Knockdown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  That would only occur if someone noticed that their speed was increasing before they reached the point where the explosives would topple the cars off the track and down the steep side of the gorge. Noorzai didn’t want to take any chances. The locomotive had to derail as planned. The added speed was just a precaution to make sure it happened.

  He reached the door into the cab. The handle twisted in his hand. He stepped inside and drew his gun as the engineer jumped up from his padded leather seat, yelling, “Hey!” Nobody else was supposed to be in here. There wasn’t even a seat for a conductor in this locomotive.

  Noorzai lifted the gun and fired a shot, placing it perfectly in the center of the engineer’s forehead. The pistol was a small caliber, deadly enough at this range but without the power to pass completely through the man’s skull and ricochet around, possibly doing damage to some of the controls.

  The engineer’s head jerked back under the bullet’s impact. He folded up at the knees and collapsed onto the cab’s floor. Blood leaked from the wound. Noorzai stepped over the corpse and took his seat, placing the gun on a little shelf where an open soft drink can also sat. The engineer would never finish that drink.

  A pair of monitors, along with dials, gauges, and displays for various instruments, filled the control panel that angled around him from the left. On the console directly in front of him were the two big levers for the throttle and the brakes. The view through the windshield was spectacular, but he wasn’t at all interested in beautiful mountain scenery. In the distance, at a somewhat lower elevation in a valley, he saw the buildings of Granby, looking a bit like child’s toys from here.

  The train would be there in fifteen minutes, Noorzai knew. He wouldn’t have wanted to cut it any closer than this.

  But now, with approximately forty-five minutes left to live, it felt as if he had all the time in the world. He leaned back in the comfortable seat and grinned in anticipation as the train rumbled along the tracks.

  * * *

  The Granby station manager, whose name was Arvin Jones, switched on the emergency signal and told Jake and Barry, “That’ll do it. When the engineer sees that the flag is up, he’ll stop to see what’s wrong. That’s what we use when there’s been an avalanche, or a pass is closed by bad weather, or anything like that.”

  “Do you know who’ll be at the controls today?” Barry asked.

  “No, sir, I don’t. I know all the regular California Zephyr engineers, of course, but that Silver Eagle is different. The people who work on it aren’t Amtrak employees.”

  “But you’re confident that whoever it is will stop,” Jake said.

  “Absolutely. No engineer in his right mind would proceed against an emergency signal like that.”

  “All right,” Barry said. “We appreciate your help, Arvin. But it’s time for you to get out of here now. There may be trouble once the train’s stopped.”

  Arvin stood up and squared his shoulders.

  “If there’s gonna be trouble at this station, then it’s my job to be here and keep it contained,” he said.

  “Not this kind of trouble,” Jake said. “Besides, you’re hurt.”

  “I’ve got to admit, this ol’ noggin of mine does ache a mite.”

  “Go home,” Barry said. “It doesn’t look to me like that cut needs stitches, so get your wife or somebody to clean it up, and then you rest a while. Then you can let the authorities know that something is going on if they haven’t heard about it already.”

  Arvin frowned and said, “I’m gonna get in trouble for not reporting all this right away, aren’t I?”

  “More than likely,” Jake admitted, “but I also give you my word that you’re helping your country right now.”

  “For some reason, I believe you, son. I’ll give you boys the benefit of the doubt . . . for a little while.”

  “That’s all we ask, Mr. Jones.”

  “Should I wish you good luck?”

  “We’ll take that, too,” Jake said. “We sure will.”

  * * *

  Alexander Sherman stood up from the long table and said, “I’m going to make sure that lunch will be ready on schedule. The rest of you continue the excellent work you’ve been doing, my friends.”

  The buzz of conversation around the table resumed as Sherman turned toward the door at the front of the car. “Excellent work” was really an exaggeration, he thought. The idiots hadn’t accomplished a blasted thing with all their wrangling. Mostly they had argued about who was responsible for the recent attacks. The conservatives all insisted it was Islamic terrorists—which, of course, it actually was. The liberals insisted it was more likely some sort of false-flag operation by the warmongering administration, since Islam was a religion of peace. They had gone around and around the usual tired talking points on both sides.

  Sherman was ready for the whole thing to be over. Ready for everything to come crashing down—literally, in the case of the train, and figuratively, in the case of the government—so that things could start anew and be rebuilt into the sort of shining paradise that he knew was waiting . . . if only people would allow him to lead them to it.

  He passed through the dining car, nodding to the staff getting ready for lunch, including the new men and women from Saddiq’s group who had infiltrated the Silver Eagle’s crew. Sherman didn’t treat them any differently from the others. Even now, he didn’t want any suspicion that something might be wrong.

  He entered the vestibule at the front of the dining car and waited there, checking his watch. Three more minutes, and the train would reach Granby. It would stop, and he would step down, and as soon as he waved to the man in the cab, the train would roll on without him. That is, if Saddiq’s man had succeeded in eliminating the engineer and taking over the controls.

  If not, if the actual engineer was still running the train, Sherman would go inside to check on the “emergency” and then order the man to proceed. He would step onto the train but immediately get off again and hope his departure wasn’t noticed.

