by Tom Clancy
Just a single occupant inside the HEP car. Clean reading. Where was the other agent?
“Briggs, we’re missing one. Stay sharp.”
“Yeah,” the man answered, his voice burred by what had to be an intense physical effort. “I’ll be ready.”
Fisher shot a look to the sky: He couldn’t see the choppers, but their rotor wash was suddenly stronger than the storm and blowing directly down on him.
Grim and Charlie were still unreachable.
As the pair of AH-6s continued around once more, Fisher peered alongside the HEP car, then looked up, zooming in with his trifocals.
Abqaiq rose like some otherworldly oasis from the swirling night, the once-bright security lights muted to soft candles, the chutes of burn-off bent sideways, the spherical tanks futilely barricading walls of sand that broke into tendrils and reared back like cobras ready to strike. Despite the sandstorm’s best efforts to disguise it, the processing plant was still out there, waiting for them, and they were racing headlong toward it.
Pursing his lips, Fisher hauled himself up along the back side of the HEP car, reaching the operator’s door and clinging to it against the high wind. He tried the lock. No, it wouldn’t be that easy.
Clutching the door’s handle with one hand, he leaned back and opted to shoot out the window. Three rounds chewed through, then he busted free the rest of the glass with his elbow and levered himself up and onto the sill, shoving in his pistol hand and ready to fire. Clear. He hauled himself inside, collapsing onto the car’s floor.
Fighting for breath, he rolled, pushed up onto his hands and knees, then stood, spinning back toward the controls.
They were gone. Stripped. Nothing here but bundles of wires jutting from empty consoles. Some of the cables had been neatly cut, others torn free.
A small hallway ahead dropped down three steps to another door, this one made of aluminum or steel and seemingly retrofitted to the car. No window. Iron bar handle. Two locks. Dead bolt, no doubt.
“Sam, watch out! I think I see—”
36
FISHER never heard the rest of Briggs’s warning. A pair of black boots had flown through the shattered window and connected with the side of his head. He flew back against the opposite door with such force that the window cracked behind him.
He reached for his weapon.
Never made it.
Two more blows struck him in the cheek and chin, a third to the neck.
He finally touched his holster. The weapon was gone.
He reached farther down to his secondary.
Gone.
Suddenly, his trifocals were torn from his head. He blinked hard, tried to focus. The barrel of a .40-caliber pistol was poised six inches from the tip of his nose.
His eyes still weren’t fully focused, but that was no matter; the voice came first.
And it was enough.
“I don’t believe it. No, not you!” she cried.
Fisher had briefly entertained the idea that yes, it might be possible that their “favorite” GRU agent was in Dammam, but conventional thinking had him and the rest of the team focusing on a handful of other Russian operators who’d gone rogue over the years, including Kestrel.
But no, it was her.
Major Viktoria Kolosov. Snegurochka. The Snow Maiden. Fisher’s pistols were tucked into her waistband. Yes, his MPX was still strapped around his back, but he’d never reach the machine gun in time.
He raised his voice above the incessant hum of the diesel engine and spoke to the wild-haired woman in Russian. “You missed a very nice helicopter ride!”
“I’m sure I did! What’re you doing here?”
“Same question.”
“No more talk. Say good-bye.”
“You won’t do it. You already had your chance back in Peru. I think you like me.”
She took a step back, clutching her pistol with both hands. “What’s so important that they sent you after us?” She gestured toward the door. “It can’t be just the gun in there.”
“The gun?” Fisher asked. “Is that what they told you? What’s your mission?”
She snorted, as though she’d never share that.
“Look, you don’t have to talk, but if this train gets to Abqaiq, nothing will matter.”
“What do you mean?”
Fisher suddenly widened his eyes and screamed at her: “What’s your goddamned mission!”
“I’m here to babysit the gun and make sure it reaches Riyadh. They’re paying me a lot to do it.”
“There’s another guy in there, right? Have you seen him?”
“No. The door’s been locked.”
“That guy’s an Iranian, the triggerman. That thing you’re calling a gun? It’s a nuke they built in Natanz. They want to blow up the oil processing station. Your Russian bosses sent you on a one-way mission.”
“I’m supposed to believe that? Listen to me, asshole, you ruined my life! I lost Nadia and I lost Kasperov. I couldn’t even go back to the GRU. Failures like me, we disappear. Do you understand? I had to take this job. And now you what? You want to save me?”
“I don’t care about you. I just need to get through that door. Now get out of my way—”
“Oh, yes, me and the gun pointed at your head will let you come on through. Now shut up and take off your fancy little rifle.”
Fisher reached up, slid a thumb under the MPX’s sling, then pulled it over his head, his gaze never leaving hers.
“Now throw it out the window.”
He smiled, thought about it.
“Do it!”
Now it was Fisher’s turn to snicker. He tossed the gun over her shoulder and out of the train.
He was about to make his move on her weapon when a pair of deafening explosions resounded from outside, twin bursts so powerful that the ground and car quaked and the cracked window behind him shattered.
