Corsair

TWENTY-FOUR

THE DRIVER OF THE HYBRID TRAIN-TRUCK HAD JUST SECONDS to react, and in saving his life he saved Cabrillo and the others. He spotted the piece of sheet steel sitting on the track and recognized immediately that hitting it would cause a derailment. Stomping the brakes, he yanked a lever on the floor next to his seat. Hydraulics raised the train wheels that sat just inside the truck’s regular tires, and as the wheels tucked under the chassis the outside tires made contact with the railroad ties.

Between the brutal deceleration and the staccato impact of running over the raised ties, the gunmen leaning over the cab readying their RPGs had no chance to accurately fire. Rocket contrails arrowed away from the truck in every direction—skyward, where they corkscrewed like giant fireworks, or into the valley below, where they detonated harmlessly in the desert.

The truck bounced over the metal plate, and once they were clear the quick-thinking driver had to slow even further in order to mate the steel train wheels with the track once again.

Cabrillo’s idea had gained them only a half mile or so, not the outcome he had hoped. The next tight corner was coming up, and he had to return to the brake wheel. He climbed over the back of the Pig, nearly gagging at the smell of burning rubber from the shredded tires. They were at forty miles an hour again, and the wind made leaping up to the boxcar a tricky maneuver. Below him, he could see the darkened ties blur by in the tight gap between the Pig and her ponderous charge.

The track rose slightly as they approached the turn, helping to slow the convoy, but it would quickly fall away again, and their speed was still too great to negotiate the bend. The uneven railbed had rattled the car so much that the bodies of the two terrorists had vanished over the side of the train. Only the corpse of the man whose throat Cabrillo had crushed lay where he’d left it.

The car crested the rise and, despite the Pig’s awesome power, the train picked up more speed.

Juan stepped past the dead man’s inert form and was reaching for the wheel when the terrorist lunged for him. Too late, Cabrillo remembered the man he had killed had been wearing a blue kaffiyeh, and this man’s head was swathed in a red one. He remembered the three men leaping from the truck and how one hadn’t seemed to make it. He had clambered aboard when Juan had been back in the Pig and had assumed the dead man’s position.

Those thoughts flashed through his mind in less time than it takes to blink but time enough for his legs to be wrapped up and his body to be dragged down. He hit hard, unable to cushion the impact. It was when the terrorist pressed his weight against Juan’s thighs that another realization hit him. His attacker was huge, easily outweighing him by fifty pounds.

Juan went for his remaining pistol. The fanatic saw him move and clamped a hand over Cabrillo’s. Juan tore his hand free and tried to twist away. Ahead of the boxcar, the turn loomed closer and closer.

“If you don’t let me go,” he cried in desperation, “we both die.”

“Then we both die,” the man snarled, crashing an elbow into the back of Juan’s leg. He seemed to have grasped the situation and was content to keep Cabrillo pinned on his stomach until the out-of-control train finished them both.

Juan torqued his body around so the tendons in his back screamed in protest, and he put everything he had into a punch that connected with his attacker’s jaw at the point it attached to his skull. There was a sickening pop as his jaw dislocated, and for a fleeting moment Juan had the other guy dazed. Wriggling and kicking, Juan threw off the man’s deadweight and landed another blow in the exact same spot. The Arab roared at the pain. Juan scrambled to his feet and grabbed the brake wheel, spinning it furiously.

He managed only a couple of revolutions before the guy had him in a choke hold. Juan bent his knees as soon as he felt the thick arm over his neck and then kicked upward, planting a foot on the wheel and kicking again. He went up and over the terrorist’s back, breaking the grip and landing behind him. The giant towered a head taller than Cabrillo, so when the man turned Juan had to punch up to deliver a third blow to the jaw. This time, the bone snapped.

Blinded by pain, the man tried to get Cabrillo into a bear hug. Juan ducked below the outstretched arms, pounded the back of his fist into the man’s groin, and went back to the wheel, knowing he had no time. He gained two more turns, forcing the overheated pads tighter against the wheels.

