Havoc

Samara, Russia

By the time the Lufthansa Airbus from Frankfurt touched down at Samara’s airport, Cali and Mercer had spent fifteen hours in the air, and thanks to Mercer’s upgrading of the tickets from the coach Ira had provided to first class, they had enjoyed their time together. Cali had teased as they ate petit filets and asparagus with sauce Bèarnaise over the Atlantic that this didn’t count as their date and Mercer still owed her a meal. And when she grabbed his hand when a crosswind slewed the aircraft just before touchdown at Samara, Mercer felt his heart trip.

For him it was almost like the beginning of a high school romance where the tiniest gestures came loaded with significance but were also fraught with pitfalls. Was it too soon after losing Tisa? Was he even capable of giving himself again? Each step forward came at a price of self-doubt. He wanted to believe that his burgeoning feelings weren’t merely a physical reaction to a beautiful woman. Yet when he looked into himself to find the truth, he saw nothing but a hollow, an empty void where once there was confidence. He felt paralyzed by a guilt he was trying to convince himself he didn’t deserve.

Cali gave his hand a squeeze as the plane began to taxi to the long one-story terminal building, then she let go. Mercer’s palms retained her nervous warmth.

They were met at Customs by a pair of men. One was short and handsome, with blond cropped hair and the insignia of an army captain on his uniform collar. The other was older, stooped, with haunted blue eyes and a large skull covered in wisps of gray hair. His suit was wrinkled and his shirt had an ink stain at the bottom of the breast pocket. He had the look of a muddled academic.

“Captain Aleksandr Federov,” the soldier said by way of introduction. He spoke with just a trace of an accent and smiled brightly. “Please call me Sasha. This is Professor Pavel Sapozhnik, of the Ministry of Defense. I will be leading your military escort. Professor Sapozhnik and his team are the disposal experts.”

“Mercer. And this is Cali Stowe of the Department of Energy.” They shook hands all around while the Customs inspector frowned. Federov said a few angry words to the inspector, then asked Cali and Mercer for their passports. They were quickly stamped and returned.

“Sorry about that,” Federov said as he led them to a closed-off section of the airport. “Samara was a closed city until the collapse. Customs still likes to give visitors a hard time. It’s not unusual for tourists to be denied entry for no reason, which makes it especially tough since Samara’s newest export is mail order brides. A lot of lonely German and American men have come here to meet the love of their life only to return more frustrated than before.”

Mercer chuckled, warming to the officer immediately.

“Of course, Ms. Stowe, you put all our brides to shame.”

She smiled at the compliment.

“I thought Grigori Popov would be here,” Mercer said.

Federov threw his hands up in a universal sign of annoyance. “Bureaucrats. He said he was detained in Moscow and will be here tomorrow or the next day. Most likely he will not come. Samara is not, how you say, a favorite destination. It is like your Pittsburgh without a good sports team.” He paused outside a restroom door. “We have another two-hour flight. You might want to avail yourselves.”

While Cali used the facilities, Mercer learned that Federov had studied languages during his military service and spoke French, German, and Ukrainian. He had been assigned to nuclear materials protection because so much of that work was carried out by foreign specialists. Professor Sapozhnik ignored them while they chatted, preferring to stare off into space rather than join in.

“Do you know anything about the mine Department 7 used as storage?”

“We did not know the facility existed until your superior’s call to Popov,” Sasha Federov answered candidly. “It is a sad state that we can misplace nuclear materials so easily but that is the fact we must deal with. The old system was so secretive that the right and left hands didn’t even know the other existed.

“It is like a story about an incident in the 1970s when one of our attack submarines almost fired a torpedo at a ballistic missile submarine returning to its port at Vladivostok. You see the two branches of the navy were in a bitter rivalry for additional funding and refused to divulge their patrol schedules. Catastrophe was avoided when the sonarman on the attack sub realized the computer was giving him a false reading on the boomer’s identity. He’d served on her a few years earlier and recognized her tonals.”

Professor Sapozhnik snapped at Federov in Russian. The younger man answered back just as hotly and an argument flared for a moment. Sapozhnik finally nodded and turned to Mercer. “Forgive me,” he said in a deep, mournful voice. “Old habits die hard. We have nothing to hide from our Western benefactors any longer.”

“No apology necessary,” Mercer said and smiled. He recognized Sapozhnik as from the old guard who believed the nation was better off under a Communist dictatorship. “No one likes to have their dirty laundry aired in public.”

“Anyway,” Sasha said smoothly, “it is an abandoned gypsum mine. There is a single road that leads to it as well as a railroad line. It was abandoned in 1957 because of flooding in the lowest levels. We now know that Department 7 commandeered it soon afterward to consolidate their warehouses of leftover war matériel.”

“Are the road and rail line still usable after all this time?”

“Yes. In fact we’re going to use a train to haul the, ah, ore to Siberia.” Even with no one around he was reluctant to use the word “plutonium.” “It’s much safer than the roads. The train has already left the main freight yard here in Samara but won’t reach the mine until tomorrow.”

Cali returned from the bathroom. Mercer dashed in quickly, urinated, and washed his hands and face. Rather than risk drinking the water, he dry swallowed a couple of painkillers. The swelling in his groin had gone down significantly and the pain was little more than the discomfort of sitting so long.