Not a second later the windshield blew inward with a horrific crash and burst into thousands of pieces that sent both of them ducking.
Next came a squealing of the train’s wheels as they locked up, the force throwing the Snow Maiden forward, into the stripped console, with Fisher caroming off the panels beside her. He was already reaching out to seize her pistol when the windows had blown, and now he had it—
But she was reaching for his Five-seveN at her waist. He went for it.
But her grip went slack. And so did his.
Because the rumbling, shrieking, and groaning noises coming from outside, along with the shattering of more glass, meant only one thing: the train had derailed.
He couldn’t be sure what happened next, judging it all based upon what he could hear and feel. His gaze was still locked on the Snow Maiden’s, the ferocity on her face turned to utter shock.
He threw her pistol behind him while reaching for his Five-seveN. He seized it—
But now she had his secondary, the P226, pressed to his forehead.
This standoff lasted barely a second more before a massive wave of sand, perhaps dug up by the locomotive as it buried itself into the desert, came rushing through the shattered windshield and drove both of them backward and into the hall and stairwell.
Even as the sand flowed in as though poured from a dump truck, the entire train heaved and creaked, iron scraping against iron, undercarriages wailing as wheels cut at wrong angles across the tracks. Another explosion rocked from somewhere outside, followed by a harsh cracking that sounded as though the hitches between container cars were being forced apart and snapped in two.
The operator’s booth continued filling with sand, the walls buckling, and just as Fisher was slapping his hand on the wall, groping for purchase—
The entire HEP car smashed onto its side and continued skidding across the
desert floor, more dirt and rocks and other debris coming in from the side door window, with the Snow Maiden now crawling backward toward the steel door at the bottom of the steps.
Summoning up a scream, Fisher forced himself up through the oncoming sand and dove onto the Snow Maiden, freeing the SIG from her grip before she kneed him in the chest, then brought her boot around and side-kicked him in the neck.
They both fell back as the side of the car, now their ceiling, began rumbling and smashing inward to a chorus of much louder scrapes and echoing booms. Fisher suspected that one or more of the oil container cars was ramming and tumbling over them, the entire train folding up like an accordion and rolling over itself, the tanks splaying across the earth like a box of cigars let slip from the hand of a drunken oligarch.
Perhaps only the train’s collision could stop the triggerman from detonating the weapon—and any second’s delay was either fate glancing kindly on Fisher or cruel irony baiting him with the idea that he still had a chance.
Barely finishing that thought, he and the Snow Maiden were thrown once more into the opposite wall as the HEP car fishtailed brutally to the right, booted by more cars piling up behind it, the reverberation like a legion of thunderheads vying for attention and drumming across the tracks.
More sand spat into their faces, and Fisher was momentarily blinded, reaching out now for the Snow Maiden, wary that she might have another pistol or knife at the ready.
A short bang came from nearby, shaking the car; it was followed by a collision that must’ve broken open one of the containers because now the air reeked of oil. A guttural hiss pierced the wind, as though pressure were being released from something, and that racket lasted a second more before the car rolled up, onto its roof, burying Fisher and the Snow Maiden under the sand.
But then the car’s momentum kept it rolling and it smashed down onto its opposite side, the sand now drawing away from them, the explosions and near-human howls and shrieks of mangled metal still rising into the night.
It was all happening around them now, the car beginning to grow steady, the vibrations coming up through the ground, and yet there was nothing else striking them. The impacts were more distant now, like mortar fire half stifled by a mountainside.
Fisher coughed and clawed his way down toward the door, with the sand rising up to just below the first lock.
They’d stopped.
Shielding his face, he fired two rounds, the lock blowing off to reveal a hole.
He lifted the pistol to the higher lock.
That’s when an arm slipped under his neck and a hand forced away his pistol.
The Snow Maiden leaned in close and wrapped her teeth around the top of his ear.
“Sam, can you hear me?” cried Grim in his subdermal.
“Come on, Sam, give us a shout,” added Charlie.
He loved his team—but they usually had better timing. Fisher wrenched himself forward, freeing his ear as she was about to clamp down on it. He broke her grip on the pistol and whirled back to shove it into her head and pin her back down, onto the sand. “Nice try,” he muttered, pressing the muzzle deeper into her skin.
“Just do it. I got nothing now.”
“What do you mean you got nothing? You got me and my government as your new best friends. We’ll have some really enlightening conversations about all your operations—past, present, and future.”
He rolled his pistol back, striking her on the side of the head. The blow was enough to stun her and buy him time to fish out some zipper cuffs and bind her wrists in front.
Leaving her there, still groaning, he elbowed his way back toward the door and blew off the second lock. He turned around and walked crab-like to get in position. Then, resting on his rump, he lifted both legs in a powerful dropkick. As the door creaked open, he went sliding into the back of the car, riding the crest of falling sand.
At the bottom he rolled and stood, then tugged free an LED penlight from his tac-suit’s breast pocket and aimed it at the back of the car.