  Sherman didn’t believe it would come to that, however. He was confident that Saddiq’s man was up there in the cab, running the controls. Despite a few glitches, Saddiq’s people really hadn’t let him down so far.

  Sherman looked at his $25,000 watch again. Soon now. Very soon.

  * * *

  The infidels had tied Tarik’s hands and feet and left him on one of the benches in the waiting room. Beni’s body was on the floor beside the bench. Tarik had stopped crying and he thought the wound had stopped bleeding, but his shoulder still hurt a lot. Every time he moved even the least little bit, it hurt worse.

  But despite that, he writhed slowly, trying to work his legs off the bench so they would swing down to the floor.

  His captors—he didn’t think of them as Americans since he was an American, too, but rather as infidels—must have figured that as badly hurt as he was, he wasn’t a threat any longer. And it was true, he couldn’t do anything to them, especially tied up the way he was. But maybe he could warn his friends on the train that something was wrong. The train was supposed to stop, but if it did, those two guys would be waiting, and they had lots of guns and were good with them.

  So maybe it would be better, Tarik’s pain-addled brain decided, if the train just went on instead of stopping. Bandar al-Saddiq, their leader, would go on to martyrdom instead of living to plot more attacks against the Great Satan, but under the circumstances, Tarik was sure that was what a holy warrior like Saddiq would want.

  Pushing the pain to the back of his mind, he got his feet on the floor while the two guys and the station man were inside the office. He struggled to his feet and leaned against the bench to hold himself upright. There was nothing wrong with his legs except being tied up. He could still hop.

  Sure, it hurt like the devil when he did, but if he could keep his balance . . .

  Closer and closer he moved to the door that led out of the station next to the tracks.

  The door opened on
to a small concrete porch with steps leading down from both sides to the concrete platform on the same level as the tracks. Tarik’s hands were tied behind him. When he reached the door after a few near-falls along the way, he turned his back to it and fumbled for the knob. After a minute or so, during which he nervously watched the office inside the station, thinking the infidels would come out and see him at any second, he got the door open and hung on to the knob as he hopped awkwardly backward.

  The steps were more than he could handle. He tried to hop down them but lost his balance and toppled to the platform instead. He almost screamed from the agony in his shoulder, but he held back the cry.

  As he lay there on the concrete, he realized he heard the steel rails humming. That meant the train was approaching, didn’t it? He rolled and twisted and lifted his head to peer to the east. Yes! There it was!

  One of the members of his cell should have taken over the locomotive by now and would be in the cab, looking along the tracks toward the station. Tarik knew that in the shape he was in, and with his hands tied behind his back, he could never stand up and wave to get his friend’s attention. There was only one thing he could do.

  He drew in a deep, rasping breath and rolled again, off the platform and onto the gravel of the roadbed. Struggling, gasping with pain and effort, he wriggled like a snake until he was able to heave himself up and over the closest rail. The man in the cab couldn’t miss seeing him, lying there across the tracks like that.

  The train was closer now, starting to slow down. Tarik stared at the locomotive’s nose as it came nearer and nearer, got larger and larger in his pain-blurred vision. He could tell that the train was continuing to slow.

  “No, bro,” he whispered. “Don’t you see me? Don’t you know it’s gone wrong? You . . . you gotta keep goin’, bro . . . Don’t stop . . .”

  With a sudden, sharply rising roar, the locomotive surged forward again as the man in the cab pushed the throttle forward. A grin stretched from ear to ear across Tarik’s pain-wracked face.

  CHAPTER 65

  Jake came out of the office inside the station and exclaimed, “Damn it! That guy’s gone!”

  He had been convinced that the wounded man had passed out, but the bench where they’d left him was empty now except for a pool of blood that had leaked from his shoulder wound. More blood led toward the door to the platform. Jake rushed in that direction with Barry following close behind him.

  He hadn’t realized the train was so close—close enough that it was already slowing to a stop. Jake caught a glimpse of the wounded terrorist lying across the tracks and instantly guessed the man was trying to warn his friends on the train that something was wrong and their great plan was in jeopardy.

  The train seemed to leap ahead like a great silver beast.

  Jake didn’t stop to think about what he was doing. He bounded down to the platform without taking the steps and raced alongside the train as it began to build up speed again. He could no longer see the man he had shot in the shoulder. That man—an American seduced into Islamic terrorism, judging by his accent—had to have perished under the train’s wheels by now.

  That was all the proof Jake needed that another member of Lashkar-e-Islami was at the locomotive’s controls. The regular engineer would have done everything in his power to stop, instead of deliberately plowing right over the poor son of a gun.

  That meant somebody had to get to the engine and stop the train—and as he reached out and grabbed the vertical steel bar next to the vestibule door on one of the cars, he figured he was the best one for that job.

  * * *

  Alexander Sherman felt the train slowing and got ready to open the vestibule door so he could step out. Then, with no warning, the floor lurched under his feet as the train surged forward. Instead of slowing, it began to pick up speed.

  That was wrong. That was all wrong! Instead of stopping, the man at the controls in the cab sent the train thundering on through Granby.