They reached an exterior door that Federov opened theatrically for Cali. On the tarmac loomed a military helicopter, a massive MI-8 transport chopper, perhaps the most successful rotary wing aircraft in history. At eighty-two feet long and eighteen high it dwarfed the men lounging next to the open door. They snapped to easy attention when they saw Federov approaching.

The Russian captain gestured for Mercer and Cali to take seats along the starboard wall and showed them how to fix their helmets. “Sorry they do not have radios, but they will protect your hearing.”

Seated along the flanks of the helicopter’s cargo deck were six soldiers kitted out for combat with AK-74s and a pair of RPG-7 rocket launchers. There were also five others aboard, and while they wore olive green jumpsuits, Mercer believed they were the civilian scientists under Sapozhnik. In the back of the utilitarian hold were crates for tents, food, water, and biohazard equipment.

Federov took his seat and jacked his helmet into the helo’s intercom. A moment later the onboard APU wound up and ignited one of the Klimov turboshafts. The second engine roared to life and the helicopter began to buck under the strain of her own power plants. The pilot engaged the transmission, and the five sagging rotor blades began to beat the polluted air. They vanished into a blur and the shaking increased so that Mercer had to clamp his jaw. He felt Cali’s hand find his. It nestled into his palm like a little creature seeking safety in its den.

The shaking suddenly eased as the pilot gently lifted the eleven-ton chopper from the crumbling apron.

Mercer peered out the yellowed Perspex window as the helicopter gained height. The city lay under an industrial pall from dozens of huge factory complexes as it clung to the shores where the Samara River dumped into the Volga, the largest river in Europe. Although the Volga was many times the size of the Ohio or Allegheny, Mercer had to admit the city of three million did look a bit like Pittsburgh.

The flight to the Samarsskaya Gypsum Mine was monotonous. The steppe slowly gave way to ugly hills of fractured granite, worn smooth by time so they looked bald, denuded. The valleys weren’t particularly deep and what timber had once grown in the region had long since been harvested, so the trees remaining were stunted and gnarled. The land was muted shades of gray and dun and the sky was particularly cheerless.

As Federov had predicted, it took two hours to reach the mine. For the last twenty minutes of the flight they flew directly over the rail spur that serviced the installation. The rails were shiny streaks in the otherwise murky landscape. The mine’s machinery and headgear, the crane that raised and lowered mine cars into the depths of the earth, were perched near the top of a long valley. The mine shaft itself was a black square in the gray stone that descended into the mountain at a shallow angle. About a quarter mile from the headgear was a clutch of small buildings, administrative offices and housing for the miners when the mine was in operation. Now they were abandoned and crumbling.

The facility had been a bleak, forlorn place even before the ravages of decades of neglect.

Near the valley floor was the rail depot with ore-loading hoppers straddling the tracks. A half-mile-long metal chute connected the two parts of the complex. A broad dirt road switchbacked down to the valley floor, occasionally passing below the ore chute. The train Federov had said wouldn’t be there until the following day was backed into the depot. There was a bright orange TEM16 diesel-electric locomotive from the Bryansk Works and a string of eight boxcars. Pale blue smoke vented from the engine’s exhaust and a few men milled around the locomotive. Several more worked near the open door of one of the boxcars.

Mercer glanced at Sasha Federov and didn’t like the puzzled look on his face. He looked back at the train, at Federov again, and quickly unbuckled his seat belt even though the chopper was making its landing approach in a large open area adjacent to the mine’s towering headgear.

“That’s not your train,” Mercer shouted at the Russian. “It’s a trap.”

Federov nodded grimly and yelled into his microphone at the pilot.

The missile came from behind, a perfect blind ambush. While a notoriously inaccurate weapon beyond two hundred yards, the RPG-7 lifted from its tube less than seventy yards behind the hovering MI-8 just as it reached its most vulnerable position. Covering the distance in less than a second, the five-pound warhead should have impacted squarely under the helo’s tail boom, but Mercer’s instincts and the pilot’s quick reaction heeled the chopper over just enough so the projectile slammed into the fixed landing gear. The explosion came a microsecond later.

Most of the detonative force blew away from the chopper, but enough blasted into the MI-8 to tear a sizable hole into her rear cargo compartment. Hot gas and molten aluminum from the helicopter’s skin ripped through the men and women inside the compartment, killing the two soldiers at the end of the bench seat outright and severely injuring three more. Something sheared the drive shaft to the aft rotor because suddenly its contra-rotating force was gone. The chopper began a dizzying spin through the sky.

Mercer had been tossed across the cabin when the pilot threw the MI-8 onto its side and now was pinned up against Professor Sapozhnik and two of his scientists. The world outside the small portholes whirled by as the chopper corkscrewed from the sky. Cockpit alarms blared over the roar of her engines and the cabin was quickly filling with smoke.

Over the din of screams and the lingering effects of the explosion that had partially deafened him, Mercer heard the ping of small arms fire against the helicopter. Whoever had sprung the trap wasn’t taking any chances. In the fleeting seconds before the big cargo chopper plowed into the earth Mercer’s mind turned to the perpetrator. He knew it was Poli who’d ordered the helicopter shot down. What he didn’t know, what had nagged at him repeatedly since first crossing the mercenary in Africa, was how he was always a step ahead.