He sensed more than heard the next attack and had his pistol out before he turned. As his hand extended, his attacker clamped it under his arm, wrenching it up so that Juan was suddenly on his toes. The colossus brought an elbow down on Juan’s shoulder, trying to break his collarbone. Juan shrugged before the blow hit and he took the impact on the socket joint rather than the vulnerable clavicle.

His attacker leered, knowing even the glancing blow was agonizing. Juan sagged in the man’s grip, kicking up a leg and knee while fumbling behind his back. There were two straps that he used to keep his leg in place when he was going into combat, and his fingers deftly unhooked them. He pulled the prosthesis off his stump and swung it like a club. The steel toe of his boot glanced off the corner of the man’s eye, tearing open enough skin to fill the socket with blood. The blow wasn’t all that powerful, but coming from such an unexpected quarter it had the element of surprise.

Cabrillo’s backhand follow-through hit him in the face again, loosening teeth, and also loosening his viselike grip on Juan’s arm. When he tried to yank his arm free, his pistol was stripped from his fingers and clattered onto the roof, so he swung the leg again. The blow staggered his opponent, and Juan didn’t waste a second. After so many years of having only one leg, his superior balance allowed him to hop after the man, swinging the artificial limb like a logger would an ax.

Left, right, left, right, reversing his grip with each blow. He bought himself just enough distance to release two safeties built into the leg and to press a trigger integrated into the ankle. There was a stubby .44 caliber single-shot pistol—little more than a barrel and firing pin—that fired through the prosthesis’s heel. The Magic Shop’s last refinement to Juan’s combat leg had saved him on more than one occasion, and when it discharged he knew it had saved him again. The heavy bullet hit the terrorist’s center mass and blew him over the side of the car as limp as a rag doll.

The train was just entering the turn by the time the Chairman applied the full brakes, and as before the timing had been cut so finely that the car’s outside wheels started to skip off the rail. Someone inside the compartment must have understood the situation, because suddenly the wheels smacked down again and stayed there. They had used their mass as a counterweight to keep the rolling stock stable.

Cabrillo looked back to see the terrorists’ train-truck crest the rise they had flashed over moments earlier. Smoke puffed from under the Pig’s cab, and the sound of autofire reached the Chairman an instant later. Mark Murphy had locked the Pig’s targeting computer on the rise and waited for their hunters to show themselves.

A stream of 7.62mm rounds raked the unarmored front of the pursuit vehicle. The windshield dissolved, flaying open the skin as shards were blown into the cab. The radiator was punctured a half dozen times. An eruption of steam from the grille enveloped the truck in a scalding cloud, and bullets found their way into the engine compartment. The vulnerable distributor was shredded, killing power to the engine, and one round severed the hydraulic line that kept the train wheels in the extended position.

The truck came down off its second set of wheels so hard and so fast that the driver couldn’t react. The tires slammed into a railroad tie, lifting the rear of the vehicle high enough to throw two of the men in the cargo bed over the roof of the cab and onto the rail line. They vanished under the truck.

With its front suspension broken, the cab settled heavily into the ballast stones, and the oddball vehicle came to a complete stop in a haze of steam and dust.

Cabrillo whooped at the sight of their vanquished foe splayed across the tracks.

A deep blast echoed off the valley walls.

Air horn blaring, the diesel-electric locomotive that Juan was certain wouldn’t be able to follow them came over the small rise like a rampaging monster. It towered fifteen feet above the railbed and tipped the scales at over a hundred tons. The smoke blowing from its exhaust was a greasy black, testimony to its poor maintenance, but the engine was more than up to the challenge of chasing down the fleeing prisoners.

A couple of the luckier men in the back of the train-truck leapt free before the locomotive smashed into the rear of the disabled vehicle. It came apart as if it had been packed with explosives. Sheet metal, engine parts, and the chassis burst from the collision, winging away as though they weighed nothing. The ruptured gas tank splashed flaming fuel into the mix so it looked like the train was charging through an inferno.

And then it was clear. The truck had been reduced to scrap metal and contemptuously shoved aside.

Juan spat a four-letter expletive, and started easing off the brake, deadly corner or no deadly corner.

