Iron Dove

by Leon, Judith

  She studied the entrance to the gangway between the engine and Car No. 1. Again, a floodlight helped. Cesare had explained how to get the door to slide open from the outside by hitting a big black button midway down on the door’s right side.

  She leaned close to her new partner’s faceplate and yelled, “I’m going first. I’m more flexible.”

  Con 3 nodded.

  Using the same line, the crew slowly let her down the fifteen or so feet between the helicopter and the gangway door.

  Whoa! What a difference this drop was, moving in tandem with a speeding engine. For a moment she froze, clinging to the line and feeling paralyzed as wind whipped at her body. After what seemed like fifteen terrifying minutes but was probably no more than fifteen seconds, she came level with the black button, a spotlight from the helicopter holding a jumping beam on it as the train sped through the moonlit night.

  She reached out to smack it, and the wind caught her arm. She spun wildly.

  She had to stop the spin before the crew panicked and started reeling her back up. She stuck out her free leg, the one with the sprained ankle. Her leg slammed against the car, and a jolt of electricity shot up her leg into her lower back. But her spinning stopped.

  She leaned into the wind and reached out, almost but not quite close enough to hit the floodlit black target.

  She waved for them to bring her in closer.

  It took the helicopter several seconds to maneuver, but the next time she reached out, she banged on the button and the door slid open.

  Gasping for air, which the train’s forward speed seemed to suck from her lips, she signaled to be lowered a bit more. Three times, she snatched at a handrail; the fourth time, she met with success. She pulled herself inside and onto the second step, quickly kicked her foot free from the loop so she wouldn’t get pulled out and fell back against the third step.

  “Damn!” she said, her head bowed, her pulse a throbbing lump in her throat.

  It was much easier getting her new partner down since she could grab his leg and his arms and then pull him in.

  The minute he was inside, she checked time. 8:37. Only three minutes left until they reached the blown-up tracks.

  “Con 1 in place, Con 2,” she said over the communicator.

  “Roger,” came Joe’s reply. “Con 2 uncoupling Car No. 4 from Car No. 5 now.”

  Con 3 had already opened the trap door on the floor of the gangway. This opening gave them access to the coupling between Car No. 1 and the engine. The noise from the wheels on the tracks and the rush of wind muffled her head in a blanket of sound.

  She studied the coupling. The directions were simple: lift the horizontal bar called a “cut lever”—using the flashlight, she spotted it immediately—to raise the pin that held the coupler closed. Once the pin came up, the coupler would open and the engine, still under propulsion, would pull slowly away from Car No. 1 and the rest of the train. But a full stop would take time, since the back of the train had lots of forward momentum. The stop, everyone hoped, would come well before the train arrived at the blown-up tracks.

  “Looks easy,” she yelled to her white-clad partner, avoiding the intercom even though she wasn’t sure he could hear over the wind and rattle of metal upon metal.

  She also located the two lines linked together that operated the air brakes. These she would separate before she pulled the coupler pin.

  “I don’t know what’s taking him so long,” she yelled. She checked her watch. Eight thirty-eight and ten seconds. Come on, Joe!

  At the sound of a loud boom, her head went up and she froze. The new sound mixed with all the noise of wind and wheels on tracks around her, but she could guess that its origin lay ahead. The deed was done.

  “They’ve blown the tracks,” her partner yelled. “We either get this thing apart, or in a little over a minute, you and I are going to get a really rough ride on a nasty train crash.”

  She heard Joe softly in her ear. “Con 1, this is Con 2. We’re a go. The train’s back half is free. Get us unhooked from the damn engine!”

  Checking time, her heart banging against her chest, she forced herself to wait the fifteen seconds they had agreed on between the time he cut loose the back of the train and she separated the remaining Cars No. 1 through No. 4 from the engine. When the cars stopped, they wanted the passengers in the train’s rearward section to be as far from Car No. 3 as possible.