“Crash positions,” Sasha screamed.

Most of the passengers were too paralyzed to move. A few of the soldiers wrapped their arms around their knees and ducked their heads. Just before they hit, Mercer saw Cali do the same and smiled. She’d doubled her chances of survival by protecting the fragile bones of her neck from the shearing forces of a crash. Mercer snaked his arm into Sapozhnik’s safety belt and held on as the blades ripped into the gravelly soil above the rail spur, not far from the mine’s entrance. The tips threw up a cloud of dust before they disintegrated. The pilot managed to torque the chopper ever so slightly so she came down not on her side but at a slight angle.

The damaged landing gear collapsed as it took the helo’s weight, and the blades gouged deeper into the soil until they blew apart, thrown like javelins across the mine site. The MI-8 slowly rolled onto its side, burying one of the air intakes for her Klimov engines in the ground. It sucked up rock and dust and debris, choking off the turbo shaft. The engine bellowed for a moment, then fell silent. The second engine cut off almost immediately but smoke continued to thicken in the hold.

For the moment Mercer couldn’t hear automatic weapons ripping into the chopper’s thin skin, and even if Poli still had them in his sights the chance of aviation fuel catching fire was too great to use the helo as a redoubt.

Mercer stood shakily. Bodies lay strewn across the cabin and for a panicked moment he thought he was the only survivor, but he soon saw slow movement. He looked to Cali. With the helicopter on its side, she was on her back, still strapped to her seat. She was pale and there was a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth where she’d been struck by the soldier next to her, but her defiant expression told him she was all right. Mercer was on Professor Sapozhnik’s lap. He looked at the man’s face. His mouth was slack, his eyes open and sightless. His neck was clearly broken. The scientist next to him was also dead. A boulder had punched through the MI-8’s side when it rolled over, and crushed the back of his skull. His head lay in a thickening pool of dark blood.

Mercer looked up to where Sasha Federov dangled from his safety straps. He was alive and working to release the belt’s catches. Trusting that the Russian officer would open the cargo door, Mercer moved closer to Cali. “Are you okay?” he asked, using his finger to gently wipe the blood from her full lips.

“They’re going to be even puffier after this.” She coughed. The smoke was as dense as Tiny’s on a Saturday night.

“I’ll think only pure thoughts.” He unsnapped her belt and helped her to her feet.

The uninjured soldier was already checking on his comrades. He was wasting precious seconds on a man who was clearly dead. “Nyet,” Mercer shouted at him. When the soldier looked up, his young face was a mask of uncomprehending fear. He’d never been in combat. Mercer pointed at the cache of weapons and made a grabbing gesture. The boy had been conditioned by the army and seemed thankful to be given an order even if it came from an American civilian. He crawled over the corpses of his friends to retrieve several AK-74s and one of the RPG rocket launchers. He handed them across to Mercer just as Sasha slammed the door back on its roller stops. The acrid smoke boiled out the opening like a volcano, but the sudden influx of fresh air also caused the small fire smoldering at the rear of the helicopter to flare up.

“Come on,” Sasha shouted in Russian. He grabbed Cali’s hand and helped her crawl up the hold. When she reached the door he said, “Jump as soon as you’re outside and run fifty meters straight ahead. The mine is behind us, so they won’t see you.” He handed her his AK-74. “Round is chambered. Is okay?”

Cali nodded. “I’m familiar enough.”

Sasha helped her climb out the open door and she immediately disappeared from view. Next came the two uninjured scientists, a man and a woman. The man was frightened and shaking so badly he was ready to topple over. The woman, with her thick body and Slavic features, looked as imperturbable as a babushka. Sasha repeated his order and was about to give an automatic pistol to the man when he thought better of it and handed it to the woman instead.

He had to struggle to push her ample backside out the door.

Mercer checked the rest of the passengers. The pilot had already escaped through the shattered windshield. The copilot was dead. The only other survivor was a pretty girl from Sapozhnik’s staff with a broken collarbone. She screamed when Mercer probed it gently with his fingers. She said something in keening Russian. “Stolichnaya,” Mercer said. “Ah, mir.” Having exhausted his Russian, he unstrapped the girl and got her to her feet. She cradled her arm against her chest. The soldier was coming forward carrying a bundle of weapons and haversacks of ammunition over his shoulders.

Sasha gave his orders to the soldier and together they tossed most of the weapons out through the door and onto the ground. Then the soldier scrambled up and out of the helicopter. Mercer shot Federov a scathing glare, thinking the girl should have been the next one out.

“I need him to catch her and cover for her. I also heard automatic fire.”

They used one of the AK-74 assault rifles as a step and boosted her up. She paused on top of the chopper, fearfully looking down at the young soldier outside.

“Go,” Sasha hissed and reached out to shove her.

A sustained burst of autofire slammed into the underside of the helicopter, opening dozens of sizzling holes in the aluminum skin and sending ricochets whizzing through the hold whenever a round struck something solid. There was no mistaking the sound of several of the bullets punching through human flesh. Either the girl or the soldier or possibly both were dead. Cali had found cover behind a hillock some fifty yards from the downed bird. From there she quickly silenced the gunfire with a pair of three-round bursts.

