The train horn hooted again, much closer now.
At length, Jack lowered his weapon. “Our ride’s here.”
“Our ride?” she echoed.
He nodded, moving to a service ladder that ran up the side of the cable bridge. “You want your money? You’ll get it when I’m on that train and not before.”
* * *
The Union Pacific Blue Arrow high-speed freight run out of Chicago, bound for the Port of Los Angeles, had lost a little time. Forced to drop below its normal cruising pace as it entered the great turn that bisected the map of the county like an iron bow, the procession of cargo wagons, flatbeds and double-stacked car carriers was almost half a mile long from the dual engines at the head to the pair of pusher power units at the rear.
As the Blue Arrow’s lead locomotive finally cleared the outer edge of the turn and settled onto the start of the long straightaway before it, automated systems began to apply more power to the bogies to make up the time. A slow, inexorable climb up to full speed began, and from here the train would be racing the sunrise at its back all the way to the West Coast.
The crewmen in the cab were paying attention to the computer-controlled dashboard, as the lead engine rumbled under the cable bridge that was all that marked the passage past the township of Deadline. They didn’t see the two figures hunched low on the middle of the open-framed metal arch.
Blocky box cars full of freight streamed past beneath the bridge, followed by flatbeds where the massive iron drums of huge electrical motors had been lashed down. Beyond them, there were container wagons, more flatbeds but these were filled by the familiar steel bricks of rectangular cargo units. With their long, flat upper surfaces, they were the best place to board the moving train. Waiting too long would bring the automobile carriers at the rear under the bridge, and attempting to drop onto their irregularly shaped gantries would be too risky.
* * *
Jack took a last look over his shoulder to be certain of where he would land, then he leapt forward, off the cable bridge, throwing himself in the same direction as the moving train. He was still dizzy and nauseous from the effects of the tetrodotoxin dose in his system, but there was no time to wait for that to wear off.
He felt the air rushing around him, the thin rain against his face, and the drop seemed to take forever. The gap from the cable bridge to the top of the moving wagon was less than three feet, but it could have been a mile for all the time it took to cross it.
Then his feet hit the roof of the metal container and he stumbled forward, buffeted by wind, throwing out his hands. Jack went down and let it happen, spreading his weight so he wouldn’t trip and roll over the side. If he fell, he would be dashed to the ground racing past below, or worse, dragged under the bogies and crushed.
He heard a pair of clattering impacts behind him; first, as Mandy tossed her gear bag in his wake, and then as she followed it down. The mercenary made it look easy, dropping into a cat-fall without ever losing her balance.
Jack rose into a crouch and looked forward along the length of the train. In the distance, he could see the lights of the twin locomotives, but there was no sign that anyone up there had detected the arrival of the stowaways. He waited a moment to be sure, then started back down along the car. The rocking motion of the train took some getting used to, and Jack advanced in a zigzag pattern, letting the roll and shift of the container beneath his feet govern the speed of his advance.
Mandy pulled her gear bag to her as he approached, keeping her head down. “What now?” she shouted, fighting to be heard over the howl of the wind.
He pointed forward, indicating the nearest of the automobile carriers. “That way.”
Slow and sure-footed, they advanced along the moving train until they came to the end of the container car, and one by one Jack and Mandy dropped to the floor of the flatbed. The thin rain and the wind noise lessened in the lee of the container, and Jack paused to take a breath. He looked out across the landscape flashing past beside them. It was a featureless blur that seemed to go on into infinity. Dark territory, he thought to himself.
The vehicles on the lower deck of the closest car carrier were all well-appointed Volkswagen MPV minivans, and Mandy made short work of the lock on the nearest one, hauling open the sliding side door to gain entry. Jack followed her inside and closed it behind him.
“Not exactly a private cabin, but close enough,” she muttered. The gear bag dropped to the floor between the seats and she worked at her windblown hair, pushing it into some semblance of order. “Level with me, Jack,” Mandy asked, leaning back. “Do you actually have a plan of action, or are you just going to keep on running until you hit a brick wall?”