  Finally, at thirteen seconds, she fell onto her belly and reached down through the trap door preparing to put her hand on the cut lever so she could pull it up at exactly fifteen seconds. She stretched…but couldn’t reach the cut lever, let alone the air hose connection. She inched forward as far as she could without falling down onto the coupling. Her fingers still fell a frustrating centimeter short.

  “Hold my legs!”

  Her partner grabbed her around her calves; she stretched the last bit, pulled up on the cut lever and saw that the pin came up nicely.

  The engine immediately began to pull away. The air hose snapped or broke apart on its own. The ground whizzed by in a flickering, dark blur.

  Please, please let us stop in time. I don’t want to check out yet.

  Chapter 42

  Nova scrambled to her feet and Con 3 dropped the gangway trapdoor into place. Leading the way, she passed to the far end of Car No. 2. Then, crouching down so as to avoid being seen through the window of the door into Car No. 3, she and Con 3 entered the gangway between the two cars.

  “Con 1 in position in the gangway between two and three,” she said softly.

  “Roger, Con 1,” Joe answered back. “Con 2 in position at the rear of Car No. 3.”

  Now she and Joe would wait and pray. Holding tightly on to the handrail and squatting low on the first step, she opened the gangway door and leaned out of the train enough to watch the south side of Car No. 3. Con 3 crouched with his gun aimed at the door, ensuring that no one left the car before it came to a halt and the Special Ops teams surrounded it. Joe and his partner, at the rear of No. 3, would do the same, with Joe watching the car’s north side.

  The swarm of helicopters Cesare had promised descended. Dark bodies, beating blades and floodlights jostled each other in the night sky. The horrible thought struck her that so many helicopters might collide with each other. With inertia winning over momentum, the train continued to slow.

  Maybe doing eighty now.

  On the train’s south side, the flat terrain had been clear-cut to about fifty feet from the tracks, at which point heavy woods of what looked like mixed beech and oak trees began. Not really ideal for containment. Way too easy for someone to run into the woods.

  When the train came to a full stop before hitting the twisted tracks, there would be new problems. The helicopters would disgorge armed Special Ops teams. No passengers would be allowed to leave their cars until the terrorists were captured, and she imagined that the terrorists might use the passengers in Car No. 3 as hostages. The action would get messy. Brutal. There really was no good way out of what lay ahead for the passengers in Car No. 3. Indeed, for every passenger on this ill-fated train.

  Speed down to about forty now.

  A barrage of gunfire erupted from Car No. 3. She heard the car’s door swish open behind her even as she watched glass exploding outward in floodlit shards from three car windows. She resisted the temptation to look behind—the door to Car No. 3 was Con 3’s job—she kept her attention fixed on the outside of the train.

  She heard her partner grunting, striking blows as he struggled with someone. Then all at once, three of the terrorists leaped out of the windows. This was her responsibility—to make sure no one left the train. One of the leapers, she was nearly certain, was the boy Ali.

  The terrorists slammed into the ground and rolled. She could see them easily in the moonlight, but floodlights that had been dancing all over rotated and also fixed on the fleeing men. Nova leaped from the train, and she too slammed into the ground and rolled. When she stopped rolli
ng, she lay still, stunned and out of breath. Her communicator had popped out of her ear. She stuck it back in.

  Gunfire erupted from helicopters and the train moved away from her. She pulled her arms and legs under her onto all fours, looked to the spot where the three men had jumped. One lay on his back on the ground, probably wounded or dead, but Butch Cut and Ali were already near the trees.

  More gunfire from the helicopter, but both men disappeared into the woods.

  She picked up the Beretta and took off after them. “Con 1 in pursuit,” she gasped out between breaths.

  At the point where she thought they had entered the woods, she ran in after them, brushing away low branches and leaping over or dashing around stubby bushes. The noise from three helicopters made it impossible to hear anything.

  “Pull up!” she commanded. “I can’t find them if I can’t hear them.”

  Immediately, the three aircraft lifted. Ahead of her and to the left, moving in the same direction as the train, she heard the sounds of bodies crashing through underbrush and breaking dried twigs.