Knowing that jumping out the hatch was suicide, Sasha and Mercer scrambled for the cockpit, and as the echoes of the exchange faded, Cali screamed, “RPG!”

They dove headfirst through the remains of the windshield and hit the ground running. The rocket veered slightly at the last second and hit the tail rotor. The explosion blew the boom from the body of the chopper while the concussion knocked Mercer and Federov off their feet and into a drainage ditch. A moment later the remaining fuel went up in a boiling cloud of orange flame and black smoke that lit the stark landscape like the hellish glow of a blast furnace.

“Who’s out there?” Sasha Federov panted as he checked over his AK-74.

Mercer inspected his own weapon and said, “A mercenary named Poli Feines. I don’t know what you’ve been told but the plutonium we’re here to secure is naturally occurring. It was mined in Africa back in the late 1940s. Feines was in the village where Cali and I found the old mining operation, again in New Jersey while we were tracking a clue about an American who first discovered the lode. Two days ago one of his men and a bunch of Arab terrorists attacked us in Niagara Falls, New York.”

“How is it he’s here?”

“Million dollar question,” Mercer said. He made sure the Yarygin nine-millimeter pistol he’d shoved behind his back was secure. “I suspect there’s a leak within the organizations I’ve been dealing with.” It was the first time he’d given voice to the nagging thought that had been with him almost since the beginning. If true, the ramifications of it were chilling because the only people who knew the truth were himself, Cali, Ira Lasko, and Harry. He trusted Harry and Ira with his life and Cali had been shot at enough times to disqualify her as a traitor, so the theory didn’t make sense. But there were no alternatives, either.

He poked his head above the rim of the drainage ditch. He spotted Cali behind a mound of boulders. The two scientists were with her, and the young soldier had found cover behind a pile of mine tailings. The body of the pretty female scientist had been immolated when the helicopter exploded.

The building that housed the headgear machinery was four stories tall and covered in corrugated metal. The seams were streaked in rust, creating a patchwork effect. Around it were several smaller buildings, offices, and workshops. Also littering the mine were piles of machinery — old ore cars with broken wheel bogies, small electric shunting locomotives, pumps, and hundreds of other items. Most of the old machinery had rusted together over the past decades and thorny weeds grew around everything. But there were two trucks backed to the gaping mine entrance. They were UAZ-5151s, rugged little four-wheel drives that resembled jeeps. Poli was here to steal the plutonium and transport the ore from the mine down to the train with the off-roaders.

Mercer spotted a dozen men around the trucks, more than half of them armed. As he watched, a forklift emerged from the mine, a single barrel lashed to a pallet it carried. Its driver wore a gas mask and protective suit. At least the Soviets had taken a few precautions, Mercer noted. The barrel was massive and obviously well shielded, and when the forklift lowered it into the bed of the truck, the suspension sagged under the load. He looked at the other vehicle. Its tires were still fully inflated which meant it hadn’t been loaded yet. This explained the train, however. The trucks couldn’t handle the crumbling Russian roads carrying such weight.

The guards didn’t seem intent on hunting down Mercer’s party. They just wanted to keep loading their trucks so they could leave. Mercer turned to Sasha.

“Do you have a radio or satellite phone?”

The Russian shook his head. “Radio was on the helicopter and I’ve never even seen a satellite telephone.”

“This just gets better and better.” Mercer plucked a sleek cell phone from the inside pocket of his leather jacket. There wasn’t a cell tower for a hundred miles but he tried anyway. When he didn’t get a signal, he slid it back into his coat. “It’s up to us.”

“You seem like you can handle yourself,” Sasha said. “Cali, too, but that leaves us just four against eight or more.”

“Five. That other woman looks capable.” Mercer’s eyes went hard. “But it doesn’t matter. We don’t have an option. We can’t call for help, and once they get those trucks on the train we’ll never be able to stop them. They’ll be beyond Russia’s borders by the time anyone comes to check on us.”

Sasha nodded grimly. “All right.”

Mercer turned back to study the terrain and come up with a plan. A frontal assault was out of the question. Poli’s force was too large. They could circle around the building, but there was a lot of open ground to cover, and if Poli was smart, which Mercer knew he was, he’d have sent a couple of guards to cover his flanks as soon as he saw people escape the chopper crash. The best way would be to circle even wider, climb up the hill rising above the mountain, and attack from above. It would take time but Mercer saw no other way. He turned to run his plan by Sasha but the Russian was gone.

He looked down the length of the drainage ditch. Federov was crawling away, and for a fleeting second Mercer wanted to put a bullet in his back. Then he realized that Sasha was getting into a better position to attack from the opposite flank, behind a row of abandoned ore cars. From there he could find cover behind the steel pylons that supported the ore chute.

Sasha would still need cover to get into position. Mercer inched his way out of the ditch, crawling across the cold ground. The forklift disappeared into the mine once again as a man emerged. One of the others used a hose attached to one of the trucks to douse his suit with water before he took off his gas mask. Even at two hundred yards Mercer recognized the bald head and eye patch.

