by Jack Mars
The controller scoffed audibly in the headset. “A moment,” he said curtly, and then there was only silence. Reid and Maria exchanged a glance and waited.
A full minute went by, and then most of another before anyone spoke in the headset again. When they did, they spoke English and did not sound the least bit pleased.
“This is Deputy Director Shawn Cartwright of the CIA. Identify yourself.”
“It’s Johansson, sir.”
“Johansson,” Cartwright growled, “just what the hell are you—”
“She’s not alone,” Reid added.
Cartwright pitched a heavy sigh. “The two of you are in an insurmountable amount of trouble,” he told them, his voice low. The number Maria had given the controller was Cartwright’s main line; regardless of where he actually stood, they knew he was undoubtedly being monitored. “Land the helo, and give me your location…”
“Can’t do that,” Reid said. “We know where the girls are. We’re en route. But we need help…”
“I’m in no position to help you,” Cartwright insisted. “You’re disavowed. You broke laws. You’ve killed… I’ve lost track of how many. You land the chopper, and you wait for Agent Strickland and Interpol to arrive.”
“We both know we’re not going to do that,” Reid countered. “You can help us now. You can be the one to end this.” With Cartwright’s CIA resources he could have the information they needed within minutes—but only if he was willing to do so. “We’re looking for a freight train owned by Czech Railways, nine cars long, currently somewhere on or near the Sněžka mountain pass in Czechia.”
“Zero, I won’t—”
“Like you said,” Reid persisted, “I’m disavowed, which means you’re not my boss right now. I’m asking as a friend.”
“We can alert the Czech authorities,” Cartwright said. “Have them stop the train and search it, find your kids…”
“That won’t work. As soon as they get word that the police are onto them, they might do something to the girls,” Reid said quickly. “Move them again, or… or get rid of them.”
Cartwright groaned through the headset. “I could lose my job, Kent. Ruin my entire career. Maybe worse…”
“And my two teenage daughters could be raped,” Reid snapped. He surprised even himself with his words; it was the first time he had acknowledged, aloud, the atrocities that his girls could be facing at that very moment. “Or beaten. Or killed. They’re just kids, Cartwright. And I’m not just talking about my own here, but any of them that these traffickers have taken. None of them deserve this. And these men, they deserve everything that’s coming to them.”
The deputy director was quiet for a moment. Reid had taken the moral high ground, appealed to his emotions; there was no way Cartwright could turn them down.
At least he thought.
“I’m sorry, Zero.” For just a moment, Cartwright sounded genuinely remorseful. “You went rogue. I can’t help you now.” The line fell silent.
“Cartwright? Hello?” There was no answer. Reid yanked off the headset and furiously threw it to the floor of the chopper.
He now saw the undeniable truth—the deputy director was a bureaucrat, nothing more. He believed in image and protocol, not the welfare of people. Not the security of a nation or even the world. And certainly not the safety of two kids lost somewhere in Eastern Europe. Cartwright was a middleman playing both sides, telling his agents that it was those above his pay grade making the wrong moves while kowtowing to the higher-ups to advance his career.
He was no better than Riker in Reid’s eyes. He had his chance to show a moral backbone and he folded.
Reid slipped the headset back on as Maria flew north, heading toward the Krkonoŝe mountains. “We’ll find them,” she promised. “Together. Even if we have to fly all over this mountain. We’ll find them.”
“And what if they’re not here?” Reid argued. “What if they’re past the mountain? What if they’re in Poland? What if Mirko lied to us?”
Maria said nothing while Reid stared out the windshield, scanning the darkness below for any lights that might be a train.
The Czech controller came back through the headset. “Your agency has denied clearance of your flight. Land the chopper,” he warned, “or you will be fired upon. This is your final—”
The line crackled with static, like a lost signal—and then another voice came through. “Agent Marigold?”
Reid and Maria exchanged a confused glance. The voice sounded young, male, and decidedly American.
“Affirmative,” she said. “Identify?”
“My name is… well, never mind what my name is,” the young man said quickly. “I have the coordinates to your missing train.” He quickly rattled off a series of numbers, and then repeated them. “Got that?”
“Yeah,” said Maria, astonished. “Got it.”
“Good.” Before either of them could say anything else, the line crackled again and the angry-sounding Czech controller returned.
Maria flicked off the radio. “Do you think…?”
She didn’t have to finish her statement. It was obvious; Cartwright had a CIA tech track the train and hack the Czech radio frequency long enough to deliver their heading. Whether it meant that the deputy director had a change of heart or was just putting on a show for any eavesdroppers didn’t matter.
They had a location, and although the train would continue to move steadily forward, they would be there in minutes.
Reid held on as Maria banked left, dropping in altitude and approaching the looming mountain of Sněžka from the northeast. He did a quick weapons check; there were four rounds in the Ruger. Six in the Lorcin. Each of the Agram SMGs was at least half capacity. He slung the strap of one submachine gun across his chest and left the other for Maria.
The nose dipped as they dropped lower. Reid craned his neck and felt a surge of hope. In the darkness of the mountain below, he saw a string of lights. From their height, it looked like a brightly speckled inchworm, barely moving as the helicopter raced toward it. But there was no doubt; it was a train.
