Ragnarok

FOUR

Walt Disney World Resort, FL

2 November, 1300 Hrs

“How the hell do I keep getting myself into these things?”

Jack Sigler, callsign: King, raced across the roof of a speeding, white public transit monorail train that ran around the amusement park on an elevated track. The man he was chasing was not going to get away.

It was an overcast day in what was supposed to be sunny Flor-ida. A high-sixties breeze buffeted King’s short-cropped hair. He missed his long shaggy hair, which he’d cut for an undercover mission in Paris and planned to grow out again. His loose-fitting black t-shirt with his hero Elvis’s TCB logo rippled across his muscular chest in the warm wind. The shirt was his favorite. That was King, too: taking care of business. The man he chased across the roof of the fast-moving monorail was dressed in his own pair of jeans and a lightweight hooded sweatshirt with a small Jansport backpack on his back. No more than twenty-five, King thought, the man had a nervous, sweaty look to him that had first tipped King off that something wasn’t right.

King had been vacationing in Florida with his girlfriend, CDC disease detective turned Endgame expert, Sara Fogg. Accompanying the pair was his adopted fourteen-year-old daughter, Fiona Lane, the lone survivor of an attack that took the lives of her grandmother, as well as the rest of the Siletz Reservation the pair called home.

As a former Delta operator and field leader of the ultra-secret Chess Team, King had met both women while on the job, and his work had severely affected each of their lives. Most of the time, Fiona was fine with her adopted family of soldiers and her life of danger, but sometimes she wanted to just be a kid. She had asked King shyly if they might take a trip to Disney sometime. After the recent events with his job in Paris, King and Sara had quickly decided it was something they all needed. A little time for each of them to be normal.

King and Sara had grown closer, too, so much so that she was naturally a part of the process now, when it came to decisions for Fiona. King wasn’t sure marriage was in the cards anytime soon-after all, he was a full-time soldier dealing with threats that affected America and the globe. The level of danger was more than could be coped with by most tactical military teams. But he also couldn’t deny that he felt empty on the downtime when Sara was out in the field battling microscopic enemies that all the bullets in the world couldn’t kill.

Their Disney vacation had started out fine, and King found himself really enjoying sleeping in each morning. The girls were impatient with him, though, so today they had headed to Epcot early and King followed when he woke. He was taking the monorail from the hotel when he had spotted the sweaty man with the backpack.

Seated at the front of the train, Sweaty had started fidgeting with his pack, and King, trained to notice such things, had started counting problems with the man. Inappropriate clothing-the sweatshirt was too hot for the day. A bag and hands in the bag fumbling with things unseen. Profuse nervous sweating and a glazed stare fixed directly ahead. King couldn’t believe it, but the man was exhibiting many of the symptoms of a suicide bomber. But he was a Caucasian man-not West Asian-so King had initially told himself that maybe he was being overly cautious. He glanced back behind him to check the rest of the monorail car for the other passengers, to see if anything or anyone else set off his security radar.

But when he turned back, he realized he never should have taken eyes off the subject. The man had stood, swept into the unlocked driver’s compartment at the front of the train and pulled an automatic pistol out of his pack.

That’s what I get for racial profiling.

King lunged from his seat, already in motion along the length of the car when Sweaty had conked the driver-an older man of at least sixty-five-over the head with the butt of the weapon. He was squatting and affixing a magnetic bomb to the dash of the train when King had nearly reached the door of the driver’s compartment.

Passengers screamed, as King eyed the bomb.

Sweaty had turned at the last second and with no hesitation had fired a sweeping arc of eight bullets through the Plexiglas windows and back into the passenger area of the compartment. King instinctively threw himself backward as he saw the gun arm coming up, almost in slow motion. The Plexiglas shattered as he fell to the floor, fragmenting and spraying large shards over him and a row of screaming Mouseketeers. He rolled to a crouch against the bottom of the door leading into the front compartment, and one of the passengers made eye contact with him. She pointed at the front of the train.

King rose and peered through the shattered window, quickly taking in the unconscious old man, the bomb on the dash and the open side window through which he could just see the leg of the sweaty man rising out of view.

The roof, he thought. Why do they always go for the roof on a moving train?

King stepped into the driver’s area and checked for a pulse on the old man. He was alive-just out cold. The bomb was unfamiliar to King, but clearly not a homemade job. Either Sweaty was a professional bomb-maker or he had obtained the device from one. King didn’t know much about the monorail trains at Disney, or about how they worked, but he had read some things about the park on the flight from Europe. He knew that the trains had a system that prevented them from colliding and shut them down in case of an emergency. He remembered that the system was called MAPO, after Mary Poppins. There were lights on the dash that would indicate when the MAPO system was engaged. But a small black device with a blinking red light had been magnetically attached to the dash next to the MAPO system, and King was dismayed to see that no MAPO lights were lit. The black device was clearly interfering with the safety system of the train.

King stared at the bomb and the black box. He didn’t know what to do. He knew how to disarm some simple, improvised explosive devices, but not a bomb of this complexity. He didn’t know if he could just remove either the bomb or the electronic device interfering with the MAPO system. Either attempt might set the bomb off early. He glanced at the speedometer and saw the train was doing nearly 50 mph, and then looked out the front of the train at the monorail track ahead. Eventually they would hit something or the bomb would go off, assuming it had some kind of internal timer.

Gonna have to bring Sweaty back, King thought, and climbed out the open window.

The man ran toward the back of the train. King chased after him, but made ready to hit the deck should the man turn and fire the 9 mm that he still clutched in one sweaty hand. But the man didn’t turn until King was nearly on top of him. Sweaty stopped on the roof of the last car and simply stood still. As King got up to him, the man turned and again brought the weapon up, but King was ready for him this time. He swatted the weapon from the man’s arm and it went flying into the air. King launched a right cross and hit the man on the chin. Sweaty staggered back and all the fight went out of him. Then the man brought his eyes up to look at King.

But his eyes didn’t stop on King’s face. He was looking over King’s right shoulder, up toward the front of the train, and King saw terror fill the man’s face. The man took a step back from King, turned and sprinted off the rear of the train, his torso slamming into the concrete edge of the raised rail and his body then flipping backward to plummet to the ground forty feet below.

King watched the sweaty man fall as if in slow motion, then he slowly turned around to see what the bomber had seen. He was expecting more men. Armed men. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his consciousness, he was even expecting some hideous creature from the unknown-King had certainly faced enough far-fetched exotic creatures as a part of his work, to make the possibility of a monstrous beast one he would consider.

What he wasn’t expecting was a Russian Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunship loaded with armaments on its wings and a Yak-B nose-mounted cannon pointed right at King. In fact, the massive Russian assault helicopter was probably further down on the list of things King’s subconscious could have imagined than the Loch Ness Monster.