The Six Sacred Stones jw-2

by Matthew Reilly

  The outer gate.

  The Predator missile slammed into the iron gate and exploded. Smoke and dust billowed out in every direction, engulfing the receiving platform, obscuring everything.

  The huge iron outer doors buckled and groaned, their center sections twisted and loosened, which was all West needed, for a moment later his train thundered into them at phenomenal speed and crashed right through them, flinging them open, hurling them from their massive hinges, before the train itself rushed out into gray daylight, racing away from the mountaintop prison, running for all it was worth.

  At first, the Chinese were just stunned, but their response when it came was fierce.

  Within four minutes, two compact helicopters—fast-attack Russian-built Kamov Ka-50s, otherwise known as Werewolves—rose from within Xintan One and took off after the runaway train.

  Another minute later, a much larger helicopter rose from within Xintan Two. It was also Russian-made, but of far highter quality. It was an Mi-24 Hind gunship, one of the most feared choppers in the world. Bristling with cannons, gun pods, chem-weapons dispensers, and rockets, it had a unique double-domed cockpit. It also possessed a troop hold, which today bore ten fully armed Chinese shock troops.

  Once clear of the prison’s walls, the Hind lowered its nose and thundered off in pursuit of West’s fleeing train.

  The final aspect of the Chinese response was electronic.

  The Xintan complex possessed two outer guardhouses situated on the mountain railway a few miles north of the prison, guardhouses that the train would have to pass by.

  Frantic phone calls were made to the guards posted at both guardhouses, but strangely no reply came back from either one.

  At both outposts the scene was the same: all the guards lay on the floor, out cold, their hands bound with flex-cuffs.

  West’s people had already been there.

  THE ARMORED train whipped through the mountains at breakneck speed, a rain of snow rushing in through its shattered forward windows.

  It roared past the first guardhouse, crashing through its boom gate as if it were a toothpick.

  Stretch drove, eyeing the landscape around them—snow-covered mountainside to the left, a sheer thousand-foot drop to the right.

  The train rounded a left-hand spur and suddenly the second guardhouse came into view, plus a long soaring iron bridge beyond it.

  “Huntsman! I’ve got a visual on the outer bridge!” Stretch called.

  West had been leaning up and out through the shattered windshield, setting up some kind of mortar-type device and peering behind them, back at the prison complex. He ducked back inside.

  “We got choppers on our tail. Two attack birds and one big bastard Hind—”

  “Three choppers?” Stretch turned. “I thought Astro said they only kept one chase copter at Xintan, the Hind?”

  “Looks like his intelligence was two choppers short,” West said wryly. “I hope that’s not the only thing he got wrong. Too late to worry about it now. The rotor net is mounted and in your hands. Just get us to that bridge before somebody on that Hind figures out who we are and decides it’s worth blowing the bridge to stop us. Keep me posted. I’ve got work to do.”

  West then grabbed a microphone from the dash, keyed the train’s internal intercom, and began speaking in Mandarin: “Attention all guards aboard this train! Attention! We are now in command of this vehicle. All we want are the prisoners—”

  In the five regular carriages of the train, every one of the Chinese guards looked up at the voice coming in over the PA.

  Among them, one other face snapped up and gasped, the only one to recognize the voice.

  Wizard. He was bloody, bruised, and beaten. But his eyes lit up at the sound of his friend’s voice. “Jack…” he rasped.

  “—We mean you no harm. We understand that many of you are just doing your job, that you are men with families, children. But if you get in our way, know this: harm will come to you. We will be coming through the train now, so we give you a choice: lay down your weapons, and you will be not be killed. Raise your weapons against us and you will die.”

  The intercom clicked off.

  Up in the driver’s compartment, West threw open the interconnecting door between the engine car and the first carriage.

  Then, holding an MP7 submachine gun in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other, he entered the prison train.

  The three guards in the first carriage had heeded his warning.

  They stood backed up against the walls, their Type-56 rifles at their feet, their hands raised. West moved warily past them, his guns up, when suddenly one of the guards whipped out a pistol and—

  Blam!

  The guard was blown back against the wall of the carriage, nailed by West’s powerful Desert Eagle.

  “I told you not to raise your weapons,” he said to the others in a low voice. He jerked his chin at a nearby cell: “Into the cage, now.”

  The four guards in the second carriage were smarter. They’d set a trap. First, they’d cut the lights, darkening the carriage; and second, they’d concealed one of their men in the ceiling above the interconnecting doorway while the others feigned surrender to West.

  West entered the carriage, rocking with the motion of the train, to see three of them holding up their hands and crying “Mercy! Mercy! Don’t shoot us!” diverting his attention from the man hidden in the shadows above the door.

