Lorenzo, his long hair whipping in the wind, looked at me like I was stupid. Judging by how fast we’d left the station, we had to be going over a hundred miles an hour already. “Biology 101! You knocked her up! Now open the fucking door!”
I found the handle and cranked it. An alarm sounded inside the train car. They probably knew we were here now.
Lorenzo readied his pistol as the door slid open. Nobody had shot my arm off, so maybe they weren’t watching the back door yet. As soon as it was open, Lorenzo was in, and I was right behind him.
We found ourselves in a tiny room about as big as a walk-in closet. The walls were made of rubber. The connectors between cars must have been like flexible airlocks. There was another door just ahead of us and stairs that went up to the second level.
“Wait, how did you find out Ling was pregnant?”
He exhaled sharply. “We don’t have time for this, okay? She told Jill, Jill told me, she was going to tell you, but didn’t because, I don’t know, she loves soap opera bullshit like this. Will you focus? Can’t you do that creepy calm-face thing you do? We need to go kill a bunch of assholes.”
He was right, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. “We’re on a train with who-knows-how-many dudes with guns, Kat, Anders, and the bomb. They can’t be planning to detonate it if they’re stuck on the train with it, right?”
“You sure about that?” Lorenzo asked.
“Uh . . . hell.” I wasn’t. Not really. The mercenaries probably didn’t know they even had a bomb. Anders? No way. But Kat? If she couldn’t get off in time, she might set it off, just out of spite.
Lorenzo glanced through the door, then pointed skyward. “Okay, this looks like other bullet trains I’ve been on. Two levels, stairs at the beginning of every car. We go up. Top level is how you get from car to car. Bottom will dead end.”
“What if someone hides below us, let us go over, then comes up behind us?”
“Then we get shot.”
We went up the stairs. I risked a quick peek through the window on the door. Armed men were moving this way, guns shouldered. I pulled back and held up two fingers. “The second we go through this door we’re toast.”
“Not necessarily.” Lorenzo removed something from his jacket pocket.
“Is that a grenade?” I asked, hopefully.
“No,” Lorenzo whispered, shattering my hopes. “I wish, but I wasn’t planning on using grenades when I was going to rescue my brother. Ended up using a bunch anyways, long story. It’s a stun grenade, a Canadian nine-banger. After that, it’s gonna get ugly. We’ve got to push straight through. Don’t let up. You ready?”
Even though Lorenzo was a real bastard, I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather be doing this with. I checked the cylinder of my revolver. “As ready as I’m going to get. Do it.”
Lorenzo nodded and slid the interior door open just a little, his suppressed 1911 at the ready. He tossed the flashbang grenade in and slammed the door shut.
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG! True to its name, the nine-banger rapidly blasted off nine head-splitting concussions. As soon as the last pop had sounded, Lorenzo shoved the sliding door open and moved in. He didn’t give the two stunned men in the room any time to react. CHUFF CHUFF CHUFF! Three shots on the closest guy, then CHUFF CHUFF CHUFF CHUFF, four shots on the next. Both went down with bullet holes in their heads and necks. Lorenzo ejected the magazine from his .45 and was slamming a replacement in as the empty hit the floor.
The train car, surprisingly quiet now, was filled with smoke.
“Cover the door,” I said, crouching down by the nearest dead man. He was dressed in black and had been carrying a compact assault rifle. It was a 5.56mm SCAR with a ten-inch barrel and a holographic sight. He had a couple of spare magazines in his pockets, which I took, before standing up.
I leveled my carbine at the door. “Hurry up, check the—” I didn’t get to finish that thought. Bullets tore through the thin door between cars. Lorenzo ducked back down the stairs while I tried to use the economy-class seats for cover. Leaning out, I flipped the selector to full auto and dumped the whole magazine in return fire. The noise of the short-barreled weapon in the confines of the train car was head-splitting, but I ignored it as best I could. “Reloading!”
Lorenzo pointed his gun toward the door and ran up, stepping over the other dead man without stopping to grab his weapon. “They’re running.” He fired after them. “Move up!”
