The meaning had been clear. By talking about the man behind his back, they had shown they had no sense, so they would forever-more have no senses either.
“The Imam’s will be done, peace be upon him,” Abdullah said hastily when he realized he should have replied. The line was already dead.
“LINDA, GET YOUR BUTT up here with the M60,” Juan shouted over the radio. “And as much ammo as you can carry. Mark, I need you to separate the Pig from the boxcar.”
“What?” cried Murphy. “Why?”
“You can’t go fast enough backward.”
Linc came over the tactical net. “I thought our problem was slowing down this crazy caravan.”
“Not anymore.”
Seconds later, the .30 caliber machine gun from the Pig’s roof cupola landed with a thud on the railcar’s tarry roof. Cabrillo rushed back to give Linda a hand with the unwieldy weapon. Behind her Alana Shepard stood with an ammo belt slung around her neck like some deadly piece of jewelry. At her feet were two more boxes of rounds. She handed up the boxes, and he helped boost her up.
“Trying to earn that fedora, I see.” Juan smiled.
Spying the bridge for the first time, Linda Ross understood why the Chairman needed the heavy firepower. As soon as she reached the front of the car, she extended the M60’s stumpy bipod legs and was lying behind the weapon, ready for him to feed the first belt into the gun. With Alana pulling a second hundred-round belt from one of the boxes, Juan loaded the M60 and slammed the receiver closed. Linda racked back on the bolt and let fly.
The bridge was well beyond the weapon’s effective range, but even random shots pattering against the wooden trestle would force the terrorists to find cover and hopefully buy them the time they needed.
Her whole body shook as if she were holding on to a live electric cable, and a tongue of flame jetted a foot from the muzzle. Watching the string of tracers arcing across the distance, she raised the barrel until the bead of phosphorus-tipped rounds found their mark. At this range, all Juan could see were small explosions of dust kicked off the blanched timbers when the rounds bored in. It took nearly a third of the first belt before the men working under the railbed realized what was happening. None had been hit, as far as they could tell, but soon they were all scrambling to hide themselves in the tangle of crossbeams.
Using controlled bursts to keep the barrel from overheating, Linda kept the men pinned, getting one lucky shot that yanked a terrorist off the delicate trestle. His body plummeted from the bridge, falling soundlessly and seemingly in slow motion, until he slammed into a beam and cartwheeled earthward. He hit the ground in a silent puff of dust that drifted lazily on the breeze.
Mark Murphy could hear the chattering .30 cal but had no idea what they were firing at. He had unhooked himself from his safety straps, climbed up and out of the Pig, and was now crouched over the rear bumper, trying not to notice the ties blurring under his feet.
He had woven a tow cable back and forth around the bumper and the railcar’s coupling to keep them attached. Linc was accelerating slightly faster than the car was rolling down the tracks, so there was no tension on the line. Using a large pair of bolt cutters, he attacked the braided steel, snipping at it as fast as he could. If the car started pulling away from the Pig, the tension would snap the cable, and Mark’s legs would most likely be taken off at the knees.
They started going through a curve. Murph noticed Linda’s machine gun had gone silent and realized the hills were blocking her aim. The car also started picking up speed. The thin cable stretched taut, and braids began to part, curling off the line like silver smoke.
“Linc, goose it a little,” Mark called, and Lincoln gave the Pig more gas.
As soon as the tension was off, Mark worked at it again, heaving on the big cutters with everything he had.
“When you’re through the last cable,” Juan shouted into the radio, “jump onto the coupling so we don’t lose the time it’ll take you to climb aboard the Pig.”
Mark swallowed hard, not sure what he liked less—the prospect of clinging to the rusted coupling or the thought of what the Chairman knew about their situation to ask him to do it in the first place.
“You hear that, Linc,” Cabrillo continued. “As soon as Mark’s done, turn the Pig around and shove this boxcar with everything you’ve got. Hear me?”
“I’m through,” Mark announced before the SEAL could respond.
