The Heretics Treasure

Chapter Fifty

The blast ripped through the train, obliterating everything in its path with fire and shrapnel.

The heat and noise were terrifying as Ben felt himself flying through the air. He cannoned backwards off something solid, collapsed to the floor as the fireball rolled over him. As if in slow motion, the train was knocked sideways with a sickening lurch by the impact and went careering off the rails. A screeching, juddering, bone-wrenching crash of buckling metal as it ploughed into the ground at forty miles an hour, kicking up a giant wave of sand and dirt and rocks as it twisted and broke apart. Ben was dimly aware of the carriage he’d just been standing in flipping upwards and crashing down with a deafening crunch.

Another impact tossed him violently sideways, and for a few moments he was aware only of the beating of his heart and the blood pounding in his ears.

Through the floating dust that choked the air came the screams and groans of the survivors. Ben struggled to his feet and saw that his carriage had stayed upright. Smoke was pouring from its far end, and through it he could see tongues of flame licking the roof and rapidly gaining ground.

Next to him, Kirby was stirring into consciousness. ‘Are you OK?’ Ben asked him, shaking his arm.

Kirby looked up. His face was pale and caked with dust and sand. ‘I’m OK,’ he croaked. ‘I think.’

Ben glanced around him at the carnage. Not far away, the guard who’d been trying to control the passengers a moment earlier was lying dead. Jerry Novak lay sprawled unconscious beside him in the broken glass that littered the carriage floor, a trickle of blood on his brow, his clothes singed. Alice Novak was up shakily on her feet, wailing for help. There was a cut on her face. She was pointing wildly back at the smoke.

Ben suddenly understood what she was trying to communicate. In the impact she’d been separated from her son, Mikey, and he was somewhere at the back of the burning carriage.

Ben slung the rifle over his shoulder and ran into the fire, feeling the flames searing his legs. The far end of the sleeper car had crumpled into a concertina shape, plywood partitions and fittings and twisted bits of bunk all piled up and burning. He kicked away the wreckage, anxiously watching the blaze as it quickly spread across the width of the carriage. The smoke was thick and acrid, and it was hard to see. But, as he ripped away a section of crushed wall partition, he saw the huddled form of the child wedged in underneath. He was alive and moving.

Ben grasped hold of the coughing, wheezing boy and hauled him bodily out of the wreckage. His face was blackened, but there was no sign of burns on his skin or clothes. Ben carried him back to the other end of the carriage and passed him over to his mother. Alice Novak embraced her child, sobbing. Her husband was coming around, moaning in pain. They’d been lucky.

‘We need to get out of here, now.’ Ben pointed at the ragged exit hole the RPG round had made in the side of the train. Beyond it, the sun was shining through the smoke and he could make out the shapes of large boulders in the tufted grass and sand. Helping Jerry Novak to his feet, he guided the little group quickly out of the smashed carriage as the fire started gaining control of its mid-section, and directed them towards the rocks. ‘Move, move.’

The train lay strewn across the ground like a broken necklace. Other passengers were emerging from points along its twisted length, staggering and dazed, some of them bleeding, supporting one another. Ben looked at the shattered ruins of the two carriages that had flipped over and virtually fused together with the impact. Flames were pouring like liquid from their windows. If anyone had been in there, they weren’t coming out. His fists tightened with rage at what Kamal had done.

‘They’re coming back,’ Kirby said in a shaky voice.

Across the tracks, a slanting column of black smoke was rising from the wreck of the terrorists’ vehicle. The remaining pickup truck, the black Nissan and the Dodge had tracked around in a wide arc and now they were approaching fast for another pass, dust clouds billowing in their wake. Ben watched the black Nissan and instantly knew Kamal’s intention. The terrorist was going to kill every single man, woman and child on board, just to get to him.

Except Ben wasn’t going to let that happen. Not today. He dived back inside the burning train, battled through the smoke to what was left of his and Kirby’s sleeper compartment, found the holdall among the wreckage, dragged it out and grabbed another grenade.

The three vehicles came roaring in across the sand. The black Nissan on the left, the Dodge on the right, the armed pickup in the middle. The.50-cal spurted flame. Bullets chewed through the smashed train.

‘The rocks!’ Ben yelled at the staggering survivors. ‘Make for the rocks!’

People fled in panic as gunfire churned up the sand. A middle-aged man in a business suit was desperately running for cover, clutching an attaché case, when a long sustained chattering burst from the machine gun pitched him forward with his arms outflung. Papers from his ripped attaché case tumbled across the ground.

But he was the last victim that the gunner would ever claim. The fire control system diode turned green as Ben’s sights locked onto the pickup. The FN blasted its grenade and the truck exploded violently. The other vehicle swerved out of its path as it flipped and rolled.

