Knockdown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “What’s going on, Barry?” Grigsby asked.

  “There’s going to be a terrorist attack on this train,” Barry replied, setting off even more gasps and curses and questions. He overrode them and went on, “I don’t know when, but pretty soon, I’m betting.”

  Grigsby nodded, clearly knowing that it was best to believe what Barry had to say.

  “What can we do to prevent it?”

  Barry took a deep breath and said, “Preventing it is up to my partner, but I think I know a way to keep all these folks safe. You’ll have to trust me, though.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Grigsby said.

  “Is everybody in here who showed up for this summit meeting?”

  “Alexander Sherman isn’t,” one of the female executives replied. “He’s gone up to the dining car.”

  “Then he’ll have to look out for himself,” Barry said. The plan that had sprung into his mind meant that Jake would be on his own, too, but that couldn’t be helped. The fate of the nation depended on saving the people in this car. Barry didn’t necessarily like any of them. They were arrogant, pretentious stuffed shirts, for the most part, and most of them had way more money than they needed, as well as dubious political beliefs, but the economy, like it or not, still needed them around.

  Grigsby put his gun away and motioned for the other contractors to do likewise. He asked Barry, “What are we going to do?”

  “We have to cut this train in half,” Barry said.

  * * *

  “What in blazes is wrong with you?” Alexander Sherman demanded as he stepped into the locomotive’s cab after the nerve-wracking trip along the narrow ledge outside. He cast a distasteful glance toward the bloody, crumpled corpse of the engineer. “You were supposed to stop in Granby!”

  The terrorist glanced back over his shoulder at Sherman and replied, “Something was wrong! One of our men was lying on the tracks, wounded. The Americans must have been waiting to ambush us!”

  “There was a man on the tracks? What did you do?”

  “Ran over him, of course,” the terrorist replied. “I’m sure he was trying to tell me to keep going.”

  Sherman scrubbed a hand over his bulldog face in exasperation. He tried to gather his thoughts, then said, “You were supposed to stop back there so I could get off the train. You’ll have to do it now.” He didn’t like the idea of getting off out here, but he had no choice. “Stop the train.”

  “I cannot,” the man said flatly without turning around. “The infidels may be pursuing us. The plan is in danger, and I must carry out my mission as quickly as possible.”

  “You’re insane!” Sherman burst out. He wracked his memory for the man’s name and came up with it. “Look, Noorzai, be reasonable. I have to get off the train in order for the plan to work.”

  Stubbornly, the terrorist shook his head.

  “When all the wealthy, immoral infidels aboard this train die, the Great Satan will collapse no matter what happens to you or me. The death of America is the only death that matters!”

  Sherman’s jaw tightened. This idiot wasn’t giving him any choice. He pulled the gun from under his jacket.

  Soon there were going to be two dead men on the floor of this cab.

  CHAPTER 66

  Jake kicked one of the beautifully set dining tables over, causing the expensive china and crystal to shatter, and threw himself behind it. Bullets thudded into the table as the two terrorists continued firing at him. He wasn’t surprised that some of Saddiq’s people had managed to infiltrate the train’s service staff. It was the same pattern Lashkar-e-Islami had used in El Paso and Long Island.

  He popped up long enough to trigger a shot at his enemies. The man reeled backward and dropped his gun. Blood bubbled from his throat where Jake’s bullet had ripped through it. He staggered and went down.

  The woman retreated from the dining car into the vestibule at the front, throwing more shots at Jake on the run.

  As the door banged shut behind her, he leaped up and called, “FBI! Is anybody hurt?”

  A few heads popped up from the places around the car where the actual serving staff had taken cover.

  “What’s going on?” a man asked. “Are we under attack? Is it those terrorists again?”

  “Yeah,” Jake replied. That was the short, easy answer, since he didn’t have time to go into details.

  “We’re all going to die!” a woman wailed. “The train is going to crash!”

  “No, it’s not,” Jake said firmly. He pointed to the man he had shot, who had collapsed and was bleeding out, if he wasn’t already dead. “That one and the woman, they were new hires, weren’t they?”