“It’s not your concern,” he retorted.
“I beg to differ. When there are people like you out in the world, I like to know where they’re at. So I can be somewhere else. Did you really believe anyone would think you’re heading to Hong Kong?”
“When I called you, why did you answer?” He held her gaze. “Why not just give me up, then and there? It would have been an easy payday.”
“Call it nostalgia. I’m not all about the money,” she demurred. Then that cunning smile came back. “Actually, that’s a lie.” Mandy drew out her smartphone and worked at the keypad. “And speaking of which … I need the code to get the balance of your payment from escrow. So let’s finish this, yes?”
He gave a nod. “I got a password: lifesucks, one word.”
Her smile grew into a grin as she entered the text string. “That’s so you.” After a few moments, the phone gave off a chime and Mandy nodded. “Transfer complete. A pleasure doing business with you.”
“Can’t say the same,” Jack replied, helping himself to a bottle of water from her bag. He guzzled it down in one long pull, and then took a shuddering breath. When he looked up, he saw that Mandy’s sly expression had hardened into something else: annoyance. She stabbed at the phone’s tiny keypad, eyes narrowing. “What’s wrong?”
“The money,” Mandy said quietly. “It’s not here.”
Jack’s hand dropped to his gun. “I paid you. We’re done.”
“Not you,” she hissed. “The Russians. They canceled the transfer to my offshore accounts. They reneged on the deal…”
He found it hard to summon up any sympathy for the woman. She was a murderer-for-hire, after all. “I guess they don’t trust you either—”
Out of nowhere, the satellite phone rang, and the abrupt rattle of the digital tone set them both to silence. Mandy reached to tap the “accept call” button, but Jack caught her wrist.
“Don’t worry,” she said, shaking him off, “I’ll put it on speaker.” She pressed the tab and the line connected. “Arkady. I was just thinking about you. Where’s my payment?”
* * *
Dimitri Yolkin pressed two fingers to the side of his headset and spoke carefully into the microphone. “Bazin is not available,” he told the woman. “He is on his way to another location. You will speak to me. There are questions.”
Across the dimly lit cabin of the Super Puma cargo helicopter, Yolkin’s SVR compatriot Mager was peering at the screen of a laptop computer. He nodded without looking up and pointed toward the ground below them. Behind Mager, there were two other operatives each in the process of making ready their weapons. In the shadows at the back of the compartment, the bodies of the Super Puma’s crew were barely visible, stacked like cordwood. They’d refused Yolkin’s demands to take off into the bad weather when he had arrived at the airstrip, even after he showed them his fake police ID. In the end, it had been the more expedient alternative to kill them and have one of his own men pilot the aircraft.
In fact, Yolkin was not completely certain where Bazin, Ziminova and the other helicopter were headed. That was not important. He and his hunter team had their orders, and they would execute them.
“What questions?” demanded the contractor. “You got the pictures? You saw? It’s over. Bazin told me to proceed h
ow I thought best. I’ve done that. Suvarov has gotten what he wanted.”
“Yes,” Yolkin agreed, feeling the helicopter start a descent through the buffeting winds and persistent rain. “But he will not be satisfied with only pictures. Where is the body? Physical proof is required.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal.” The momentary pause before she went on told Yolkin that she was lying to him. “It’s gone. I burned it.”
“I am not convinced.” Ahead, through the cockpit windows, he could see a long strip of lights shimmering as it moved across the barren landscape below.
“Not my problem.”
“You will see that it is.” He cut the call and pulled the headphone jack from his handset, switching it back to the helicopter’s onboard intercom.
“Location is confirmed,” Mager said. “She’s on the train.”
“She is attempting to deceive us,” Yolkin told Mager and the others. “Find her. Kill her.”
* * *
“Shit.” Mandy glared at the silent phone in her hand. “Bazin must have … inserted a code worm into the intel data he sent. They tracked me.” She dropped the device to the floor and stamped on it.
