For just then, the runaway train hit the bend.
The speeding train hit the alpine curve going way too fast.
Derailment.
The forward engine car jumped the tracks, bumping roughly over them before skidding out onto the steeply sloping plain of snow beyond the curve.
The rest of the great black train followed the engine car, leaping off the rails before also sliding out onto the snow plain.
The engine car skidded down the slope, its forward grille grinding into the powder, the rest of the train snaking along behind it like a twisted accordion, the whole crashing mess turning laterally as it slid until the entire train was sliding in reverse down the slope and headed inexorably toward the bottom, where there was nothing but a bare cliff edge and a thousand-foot drop.
And circling above all this was the Hind gunship.
Inside the train, the world spun crazily.
The shocking jolt of their derailment had sent the Captain of the Guard flying sideways, slamming into the right-hand wall of the carriage. Then the inertia of the train’s lateral spin as it slid down the slope—at first forward, now backward—pressed him into it.
West and Stretch were better prepared: they’d grabbed hold of the nearest cell bars at the first bump and it still took all of their strength to stay upright during the crazy bouncing of the derailment—Stretch grabbing Tank, West clutching Wizard.
Yet still, in its own out-of-control way, this was part of West’s plan. He’d planned to crash there. To end up on this snow plain with the train buried in the deep snow.
Because he still needed something.
He still needed the Chinese to—
But then with shocking suddenness something happened that West hadn’t planned.
The train went over the edge at the base of the snow slope.
UNFORTUNATELY,the snow hadn’t quite been deep enough, its slick icy base causing the snakelike train to slide all the way down the snow plain to the very edge.
Now traveling backward, the rear engine car went over the edge first, its weight pulling first one, then two, then three carriages over with it—
West felt it coming an instant before it happened.
Felt the distinctive tug of the train’s last three cars—the engine car and the last two regular carriages—going over the precipice a moment before his own carriage lurched sickeningly and…
“Grab something!” he yelled to the others, including Wizard who was still not yet free of his ringbolts.
Their carriage went over the edge.
The world went vertical.
Anything not nailed down dropped the length of the carriage, including one of the Captain of the Guard’s men.
With a cry, the hapless fellow fell the full vertical length of the carriage, hitting the heavy iron door at the bottom with a foul cracking noise.
The Guard Captain and his remaining companion had quicker reflexes: as the carriage fell, they both discarded their guns in favor of having free hands, and rolled into a nearby cell at the top end of the now-vertical carriage.
West and Stretch grabbed the bars of the nearest cell, holding on to Wizard and Tank, before—smack—their carriage’s fall was arrested.
Somehow, the entire train had stopped its plunge down the cliff face, coming to a jarring, crunching halt.
Although they couldn’t see it, the train’s lead engine car had rammed up against a large boulder at the edge of the precipice and lodged there, holding fast, holding the entire train suspended beneath it, dangling over the thousand-foot drop!
West quickly took in their new predicament: he, Stretch, Wizard, and Tank were halfway down the vertical carriage. The Guard Captain and his buddy were up near the top, resting against the now-horizontal wall of their cell, not far from the interconnecting door that led upward to safety.
A grinding groaning sound.
With a jerk the entire train dropped three feet. Chunks of snow rained past the barred windows. The upper engine was slipping, a yard at a time.
West exchanged a look with Stretch.
Then another groan, but a different kind: the sound of a metal coupling straining under the weight of the dangling train.
“We’re gonna fall,” West said to Stretch.“Up! Now!”
“What about you?” Stretch nodded at Wizard’s ringbolt. The old man’s leg irons were still chained to it.
“Just go!” West said. “I’m not leaving him! Go! Someone has to get out of here alive!”
Stretch didn’t bother to argue. He just grabbed Tank and started hauling him up the carriage, using the bars of the cells as ladder rungs.
They climbed up the left-hand side of the carriage’s central aisle—passing the Guard Captain as he emerged from his cell on the right, dazed and gunless.
West went back to work on Wizard’s chains with his blowtorch. He had to do this fast.
Another grinding groan. More snow sailed past the window.
The train dropped another three feet.
The blowtorch cut farther through the chains before—shwack!—the flame sizzled through the final section of chain and Wizard was free.
“Come on, old buddy,” West said. “We gotta move.”
They looked up to see Stretch and Tank disappear through the interconnecting door at the top of the carriage—but also in time to see the Guard Captain step across their line of sight, staring daggers at West, blocking the way.
“This way,” West said, leading Wizard down.
“Down?” Wizard asked.
“Trust me.”
They came to the bottom door of the third carriage just as another metallic groan squealed out from nearby and—crack—the coupling connecting their car to the carriage beneath them broke loose and the bottom two carriages of the train, plus the rear engine car, just fell away into the void.
