t been part of the terrorist cell had been injured, and the environmental impact would be small.
Everyone else on BNSF’s payroll who worked at the freight yard was currently being interrogated by either the FBI or Homeland Security. The El Paso police and the Texas Rangers would have liked to get in on that, but the Feds were telling everybody else to keep their hands off.
Jake was stiff and sore from being slapped down by the concussion from that explosion, and his ears still rang a little, too. Barry was limping slightly from a twisted right knee. Considering everything they had gone through, though, they could have been banged up a lot worse.
Walt Graham crossed his arms, looked at them, and shook his head. Barry said, “What are you going to do with us?”
“That depends on what you have to tell me about all the hell you’ve been raising for the past few days. You left a trail of death and destruction halfway across New Mexico—started where you left off here in Texas. I want to know everything you’ve done and why . . . and the reasons had better be mighty good ones.”
“Well, it’s not that complicated,” Barry began, then stopped short as the door into the SAC’s office opened. Graham straightened from his deceptively casual pose and frowned in annoyance at being interrupted without so much as a knock on the door.
Jake had never seen the man who strode into the office, but Barry’s eyes narrowed in recognition—and, quite possibly, dislike.
The newcomer was in his fifties, with a thick shock of white hair above a stern, ruddy face. He wore a dark, conservative suit and moved with an athletic ease. He was a Fed if Jake had ever seen one.
Jake was a little surprised to see Gretchen Rogers following the stranger into the office. He and Gretchen had been split up pretty quickly by the FBI when they arrived on the scene, and she’d been spitting mad about taking orders from them, too.
She still didn’t look happy, but at the same time she had a bit of a deferential air about her, which made Jake wonder if this guy was her boss.
Walt Graham still looked annoyed, something that didn’t change as the newcomer nodded curtly to him and said, “Graham.”
The FBI man returned the nod politely enough and said, “Hello, Mitchell. You got here pretty quickly from Washington.”
“I’d already been hearing rumors you had a rogue agent stirring up trouble.”
Graham bristled at that. “Special Agent Rivers has hardly gone rogue,” he snapped.
“Oh? What would call running around over two states while blowing things up and killing people? Do you know how many civilian casualties he’s been involved with over the past two days? I believe the death toll right now stands at thirty-seven.”
“I’m right here,” Jake said, not bothering to conceal his irritation. “And that death toll might have been a lot higher if I hadn’t tried to stop those terrorists.”
“Alleged terrorists,” the white-haired man said. “Why don’t you ask the citizens of Hachita what they
think of your involvement, Rivers? Or Vincent Gilpin, who was killed along with his family when their motor home crashed and burned?”
Barry spoke up, drawling, “That’s not fair, Cavanaugh. The men we were trying to stop committed those crimes, not us.”
“But would they have killed those people if you and your nephew hadn’t gotten involved?” the white-haired man shot back at him.
Jake had heard the name Mitchell Cavanaugh before. He was some sort of high-ranking official in the Department of Justice. Probably reported directly to the Attorney General. That meant he wasn’t Gretchen’s boss, since DOJ was separate from Homeland Security, but Cavanaugh still had a lot of clout.
Graham said, “You can’t blame these two men for the actions of others. We’ve been questioning people all morning, and it’s obvious that if they hadn’t stepped in, we would have had a major terrorist attack here in El Paso this morning.”
“They stepped in with no authorization or supervision.”
“That’s true,” Graham admitted with a shrug. “But there were special circumstances—”
“No circumstances warrant such dangerous, irresponsible behavior.” Cavanaugh looked at Barry and sneered. “It’s a cliché to call someone a loose cannon, but I can’t think of a better term to describe you. And you’ve been a loose cannon for far too many years. You believe you’re above the law and can just take whatever actions you deem necessary—”
“That’s how the people we’ve both worked for wanted it,” Barry broke in.
“—no matter how dangerous and crazy they are,” Cavanaugh finished. “Well, that’s over. You’re officially suspended, pending further investigation.” He looked at Jake. “And so are you, Special Agent Rivers.”
That was like a punch in the gut to Jake. He frowned and looked at Barry, who didn’t seem all that perturbed.
“I don’t think you can suspend me, Cavanaugh. I believe that’s above your pay grade.”