Uncontrollable rage made him bring the AK to his shoulder, not caring that the counterfire would catch him exposed. He wanted the son of a bitch dead. He centered Poli’s broad chest in the weapon’s iron sites and eased the trigger. The instant he fired, Mercer rolled to his left several times and lurched to his feet, racing toward where the young Russian soldier had found cover as Poli’s men chewed up the ground at his feet with a steady barrage. He reached the pile of crushed rock and ducked his head around the slope. Mercer cursed.

Poli was directing his men and there wasn’t a scratch on him. Mercer was a fair shot with a rifle but he was unfamiliar with the AK and hadn’t compensated for the wind’s effect on the light 5.54-millimeter bullet.

Mercer glanced back and saw that Sasha had reached the first row of small mine cars and settled his rifle on the side of one. He fired, picking targets who were covered from Mercer’s position but exposed to his. He dropped two of them before half the force swung their aim and raked the ore car. He ducked behind it as rounds ricocheted off the thick metal. Mercer and the young soldier named Ivan opened up, hosing the trucks with little regard to how much ammo they were using up. Ivan had managed to keep his rucksacks of magazines as well as the RPG-7.

Poli’s men sought cover behind their trucks as Cali and the heavy-set Russian woman, Ludmilla, added their guns to the attack. Three of the terrorists were down, two dead, and one had half his jaw shot away. Using all the cover fire, Federov ran from behind the train car, eating ground to reach one of the ore chute’s support pylons.

The forklift emerged from the mine once again. Judging by how the truck had settled, Mercer believed this was the last barrel Poli would load on it. He thought about using the rocket grenade but he only had the one, so he could only take out one truck, not both, and he had no idea how many barrels had already been loaded onto the train.

Poli’s men had no such shortage. A pair of RPGs streaked from behind one of the trucks and exploded on the far side of the gravel pile where Mercer and Ivan crouched. The fifty-foot-high mound of mine waste absorbed the twin explosions as though they were nothing, but a moment later the top of the pile shifted and a hissing avalanche barreled down the slope. It came down so fast that Mercer didn’t have time to shout a warning as he jumped out of the way. Ivan looked up and screamed as a towering wall of fist-sized rocks pounded into him. The sheer weight of rock crushed him flat and the rough edges tore away his clothes and flayed great sheets of skin from his body. He was dead before he was fully buried, but that didn’t stop Mercer from trying to reach him as more rock shifted and slid down the hill. Mercer recklessly waded into the avalanche, getting buried up to his knees in seconds and up to his thighs in just moments more. But there was nothing he could do. The barrel of the RPG launcher poking up from the ground was all that marked the young Russian’s grave.

Another RPG arced from behind the truck. Mercer watched its path as it slashed through the cold mountain air. Sasha Federov was behind one of the pylons and had just a couple of seconds to run before the rocket exploded against the metal stanchion. He was thrown fifteen feet by the blast, landing in a tangle of loose limbs, and when the smoke cleared he wasn’t moving.

Mercer fought to lift himself from the avalanche debris, tearing at the stones with his bare hands until his fingers bled. He heard the trucks’ engines fire. With Cali so far to the left, Poli had a clear path down the hairpin road to the railhead. The convoy would pass no more than twenty feet from Mercer, and if he didn’t get himself free he was dead.

Frantic now, he kicked and struggled, his heart hammering painfully in his chest. The trucks grew louder as they started across the facility. They fired barrage after barrage in Cali’s direction to keep her pinned. Mercer had seconds at most, and rather than loosening, the rubble seemed to be solidifying around his legs. What a stupid way to die, he thought fleetingly — standing thigh-deep in a pile of mine tailings so trained gunmen could use him like kids with BB guns going after soda bottles.

In one desperate heave he managed to free one leg. He lurched to his right, painfully wrenching his trapped knee to tear it from the earth. The lead truck rounded the massive pile as Mercer dove flat. His movements caused the heavy aggregate to shift again, and a small wave of rock slid down the mound and buried him under a foot of loose stone.

The trucks roared by, doing forty miles per hour, and while a couple of the terrorists noticed the rock slide, none saw the man hiding under the veneer of rubble. Moments later the vehicles turned down the first hairpin and vanished down the hill.

Mercer began to heave himself from under the rock, moving slowly because his body had taken a beating by the stones. He was almost free when Cali raced up to him, the two Russian scientists in tow. The man was catatonic, while the woman scanned the grounds warily.

Cali threw herself into Mercer’s arms, tears on her cheeks. “I thought you were dead.”

“The boy is,” Mercer said grimly, holding her tight. He wanted nothing more than to stand there forever, forget about Poli, the plutonium, and everything else and simply surrender to the embrace. Pulling his arms from around her neck took a force of will. “Sasha?”

“We haven’t checked.”

“See to him. I’m going after Poli.”

“How? They’ll have the barrels loaded before you get halfway to the train.”

Mercer looked over his head. “Like hell they will.”

He grabbed the RPG from where it stuck up from the tailings, checked that it hadn’t been damaged, and slung the long tube over his shoulder. The steady growl of the locomotive at the bottom of the valley deepened as the engineer made ready to pull from the ore depot.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to catch a train.”