Jack went to the window of the minivan as a distant flash of lightning lit up the sky. “Little late for that now.” He glimpsed a flickering shape overhead and realized it was the sweep of a spinning rotor disc. “They’re coming.”
He turned back and found the muzzle of Mandy’s Walther P99 aimed directly at his right eye. “I knew I should have really killed you,” she snapped.
“Do it,” he said. “And that’ll get you, what? An extra thirty seconds before the Russians decide to shoot you anyway? You know how the SVR works. They don’t like loose ends.”
Jack heard the thrumming rotors as the helicopter made a low pass over the top of the train, the pilot lining up and matching speed.
Mandy swore again and let the gun drop. “Just know this. Get in my way and I won’t hold fire.”
“I was going to say the same thing.” Jack pulled the Nemesis sniper rifle from the Velcro straps holding it to the gear bag and pocketed a spare ammunition magazine. “If the train crew are alerted, we’re blown. We’ve gotta deal with this quickly.” He grabbed the handle on the minivan’s door and yanked it open. “Get their attention.”
Windblown rain spattered his face as he dropped out of the vehicle and onto the bottom of the car carrier. Jack held the spindly rifle close to his chest and moved low toward the rear of the wagon.
Above, the gray form of the helicopter’s belly was visible, and as he watched a hatch slid back. A head peeked out over the side, then vanished back within. The aircraft shifted, dropping closer to the top of the car carrier. Jack had no angle, and he kept moving, letting the shadows conceal him.
A figure—a stocky man clutching a silenced short-frame AKS-74U—emerged from the open hatch and hesitated on the threshold, looking for a place to put down. His delay cost him his life.
Mandy had ditched the Walther’s suppressor and so Jack saw the flash and heard the crack-crack of shots as she fired straight up from below. Both rounds hit the Russian operative and he dropped from the helicopter’s open hatchway, crashing hard into the roof of a town car on the wagon’s upper deck. The dead man’s body slid down, off the rain-slick hood, before falling over the side. The rushing blackness swallowed up the corpse and it was gone.
Guns opened up from inside the helicopter’s cargo bay and Jack ducked as bullets shredded metal and shattered glass. The gray aircraft drifted forward, turning to present its flank. The pilot put the helicopter into a sideways attitude perpendicular to the line of the train cars, and the men inside kept firing, shooting wild to keep Jack and Mandy in cover.
Two more figures dropped out of the open hatch and landed on the roof of the containers one car back. They started forward, but with only the ghostly, random illumination of distant lightning, it was hard to see anything of them except vague shadows.
The bulky Super Puma helicopter was a different story. Even though the pilot had switched off the navigation indicators, the cockpit was still aglow through the greenhouse-like canopy, and dull illumination spilled from the still-open hatch.
Moving quickly, Jack snapped open the bipod legs on either side of the sniper rifle’s barrel and laid it across the hood of a Jetta chained to the deck of the car carrier. He put his eye to the thermal-optic sight just as the helicopter pivoted, pointing its nose back toward the rear of the train. His first shot was a little wide, something to be expected with an unfamiliar weapon, and he saw the bright flare of the bullet as it ricocheted off the hull of the aircraft, narrowly missing the hazy figure of another gunman in the rear compartment.
He worked the bolt, ejecting the round and chambering another in one smooth motion, and now the prow of the helo was turning directly toward him, presenting a perfect target. Through the canopy the thermal scope showed him the white phantom of the pilot’s upper torso. The sight picture was a mess of motion. Every element in the shot was shifting. Jack fired again and put a round into the cockpit, but missed anything vital. He saw the pilot twitch in shock and hesitate.
It was enough. A split second after Jack had worked the rifle’s action once more, he ranged his third shot right into the helicopter pilot’s sternum.
* * *
Slumping forward, the pilot’s hands went loose on the controls and the Super Puma’s engines revved. As if it had been jerked on an invisible line, the cargo helicopter lurched away, describing a terminal arc that sent it up into a stall and then back down again, slipping sideways into a plowed cornfield a few hundred yards from the rail line.