Nodding, I quickly ran up the aisle, weapon at the ready. I had shredded most of the couchlike seats in this car, and fabric was floating in the air. Lorenzo and I found ourselves on opposite sides of the door that led to the next car. “Got any more tricks?”
“You’re not going to like it,” he said. “Go prone on the floor in the aisle. Get ready. When I pull the door open, you shoot low, and I’ll shoot high.”
“Why am I the one that has to lie in the line of fire?” I asked, dropping to the floor of the train car.
“Quit being a bitch. You’re below the line of fire. You ready?”
“No,” I said, looking through the holographic sight. “Do it anyway.”
Lorenzo was right. I was below the line of fire. You should’ve seen the look on the man’s face when the door opened and he fired, his rounds passing above me. I stitched him up, firing a long burst into his guts, going under his hard plate. He fell.
Another guy rolled out and tried to blast me with a short shotgun. But I was Calm, and he was painfully slow. I rolled to my left, out of the way, with a faction of a second to spare before his buckshot obliterated the carpet I’d been lying on. Before he could pump another round into the chamber, Lorenzo came around the corner and started shooting. He was out and moving before I could even get up. His pistol, that custom 1911 with the can and the old electronic sight, was firing so fast it sounded like an MP40. The shotgunner was hit repeatedly and crumpled.
Lorenzo looked over the top of each seat until he reached the flexible connection. “Clear!”
“If this is the best she’s got,” I said, pulling magazines out of the pouches on a dead man’s armor vest, “we’ll be home by dinner.”
“Don’t get cocky,” Lorenzo warned.
Kat’s men didn’t wait for us to enter the next car. The door slid open and all of them rushed through, weapons shouldered, firing. A burning pain shot through my side as the second man in the stack lit me up with a P90 submachine gun. As I fell, Lorenzo dropped to a knee and opened fire with the shotgun, blowing the lead man’s head off in a spray of blood and buckshot. Stumbling backwards, I landed hard on the armrest of one of the economy-class seats, lost my carbine, and flopped to the floor. I rolled onto my side, pulled the .44 from its holster on my hip and jabbed it outward, rocking the trigger, firing up the aisle toward the man who was now trying to retreat. He didn’t make it.
“You good?” Lorenzo asked as he dragged me up.
I nodded jerkily. It burned, and I could feet something hot and wet under my armor vest. A round must’ve gotten through.
It didn’t matter. We couldn’t stop now. “I’m good. Let’s go.”
LORENZO
Entering each new car was a nightmare, but we had to keep pushing.
The doors were a fatal funnel, but there was no other way to go around. I couldn’t tell how fast we were going, but judging by how quickly the countryside was flying past the window, it was really fast. If this had been a normal train I could have taken to the side or the roof to bypass the choke points and ambush the ambushers, but on this thing that would’ve been like trying to walk across the wing of a jet plane. Despite that the ride was remarkably smooth. If we hadn’t been fighting to the death this would be a pleasant way to travel.
Valentine was leaning against the huge, flexible rubber gasket that served as the bridge between cars, waiting for me while I hurried and looted a corpse. He still had that eerie Calm thing going on, but he was breathing too hard.
“Vest stopped it.” But I think he was lying. He went back to trying to get a peek through the glass door into the next car to see how many of them were waiting to kill us. “I don’t see anyone.”
I risked a glimpse through the glass door. The next car was the food car, with rounded couches instead of packed seats like our current economy car, and a bar down the opposite side, but I didn’t see anybody waiting for us. “They’re there.”
“I know.” He’d picked up a SCAR off one of the men we’d killed, and kept that at his left shoulder while he put his right hand on the door to pull it open for me. I got into position, and when I nodded back, Valentine yanked the handle.