If you lacked a military background or hadn’t spent the bulk of your adult life shooting, evading, or destroying military weapons, you wouldn’t recognize it for what is was—
But Fisher did.
It weighed close to six tons and at nearly twelve feet long took up the space ordinarily reserved for both the locomotive diesel and its electrical generator. For Fisher, the giveaway was the Sa’ir KS-19 gun breech.
In layman’s terms he was staring at a stripped-down version of a 100mm antiaircraft gun. All the electronics and computer interfacing was gone—removed because the Iranians were fearful of an accident or premature detonation due to a crash, fire, or electrical short. The business end of the sawed-off barrel terminated into a larger cylinder roughly nine feet long and two feet in diameter, the whole contraption mounted to the AA gun’s original four-wheel base, now collapsed onto its side. The gun was part of the bomb, of course, and they were using it to trigger the nuclear reaction.
The Sa’ir, Fisher knew, could deliver a projectile with a muzzle velocity of about six hundred meters per second, much faster than the trigger speed used to detonate “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. If two pieces of subcritical material were not brought together fast enough, nuclear predetonation or “fizzle” could occur, with just a very small explosion, blowing the bulk of the material apart.
He couldn’t see the neutron generator yet. It was either on the other side or underneath, out of sight, but he felt certain it was there.
The triggerman himself, a fey-looking agent in his sixties whose eyes shone like sapphires in the penlight, was trapped under all six tons of the device, blood pouring from his mouth as he reached for the gun’s breech lanyard. It was clear the Iranian had already locked the breech on the 76.2mm discarding sabot projectile, allowing the three-inch projectile to be fired from a four-inch gun. All he had to do now was tug down on that black lanyard to manually trigger the bomb.
However, he couldn’t reach it, his fingertips barely brushing the nylon.
Fisher thought of shooting him, but with a hundred pounds of weaponized uranium within spitting distance, there were “safer” ways of neutralizing him. Fisher rushed to the bomb, swung the lanyard away, then crouched down.
“Praise be to Allah,” the man said in Farsi.
“You’re going to die here,” Fisher said, using the man’s native tongue. “Just tell me, who hired you?”
The man opened his mouth, but then his eyes grew vague and his head slumped.
Fisher checked his neck for a pulse and found none. He stood back and began taking a video of the bomb with his OPSAT. “Grim, you getting this?”
“Receiving now, Sam.”
“Is this thing stable?”
“They designed it to ensure that. If it survived a train wreck without going off . . .”
“All right. Have you heard from Briggs?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Damn, I’m going up for him. You notify the POTUS and coordinate with the prince. We’ll need a team in here to dismantle this thing.”
“We’re on it.”
Fisher sighed and bounded back up the pile of sand to where the Snow Maiden was still lying. As he began to lift her, Briggs appeared in the shattered door window above them, his face half obscured by the penlight he directed into the booth. “Sam?”
“I’m here. You okay? What the hell happened?”
“Those choppers launched Hellfires at the tracks. The engineer’s dead. I jumped off like a second before it all went to hell.” Briggs shifted his light. “Oh my God, is that—”
“Yeah,” said Fisher. “It’s her.”
“She tracked us?”
“No, they hired her.”
“Well, that’s some bad luck for her—and payback for us.”
; “Yeah. Come around through the window. See if you can help me get her out of here.”
“On my way.”
As Fisher checked the Snow Maiden’s zipper cuffs to be sure they were still fastened, her eyes flickered open. “Kiss me,” she said.
“What?”
“You heard me. You’ll send me away. Who knows when I’ll ever feel a kiss again.”
“Sorry, honey, you’re not my type.”
“Oh, yes I am. And you owe me.”
“For what?”
“For like you said, not killing you back in Peru.”
Fisher rolled his eyes. “You really are a crazy bitch, aren’t you?”
She wriggled her brows. “Come here.”
He leaned toward her. She did smell magnificent. She was beautiful in a terribly sinister way. His lips did lock onto hers—
But then she grabbed his bottom lip with her teeth and bit down hard, just as Briggs caught them together.
Fisher cursed and pulled up, his lip beginning to bleed as he gaped at his teammate.
“Everything okay, boss?”
Fisher hesitated. His gaze averted to the Snow Maiden, who lay there, smiling daggers.
37
FISHER, Briggs, and the Snow Maiden were evacuated from the crash site by a squad of Shammari’s troops. They remained inside a Humvee parked about a quarter kilometer south of the train, waiting out the sandstorm. A medic came by and treated Briggs for some lacerations on his arm and neck. The prince himself drove up and climbed into the passenger’s seat of the Humvee, then sat with them a moment.
“My security here at the processing station is very effective,” he said. “But we still have a lot of work to do at the port.”
Fisher wasn’t one to gloat or pretend he had all the answers. He just shrugged. “Too many leaks, too many bribes. And sometimes you can’t watch everything.”
“But we do our best,” he said.
“Yeah. So it looks like nothing will be flying for a while.” Fisher rapped a knuckle on the window. “Any chance of us getting a ride to Dubai?”
“My men will take you. But she stays with us.”