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Prologue
THE C-141 STARLIFTER CARGO plane had been airborne for nearly ten hours.
Carving its way through the icy arctic air streams high over Free Canada, the huge jet was following no set flight plan. Nor did it have any particular destination.
The airplane, known by the call name Candlestick One, was in effect a flying prison, one of four C-141’s configured for the job. The single prisoner it carried was considered so likely to escape that the only way to prevent such an attempt was to keep the person in question airborne for extended periods of time. This way, the only time the prisoner would even set foot on the ground was in switching from one of the four of prison planes to another.
The prisoner was awaiting trial for attempted murder. Not a month before, six shots had been fired into the disgraced former vice-president of the United States, he having been convicted of high treason just minutes before the assassination attempt. The traitor clung to life for days, finally recovering to the point where he was transferred to a special secret prison in Nova Scotia. The would-be assassin was apprehended seconds after the shooting and arrested. A trial was scheduled to begin in two months.
The fact that the prisoner was a celebrity—and a very beautiful woman to boot—had long ago lost its novelty on the flight crews of the Candlestick aircraft. They all knew her past history. The daughter of a famous scientist, she had been kidnapped by a gang of Nazis who exploited her extraordinary “deep zone” archaeology skills to find lost Mayan and Inca gold in Central America—bullion which would fuel their Panama-based fascist war machine. While being held captive, this beautiful, intelligent woman went mad. And in her twisted insanity, she had plotted and carried out the shooting of the traitorous ex-vice-president.
Ever since then, everyone in the country knew the name of Elizabeth Sandlake.
Sticking to the customs used before World War III had devastated America, most of the people assigned to guard the prisoner were women.
Every day they strip searched the prisoner, fed her, watched her as she bathed and sat outside her small prison cabin as she slept. Like just about everyone else who came in contact with her, these women guards couldn’t believe that Elizabeth was the insane criminal that the media claimed she was.
So, inevitably perhaps, the female guards on Candlestick One became friendly with her—in the end, too friendly. The truth was they had unsuspectingly come under the influence of Elizabeth’s considerable hypnotic powers. Soon enough, the time devoted to strip searching actually evolved into sensuous mutual massage sessions, as did the daily bathing ritual. The eating periods were filled with long, whispered conspiratorial conversations.
And frequently, the prisoner did not sleep alone.
Gradually, over the course of several weeks, the men in the flight crew aboard Candlestick One also came under Elizabeth’s spell. Soon, they too were participating in intimate meetings with her. At one point, five of the six men had proclaimed nothing less than undying love for her.
Little did they know that their declaration would prove prophetically true.
On this night, Candlestick One had just completed a routine mid-air refueling when the pilots heard someone climb up to the flight deck.
Turning around and expecting to see one of the guards, they were stunned to find Elizabeth standing before them, stark naked.
“I’ve escaped,” she said with a hint of her frighteningly unique laugh. “Who wants to be the first to help me celebrate?”
Right away the pilots realized their fraternization with the prisoner had gone too far. Before this, despite all the dalliances, she had never been allowed to roam the airplane alone, never mind naked.
Now the copilot stood up to escort her back to her cabin. But no sooner had he unstrapped from his seat when she suddenly produced a gun which she’d been hiding behind her back.
“Come over here,” she told the man, pointing the revolver with one hand and seductively squeezing her lovely right breast with the other. “I want to give you something….”
Seeing he had no other choice, the copilot obeyed. As soon as he was close enough, Elizabeth stuck her free hand down the man’s pants and began fondling him. He quickly approached a climax, one that she could sense by his quickened breathing and groaning.
“Do you like it?” she asked, expertly moving her fingers.
“Yes …” the man answered breathlessly.
“Is it the best you’ve ever had?”
Again the man answered: “Yes …”
“Do you really love me?”
“God, yes …” was the reply.
With that she quietly put the gun to the man’s head. Then, at the precise instant the climactic moment arrived, she pulled the trigger.
It was the frightened pilot who next felt the cold steel on his forehead and the soft groping hand inside his pants.
“I’m in charge now,” Elizabeth whispered into his ear, her voice dripping with heart-stopping sensuality. “And you’re going to fly me anywhere I want to go, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” came the terrified reply.
Part One Other Voices
Chapter 1
Los Angeles, Free Republic of California
“THIS TRULY IS AN awesome sight, ladies and gentlemen.” Nick “Red” Banner, newsman for KOAS-TV in Los Angeles, was shouting into his microphone and trying not to throw up at the same time. “There are thousands of spectators on hand here today. They are stretching in lines along the tracks that go back as far as I can see. And, of course, all of them want to be here to witness this historic occasion.”