I dove through, hit the floor, and rolled behind the end of the bar. Somebody must have shown themselves because Valentine started shooting over my head. I crawled forward as bottles and glasses shattered above me. I flinched when I stuck my palm on something sharp, but I was too occupied to care. By the time I popped up, there was a bunch of stuffing floating in the air, as Valentine tried to peg one of Kat’s men hiding behind a couch. There was another man hiding at the opposite end of the bar, so I opened up on him. He ducked further down as he was pelted with splinters and flying glass.
“Moving,” Valentine shouted as he came through the door. I kept hammering the boxy little subgun at the two men, alternating between them, fast semi-auto shots, trying to keep them pinned. Apparently there was some sort of solid metal frame beneath the rounded couch, because I couldn’t seem to hit the bastard through it, but from the swearing and shouting, I was pretty sure I’d gotten the one behind the bar.
Valentine went right down the middle, gun shouldered, aggressive as could be, and by the time the men realized he had an angle on them, it was too late. He pumped half a dozen 5.56 rounds into the one behind the couch. The barman leapt up to engage Valentine, but I put a bullet through the side of his skull on the way up. He jerked the trigger as he fell, shooting through the side wall and spraying rounds across the French countryside. Valentine reached him and put one more into his head to be sure.
“Clear!”
I ran up to him. It wasn’t until I looked down to see how much ammo I had left that I realized I was bleeding all over the P90. I’d cut my hands on broken glass. But that wasn’t as important as the fact that the gun was almost empty. Fifty rounds went fast when you were really motivated.
The glass door had been struck and broken during our firefight. Valentine had an unobstructed view into the next car. He took a knee by the wall and signaled for me to stay low. There were more waiting for us. And as if to punctuate that, somebody started randomly launching bullets through the wall. Valentine hunkered down as I crawled toward the nearest body.
While I was searching for another weapon, a voice came over the intercom.
“This is your captain speaking,” Katarina said. “Apparently we have some uninvited stowaways on our five-thirty nonstop to London. Whichever one of you kills these annoyances will receive a ten-million-dollar bonus. That is all.”
The man we’d nearly decapitated had been armed with a P90 as well, so I started rifling through his stupid contractor vest looking for more magazines. Valentine fired back through the door. “Just one shooter. He’s retreating,” he reported.
Fresh magazine in the gun and another one stuffed in my back pocket, I got up. “Keep pushing.” The two of us rushed into the next car. We both had to pause and take cover as the man we were chasing decided to start firing indiscriminately through the walls again.
“Are they dead yet? I’m getting impatient up here. Is that you, Lorenzo? Valentine? I knew it. You just couldn’t let it go.” Kat was getting agitated. “Bonuses be damned, if you idiots don’t hurry up and take care of them, they’re going to kill you all.”
We reached the next wall. There were brass casings rolling beneath our boots. The glass between the two cars was already shattered. Valentine did a quick peek through the hole, then pulled back and held up one finger. The shooter was waiting for us. Another fucking fatal funnel.
I didn’t know who her security was. They looked more like PMCs than typical Montalban criminal stooges. They probably didn’t even know they were protecting a maniac with a nuclear bomb. Not that they’d be inclined to believe us over their current employer, since we had just killed a bunch of them, but what the hell? It was worth a shot.
Signaling for Valentine to hold, I shouted, “Hey, asshole. Do you know what’s in that box you’re protecting?”
There was a brief pause, and then somebody shouted back. “Why don’t you tell us then?”
Valentine’s eyes narrowed. He slowly moved his weapon along the wall, estimating where the voice came from.
“It’s a nuclear bomb. Kat intends to blow up London with it and I don’t think she’s going to stop and let you morons off first!”
He must not have believed me, because he opened fire, punching holes through the rubberized walls. I nearly got my head blown off. Valentine emptied his magazine through the wall in response.
Except for the ringing in my ears, it was quiet. “Fuck diplomacy!” I shouted.
“You’re really bad at it,” Valentine stated flatly. We both looked in. The gunman was flat on his back, dead. He’d been hiding behind a table, but Valentine had shredded it and his body. “Go.” We moved in, leaping over the dead man, and headed for the next car.