“There! I see it!” he shouted into the headset.
Maria nodded and adjusted the tail rotor to align with the train’s direction. “I’ll get ahead of it and set down on the tracks. We’ll force it to stop, and then do a sweep—”
“No,” Reid said. “We need the full element of surprise.” He was too close to risk letting anything further happen to his girls now. “Get as low as you can.” He climbed over the seat to the rear cabin, grabbed onto the loop in the ceiling, and slid the door open.
“Kent!” Maria shouted into the headset. “You’re not exactly in the best state to be jumping onto moving trains.”
He resisted the urge to tell her that he had, earlier that same night, leapt out of an airplane. Instead he leaned out over the darkness as they descended, cold wind whipping around his face, and counted the cars of the train. There were nine, just as Mirko had said—the engine, five freight cars, and curiously, at the center of the train, three passenger cars.
He frowned. The only time passenger cars would be attached to a freight train was if they were new or being transported to another train. Whichever was the case, they wouldn’t actively be carrying passengers… Unless the traffickers are using them, he thought.
“There’s a flashlight in the stock of the rifle,” Maria told him. “You might need it.”
“Thanks.” He took the black flashlight and secured it, with the two pistols, in his jeans as best he could. The helo dipped again; they were no more than a hundred feet above the train. Close, but not close enough.
Reid reached into his jacket and took out the plastic-wrapped parcel there. He tore open the epinephrine shot and popped the cap from the needle. It was his last one—but with a few minutes of adrenaline, enough rounds, and a little luck, he wouldn’t need another.
“I’ll secure from the rear,” Reid said into the headset. “Give me a few minutes to make some leew
ay before you stop the train. Once you do, start at the front and we’ll meet somewhere in the middle.”
“Ten-four.”
“And Maria?” He still wasn’t sure how he felt about her, but he knew that something needed to be said. “Just in case this is it for me, I just want to say—”
“Save it,” she interrupted. “You and I don’t say goodbyes. Not now, not ever. Whatever you want to say can wait until after.”
He nodded. “All right. Then how about just a ‘thank you’?”
“That I’ll take,” she said simply. “Fifty feet.”
Reid looked out over the edge of the chopper’s skid as the train came into sharper relief. Almost there. He took off the headset and tossed it into the cabin behind him.
Then he gripped the epinephrine shot and jammed the stubby needle into his upper thigh.
The helicopter dipped lower, rocking slightly, as Reid gauged their height. It was hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like the skids were about twenty-five to thirty feet over the top of the freight train.
He sucked in a breath as the familiar sensation of surging adrenaline coursed through him. His pulse tripled; his muscles contracted. The pain seeped from his limbs.
Reid exhaled, and leapt out of the helicopter.
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
Reid watched his own feet as he fell. It was a strange sensation, falling onto something that was moving below him. The train chugged forward even as he dropped toward it; for a brief moment, it looked like he would miss it entirely, as if the last freight car would rush out from under him before he landed.
Then his feet found purchase on the solid but unsteady surface.
He reeled, misjudging the momentum of a literal speeding freight train, and his feet flew out from under him. He tumbled onto his back and into a roll, but he didn’t have the runway to land it. His hands shot out, grabbing onto anything they could find—the top rung of a rusty ladder at the rear of the car. The bottom half of his body swung out over nothing, but he held fast.
Something silver and black skittered past his head and soared off the train car, into the night. The Lorcin had come loose from his pants when he landed. He groaned and quickly pulled himself back to the roof of the freight car.
Atop the car was a square hatch about two feet wide. He strained to open the locking arm, teeth gritted, but finally it gave way with a heavy clunk. Reid readied his flashlight and the Ruger, and then he pulled open the steel hatch. There was no movement below him that he could discern; no sounds. He shined the light down into the dark hole. There was something in there… He lowered himself to his stomach and dared to stick his head in.
The last freight car in the train was an actual freight car, filled with crates of an unknown something. He shined the flashlight around the inside but saw no people, no faces.
Panic gripped him. What if we have the wrong train? Despite Cartwright’s help, it was still entirely possibly that Mirko had lied to them.
He scrambled to his feet. The epinephrine wouldn’t last forever and he needed to clear as much as he could before Maria stopped the train. Reid took a running start and leapt over the coupling to the next car, landing shaky on his feet. Both arms shot out to steady himself, and then he rushed to the next hatch. After a similar struggle to open it, he readied the flashlight and the Ruger and dropped through the opening, his arms crossed over his chest.
He landed with a thud inside the freight car and immediately heard a surprised cry. He crouched, bringing both the light and the pistol up, sweeping the beam over three faces.
Two young women were huddled in the far corner, holding each other and squinting into his light. Their faces were chalk white, save for the purple bruises apparent on their skin. A third girl sat with her back to the car’s wall, legs splayed in front of her. Her eyes were closed and her head lolled gently with the rhythm of the moving train.
Reid couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead.