Banner was delivering his report from a helicopter circling over downtown LA. And that was a story in itself.
When his station manager had first assigned the newsman to cover the “historic occasion” from the air, Banner had told him that he was apprehensive.
Actually, scared to death was more like it.
Banner hated flying, and so he preferred to leave the aerial heroics to someone else. His station manager had other ideas however. He reminded Banner that the people of Los Angeles and the rest of California depended on his news reports every day. The compliment was technically correct: KOAS-TV was the only television station operating on the West Coast these days, and because he was the senior anchorman, the audience had little choice but to watch Big Red.
Still Banner had refused. He didn’t trust aircraft or pilots, and nothing in his contract said he had to go up. It was only when the station manager threatened to send a rookie reporter—a woman no less!—to cover this, the biggest story since the end of the war, that Banner changed his mind.
So now he was strapped tightly into the helicopter, trying to convince himself that he was being very courageous about the fact that he was hovering a couple of thousand feet off the ground with a hearty breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon in his stomach that was barely an hour old.
Truth was, he had never felt so sick in his life. To combat his nausea and nervousness, Red was talking even louder and faster than usual.
“A stream of humanity has been pouring into downtown LA since early this morning,” he boomed, over-emphasizing the so-called punch words in his commentary. “Everyone wants to be part of this momentous event. Everyone wants to be able to tell their grandchildren they were here on this magical day when the great train came roaring out of the east …”
It was not unusual for Banner to overwhelm his viewers with hyperbole, even when covering the most mundane events. But today, his inflated speaking style was almost appropriate.
After all, he really was covering an event of historical significance.
Three days before, a similar great event had taken place in Football City—the metropolis known as St. Louis before World War III and its bloody aftermath had torn apart the American continent. Football City sat right on the eastern edge of the heartland of America, the vast area that had been devastated by a Sovi
et nuclear sneak attack at the end of that war. Even today, five years later, the region from the Dakotas down to Texas and on through New Mexico and Arizona remained a ghostland of inconceivable destruction and desolation.
The region was appropriately called the Badlands.
Since the war, traveling across the Badlands by land was considered suicidal. In addition to some lingering effects of the radiation and the hallucinogenic gases the Soviets had sent over, the habitable portions of the region were now populated mostly by roving bands of cutthroat terrorists, common bandits, air pirates and other assorted varieties of human slime.
The Bads had also been the site of several huge battles fought after the war between the American democratic forces and those allied with the Red Star, the fanatical Soviet clique that had launched World War III in the first place. It was their aim to see the American continent stay divided in the war’s aftermath, but after a handful of bloody years, the Americans had managed to throw them out. One side effect was that the Bads was now a kind of junkyard for military equipment, much of which still worked.
No surprise then that for anyone who wanted to travel from one coast of the American continent to the other, the preferred means of transport was in something high and fast—something that would fly over the nightmare landscape at about twenty-five thousand feet, going five hundred mph plus. Thus, for a long time, airplanes had become the sole means of long-distance travel between the civilized coasts.
But times were changing in America. Most of the Soviet-backed forces were gone, defeated by the democratic armies. The massive air convoys that traversed the continent had increased threefold. The water route through the Panama Canal had been secured, and the enormous task of rebuilding the eastern side of the continent—the scene of most of the battles against the Soviet-backed armies—had begun.
All that remained was to open a secure land route between the coasts.
Most of the highways had been long ago destroyed. But oddly enough, a vast majority of the railroad system was still intact, including the old Amtrak southern route. However, these tracks ran through New Mexico and Arizona—the most treacherous territories in the southwest Badlands—and no one had yet attempted to travel on them.
Until now.
The train had left Football City to a rousing send-off three days before.
An intrepid band of adventurers—they had dubbed themselves, The Modern Pioneers—had strung together a bunch of railroad cars and a locomotive on little more than a dare and had set out across the untamed country. Twenty-four of them in all, their well-publicized mission “was to relight the spirit of adventure and exploration on the continent.”
Very few in the thousands of people crowded along the tracks leading to LA’s recently rebuilt Amtrak station thought that one train making this journey meant it was again safe to travel across the country. No, this first trip would be more of a symbolic victory—another important step in the process of restoring the stability of the reemerging American nation.
Unlike most of the country, the West Coast had escaped much of the brutal fighting and destruction of the past few years, but the people of LA had still felt the effects of the horrors back East nevertheless. Many young men had left LA and joined America’s freedom forces, now known as the United American Army, as they battled to restore liberty to the American continent. Many did not return. Even today, hundreds of well-armed soldiers circulated in the crowd, a constant reminder that America could never again lower its vigilance against the ever-present dangers from within and without.