  “Yeah,” replied the man who had spoken. “This . . . this was their first trip on the Silver Eagle.”

  “Anybody else who’s new?”

  “There are three more of them,” the man replied. His voice was a little stronger now, and understanding had dawned on his face. “They’re terrorists!”

  “More than likely,” Jake agreed. “Where are the others?”

  The man nodded toward the next car.

  “They went up ahead a few minutes ago, where Lilah just went. They were fetching some more things for lunch.”

  That might be true, or they might have been hatching more trouble, Jake thought. But the important thing now was that there were more enemies between him and the destination he had to reach—the locomotive’s cab.

  They didn’t have to stop him permanently. All they had to do was delay him long enough for the train to reach the point where the attack was supposed to take place. Since Jake didn’t know where that was, he had no way of knowing how much time he had. But he was certain he didn’t have enough that he could afford to waste any.

  But if he couldn’t go through the next car to get to the engine, he could still go over it. He slipped a full magazine into the Browning and stuck the gun behind his belt.

  “Go back to the other car where they were having their meeting,” he told the people in here. “There’s a man back there named Barry. He’ll see to it that you’re safe.”

  “What are you going to do?” the man asked.

  “Stop those people from wrecking this train.”

  He went into the vestibule and opened the door to the outside. Holding on and leaning out, he saw the metal rungs attached to the front of the car.

  “Up you go,” he muttered to himself as he reached around, got hold of one of the rungs, and swung around onto the ladder.

  The gap between cars was barely big enough for Jake’s brawny form to fit through it. He reached the top, twisted around, and pulled himself onto the top of the car right behind the engine. Wind whipped and battered him as he lay there, stretched out on his belly.

  He grimaced as he thought about how many movies he had seen where guys ran around and fought on top of moving trains. They made it look easy. In real life, the thought of even standing up on this one was scary as blazes.

  But the train getting blown up or derailed was pretty scary, too. Jake worked his way to the center of the roof, then pushed himself to hands and knees. From there, he made it to his feet and lurched unsteadily toward the front of the train.

  A small part of his brain realized how beautiful the scenery was all around. Steep, thickly wooded mountain slopes and deep, rocky gorges, including the one that ran to the left of the railroad tracks, only a short distance away. At the bottom of that gorge, a good-sized stream raced along. That was the Colorado River, Jake recalled from his study of the maps of the area.

  He wished he could fish that stream. He bet there were some good trout in it. For a second, he thought about how nice it would be if he and Barry could set up camp and just laze away, spending some time fishing. It would be even better if Gretchen came along, too . . .

  A head appeared at the front of the car, followed by a set of broad, powerful shoulders. Almost before Jake realized what was happening, a man had pulled himself on top of the car and was charging toward h
im.

  The terrorists had had the same thought about getting to the engine this way, and they were determined to stop him. Jake grabbed the Browning, figuring he would shoot this guy off the train, but before he could fire, a shot blasted from somewhere else and a bullet ripped along the outside of his right upper arm. The fingers of that hand opened involuntarily, and the 9mm dropped out of his grip to hit the car’s roof and fly off into space.

  The next second, the big guy lunging at him tackled him and drove him backward off his feet.

  * * *

  Barry stood on the steps just outside the vestibule, which leaned down toward a white-painted metal bar that led into the coupling apparatus between this car and the next one. George Grigsby was just above him, hanging on to his other arm.

  “I don’t think you can do it, Barry,” Grigsby shouted above the train’s rumble. “That coupling’s got too much weight on it for you to be able to lift the cut bar and disengage it.”

  “We don’t have any choice,” Barry replied. “Cutting loose the back half of the train is the only sure way to save all you folks.”

  He had already tried pulling the emergency chain to engage the air brakes, just in case it worked, but as with the freight train in El Paso, the plotters had taken care of that contingency. Someone must have closed the air cocks in the line before the train left Denver.