In the Pig, Linc stood on the brakes, blowing off clouds of carbon dust from the nearly spent pads. He cranked the wheel as soon as he felt it safe enough. The tires hit the railroad ties with bone-jarring regularity, and the heavy truck grew light on one side. He rammed it into first before he’d come to a complete stop, kicking up twin sprays of ballast stones. The truck leapt after the runaway freight car, Linc aiming to put the wheels atop the rails once again. His vision blurred, and it felt like his molars were going to come loose from his jaw before he could center the Pig on the tracks.
Once the wheels were aligned, he chased down the car until the reinforced bumper kissed its coupling. He watched, amazed, as Mark Murphy planted one foot on the bumper and bent to strip off coils of towline from the Pig’s forward winch and started to wrap it around the coupling to secure the two vehicles together. Linc had never doubted the kid’s courage, but even he would have thought twice about the dangerous maneuver.
“Chairman,” he called, “I’m around and pushing hard. Murph’s tying us to the train car with the winch.”
“Mark, have you run your calculations?” Cabrillo asked. He stood over the young weapons expert and watched him work.
Murph snapped the winch’s hook around a couple of loops of cable and climbed up the Pig’s windshield before turning to the Chairman and answering. “Yeah, just like you asked, I mathed it. The freight car’s got enough buoyancy to hold us on the surface. The unknown is how fast water is going to fill it up.”
“Max will just have to be quick with the Oregon’s derrick crane.”
“Tell him he should switch from a lifting hook to the magnetic grapple.”
Juan instantly saw the logic to Murph’s suggestion. The big electromagnet wouldn’t require crewmen to secure the crane to the freight car.
Behind him, the train must have cleared another hill because Linda opened up again with the M60. He caught whiffs of cordite smoke in the air as the railcar continued to accelerate. He turned. The bridge was still some distance away and looked as delicate as a railroad hobbyist’s model. Under the hail of tracers arcing in toward the structure, the men setting the explosives hid behind the trestle supports again. At the speed the Pig was pushing the old freight car, they would be sweeping through another turn in seconds, and the terrorists would be free to finish their work.
Cabrillo went ashen under his tan. He knew with certainty that they weren’t going to make it. The Pig snarled as it pushed the boxcar, but they were just too far away, and without a direct line of fire to keep the sappers pinned they would be ready to blow the bridge at about the same time the train hit the trestle.
He was just about to order Linc to stand on the brakes in the vain hope that they could unload the passengers and make some sort of stand when movement on the far side of the bridge caught his eye. At first, he couldn’t tell what he was seeing because the heavy timber supports obscured his view.
And then without warning the Corporation’s glossy black McDonnell Douglas MD-520N helicopter roared over the bridge. With its ducted exhaust eliminating the need for a rear rotor, and by using every scrap of cover he could find, George “Gomez” Adams had achieved complete surprise.
The sound of the rotors and Adams’s rebel yell filled Cabrillo’s earpiece. The noise was quickly drowned out by the hammering of a heavy machine gun. A figure silhouetted in the chopper’s open rear door had opened fire at near-point-blank range. The thick timber supports had stood for more than a century, baking and curing in the relentless desert heat until they were as hard as iron. And ye
t chunks of wood exploded off the bridge under the relentless fire, leaving behind raw white wounds and a steady rain of dust and sand. Where the bullets met flesh, the damage was much, much worse.
“About time you showed up,” Juan radioed.
“Sorry about the dramatic entrance,” Gomez Adams replied. “Headwind the whole way here.”
“Keep them pinned on the bridge until we cross, then fly cover for us until we hit the dock.” Juan changed frequencies. “Max, you there?”
“Sure am,” Max said breezily as if he didn’t have a care in the world, which showed how worried he really was.
“What’s your ETA?”
“We’ll be alongside the dock about two minutes before you get here. Just so you know, it’s a floating pier, and at the speed you’re going to hit the rail bumpers at the end you’re going to kill everyone in the boxcar.”
“That’s your idea of an FYI? You have a plan?”