The pylons supporting the ore chute had integrated ladders so workers could access the half-mile-long slide for maintenance. The metal was scaled with rust and the paint was badly flaked. With the RPG and an AK over his shoulder, Mercer climbed the ladder, wincing with the pressure of each step on his strained knee but thankful it would take his weight.

No sooner had he cleared the ground than he felt movement below him. Cali was climbing on his heels. He wasn’t going to make any chivalrous remarks. He could use all the help he could get.

The support column was eighty feet high and it took them nearly two minutes to climb. Their hands were cramped from the cold metal rungs, and Mercer’s eyes teared up because the wind was gusting to thirty miles an hour.

From the top of the stanchion they could see the ore-loading hoppers and the train far below, although their vantage wouldn’t let them see what was happening on its far side. The twisty road down to the depot looked clear. Poli would have had more than enough time to reach the rail spur.

Mercer helped Cali up onto the small platform next to the chute. “You sure about this?”

She threw him her trademark saucy grin. “As sure as you are.”

The chute was more than twenty feet wide, with curved sides to prevent ore from tumbling to the ground. The decades of rain and snow hadn’t rusted the metal. It was still bright from years of being polished by ore headed to the hoppers down below. Mercer repositioned the RPG so it was across his chest and cinched the AK-74’s sling around his arm before he and Cali climbed over the rim. The angle was steep and they had to hold themselves in place by planting their rubber-soled boots and holding on to the edge. Just before he sat, Mercer saw the locomotive lurch and heard the rail car’s couplings crash together as the train started to leave.

“Shit! Come on.”

When they sat, their view was blocked by the sides of the chute so it was like looking down a ski lift or a bobsled run. Mercer could feel gravity sucking at his chest as his eyes adjusted to the vertiginous scene. He took Cali’s hand and they eased their feet off the bottom of the chute. They began to slide immediately, slowly at first but the speed built quickly. Too quickly. Mercer tried to apply pressure with his feet to slow himself. Cali did the same and for a moment it was working. Then her shoe caught a seam in the metal chute and she flipped head over heels. As Mercer made to grab her, Cali careened into him and he too began to tumble out of control.

They somersaulted down the chute for fifty feet before Mercer managed to grab Cali’s collar. The move vaulted him over her prone form and he slammed into the chute hard enough to make it vibrate, but the maneuver stopped her from flipping again. Now flat on his back, Mercer eased his heels against the metal, careful to lift when he neared a seam, and had himself slowed enough to regain control of the slide.

“Are you okay?” he called over his shoulder, feeling Cali’s presence right behind him.

“I think so,” she answered.

“We’re almost there.” Mercer was glad she hadn’t asked about his condition. His back ached from the impact and he’d have a bump the size of an egg on his forehead if he survived the next few minutes.

They’d descended two thirds of the way to the ore hoppers, and now that they knew how to handle the slide, they rocketed downward, crisp wind whipping at their faces so their eyes streamed tears. With thirty feet to go, they could see the top of the train through the open hopper. It was still moving slowly but the last car was halfway through the loading trough. They had seconds or they’d drop twenty feet to the hard rails below.

“Hurry,” Mercer shouted and he and Cali took their feet off the chute completely.

They shot down the last section of the ore slide like arrows, the metal walls becoming a blur as they focused on landing atop the last rail car. Cali pulled slightly ahead.

The ore hopper was a long metal trough with steeply angled sides and an open bottom that allowed the crushed rock to stream into rail cars. Cali braced her feet when she reached the end of the slide, slowing herself just enough so when she was launched off the lip she didn’t crash into the far side of the hopper. The impact was still brutal, but she absorbed the blow and fell easily to the roof of the rolling boxcar.

Mercer had to contend with the RPG-7 as he came to the end of the chute, tugging the weapon back over his shoulder at the last second. He was in an awkward position when he shot off the end of the slide. Cali screamed his name. He slammed into the opposite side of the ore hopper, knocking the air from his lungs in a painful explosion of breath. He looked down to see that the rear of the train was almost past him. He pushed off from the hopper and fell through empty space.

His timing was a fraction off. He dropped clear of the chute and hit the very end of the boxcar, further bruising his aching ribs. With his legs dangling off the edge of the train, he struggled to find something to grab, but there were no handholds and he began to slide off. He looked down. Railroad ties emerged from under the car like an ever-lengthening ladder as the locomotive accelerated down the valley.

He slid farther, clamping onto the edge with just his elbows, his legs bicycling against the rear of the car as he fought to find purchase. He couldn’t support himself much longer — his body had taken too much punishment and he just wanted to let go. Instead he fought harder, kicking at the rear of the boxcar with his steel-toed boots, using his chin and the muscles of his neck to give him an ounce more leverage. Cali was running toward him. He had to hold on for a few more seconds, but he wasn’t sure he could.

A head emerged between their boxcar and the next one in line. Mercer saw it through Cali’s long legs. Then he saw a torso and an assault rifle.

“Behind you,” he gasped. Cali kept coming. Mercer managed another hoarse bellow: “Behind you!”

She barely slowed as she whirled around, flipping her Kalashnikov off her shoulder and under her arm in a fluid, almost well-practiced motion. She fired from the hip, sweeping across the gunman’s midsection, and continued to spin so she was still running toward Mercer. The three bullets that hit the gunman passed clean through, tumbling as they transited his body and tearing fist-sized chunks of tissue from his back. He fell between the two cars and hit the tracks.