  With that option gone, Barry had fallen back on his original idea: to uncouple the back half of the train.

  He leaned down and wrapped his fingers around the bar. Gritting his teeth, he heaved up on it . . . and the bar didn’t move. Grigsby was right. Railyard workers uncoupled cars when they were stationary, or else when the locomotive had bumped the string in the other direction to make sure the pressure was off.

  He tried again and failed.

  Of course, uncoupling when the train was moving, especially at speed like this, had some inherent dangers of its own. Hydraulic and air pressure lines would rip loose, the brakes wouldn’t work, and there was no way of being sure what the suddenly freed cars would do. But it was still the only option Barry could see, and as he hung there with Grigsby holding his arm, another idea occurred to him.

  “Pull me in!” he called.

  Grigsby did so. Every moment that went by stretched Barry’s nerves a little tighter, but he said, “We need some belts we can weave together to make a strap sturdy enough not to break when several of us use it to pull that lever up.”

  Grigsby nodded, instantly grasping Barry’s plan. Both of them started taking off their own belts. Grigsby turned his head and said to one of the other security contractors, “Don’t just stand there. Get a couple more belts for us!”

  Within minutes, they had woven the belts together to form a thick strap. Barry fashioned a loop in the end of it and got out onto the step again. He leaned down, dangling the loop and trying to jockey it into position where it would catch the cut bar. Doing that took several tries and cost more precious moments of time, but finally it was in place. Grigsby joined him on the step, which was pretty crowded with two big men on it. Two more of the security contractors were in the doorway. All four men got hold of the strap.

  “All right,” Barry said. “Heave!”

  They pulled up with all the strength they could muster. Through clenched teeth, Grigsby said, “I wish we had . . . Red Dolan here . . . That big Mick . . . is the strongest guy I know.”

  “Yeah,” Barry said, “and my nephew Jake . . . could probably do this by himself. But it’s down to us . . . now . . . to get it done!”

  Jake undoubtedly had his own problems.

  * * *

  The terrorist’s weight coming down on top of him drove the air out of Jake’s lungs and half-stunned him, but it also pinned him to the roof of the car. He wouldn’t fall off as long as the guy was lying on top of him.

  But he wouldn’t be able to stop the train, either, so he forced his muscles to work and clapped his open hands against the man’s ears as hard as he could.

  The guy yelled in pain and jerked back. Jake punched him in the throat. The man started to gag and his eyes bugged out.

  “Get out of the way! I’ll shoot him!”

  That was a woman’s voice. Jake realized that the female terrorist had climbed onto the car and winged him from behind, causing him to drop his gun. From the corner of his eye, he saw her move unsteadily forward, her gun held in front of her.

  The man who had tackled him was still choking, but he managed to try sledgehammering Jake’s head into the car’s roof. Jake jerked aside from the fists at the last second. He whipped a punch into the guy’s ribs and thought he felt one of them break.

  The woman loomed over them, watching for an opening through which to put a bullet in Jake. He grabbed the man’s shoulders and heaved, throwing him off to the side. The man hit the woman’s legs and got tangled up in them. She screamed as she lost her balance and fell backward.

  Both of them went off the side of the car. Jake didn’t see what happened to them, but he knew the odds of them surviving such a fall onto rocky ground, from a speeding train, were slim to none. Closer to none.

  He rolled onto his belly again, breathing hard as he tried to get enough air back in his lungs. His heart slugged so hard in his chest it felt like it would rip right through his body at any second.

  He would have been content to just lie there, but he knew he couldn’t. He forced himself up again and moved forward, arms outstretched to help him keep his balance. Assuming that one of the terrorists was in the engine, that left another man unaccounted for. Jake had no idea where the man was, but he had a bad feeling he might find out before he reached the engine.

  He made it to the front end of the car without anybody else shooting at him. His guts were shaky as he climbed down the ladder there, but his muscles worked just fine. A narrow walkway led along the side of the locomotive to a door that opened into the cab.