“Of course. We’ve got it handled.”
“All right,” Juan said, trusting his second-in-command implicitly. With so much happening on and around the train, he would leave the details to Hanley.
They were barreling through the turn now. The engineers who’d built the line had carved a narrow shelf into the side of the hill, barely wide enough for the freight car. He imagined that when they normally took the big locomotive through the tight curve, they did so at a snail’s pace. Living rock whizzed by the edge of the car with less than a hand span’s clearance.
The tight tolerances saved their lives.
The train’s outside wheels lifted off the track, and the top edge of the car slammed into the blasted-stone wall, gouging out a deep rent in the rock and showering Cabrillo with chips as sharp as glass shards. The impact forced the car’s wheels back onto the rail, and for a moment they held before the incredible centrifugal forces acting on them lifted them up again. Again, the top edge of the car tore into the rock, but this time Juan turned so it was his back and not his exposed face blasted by debris.
“Chairman?” There was something in Franklin Lincoln’s voice that Cabrillo had never heard. Fear.
“Don’t you dare slow down now!” Juan said. Below him he could hear their passengers’ screams of panic. As bad as it was riding on top of the car, he couldn’t imagine what they were experiencing in the pitch-darkness inside.
Twice more, they hit the rock, before the turn started to lose its tight radius and the wheels stayed firmly planted on the hot iron rails. That was the last curve before they hit the bridge. Before them was a straight shot down a gentle defile, then across the trestle. A flash of light blazed off the binoculars of an observer in the valley below the bridge. Juan could almost sense the man’s thoughts despite the distance. Seconds later, an order had to have been given, because the men rigging the bridge with explosives started swarming down the trestle, ignoring the blistering fire from Gomez Adams in the MD-540.
Cabrillo moved to the leading edge next to where Linda and Alana crouched behind the M60.
“I know I’m dating myself,” Linda said, her face a little pale under its dusting of freckles, “but that’s what I call an E-ticket ride. Makes the Matterhorn feel tame.”
She no longer had an angle to fire at the men, but Adams was making their retreat hell.
“There’s nothing more we can do,” Juan shouted over the roar of wind filling his ears. They were pushing sixty miles per hour, and the rush of wind over the carriage threatened to blow them off if they rose above a crouch. “Let’s get back to the Pig.”
He hefted the big gun, with its necklace of shining brass shells dangling from the receiver, so Linda and Alana could crawl back to the rear of the car together. They lowered themselves down onto the Pig’s cab and then vanished through the open hatch. Cabrillo paused for a moment, forcing his eyes to slits to look up the tracks. Adams ducked and weaved in the chopper, dancing away from enemy fire, while his door gunner—Cabrillo thought he recognized the beefy form of Jerry Pulaski—peppered the bridge supports whenever the helo was steady enough to shoot.
The tone of wheel against rail suddenly changed. They were on the first section of the bridge. A quick glance over the side of the car confirmed that the ground was beginning to recede from under them.
The explosion came farther along the bridge’s length, on the valley floor near one of the trestle supports. Smoke and flame climbed the wooden members, mushrooming outward and upward like a deadly bloom. Cabrillo threw himself flat as the train barreled through the pulsing surge of fire and emerged on the other side with no more damage than some singed paint.
Behind them the blast had weakened the bridge’s lattice framework, but Linda’s and then Adams’s sniping had prevented the terrorists from properly rigging the structure. The supports stood firm for a solid ten seconds after the train had rushed past, allowing them to get nearly to the end of the long span before the structure started to collapse. The great timbers fell in on themselves, the valley choking with dust thick enough to obscure the waiting Mi-8 helicopter and the tiny figures of running terrorists.
The bridge fell like dominoes, the steel rails sagging as though they had no more strength than piano wire. Linc had to have seen what was happening behind the Pig in the wing mirrors, because the engine beat changed when he flooded the cylinders with nitrous oxide.