The three cars fell forever, soaring silently down into the great mountain chasm before they smashed violently against the jagged rocks at the base of the ravine, the engine car exploding in a cloud of flames and black smoke.
“No time to waste,” West said to Wizard. “This way.”
Dangling by their fingertips, they swung out along the underside of their carriage, their feet hanging a thousand feet above the world, before they turned upward, climbing up the outside of the third suspended prison car, using any and every protrusion on it as a handhold—the bars on the windows, hinges, handles, anything.
Up the side of the third carriage they went, moving quickly, Jack helping Wizard. They reached the gap between this carriage and the next one just as the Guard Captain and his companion did—moving inside the train—and so Jack and Wizard just kept on moving, scaling the exterior of the second carriage as quickly as they could until they reached its summit and clambered onto its flat upper surface—
—just in time to see the Guard Captain climb up into the safety of the next (and last) carriage above them, his junior companion still waiting to climb up after him.
It was at that moment that the Captain saw West—and something evil gleamed in his eye.
He reached for the coupling, despite the fact that his own man was still standing on the lower carriage. The junior guard yelped “No!” when he saw what was going to happen but West just moved, leaping for a grille on the upper carriage, calling to Wizard as he did so: “Max! Jump for my legs!”
Wizard jumped immediately, reaching for Jack’s waist as—
The Guard Captain disengaged the coupling.
The second carriage dropped instantly.
It took the junior guard with it, his wide eyes receding into the chasm, his mouth open in a silent scream all the way down.
But West and Wizard were still in the game: West now dangling from the bottom of the first carriage, with Wizard hangingfrom his belt!
“Max, quick, climb up my body!” West yelled, as Wizard quickly and clumsily climbed up the length of West’s frame, at one point using the folded carbon-fiber wings on Jack’s back for handh
olds.
The look on the Guard Captain’s face said it all. He was furious. He wouldn’t let that happen again.
He ducked back inside the carriage and started climbing—fast.
Jack knew what was happening instantly.
It was now a race to the next coupling.
“Go, Jack! Go!” Wizard yelled. “I’ll catch up!”
West charged up the outer wall of the final carriage, while the Guard Captain raced up its internal aisle.
They both moved quickly, clambering up the vertical carriage.
“Stretch!” West called into his radio as he climbed. “Where are you!”
“We’re up, on the precipice, but we got a prob—”
West knew what that problem was. He could see it.
The Hind chopper was hovering directly above him, a short way out from the cliff top, not far from the sharply tilted engine car hanging out over the edge—waiting for them, if they made it up.
Stay alive,he thought.As long as you’re alive, you have a chance.
Up he climbed, up the outside of the vertical carriage, moving like a monkey.
Then he rose over the final lip and stood…just as the Guard Captain emerged from the doorway there.
Jack had beaten him in this race, got there first by a bare two seconds. He stepped forward to unleash a fierce kick at the Guard Captain—
Only to see a gun appear in the Captain’s hand.
Jack froze as the realization dawned on him: that was why he’d beaten the Captain in their race. The Guard Captain had taken a moment to grab a loose gun on the way up.
Aw, shit…Jack thought.Shit, shit, shit.
He stood there, frozen on the horizontal end section of the upturned carriage, the beating wind from the helicopter hammering his clothes. Without thinking, he raised his hands.
“You lose!” the Guard Captain spat in English, grinning, as Wizard’s face popped up over the edge behind Jack’s boots and saw the situation.
The Captain jammed back on the hammer of his gun.
“Wizard…” Jack said. “It’s time to fly.”
Then, just as Guard Captain pulled the trigger on his gun, quick as a flash, Jack’s raised hands grabbed the safety rod on the coupling above his head and disengaged it—
—causing their own carriage to drop away from the engine car, with them and the Guard Captain on it!
THE GUARD CAPTAIN’S eyes boggled. Jack had just condemned the mall to death.
The carriage fell fast. Down the side of the massive cliff.
The gray rock wall blurred with speed as the iron prison car fell past it.
But as the carriage fell, Jack was all action. He grabbed Wizard and pulled him into a bear hug, yelling “Hold on to me!” as he pressed something on his chest armor and suddenly his Gullwings sprang out from the compact unit on his back and instantly the two of them soared away from the falling armored carriage, at first flying downward at incredible speed before swooping up in a graceful glide, leaving the Guard Captain to fall the rest of the way by himself, screaming all the way to his death.
With Wizard hanging from his chest, Jack caught an upward thermal draft, and they glided away from the mountain railway and the twin mountain peaks that housed Xintan Prison.