  Lights—ten or fifteen of them from four choppers—slashed into the woods, crisscrossing, zigzagging, searching.

  A tremendous metallic screeching, followed by booms, came rushing through the trees from a distance. She imagined the engineer putting on the brakes, perhaps trying to stop before flying off the blown-up tracks. She prayed the rest of the train would stop in time.

  “Ahead of you at eleven o’clock, Con 1,” said a voice in her ear.

  She spotted two shafts of light aimed at the ground in that direction and followed them. A black movement up ahead gave her visual contact. Was it Ali, her target, or Butch Cut?

  It’s what you can see. Figure it out later.

  The man tripped on something and went down. She strained to take advantage, pushing her legs still harder to catch him, alternately watching the ground and her quarry.

  Gunshots rang out ahead of her, and she started zigzagging. A bit of tree bark hit her forehead.

  The black figure ran to her left, his body flickering as he raced between one tree and the next. Lights hit him and then lost him.

  She braked to full stop, sucked in a deep breath, aimed; the next time a light hit him, she fired off six shots as if she were shooting at moving ducks on a belt at a carnival.

  He went down.

  As she ran toward him, he started firing again, but way off the mark. She shot three more times.

  She found Butch Cut lying in the center of a disk of light. One of her last three shots had hit him in the right cheek and taken out most of his brains. Blood had speckled and now pooled dark red on leaves, dirt and twigs around his head.

  She stopped, listened and heard a noise off still farther to her left.

  “About a hundred feet dead ahead,” said the voice in her ear. “Now he’s stopped, crouched behind a boulder that looks like a Humvee.”

  The ground sloped slightly uphill. He might be a teenage boy, but she was in top condition. Unless he was in equally good shape, going uphill gave her the advantage.

  “He’s running again,” said her eye in the sky.

  She took off after the sound, following the shaft of light.

  “You’re gaining,” came the voice.

  From ahead, gunshots rang out again. She ran still harder.

  Finally, she saw him. He stumbled, got off three shots at her while his legs kept him in motion. Catch him, she said to herself. Run.

  Suddenly, a clearing opened up ahead. When he ran into the clearing, he’d be naked to the relentless lights. He stopped, hugged a tree, moonlight alone lighting him.

  She huddled behind her own tree, an oak with foot-thick trunk.

  The teenager leaned against a sturdy birch tree, exhausted, and fired off three rounds in her direction—wild, pointless.

  Her hand froze—she didn’t return fire.

  “You can’t get away,” she yelled in Italian. Did he understand Italian?

  Two more shots was his answer.

  He wasn’t more than forty feet away and she could see his left leg. She took her time, held her breath, fired.

  He spun around and fell, face down.

  Lungs burning, she approached.

  At fifteen feet, he rolled over in the moonlight, aimed, and yelled, “Allahu Akbar.”

  She fired off three rounds to his one.

  So far Joe had counted six terrorists dead. On the train they had one alive, captive, and very pissed off. That left one more, the carrier, unaccounted for.

  “She’s about fifty feet ahead and to your left,” said a voice in his ear. “Follow my light.”

  The pissed-off captive on the train was a kid the right age to be the carrier, Ali, but the face was wrong. After a brief struggle in which the young thug had used a knife to cut across Joe’s chest, right through the jumpsuit and nearly through the skin—two inches higher and it would have been across Joe’s throat—Joe had hit the kid’s solar plexus so hard that his would-be teen killer fell motionless to his knees. Joe pushed him, facedown, onto the gangway and held him in place with a foot on his back and a gun at his head until Special Ops, dressed in HAZMAT gear, took over.

  “More to your left,” came his guiding voice from above.

  Joe shifted direction.

  Car No. 1 and the rest of the train, thank God, had stopped just short of the destroyed tracks. The engine hadn’t been so lucky.

  HAZMAT-dressed Special Ops teams swarmed around the cars like busy, white worker ants. Similarly outfitted medical teams were on the way.