  The fourth terrorist was part of the way along that ledge. He twisted around, holding onto a small iron grab bar with one hand while he snarled at Jake and pulled a gun from under his jacket with the other.

  Jake didn’t have anywhere to go except straight ahead, and he had to do it fast. With every bit of agility he could muster, he ran along the walkway while the wind tried to pluck him off. The terrorist triggered a pair of shots, but both of them went wild.

  Then Jake reached him, batted the gun aside, and grabbed the front of the guy’s jacket with both hands. He tossed the man right off the train. Shrieking in terror, arms and legs windmilling, the terrorist sailed out over the gorge, closer than ever to the roadbed, and plummeted toward the churning Colorado River almost a hundred feet below.

  That was the last Jake saw of him.

  The effort almost overbalanced Jake. He grabbed hold of the little support bar and hung on for dear life. When he was steady again, he moved forward to the door into the cab.

  Through the window in the door, he saw two men—a man in the uniform of one of the Silver Eagle’s serving staff sitting in the engineer’s seat, and a bulky older man in an expensive suit holding a gun to the first man’s head. Jake had seen enough pictures of Alexander Sherman in the past twenty-four hours to recognize the multibillionaire, but this was the first time he had laid eyes on the true architect of this terror plot in the flesh.

  This was no time for big, dramatic statements or witty quips, Jake knew.

  He jerked the door open to charge into the cab, raise hell, and get this train stopped.

  CHAPTER 67

  Sherman heard him come in and started to turn. Jake lowered his shoulder and rammed it into the older man, knocking Sherman forward against the locomotive’s control console. The unidentified terrorist whirled around and slashed at Jake, who only realized the guy had a knife when he felt the line of fiery pain cutting across his chest.

  Jake grabbed the man’s wrist before he could attempt a backhand slash, closing his fingers so hard he felt bones grind together in the man’s wrist. The ter
rorist cried out in pain and punched Jake in the face. It was a good strong blow and landed cleanly, but Jake was too full of adrenaline to feel it much. He hammered a left to the man’s jaw and knocked him against one of the big levers sticking up from the console.

  The train started to go faster.

  Okay, that had to be the throttle, Jake thought as he grappled with the terrorist. That meant the other handle would be the brake. Good to know.

  Sherman regained his balance and fired. The gun blast was deafeningly loud in the already noisy cab. Jake felt something warm against his cheek and knew the bullet had missed him by a whisker. He kicked backward at Sherman.

  The terrorist headbutted him. Pain made Jake squint, and his eyes watered, further blurring his vision. He twisted at the waist as the man tried to knee him in the groin. The guy’s knee thudded against Jake’s thigh instead.

  Jake got a hand on the man’s throat and swung him around just as Sherman triggered another shot. That move wasn’t intentional, just something that happened in the heat of battle, but it saved Jake’s life anyway. The bullet struck the terrorist in the back of the head and killed him instantly.

  Jake shoved the body at Sherman, trying to keep the billionaire distracted for a second. Lunging at the control levers, Jake grabbed the one for the brake and hauled back on it.

  “Yes, stop the train, you fool!” Sherman yelled as he shoved the terrorist’s corpse aside and leveled the gun at Jake. “We have to stop now!”

  The panic in Sherman’s voice told Jake they must be almost at the spot where the attack was going to take place, whatever it was. He grinned as he said, “Not going the way you planned, is it, Sherman?”

  “Stop the train!”

  With a laugh of perverse satisfaction, Jake moved before Sherman could stop him. He shoved the throttle forward again, and the locomotive responded smoothly and instantly, surging ahead.

  Jake pointed at what he had just spotted through the window in the cab door.

  “Look back there!”

  The tracks, following the long curve of the canyon through which they were passing, put the locomotive in a position where Jake and Sherman could look back along the rails and see the rear cars of the train falling farther and farther behind. Barry had cut them loose somehow, Jake knew, freeing them from the threat of whatever was about to happen to the rest of the train. And Jake was sure Sherman’s intended victims were back there, too, safe now. He hoped the other innocents on board the train had made it to the rear cars.