There couldn’t be many left. I didn’t see anyone inside the next one. This car must have been intended for business meetings and taking calls. There were little glass privacy enclosures inside, each one crowded with comfy chairs and tables. It was all very fancy. It was a good thing the maglev line didn’t actually have passengers yet, because we’d indiscriminately fired so many rounds through this place we would have accidentally killed a bunch of them.
There was movement at the far end of the car. Anders! Unfortunately, he saw us coming and jumped down the stairs before I could get a shot off. I’d forgotten just how freaking fast he was for a big dude. Val had seen him at the same time, and both of us instinctively rushed inside, hoping to take him out fast. Since the glass partitions ran down the middle with aisles on the sides, Valentine automatically veered left and I went right. Anders was a high-value target. He had to die.
It wasn’t until the gunshot went off that I realized we’d walked right into a trap. Valentine shouted a warning as he caught a bullet in the back. I spun around to see the shooter, but I was too late. He’d been lurking in a corner, hiding behind a shelf, and since we’d focused on Anders we’d gone right past him.
We fired at the same time. The glass partition between us exploded. I know I hit him, but then it was like a fiery fist punched me right in the sternum. He punched a few holes in the glass behind me before there was a flash of heat down my forearm and the P90 was torn from my grasp. I crashed against the heavy window hard enough to crack it, and then launched myself at the floor before he could shoot me again.
I know I’d plugged him repeatedly, but the stubborn gunman was still up and coming my way. He lined up the sights of his subgun on my face and I knew I was going to die.
But then Valentine rolled over, pulled his .44 and blew the back of his head off.
My chest was on fire. Because I’d needed to be mobile and stealthy low crawling through the weeds all night, I’d only worn an old Level II soft vest beneath my shirt. I put my bloody hand on my sternum and found the slug flattened there, still hot to the touch. Then I realized his other bullet had cut a shallow bloody line down my arm before it had smacked the FN, but like Gideon had always said, the wound wasn’t squirting . . . So I crawled forward, trying to find a gun so I could finish off Anders before he could—
Anders came out of nowhere and kicked me so hard in the ribs that it launched me thro
ugh another glass partition.
It was like being mule kicked. I’d broken the glass with my head. I lay there on the floor, stunned, cut, in a pile of broken glass, trying desperately to breathe, as Anders crunched after me. He had that little suppressed shotgun pointed toward where Valentine had been. Apparently Anders didn’t have a shot at him through the furniture separating us, but that didn’t stop him. He simply switched the shotgun to his other hand, aimed it at me, and ordered “don’t move” as he pulled a pistol from beneath his jacket to keep pointed toward where Valentine was hiding.
“Yo, Valentine, show yourself or I’m killing your partner here.”
“You think he cares?” I gasped.
“Shut up.” The 12 gauge hole on the end of the boxy shotgun remained pointed at my mouth. His finger was on the trigger.
“What are you doing, Anders?” Valentine shouted back. He sounded like he was in a lot of pain, but he was smart enough not to show himself. Anders didn’t miss much. “You’re not suicidal.”
“You think I wanted to end up on this train? That’s your fault. From here on Kat can see her glorious dreams come to fruition without me. I’m getting off here.”
We were riding the world’s fastest train, how in the hell did he think that was going to happen without turning into paste? But then I remembered that he’d been doing something in the floor between the train cars.
“He’s decoupled the cars!” I shouted. “You’ve got to reach that bomb, Valentine!”
Anders just scowled and dropped one big boot down on my chest, stomping the remaining air right out of my lungs. Damn. That hurt. But shutting me up had been a mistake. Anders was now in reach.
“Hell, it wouldn’t be the first time. Valentine helped us retrieve this bomb. Isn’t that right, kid? We couldn’t have done Project Blue without you.”
Fuck it. He was going to kill me anyway, and we couldn’t afford to let that bomb go off. I had to go for it. Only before I could make a grab for Anders’ shotgun, I saw something silver sliding across the floor, beneath the couches, directly toward me.
Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3) Page 39