Besides the three girls, the freight car was empty. After sweeping every corner with the flashlight, he turned back to the two in the corner. “English?” he asked urgently. “Speak English?”
“N-nyet,” stammered a blonde one of the pair.
Russian. He knew Russian. “I am… American police,” he said quickly in her native tongue. “The train will soon stop. You will be safe. But you must keep still and be quiet.”
Tears welled in their eyes at the notion of being safe, being freed from the hellish train.
“But I need to know,” he asked. “Are there other girls on this train?”
“Yes,” the blonde girl confirmed. “I have seen others. Sometimes the train stops for just a minute or two. Men come aboard. Men leave. Sometimes we are taken to the… the…” She seemed to have trouble finding the right term. “The cars with the beds.”
“The passenger cars? Girls are taken to the passenger cars?” He shoved the LC9 back into his jeans. “Remember what I said. Be still and silent, no matter what happens.” He leapt up, gripping the edge of the hatch overhead and pulling himself back onto the top of the train and into the cold wind.
Why do they take girls there? he wondered, although deep inside his brain he knew the answer. There was still one more freight car between him and the three passenger cars, and then three more freight cars beyond them before the engine. Once Maria stopped the train, she would clear from the front. He had to keep going.
Reid glanced skyward. But where is Maria? He had lost sight of the helicopter; in fact, he couldn’t even hear it.
But he could see the hulking shadow of the mountain, looming impossibly large directly in front of the speeding train. The tracks don’t go around Sněžka, he realized grimly. They go through it. The mountain pass is underground.
The train barreled toward the yawning black mouth of a subterranean tunnel. Reid bolted forward, leaping the next coupling and continuing down the length of the third freight car. He had no time to try to wrench open the top hatch, no time to clear it. A wall of stone rushed towards him as the first few cars of the train entered the tunnel.
He held his breath and leaped, tucking his head down and his arms in as he fell between cars. The stone whooshed over his head, so close he felt a breeze on his freshly shorn scalp. Then he landed, catching himself by the waist on the railing of the passenger car’s small balcony.
He grunted as the air was forced from his lungs, but he held himself. A half second later or a slightly miscalculated jump and the stone top of the tunnel would have taken his head off his shoulders.
Reid pulled himself onto the small steel balcony behind the passenger car, hanging over the car coupling, and took a few breaths. He had no idea how long it had been since he had taken the epinephrine shot; two minutes? Possibly less? Either way it would wear off soon.
He hefted the Agram, finger on the trigger, and put his other hand on the sliding door to the passenger car. He did not know what might be waiting for him on the other side; the small window had been covered.
He yanked the door open and stepped into the corridor of the bright car.
Not five feet from him, a man spun in surprise. He had an unlit cigarette pinched in his lips, a plastic lighter halfway to his mouth, and an SMG hanging from a strap. The cigarette fell as the man fumbled for his gun.
Reid fired a short burst and cut the Slav down. From the sleeper cabins to his left came shouts and shrieks of fear and shock—and not just female. His stomach tied itself in a knot as he forced himself to realize what the traffickers were doing with the passenger cars.
But he didn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it, until he saw it for himself.
He tore open the door to the first sleeper cabin and gaped in disgust. On the bottom bunk of two cots was a girl, her face red, tears streaking her cheeks. Atop her was a small man, bald, wearing round, silver eyeglasses, his pants pushed down past his hips.
The both of them were frozen in alarm at the report of the gunfire—yet the man’s hand was still
firmly around the girl’s throat.
Fresh anger washed over Reid as he grabbed the small man by the nape of the neck and hauled him backward. The bespectacled rapist yelped as he was tossed out of the cabin and into a heap in the corridor.
“Wait, wait!” he shouted. “Please… do not hurt me.” His English was heavily accented—Austrian, Reid guessed. “I-I have money. Lots of it…”
Reid pulled out the Ruger and shot him once in the forehead.
The girl in the room was not Sara. But she couldn’t have been much older.
“English?” Reid asked her.
She nodded fervently, her eyes wide in terror.
“Get under the bed and stay there.” She did not have to be told twice; she scrambled off the bunk and slid beneath it.
As Reid stepped back into the corridor, he saw a flash of movement and heard another cabin door slide shut. He strode to it and threw it open, the LC9 pointed at the nose of a fat man trembling from head to toe, wearing only a white tank top and briefs.
“Out.” Reid gestured with the gun. The man put up his hands and whimpered slightly as he stepped out of the cabin. Reid glanced beyond him; the young woman on the bed was not one of his daughters. But she was unconscious, lying on her back with her limbs splayed.
“Please don’t shoot me,” the fat man whined.
Reid raised an eyebrow. “You’re American?”
“Yes… a-and I have children, two of them…”
“So do I.” He raised the Ruger. “And I’d like to keep them safe from people like you—”
Before he could fire, the far door of the passenger car was flung open, men beyond it shouting in Slovak. Reid ducked and tucked in his arms as a hail of automatic gunfire tore down the corridor and into the fat man. Reid spun and threw himself into the sleeper car, falling to the floor on his back. He raised the Agram, breathing hard, waiting for the Slovakians to come find him.