  Quarantine and isolation now. Every car would be kept separate from every other car, and the passengers from the separated cars would be held in separate tents to await their fate—life or death within two days.

  Fortunately, the virus could only live outside a body, in open air, for not much more than ten minutes, so the quarantine and HAZMAT gear would only have to be worn when in contact with the passengers or in their shared environment.

  Joe saw Nova, sitting with her back against a birch tree, brightly lit by a floodlight. She seemed oblivious to its glare. Then he saw the body lying next to her. It had to be the carrier.

  She looked up at him, and she was crying. Great big tears.

  “Cut the damn light,” he said softly but firmly into the communicator.

  The floodlight moved off, leaving her in moonlight.

  Joe had never seen her cry.

  She shook her head and brushed at the tears. She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “He was just a kid.”

  So that was it. “He was willing to kill…he has killed…a great many people. Most of the people on this train, I’d guess.”

  “He can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.”

  “Old enough.”

  “Not so old.”

  He didn’t know what to do. Let her sit there? Make her get up? “Are you okay?”

  “You saw the tape. He did it because his family needed money and some goddamn scumbag said, ‘I’ll give them money. All you have to do is die and go to heaven.’” She bowed her head and shook it. “Maggie is only a few years younger than he is.”

  He squatted in front of her, made her look him in the eye. “Are you physically okay?” He didn’t add, “You had to do it, Nova.” She knew that. He’d not insult her by saying the obvious.

  She shrugged. “I didn’t feel a thing when my adrenaline was pumping, but right now my ankle is killing me.”

  “Good. I’m glad that’s all.” He stood, stuck out his hand; she took it, and he pulled her to her feet.

  “Want me to carry you?” he said, letting lightness touch his tone, hoping it would touch her feelings.

  It did. She shoved his shoulder in mock disgust. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Chapter 43

  Moving back toward the train, Nova limped beside Joe, fishing in a pocket for her cell phone. “We took one alive,” he explained.

  “Good.”

  She found the phone
and punched in the number Star had given her for Maggie. Maggie answered immediately. She and the Robertsons had done as Nova suggested. They were already holed up in the small hotel. Maggie wanted to know where Nova was and what she was doing. Nova explained that she couldn’t talk but that she was glad they were safe and that Nova would call later with more explanation.

  In Car No. 3 they found Provenza, dressed in a white HAZMAT suit and standing over a seated boy dressed in black. Two Special Ops men also hovered nearby with automatic rifles slung over their arms.

  Seeing her and Joe, Provenza said in English, “What about the carrier?”

  “He’s dead,” Joe said without emotion. “You should get a team to go collect his body.”

  Nova felt a twist in the pit of her stomach, a tightening of the throat. She wished she somehow could have avoided killing the boy. But then, within two weeks or less, he would have died horribly of Ebola. Maybe she should think of herself as an angel of mercy. Wasn’t it human nature to always try to put the best spin on your behavior, no matter how bad or disgusting or dishonorable it might be?

  “Good job! Excellent,” Provenza crowed.

  Praise was being heaped on her head; it just made her heart ache all the more.

  “You pigs, you infidel pigs,” the young terrorist spat out in decent English.

  “Well,” Provenza said. “So you can talk. And in English, no less.”

  “For your blasphemous lives and your support of the Great Satan, Allah will punish you by the legions with death.”

  “Sounds like something you’ve been made to memorize,” Provenza shot back.

  The terrorist’s young age struck her a fresh blow. So many young people suddenly in her life, and all of them so different: the dead Ali, a boy she’d killed, a boy who wanted to give his family financial support and who had died for a cause that he likely hadn’t understood; Maggie, the closest thing Nova had to a daughter, who still might contract this dreadful disease and die from it; and now this ignorant young hater, so filled with stupid lies and venom that he wanted to kill at random—young, old, evil or good—just kill. How could a species so willing to destroy its young, physically or with poisonous ideas, be so damn successful? Or then, again, were the doomsayers right? Were humans setting themselves up for extinction?