Merry Christmas, Alex Cross

CHAPTER 69

Snow began to fall again as one of Nazad’s men set down his bolt cutters after clipping out an entire section of the chain-link fence that separated them from the train tracks. He and the other two members of the Family were all wearing the same fake CSX repairman uniforms as their leader.

“Get the substitute barrels,” Nazad hissed to two of them, and he told the third, “Bring the tank.”

The Tunisian charged down the steep bank in the knee-deep snow as the flakes grew thicker and fell faster until it was almost as if he were in one of those Christmas movies that the infidels so adored and he so despised. Almost there, he glanced to his left along the boxcars. He was unable to see the two locomotives at the head of the freight train, which was good: he wanted them deep inside the tunnel, blind to what was about to happen twenty-nine cars back.

He reached the green C. Itoh container car and went to its rear doors, which were locked. To ensure the integrity of the cargo, whoever had loaded the car had sealed the locks with heavy-gauge steel cables and crimped metal plates that bore the date and time the doors were closed.

One of Nazad’s men appeared, lugging what looked like a scuba tank. Nazad reached inside his coat and pulled out an apparatus that included two rubber hoses, a brass connector, and the thin neck and head of an acetylene torch.

They had it attached in seconds. Nazad glanced up the north bank toward the freeway. No one would ever see them down here. Who would look anywhere but the road in a crazy storm like this?

He got out a flint striker, turned the gas on, and lit the torch with a sound like a cork popping. With three slow, deliberate slashes, he severed the cables from the sealing plates. They fell, hissing, into the snow at his feet.

Nazad shut the torch off and handed it to his helper, who set it aside and started to claw his way back up through the snow toward the repair van. Nazad retrieved the sealing plates and pocketed them. It was snowing so hard now that he kept blinking at the infernal flakes as he opened the door.

“Brother,” he heard one of his men say with a gasp. “It is too much!”

The Tunisian grimaced, looked around the door, and saw the other two men with him at the bottom of the bank, a blue fifty-five-gallon drum half submerged in the snow between them.

“We can’t lift it!” the other man said. “Without the snow, yes, we could use the dolly, but it’s too much.”

Nazad lost it. Livid, he ran to them, down the path that had begun to form. “Too much?” he said, slapping one man and then the other. “It’s too much for you to get six barrels one hundred feet through the snow, and not too much for Hala to risk her life to stop this train for you? Think of where she is, brothers. Think of what she’s doing for you and for Allah right now.”