“Astro?” West said into his mike. “We’re gonna need a pickup farther down the railway. How about near that farm we saw earlier?”
“Roger that, Huntsman,”came the reply.“Just gotta grab Stretch first. Then we’ll come get you.”
Stretch stood on solid ground, knee deep in snow, with the weary Tank beside him, alongside the engine car of the prison train, tilted on the edge of the precipice, the only carriage still remaining.
Unfortunately, hovering in the air in front of them was the Hind gunship, looming large.
A voice over its loud-hailer commanded in English:“You two! Remain where you are!”
“Whatever you say,” Stretch said.
The Hind landed on the snow plain, its rotors kicking up a miniblizzard.
Ten Chinese troops rushed out of its hold, dashing through the billowing snow, quickly forming a ring around Stretch and Tank.
Sitting in the chopper’s cockpit, the Hind’s two Chinese pilots saw Stretch raise his hands a moment before the miniblizzard shrouded the entire scene in white.
Which was why the pilots never saw the snow plain around their gunship come alive, three ghostlike figures rising from beneath it, dressed in white camouflage gear and bearing MP7 submachine guns: Astro, Scimitar, and Vulture.
The three white-clad men took the unguarded chopper easily and once they had it, Vulture aimed its huge six-barreled cannon at the ten-man Chinese team on the ground and demanded over the loud hailer that they drop their weapons. Needless to say, they complied.
Minutes later, the Hind’s crew and troops stood shivering on the snow plain, dressed only in their undergarments, their helicopter lifting off without them—flown by Astro and Scimitar, with Vulture manning the main cannon and Stretch and Tank safely in the hold.
It was the final piece of Jack’s plan: they’d needed the Hind to land here—so they could steal it for the next part of their mission in China.
THE SALISBURY PLAIN, ENGLAND
DECEMBER5, 2007, 3:05A.M.
THE RENTEDHonda Odyssey zoomed along the A303, alone in the night.
In the glare of a bright full moon, endless fields of Wiltshire farmland stretched away to the horizon on either side of the highway, bathed in eerie blue light.
Zoe drove, with Lily and Alby beside her.
In the back of the S.U.V. sat the two young men who had met her and the kids at Heathrow: the unique Adamson brothers, Lachlan and Julius.
Identical twins, they were both tall and lean, with friendly freckled faces, carrot orange hair, and thick Scottish accents.
Both wore simple T-shirts, one black, the other white. Lachlan’s black shirt read, somewhat enigmatically: “I HAVE SEEN THE COW LEVEL!” while Julius’s white one proclaimed “THERE IS NO COW LEVEL!”
They also had a habit of finishing each other’s sentences.
“Zoe!” Lachlan had exclaimed on seeing her.
“It’s great to see you again!” Julius said. “Hey, this sounds like a secret mission.”
“Is it a secret mission?” Lachlan asked.
Julius: “If it is, don’t you think Lachy and I should have code names, you know, like Maverick or Goose?”
“I’d like to be called Blade,” Lachlan said.
“And I’d like Bullfighter,” Julius said.
“Blade? Bullfighter?”
Julius said, “Pretty rugged and heroic, huh? We’ve been thinking about this while we’ve been waiting for you.”
“Clearly,” Zoe said. “How about Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Romulus and Remus?”
“Aw, no! Not twin code names,” Lachlan said. “Anything but twin names.”
“Sorry, boys, but there’s only one rule when it comes to call signs.”
“And that is?”
“You never get to pick your own.” Zoe smiled. “And sometimes your nickname can change. Look at me, I used to be known as Bloody Mary, until I met this little one.” A nod at Lily. “And now everyone calls me Princess. Be patient, you’ll get call signs when the occasion calls for it. Because, yes, this mission is about as secret as it gets.”
Now, speeding west along the A303, they were heading for a place that of all people Alby had led them to.
The military air base outside Dubai. Two days previously. Just after Earl McShane’s cargo plane had smashed into the Burj al Arab.
Jack West had stood on the tarmac, crouched low over Alby and Lily, while armed men and CIA agents calling themselves attachés spoke into cell phones, a black pillar of smoke rising into the sky above the Burj al Arab in the distance.
“Talk to me, Alby,” Jack had said.
During the meeting, Alby had deciphered one of Wizard’s more obscure notes: the reference to the “Titanic
Sinking and Rising.” But he had hinted to Jack that there was more to it.
Alby said, “I also know what one of the symbols on Wizard’s summary sheet means.”
Jack had pulled out the summary sheet.
“The symbol at the bottom right,” Alby said. “Next to the ‘Titanic Sinking’ reference.”
“Yes…” West had said.
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