  “You idiot!” Sherman exclaimed aloud, even though he knew the man in the cab couldn’t hear him. “I’m still on board!”

  Beads of cold sweat popped out on his forehead. He jerked the vestibule door open, knowing that he had to jump—otherwise, he would go crashing down into that gorge along with everyone else. The location that had been carefully picked for the derailment wasn’t that far away. Ten minutes or so.

  Sherman stood in the open doorway and looked out at the landscape flashing past outside. The train was already back up to a good speed, moving fast enough that if he jumped from it now, he would be seriously injured, at best. More than likely, he would die.

  There was still time to stop the train. But to do it, he would have to reach the engine and find out why that lunatic had disobeyed his orders.

  Sherman closed the outer door and moved to the one leading into the passage between cars. He reached under his coat and loosened the gun he carried there. He wasn’t sure how to operate the train’s controls, but the man in the cab would stop the train at gunpoint, if need be. Otherwise, Sherman would shoot him.

  Sherman bit back a groan as he realized that the fanatic intended to die shortly, anyway.

  * * *

  As Jake pulled himself up onto the step leading into the vestibule, he glanced back and saw that Barry was following his example on the next car back. The two men, uncle and nephew, paused where they were for a second and exchanged a brief nod along the length of the train car Jake was about to board.

  Then Jake twisted the handle on the door and jerked it open. The wind was already tugging at him as the train picked up speed. He hauled himself up into the vestibule and closed the door.

  A man stood there staring at him. The guy didn’t look like a terrorist, more like a shocked employee of the excursion train, but Jake pulled the Browning from behind his belt anyway and said, “FBI! Don’t move, mister!”

  The man put up his hands and stammered, “W-What’s going on here?”

  Jake didn’t answer the question. He asked one of his own.

  “What car is this?”

  “The . . . the dining car.”

  “How many cars between here and the engine?”

  “Th-This one and one more.”

  “What’s in that second one?”

  “An office. Storage and supply rooms. Bunks for the staff.”

  “You can get all the way to the locomotive cab from here?”

  “Well, you have to go up the walk on the outside of the locomotive to reach the cab—”

  That was all Jake needed to hear. He nodded and said, “Stay here. Don’t raise the alarm. That’s an order. This train’s now under the jurisdiction of the FBI.”

  The man nodded weakly. Like most people, he would go along with anything that he believed came from an official source.

  Jake opened the door into the dining car, which was so luxuriously appointed that it could have been in some fancy, exclusive restaurant in New York or Los Angeles, maybe even London or Paris. The tables were set with expensive china, silver, and crystal for the lunch that was supposed to be served soon. Several neatly uniformed staff members were scattered around the long room. Jake expected them to exclaim in surprise and fear when they saw a man with a gun, but he figured they would get out of his way when he waved them aside.

  Instead, two of them, a man and a woman, both dark-complexioned, yanked guns from under their jackets and opened fire on him while the rest screamed and dived for cover.

  Barry had never seen quite this many bigwigs in one room before, and as he looked around, he realized just how brutally effective the plot hatched by Alexander Sherman, Bandar al-Saddiq, and Mitchell Cavanaugh had been. Wipe out all the people in this room, and the American economy would crash, all right, crash like it hadn’t in a long time. And people would suffer enough they would turn to Sherman to relieve their pain.

  It was the oldest play in the totalitarian playbook. Dictators the world over had used it with smashing success, and U.S. presidents ha
d taken advantage of times of crisis to grab more control for the presidency. And now Alexander Sherman was poised to seize the reins of power and transform America into a true dictatorship.

  Barry wasn’t going to allow that to happen.

  But as soon as he stepped into the car with a gun in his hand, half a dozen men in dark suits standing around the outer edges of the room also pulled their weapons and leveled them at him.

  “Drop it!” one of them yelled.

  “Down on your belly!” another added.

  Well, of course a bunch of rich big shots like this would have security on hand, Barry thought. He was glad they hadn’t just opened fire on him. He didn’t drop the Colt, but he half-lifted both hands and pointed the. 45 at the ceiling.

  “Take it easy, boys,” he said. “I’m on your side. My name is Barry Rivers.”

  All but one of the private security contractors didn’t look impressed, and he figured they had never heard of him. The oldest one, though, exclaimed, “Dog?”

  “That’s right,” Barry said. “Have we met?” He looked closer at the guy and went on, “Is that you, Grigsby? How are you doing, George? How are Dolan, Cordie, and Putt?”

  Barry had last seen George Grigsby in Malaysia, five years earlier, on a job that had gone south in a hurry and might have proven disastrous except for the four American mercenaries he’d run into. Obviously, Grigsby had semi-retired into executive protection. He said, “The rest of the boys are doing fine, all busy with lucrative jobs.”

  Barry smiled and said, “I’m glad to hear it.” Having friends in lots of low places certainly came in handy in his line of work.

  The big shots in the room were all buzzing with outrage and fear. Grigsby lowered his gun and said to his fellow contractors, “This guy is all right. You’re all too young to have heard of him, but he’s a living legend. They call him Dog.”

  “I don’t care what they call him,” one of the executives said. “He can’t just come in here waving a gun around.”