Wood and iron tumbled in a rolling avalanche that chased after the fleeing boxcar. Cabrillo watched awestruck as the bridge vanished in their wake. He should have felt fear, but his fate wasn’t in his hands, so he saw the spectacle with almost clinical detachment. And even as the Pig gained more speed, so, too, did the structure’s incredible failure. A hundred feet behind their rear bumper, the rails quivered and then vanished into the boiling maelstrom of dust.
He didn’t dare look ahead to see how much farther they had to travel. It was better, he thought fleetingly, not to know.
Just as the rails started to dip under them, the hollow sound of air rushing below the carriage changed once again and thick wooden ties appeared under the line. They had made it just as the last of the bridge crumpled into the valley, rending itself apart so that nothing showed above the billowing debris.
Cabrillo pumped his fist, shouting at the top of his lungs, and nearly lost his footing in his excitement. “That was a hell of a piece of driving,” he called to Linc. “Is everyone okay?”
“We’re all good,” Lincoln replied.
There was something his voice, something Cabrillo didn’t like. “What is it, big man?”
“I tore the guts out of the transmission the last time I hit the nitro. I’m looking down the tracks in the mirror and see we’re laying one hell of an oil slick.”
It was only after it was reported that Juan noticed he couldn’t hear the motor’s aggressive growl. Without gears, there was no reason to leave the engine running.
“Mark says the rest of the line is pretty gentle, but . . .” He let his voice trail off.
“And let me guess,” Juan added, “our brakes are shot, too.”
“I’ve got my foot pressed to the floorboards, for whatever good it’ll do us.”
Juan looked in the direction they were heading. The ocean was a slag-gray shimmer in the distance. The train tracks’ terminus was hidden in a fold of land, though he estimated they had only a few more miles to go. He also agreed with Mark Murphy’s assertion that the rest of the way was a gentle glide down to the sea. He could only hope that whatever reception Max had planned would work because when he clamped on the boxcar’s brakes he could tell they, like the Pig’s, were worn down to nothing.
“Max, do you read me?” he said into his mic.
“Loud and clear.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re in position and ready to pick you up.”
“Any word on the choppers of the Libyan strike team?”
“No. I suspect they’ll come in from the south, so we’ll never see them. And more important, they’ll never see us.”
> “As soon as you have us with the magnet, I want Eric to make best possible speed into international waters.”
“Relax, Juan. Everything’s ready. Doc Huxley and her people have set up the forward hold with cots, blankets, and plenty of IV drips. The cooking staff ’s been whipping up enough food to feed the people you’ve found, and I’ve got every weapons system on the ship locked and loaded in case someone wants to take them back.”
“Okay. Okay, I get it. We’ll be there in about three minutes.”
The last section of the rail line came out of the mountains through a valley that ran right to the sea. The Corporation people, along with Alana, Greg Chaffee, and their new Libyan charge, Fodl, were strapped into the Pig, while the rest of the refugees in the boxcar had been given a shouted warning to brace themselves.
The old coaling station was a run-down ruin, little more than the metal framework of a couple of buildings with bits of wood still somehow clinging to their sides. The cranes that once filled freighters with coal were long gone, and the desert had hidden where the anthracite had once been mounded in the lee of a cliff.
The Oregon loomed over the newly installed floating dock. Her main cargo derrick was swung over into position, and the large electromagnet dangled less than twenty feet over the pier.
Juan’s pride usually swelled a bit whenever he saw his creation, but this time his mind was on the speed the train was making as it raced for the station. He fought the urge to glance at the speedometer but guessed they were pushing seventy. He’d expected Max would have laid down some sort of barrier foam to slow the train, but he saw nothing on the tracks. Then he realized the dock was much lower in the water than he’d first thought. In fact, the far end of it was completely submerged.
He laughed aloud when the hurtling train left its old railbed and started along the pier. Max had holed the large interlocked plastic pods that made up the dock, most likely with the Oregon’s Gatling gun. The pier’s own weight started it sinking, and as the boxcar pressed down the pier dipped deeper.
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