  Then, completely unseen by West, the concealed man extended his arm, aiming his gun at West’s head from directly above—

  —and suddenly West looked up, too late—

  —just as the entire carriage rocked wildly, pummeled from the outside by a ferocious burst of supermachine gun fire.

  The chase copters had arrived, and had started firing on the speeding train!

  The guard above him was thrown from his perch above the door and, missing West by inches, hit the floor with a clumsy thud.

  Then the other three guards drew their weapons and the darkened carriage erupted in strobelike flashes of gunfire, with Jack West Jr. in the middle of it all, firing in every direction with both of his guns—sidestepping to one side then firing left, right, and down—until at the end of it all when darkness had returned and the smoke had cleared, he was the only one left standing.

  He moved grimly onward: next carriage.

  The prisoner carriage.

  At the same time, outside, the two chase helicopters from Xintan had caught up with the runaway train and were assaulting it with a hail of bulletfire from their strut-mounted 30mm guns.

  Stretch brought the train past the second guardhouse, smashing through its boom gate before racing out onto the long swooping bridge that led to the rest of the mountain railway.

  Onto the bridge, totally exposed.

  One chase chopper swooped low over the train’s engine car—just as Stretch triggered the mortarlike device on its hood.

  The device went off with a muffled whump, propelling something into the air high above the speeding train.

  It was a wide nylon net with heavy weighted bearings at every corner. It fanned out above the engine car like a giant lateral spiderweb—a spiderweb that was designed to bring down helicopters.

  The net entered the rotor blades of the lead chopper and instantly got entangled.

  The rotors caught horribly and with a jerk, stopped, and suddenly the banking helicopter became a forward-moving glider with the aerodynamics of a brick.

  It sailed down into the ravine below the bridge, falling down and down and down before it hit the bottom with a tremendous explosion.

  Stretch left the controls of the train for a moment to grab his Predator rocket launcher and insert a final rocket-propelled grenade into it.

  When he returned to the controls, he found himself staring at the huge Chinese gunship, the Hind, hovering off to the side of the long swooping bridge, flying parallel to his engine car.

  “Oh shit,” Stretch breathed.

  Th
e Hind loosed a single rocket from one of its side-mounted pods—a missile aimed not at the train, but rather at thebridge; a missile that would stop West from snatching Wizard and Tank. That a few guards would also be lost was clearly of no concern to the Chinese generals who had ordered the missile launch.

  “Fuck me…” Stretch keyed his radio: “Huntsman! They’re going to take out the bridge…”

  “Then drive faster,”came the reply.

  “Right!” Stretch hit the gas, pushing the train’s throttle as far forward as it would go.

  The missile from the Hind struck the bridge right in its middle, in the latticework of struts that formed the apex of its arch, a bare second after the speeding train had shot over that point.

  The detonation of the missile sent a shower of iron girders and beams raining down into the ravine.

  But the bridge held…for the moment.

  The train sped across it, a hundred yards from the other side and the shelter of a tunnel there.

  There came an almighty groan. The distinctive groan of iron girders bending.

  Then, in almost glorious slow motion, the great bridge began to sway, and rock, and from the middle outward, it began to drop in pieces into the ravine.

  IT WAS an incredible sight.

  The slowly collapsing bridge, falling away in its center, while the armored train—still on it—sped off its eastern end, chased by the disintegrating bridge.

  But the train was just a fraction too fast.

  It shot off the end of the bridge and disappeared into the waiting tunnel a bare second before the rails behind its final carriage—the rear-facing second engine—dropped away into the ravine, disappearing forever.

  Inside the train, Jack came to the third carriage, the prisoner car, just as all the lights abruptly went off.

  The guards here weren’t going to give up without a fight and now in the darkness of the tunnel, the interior of the prison train was enveloped in near-total blackness.

  Snapping the night-vision goggles on his helmet into place, Jack entered the prisoner car, seeing the world in phosphorescent green, and he beheld…

  …two burly Chinese guards holding both Wizard and Tank in front of their bodies with guns held to each of the blindfolded professors’ heads. Neither of the guards wore night-vision goggles and they stared wildly into the darkness—they didn’t need NVGs to kill their hostages.

  When they heard the heavy interconnecting door open, one of them yelled, “Drop your weapon or we blow their—”

  Ba-blam!Two shots.

  Both guards dropped. Matching holes in their faces.

  Jack never even broke his stride.

  The other two guards in the carriage weren’t so bold and Jack quickly herded them into a spare cell before sealing the rear door of the carriage with an axe—he didn’t want any more enemies bothering him.