Rotors chopped at the dirt, buckled and snapped off. The fuselage rolled onto its side, crumpled and broke. In seconds, fires started in the overstressed engine compartment.
The train was long gone by the time the flames reached the fuel tank and turned the crashed aircraft into a blazing torch, the crash of the explosion and the flash of light blending into the thunder of the storm high above.
* * *
The men that dropped from the helicopter came to the far end of the cargo container, leading with their guns, firing bursts of suppressive fire down toward the car carrier beneath then. Bullets chewed up the hood of the minivan and punched through metal, forcing Mandy to give up her position and break into a run. She sprinted back down the length of the wagon, shoving her way past Jack, and she leapt the gap to the next carrier along.
Jack saw her go and frowned. Falling back wasn’t going to cut it. They would run out of train long before the SVR hunters ran out of ammunition. He crouched, his thoughts turning. Every second the Russians were still breathing was a second they could be calling for reinforcements. With the chopper out of the picture, Jack had the edge, but hard experience had taught him never to count on the odds.
* * *
Ahead, the two men scrambled down from the wagon and began moving forward. Yolkin tapped Mager on the shoulder and pointed toward the carrier’s upper deck. Mager nodded his understanding and slung his Kalashnikov, reaching for the rungs of a metal ladder.
Yolkin snapped on a tactical light under the barrel of his weapon and advanced, panning the beam left and right across the flanks of the cars rattling and pulling against the tethers holding them in place. He glimpsed a flicker of movement in the next wagon along and smiled. The woman—the contractor—had nowhere to go, and if, as he was certain, she had Bauer with her, the two of them would soon be dead. Yolkin allowed himself a smirk, and wondered if he would be personally rewarded by President Suvarov for ending the life of the troublesome American.
He moved slowly past a silver sedan, ignoring the increasing force of the downpour as the train drove deeper into the storm line. A lightning flash gave him a moment of stark, white-lit visibility, and it betrayed the woman. He saw her pressed against the wheel of a people-carrier, her gun held high.
Yolkin raised his weapon and thumbed the fire selector to full auto.
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* * *
Jack waited until the Russian’s outline was in the right spot, and then with all the force he could muster, he kicked out with both feet against the inside of the Jetta’s passenger door. Laying low across the back seats, the gunman had missed Jack there in the shadows, and now he would pay for it.
The door hinged open like a pinball flipper and knocked the Russian off his feet, slamming him into the frame of the wagon. Jack slid out of the car and hit him again with the sniper rifle. The weapon was too long for him to use in such close quarters, so he repurposed it as a club, cracking the gunman across the side of the skull as he tried to recover. The whipcord-thin Russian fumbled at his weapon and Jack kept on hitting him, keeping him off-balance.
The other man swore in his native language and fought back, grabbing the stock of the rifle as Jack brought it across his head once again. Despite the gunman’s tall, thin build, he was strong enough to be a match for Jack. They fell into a savage push-pull battle, back and forth across the wet metal deck of the wagon, bouncing off the flanks of the rain-slick cars. The Russian forced the frame of the sniper rifle back at Jack’s throat, putting all his power into the motion, trying to choke him with it.
Jack slipped against the trunk of the sedan and used the motion to his advantage, pushing himself about, abruptly spinning the Russian back around to face him in the opposite direction.
Pistol shots rang out in the damp air and the gunman jerked, his eyes going wide with agony. His legs bent and he staggered. Jack glimpsed ugly entry wounds across his back and saw Mandy, half in cover from where she had shot him. The Russian collapsed to the deck and was still.
In the next second, Mandy was shouting into the wind. “Above you!”
Jack twisted away as automatic fire blazed down at him from the car carrier’s upper deck, losing the rifle. He felt the burning line of a bullet crease his arm as he vaulted out of the line of fire, and almost overbalanced. For one unpleasant moment, Jack lurched out into the rush of the wind whipping past the train, and he clutched at a dangling chain to stop himself from falling into the darkness.
24: Deadline (24 Series) Page 27