Still, as the Pioneer Train’s scheduled arrival time drew closer, the festive mood of the huge throng swelled into a patriotic fervor. A band standing on the station platform broke into a stirring rendition of “America, the Beautiful.” Nearly every hand in the midst waved an American flag.
It was close to ten A.M. when somewhere at the far end of the crowd, several miles from the train station, a single voice suddenly called out, “There it is! I see it!”
Like a wave, the message rolled along the human pipeline to the station: “It’s here … the train is here. They made it!”
Suddenly all eyes were turned to the east. From his precarious perch in the sky, Red Banner should have been the first person to spot the train, it being a silver streak cutting through the foothills, rolling toward downtown LA. But Banner was so wrapped up in his efforts to verbalize the festive scene directly below him, that he neglected to watch for the historic train.
Finally his cameraman grabbed him by the shoulder. “Red! There it is!”
Banner swung around to look, just as the pilot swerved the chopper sharply to the left to give him a better view.
Banner felt his stomach roll up into his mouth.
“What the hell are you trying to do, kill me?” he bleated into his microphone, to the delight of several thousand viewers.
The newsman quickly regained his poise and resumed describing the scene below him.
“The crowd is really becoming excited now … we can see the Pioneer’s train. It’s racing toward the station. It should be pulling in within a minute or two … we’re going to land very shortly so we can be on hand to greet the brave members of this history-making train crew. Until then, this is Red Banner for KOAS-TV.”
This time Banner remembered to turn off his mike before growling at his pilot.
“Get this damn thing down,” he yelled. “Fast!”
In his haste to return to solid ground, Banner failed to spot something that many of the people lining the tracks had already noticed as the train shot past them on its way to the station.
They had expected to be able to catch at least a glimpse of the crew members waving triumphantly from the train windows. Yet no faces appeared at those windows.
As the train approached the Amtrak terminal, an even greater concern began to grow in the crowd. Although it now was only a few hundred yards from the platform, the train was still rocketing along the tracks at an incredible speed.
With growing horror, the crowd realized that this train, careening along at nearly one hundred thirty miles an hour, wasn’t going to stop.
All along the tracks, people tried to flee. Only moments before, the air had been filled with the sounds of celebration; now it was filled with screams of terror and panic. Hundreds were trampled as the crowd quickly turned into a desperate, howling mob, scrambling for survival.
Under the feet of the unlucky ones, the ground began shaking. But this was no earthquake tremor. Like a giant metal monster relentlessly tracking its victim, the train charged into the mouth of the station.
The loading platforms inside the terminal were filled with dignitaries ready to welcome the heroic crew members. Although they had heard the shouts of panic from outside, there was no time for them to escape. The speeding train roared into the building, past the loading platform and, with a horrible, deafening crash, continued on into the back wall of the station.
As the wall collapsed, the roof of the building caved inward, raining tons of steel and concrete onto the crowd. The impact did little to slow the train, however. It rampaged on for several hundred yards, smashing out of the far end of the station and onto the crowded street before finally coming to rest in the middle of an abandoned department store. The resulting impact and explosion sent this three-story building toppling to the ground.
Behind the engine, the train’s twenty cars were tossed in all directions. The crash sent some of the cars catapulting high into the air. Others shot off the tracks and into the path of the fleeing mob, crushing bodies underneath. In seconds, death and debris were everywhere.
The veteran pilot of Red Banner’s helicopter had realized just in time that the train was going to crash. He managed to dodge the whirlwind of flying debris, rocketing the chopper back up to a safe altitude at the last possible second. Now the aircraft was slowly circling the devastation, the video cameraman hanging halfway out the window, capturing the horror below.
Yet Banner�
�s viewers were deprived of hearing his golden tones describe this scene of carnage and panic. He was too busy vomiting.
It would take almost a week for workers and volunteers to sort through the tons of wreckage surrounding what was left of the train and the station.
For days, the smell of seared wreckage and burned diesel fuel permeated downtown LA. The death toll finally was established at 502, many of the bodies burned or crushed beyond recognition.
The extent of the destruction made it virtually impossible for investigators to determine the cause of the crash. The locomotive was totally destroyed, so tracing any mechanical or electronic failure was out of the question.
But after dozens of hours of probing through the demolition, however, the city’s Civil Guard investigators were able to come up with one indisputable, haunting fact: When the death train roared into the LA station, no one had been on board.
About the Author
Mack Maloney is the author of numerous fiction series, including Wingman, Chopper Ops, Starhawk, and Pirate Hunters, as well as UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn’t Want You to Know. A native Bostonian, Maloney received a bachelor of science degree in journalism at Suffolk University and a master of arts degree in film at Emerson College. He is the host of a national radio show, Mack Maloney’s Military X-Files.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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