From the side of the Pig, an arrow lanced out riding a fiery tail. Mark had fired their last missile in a snap shot. Juan held his breath as it ate the distance to the locomotive. The rocket connected an instant later. The resulting explosion was many times that of the impact with the truck. The engine was wreathed in fire, and the blast shook the very air. The locomotive looked like a meteor hurtling down the tracks, with flame and smoke boiling off its hide.

But for all its fury, the missile made no difference on the two-hundred-thousand-pound behemoth. It shook off the blast like a battle tank hit with a pellet gun and kept charging after the Pig.

Their little caravan was once again picking up speed, yet it was no match for the diesel-electric engine. It was bearing down on them at twice their velocity. For a fleeting second, Cabrillo considered jumping clear. But the idea was dismissed before it had fully formed. He would never abandon his shipmates to save his own skin.

The locomotive was fifty yards from the Pig, the flames all but blown out. There was a smoldering crater low on the engine cover and some blackened paint. Other than that, there was no visible evidence the four-pound shaped charge from their surface-to-surface missile had done anything at all.

However, what Juan couldn’t see under the front of the locomotive, where the leading wheel truck was secured to the steel frame, was that the mounting pins had taken a direct hit from the jet of searing plasma produced by the warhead. The train hit one more jarring bump in the old rails and the pins failed entirely. The lead truck for the four front wheels derailed, the hardened wheels splintering the thick ties and peeling sections of track off their supports.

With its front end no longer held in by the rails, the locomotive broke free entirely, tipping in slow motion until it crashed onto its side. The added friction from plowing up ballast stones and yanking dozens of ties from the earth weren’t enough to check its awesome momentum. Even in its death throes, it was going to collide with the Pig.

It was twenty feet from them, coming on as strong as ever. Linc had to have had his foot to the floor in a last-ditch effort to set them free. The Pig and boxcar continued to sweep through the turn, barely clinging to the tracks as they curved around the mountain.

Without the tracks to guide it, the locomotive kept going straight, driven by its massive weight and the speed it had built chasing its quarry. It passed no more than a yard in front of the Pig as it careened toward the edge of the steep valley. There were no guardrails, nothing to keep it on the man-made rail line. Its nose tore a wedge out of the ground when it reached the lip of the precipice and sent a shower of gravel pattering down the hillside, and then it barrel-rolled over.

Low down in the Pig’s cab, Linc and Mark could no longer see it. But from his vantage high on the boxcar’s roof, where he was already tightening the brakes again, Cabrillo watched the locomotive tumble down the hill, gaining speed with each revolution. Its huge belly tank split open, and fuel ignited off the hot manifolds. The resulting explosion and pall of dust obscured its final moments before it crashed into the rocky valley floor.

The freight car went around the last of the corner on its outside wheels only, at such an angle that Juan thought it would never recover. But somehow the plucky old antique finished the curve and flopped back onto the rails. Juan sagged against the brake wheel, catching his breath for a moment before strapping his artificial limb back on his stump.

He estimated there were only another ten or so miles to the coaling station and the dock where the Oregon would be waiting, and they were home free.

The only thing he didn’t know, and couldn’t understand, is what had happened to the Mi-8 helicopter that he was certain he’d heard before they’d escaped the mine depot. The tangos hadn’t tried coming after them with it, which to Cabrillo made no sense. True, a cargo chopper wasn’t the most stable platform to mount an assault, but considering the lengths the terrorists had gone to in order to stop them he would have thought they’d have launched the helo at them, too.

For the next five minutes, the train eased around several smooth turns, each so gentle that Juan barely had to work the brakes. He was just switching comm frequencies to patch through to Max aboard ship when they rounded another bend that had hidden his view of the tracks ahead.

His blood went cold.

The rail line left the relative safety of the mountain’s flank and angled off over the valley across a bridge straight out of the Old West. It resembled a section of a wooden roller coaster and towered a hundred or more feet off the valley floor, an intricate lattice of timber beams bleached white by decades of sun and wind. And at its base, its rotors still turning at idle, sat the Mi-8.

Juan didn’t need to see exactly what the men moving gingerly along the framework were doing to know they were planting explosives to blow the bridge to hell.