Mercer glanced down as he felt Cali’s hands on his jacket collar. The gunman had landed across the tracks and the train’s steel wheels had sliced his corpse into three pieces.

“Hold on,” Cali panted, struggling to haul him back aboard the boxcar.

“If you insist,” Mercer said, knowing she had him. She heaved and he rolled over the edge of the car and onto his back, not caring that the RPG’s pistol grip was digging into his flesh.

Mercer gave himself just a second before getting to his feet. Poli wouldn’t just post one man to guard the train’s roof. And with the train continuing to accelerate down the valley, they didn’t have much time to stop it before it was going too fast for what he had in mind.

“Are you okay?” Cali asked. She’d seen Mercer wince when he put weight on his bad knee.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said grimly. “Come on.”

In a crouch they padded forward, and as they neared the coupling to the next rail car Mercer cautiously poked his head over the gap. It was clear. They leapt in unison and continued forward. The train was starting to vibrate as it sped past twenty miles per hour.

“Watch our backs,” Mercer said, fearful now that one of Poli’s men could still emerge from between the cars.

They leapt four more cars without seeing anyone and were a quarter of the way down the sixth car when three men began to climb up from between it and the next car. They spotted Mercer and Cali instantly. Mercer opened fire and saw an explosion of pink mist blow away in the wind as one of his rounds found its mark, but the other two men vanished back into the gap. Without cover, Mercer had to turn back and run. He grabbed Cali’s arm and they raced to the end of the car, scrambling down the ladder before the gunmen at the front of the car recovered. This situation was exactly what Mercer didn’t want. It was a standoff, and every second that passed meant the train was going that much faster.

He didn’t think through his decision. He just went for it. He handed Cali his AK-74 and hung the RPG from a tear in the boxcar’s skin. “Act like we’re both still here. Fire both weapons and weave back and forth so it looks like two people pinned here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Outflank them.”

Mercer ducked around to look up the length of the train. With the exception of the big door in its middle, the side of the railcar was a featureless wall of steel. The tracks ahead ran straight down the valley floor, boxed in by mountains on both sides.

“They’ll see you on the side of the train if they look around the corner,” Cali said, desperately trying to stop him.

“I know.”

Without another word, he climbed the rest of the way down the ladder and crawled onto the heavy coupling securing this car to the next. The tracks were only two feet below him, a blur of wooden ties and gray ballast stones. He ducked lower still and peered under the railcar. Beyond the bogie trucks that anchored the wheels was a series of girders and beams that gave the boxcar its strength. It would be difficult but not impossible.

Mercer moved the Yarygin pistol from his back into the front of his jeans and slung himself under the coupling. An occasional weed growing between the tracks whipped at his head. Ignoring the distraction, he reached forward and grabbed the bogie truck, feeling the power of the train’s engine through the cold metal. He shifted his weight, using the muscles of his legs and stomach to keep his body from sagging onto the ground, and slowly inched himself into the space above the axles.

He heard Cali fire a couple of shots as he eased himself above the whirling axles. Grease coated everything, but the railcar was so old it was sticky rather than slick. He flipped onto his stomach to jam his feet against one of the longitudinal beams and hold on to the other with his arms. Inch by inch he shimmied down the length of the car, his stomach quivering with the strain of holding his body in a shallow arch. The ground whizzed by a foot under his nose. He could no longer hear Cali because of the noise generated by the boxcar, but when he reached the forward set of bogies he caught the sound of the gunmen. He torqued a leg over the top of the bogie assembly, felt the axle spinning against his skin, and yanked the leg back. One hand slipped from the beam and for a precarious moment he was suspended over the tracks by one hand and a foot and felt himself tipping over.

Mercer scrambled to right his grip and keep his heart from exploding from his chest. He took a couple of breaths before trying again. This time his foot landed on one of the axle’s supports and he managed to awkwardly climb onto the truck. The front of the car was only a few feet away. He could clearly hear the men shooting back at Cali, precisely timed shots that made him think they had ammunition to spare.

He eased forward again and was reaching for the coupling when he felt the mechanism vibrate. One of the gunmen had jumped off the ladder and onto the coupling. Hanging one-handed like a gibbon, with his shoulder no more than an inch from the wooden ties, Mercer pulled the Yarygin pistol just as the gunman got on his knees to see if he could pull off the same trick Mercer just had.

In the microsecond of shock, Mercer saw he was Middle Eastern, hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and had perfectly capped teeth. He put a bullet through the man’s skull and swung out of the way as his body fell onto the tracks and vanished.

The gunman still on the ladder heard the shot and looked down just as Mercer swung back, extending the pistol over his head. He fired as fast as he could, absorbing the recoil with a stiff elbow to keep the barrel pointed at the assassin. He had to give the man marks for courage, because even as a wall of lead flew around him he tried to bring his gun to bear. He had the barrel pointed downward when he ran out of time. One of the nine-millimeter rounds entered his stomach just below the diaphragm and shredded his left lung before emerging out the top of his shoulder, nearly severing the arm. The next two hit him in the upper chest as he lost his grip on the railing and started to fall. Another punched through his head as the Yarygin locked back empty.