  Then he slid to Wizard’s side, snatched away the blindfold, and gazed in horror at his battered friend. “Wizard, it’s me. Jesus, what did they do to you…”

  The old man’s face was a mess of cuts and peeled skin. His arms and chest bore the distinctive scars of electric shock equipment. His long white beard was matted with dried blood.

  “Jack!” he sobbed. “Oh, Jack. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry to have brought this on you! I thought I’d die here! I never thought you would come for me!”

  “You’d do the same for me,” Jack said, glancing at the thick ringbolts holding Wizard’s and Tank’s leg irons to the floor. “Don’t celebrate too soon. We’re not out of this yet.”

  Jack then extracted a hand held blowtorch from his utility belt, fired it up, and went to work.

  THE TRAIN zoomed through the tunnel.

  As it did so, the remaining chase copter flew ahead, gunning for the tunnel’s exit farther round the mountain.

  It beat the train there, steadying itself in a deadly hover just out from the tunnel’s mouth, cannons ready and aimed at the oncoming engine car.

  But before the train emerged from the tunnel, something else did.

  A Predator missile.

  It lanced out from the tunnel’s mouth, a dead-straight tail of smoke issuing out behind it, before it plowed into the hovering copter, blasting it to a million pieces, blowing it out of the sky.

  Then the train roared out of the tunnel and swung hard left, following the mountain railway on its course.

  But the meanest pursuer of all still remained.

  The Hind gunship.

  It chased Stretch around every bend, paralleling the fleeing train, harrying the engine car mercilessly with withering fire.

  Before suddenly, all the gunfire stopped.

  Stretch frowned, confused.

  What the—?

  Thumps on the roof—

  Then before he knew what was happening, a dark figure swung in through one of the shattered forward windows and into the driver’s compartment!

  Two boots slammed into his chest, knocking him to the floor.

  Damn it! I was stupid!he realized as he tumbled.They’re guards—from the back carriages of the train. Must’ve crawled forward along the roof…

  The first guard to land inside the cabin drew his pistol, only for Stretch to kick him viciously—square on the kneecap—breaking it backward, causing the man to howl out in pain, giving Stretch the second he needed to draw his own gun and fire it once, twice, three times into the man’s chest—

  More thumps on the roof.

  Stretch stood—just in time to see three more pairs of boots jump down onto the hood of the engine car, blocking his view of the track ahead: a long, straight section of track that ended at a sharp left-hand curve. Beyond that curve was a steep downward slope of densely packed snow.

  “Huntsman!” he called into his radio mike. “How’s it going back there?”

  “I’ve found Wizard and Tank. Just have to cut them free.”

  “I got overwhelming company up here, about to storm my position! They came over the roof, from the rear carriages! I have to launch us now!”

  “Do it.”West’s voice was calm.“Then get back here.”

  “Right.”

  Stretch knew what he had to do.

  He jammed the throttle fully forward—and the train sped up markedly. Then he wedged a grenade between the throttle and the brakes and pulled the pin.

  This was now a one-way ticket.

  He dashed back into the train itself, slamming the interconnecting door behind him—

  —just as the grenade exploded, ripping the controls to shreds—

  —a moment before the entire driver’s compartment was shredded by a volley of bullets, and three more guards swung in through the forward windows.

  They entered with their guns up, their leader—an older man, more seasoned than the others, more battle-hardened, the Captain of the Guard—looking pissed as hell at this brazen assault on his train.

  THE TRAIN was now rocketing along the high-altitude railway, all but out of control and heading for the sharp left-hand bend that it couldn’t possibly take at this speed.

  Stretch burst into the third carriage, the prisoner carriage, where he saw West kneeling beside Wizard and Tank, blowtorch flaring.

  Tank was free, but West was still cutting through the leg irons fastening Wizard to the floor.

  The Captain of the Guard stormed angrily into the first carriage, not caring for the runaway state of the train—unable to slow it, he was going after the intruders.

  He found two of his men huddled in a cell there and heard their pathetic excuses, before he put a bullet in each of their heads for cowardice.

  Then he moved on, hunting.

  West’s blowtorch blazed away as it carved through Wizard’s chains.

  “How long?” Stretch asked anxiously.

  “Almost there…” West said, his face illuminated by the blowtorch’s magnesium glare.

  The rocking motion of the train was getting wilder.

  “We don’t have much track left, Jack�
�”

  “Just…another…second…”

  The door to their carriage burst open—revealing the Captain of the Guard!

  Stretch spun.

  West spun.

  The Captain of the Guard stood in the doorway, grinning. He gripped his gun tighter.

  But he needn’t have, because it was already too late.