Mirror Image

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

Spetsnaz soldiers were trained to do many things with their chief weapon, the spade. They were left in a locked room with just the spade and a mad dog. They were ordered to chop down trees with them. On occasion, they had to dig ditches in frozen ground with them, ditches deep enough to lie in. At a specified time, tanks were rolled over the field. Soldiers who hadn't dug deep enough were crushed.

With the help of Liz Gordon, Lieutenant Colonel Squires had made a special study of spetsnaz techniques, searching for those that best accounted for the remarkable endurance and versatility of their soldiers. He couldn't adapt them all. Regular beatings to toughen the soldiers would never have been approved by the Pentagon, although he knew commanding officers who would have sanctioned them gladly. But he adapted many spetsnaz methods, including his favorites— their ability to create camouflage in a very short time and to hide in the unlikeliest places.

When he had learned about the soldiers posted on top of the train, he realized they'd be watching the treetops, cliffs, boulders, and snowbanks along the route. He knew that someone in the engine would be watching the tracks for explosives or debris. But he also knew that he had to get under the train unseen, and that the best place to hide would be on the tracks themselves.

The glow of an engine-mounted headlight would be diffused and dull, and the soldiers would be paying careful attention to the rails. So he felt safe using a small hatchet to hack through two of the dry, old crossties, chop a shallow ditch in the railbed, lie on his back, and have Grey cover him and his sack of C-4 with snow— leaving an arm-thick tunnel on the side so he could breathe. After interring Newmeyer nearby, Grey hid behind a boulder, far from the train; when Squires and Newmeyer tackled the two cars and the fireworks started, Grey would move on his target, the engine.

Squires had heard, then felt, the drumming approach of the train. He hadn't been nervous. He was below the surface of the rails where even the cowcatcher, if there was one, wouldn't touch the snow piled on top of him. His only concern was that the engineer see the tree too soon or not see it at all and collide with it. In the latter case, not only would the train be damaged but the wheels would kick the tree back and over him, in which case he would be, as he'd joked to Grey, "ground Chuck."

Neither of those had happened. But when the train did stop and Squires was able to burrow a little hole in front of his eyes, he saw that he was under the coal tender. That was one car ahead of where he had hoped he'd be.

At least the camouflage worked, he'd thought as he discreetly began to push the snow from himself. There was something very gratifying and historically fight about Russian troops falling for a Russian scheme— like Rasputin being killed by Czarists and the Czar being killed by Revolutionaries.

As he'd finished brushing away the snow, Squires had heard shouting. Despite the fact that virtually every inch of skin was covered with Nomex garments, he was cold— a chill that seemed deeper, for some reason, because of the flat darkness surrounding him.

No sooner was he free than he heard boots crunch hard in the wet drifts. This was followed by the lighting of flares, which spread rosy circles of light in the snow and caused the dark underbelly of the train to glow devilishly.

Carefully placing his backpack on his belly, Squires began wriggling backward, out of the ditch and along the railbed toward the first car. Soldiers were moving to the right of him, and he stopped for a moment to unbutton the safety strap of the holster he wore low on his right hip. Though Squires didn't want to cause an international incident, he would rather read newspaper accounts of his crimes and misdeeds than have others read about his death on a frozen plain in Siberia.

Squires's backward crawl went quickly, and he was underneath the coupling between the coal tender and the first car just as the Russian soldiers reached the fallen tree. This, despite the fact that he was pushing up mounds of snow with his shoulders and had to limbo over them backward. Opening the ruck flap, the Striker removed the C-4 and gingerly pressed it against the metal as flakes of damp, rusted iron fell like snow. When the explosives were secure, he took out the three-inch diameter timer and, with an insistent push from the heel of his hand, slipped the positive and negative ends into the plastique. There were two buttons above a numeric keypad, and he pressed the button on the left. That turned the unit on, and he used the numeric keypad to enter the countdown. He would give himself one hour. After punching in 60:00:00, he hit the button on the top right to lock it in. Then he hit the left-button, right-button sequence one more time to start the countdown.

Squires pushed his feet against the ruddy snow and wriggled to the middle of the first car. He heard thumping overhead, toward the upper right. The sudden stop must have dislodged the cargo and it was being restacked. Kicking backward another few feet, he stopped directly beneath the noise and put the C-4 there. He plugged in a timer and repeated the process that would cause this larger batch of plastique to explode. Moving under the second car, Squires rigged it to go off with a third slap of C-4 and a timer.

When he was finished, Squires allowed himself to enjoy a long, deep breath. He gazed across his chest toward the front of the train and saw that the men were nearly finished removing the tree. He didn't have much time.

Sliding out from under the ruck, Squires set it gingerly to his right as he sidled to the left. When he was out from under the train, he turned over on his belly and lay in the long, flare-cast shadow of the train. He looked at the luminous dial of his watch and was pleased at how quickly the operation had gone. He knew it was one of those things that, had he had time to rehearse it back at Andrews, would have taken ten or twenty percent longer to accomplish in the field. Why it worked that way, he had no idea. But it did.

He looked back toward the first car and, walking on his elbows, made his way to a drift near the coal tender. He began pushing the snow aside; that was Newmeyer's signal to start digging himself out. The Private was trembling and had bitten down on the mouth covering of his balaclava to keep his teeth from chattering. Squires gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder as Newmeyer rolled onto his belly. He had been buried with his 9mm Beretta on his chest, and he holstered it now.

Newmeyer knew what to do, so Squires crawled back to the second car to get in position.

This was one action he wished he had been able to rehearse. But though a spetsnaz soldier might be able to function without sleep for seventy-two hours, and Israeli Sayeret Tzanhanim paratroop recon commandos could land on top of a running camel, and he had seen an Omani Royal Guard officer kill a man with a hatpin to the throat, Squires knew that no soldier in the world could improvise like a Striker. That was the beauty of the team, why they fit perfectly with Op-Center's mandate to bronco-bust unfolding crises.

Squires hooked the detonator to his belt, slipped on his compact respirator, then drew a flash/bang grenade from his left hip pouch. He slid the pull ring of the grenade over his right thumb, still holding the safety spoon. Then he pulled an M54 lachrymatory gas canister from its pouch and held it in his left hand, his thumb through the ring. When Newmeyer had done likewise, the two men rose slowly, in the shadows, and stood just to the right of the windows of the first and second cars.