The gunman hit the coupling and rolled off to follow his partner as so much litter on the tracks.

Mercer heaved himself up and climbed the ladder. He waited while Cali fired off a three-round burst and then he shouted, “Cali. All clear.”

“What?”

He thought to himself that if he was calling out to her she should realize it meant he’d made it and it was clear to come forward. “It’s clear. I got them. Bring the RPG.”

He looked up as she scrambled onto the roof of the boxcar and he too climbed up. “Hurry,” he urged and she broke into a run.

“God, you’re filthy,” Cali said when she reached him. She gave him back his half-empty assault rifle.

“Yeah, but you should see the other guy.”

She made a face. “I’ll pass, thanks.”

On the last car before the locomotive, Mercer stopped and set his AK onto the roof. Hot exhaust spewing from the locomotive stung their eyes and made the air difficult to breathe.

“This is close enough,” Mercer said. Ahead of them they could see the tracks running down the valley. The rail spur was so straight that it looked like they could see forever.

He checked over the RPG, making sure he knew how to use it. “I think the train’s clear so why don’t you start back.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Blow the tracks a couple hundred yards ahead of the train and derail the whole thing. We can jump off the back.”

She looked him in the eye. “We go together.”

Mercer made to argue, but every second saw the train going faster and faster. A leap off the back of the train was dangerous enough. It would be suicide if it was traveling much faster. In fact just to be safe he would need to give the engineer time to slow down to avoid hitting the destroyed section of track.

Without a word he hoisted the rocket launcher onto his shoulder, aimed at a spot three hundred yards ahead of the train, and pulled the trigger. The eighty-five-millimeter missile shot from the tube and an instant later the motor ignited, blasting Mercer and Cali with a wave of hot gasses. The fins deployed as the missle rocketed ahead of the train, zeroing in exactly on the spot Mercer had aimed for. He had already dropped the tube and was turned to start the mad race to the end of the train when he saw the rocket motor cut out and the missile drop like a stone. It hit the tracks and exploded less than two hundred yards in front of the speeding train, sending up a shower of loose ballast stones and tearing one of the rails off the ties.

He and Cali started to run, lurching slightly as the engineer slammed on the brakes, creating a keening screech like nails across a blackboard amplified a thousandfold.

Mercer ignored the pain in his knee, sprinting on his toes, his lungs pumping in time with his pounding heart. Next to him Cali ran with the grace of a natural athlete, her head high, her lips only slightly parted. He knew she could have run even faster but she was determined to keep pace. They took the leap onto the next car like a pair of Olympic hurdlers, with barely a check in their speed.

Behind them, the locomotive barreled on toward the ruined track, her antiquated brakes fighting her massive inertia. It was a losing battle. The one-hundred-and-eight-ton TEM16 diesel-electric hit the broken rail doing twenty-seven miles per hour. When the right side wheels hit the ground, they dug into the hard earth, plowing a deep furrow for thirty feet before the entire locomotive tipped onto its side. The coupling to the first car in the train was wrenched to one side and the car jackknifed, splitting in half as it slammed into the back of the engine.

Cali and Mercer leapt onto the next car, feeling the vibrations of the destruction behind them through their feet. Neither dared look back.

The second car came loose and rode up and over the first, tumbling it like a log as the locomotive’s belly tank ruptured and the four thousand gallons of diesel fuel she carried spread out in a small lake.

They continued even faster, running beyond what either thought they were capable of, the sound of the awful destruction behind them never seeming to recede as they ran from it.

Even with the train slowing, they jumped to the second car from the end an instant before the one they left slammed into the pileup. That car had a structural flaw of some kind because when it hit, the front of it accordioned, metal shearing and tearing as though it was paper.

The gaps between the trains were only about four feet but as Cali and Mercer neared the rear of the car Mercer shouted jump with five feet to go.

Cali did as he ordered, and as they launched themselves from the car, it hit the one before it. The coupling to the last car broke free as the second boxcar was pulled off the tracks and onto its side, falling as if in slow motion, spreading ballast stones in an arc as it tore into the ground.

They landed hard on the last car, both of them knocked off their feet by the impact. Mercer looked back. With the preceding car pulled bodily from the tracks, the last of the rolling stock had a clear path to the tangle of destroyed train cars. It had slowed enough so he threw an arm over Cali and together they held on as it hit. Most of the energy of the collision was absorbed by the squashed cars in front, so it felt like nothing more than a mild bump.

Cali and Mercer shared a surprised look, then burst out laughing.

“I think this is our stop,” Mercer quipped and Cali laughed even harder.

But their laughter was cut short when both smelled burning fuel at the same time. They scrambled to their feet and ran to the rear of the car. Cali descended the ladder first, with Mercer right behind, hooking his feet outside the rungs so he could slide down the ladder like a submariner. They ran for a couple hundred yards before turning back.

The railcars were piled three high in places. Two of them were flipped over on their roofs, and as Mercer and Cali watched, the spreading pool of diesel consumed the wreckage in a wall of flame that grew to a hundred feet.

Mercer put his arm around Cali’s slender waist and she snuggled into him as they watched the inferno mutely, confident that Poli was dead.