Ben loaded another grenade. Aimed at Kamal’s Nissan and fired. But the driver somehow managed to swerve out of his line of fire. The grenade impacted on the rusty Dodge and kicked it away like a toy. It blew apart into a million pieces as the fuel tank ruptured.

The Nissan was the only one left now. The driver banked sharply off course and the engine rasped as he accelerated away in the sand, wheels spinning. Ben chased the vehicle with a long burst of automatic fire, the FN bucking in his hands. Then his magazine was empty and the Nissan was disappearing fast into the morning heat haze.

He lowered the rifle. It was over for now. Kamal had taken a battering, down from eight men to three. But Ben knew he hadn’t seen the last of him.

He ran back to the small crowd of survivors huddled among the rocks. Faces watched him, pale and frightened, streaked with dust and tears.

‘Will they come back?’ a woman asked.

‘No,’ Ben replied. ‘They’re gone.’

Suddenly the questions were firing from all sides.

‘I can’t find my wife.’

‘What’s going to happen to us?’

‘How far are we from Aswan?’

Then a small Egyptian man in his late fifties stepped up. His suit was dusty and rumpled, and his long, thin face bore the melancholy look of someone who’d seen a lot of suffering in the past and was resigned to the knowledge that he’d see a lot more in the future. ‘I am a doctor. Let me help you.’

Ten minutes later, the wounded were being attended to as well as the doctor could manage with the limited first-aid kit from the guard’s van. All the water supplies they could find were gathered together in the shade of a rock. Ben used the radio from one of the dead cops to call the attack in to the Cairo police. Emergency teams would be on their way. He gave Kirby the rifle and the holdall to look after as he ran the length of the train, pulling open doors, searching through corridors and sleeper compartments, looking for more survivors. The first carriage he searched was sitting at a crazy angle, propped up against the one in front of it. Inside, he found a frail old man lying splayed out on the sloping floor. His neck was broken. It looked like he’d been sleeping when the crash happened, come flying off his bunk and hit the washbasin. Ben felt deeply saddened by the sight, and his hands were shaking with rage as he lifted the body out and laid it carefully on the ground outside.

In a short time, he found four more survivors in the wreck, three of them walking wounded and one with a concussion, and delivered them to safety among the rocks. But there were more dead than alive inside the train. The driver had taken a bullet as he sat at the controls. The guard nearest to the RPG strike had had his throat blown out by shrapnel, the other had been crushed in the impact of the derailment. All three plainclothes cops had been shot dead. One of them had caught a burst of machine-gun fire across the torso that had separated him into two pieces. The same string of bullets had killed a young couple as they sat together on their bunk.

Eleven bodies in all, not counting the charred remains that everyone knew were still trapped inside the smoking husks of the two badly burned-out and overturned carriages. Their recovery would be the terrible task facing the paramedic teams and fire crew, when they arrived.

Ben arranged the dead in a row on the ground a few yards from the train, and a woman passenger who turned out to be an ex-nurse helped him to cover them with sheets and blankets that they weighed down with rocks. Then he gathered up the weapons from the three dead cops, in case they fell into the wrong hands. Finding a fire extinguisher in the guard’s van, he used it to douse the flames in the carriages that were still smouldering.

Once he was assured that the fires were all out and the survivors were safe, he returned to their sleeper compartment and muttered a quick thanks to God that the fire hadn’t spread that far. Digging through broken glass and wreckage, he retrieved his phone, cash and the laminated photocopy of the Wenkaura map that Claudel had made for him.

As he worked, he wondered how Kamal had caught up with them. Had Claudel betrayed them? It was more likely that Kamal had pressed it out of him somehow. Which probably meant the Frenchman was dead as well-but it was too late to worry about that.

The real concern was that if Kamal had known to come after the train, it was certain he knew where the treasure was. In which case eliminating the opposition wasn’t the terrorist’s only goal. He wouldn’t return to the scene of the crime. He and his remaining men were already heading for the Sudan. It was a race now.

The sun was rising, and it was getting hot. Walking back to the rocks, Ben found the doctor and ex-nurse treating a woman with a lacerated arm. He kneeled down next to them and briefed them on the situation. ‘The emergency teams won’t be long,’ he said. ‘You’re in charge now.’

‘Where are you going?’ the doctor asked.

‘I’d rather not be around when the police get here,’ Ben said.

The doctor’s face creased into a sad, faint smile. ‘I don’t know who you are, or what you are. But you saved all these people. If you had not been here…’

‘I wish I could have done more.’ Ben stood up. He hated leaving the scene, but he trusted his improvised medical team to take care of things.

He scanned the horizon. The Nile was no more than a couple of kilometres away. And wherever in Egypt you could find greenery and water, you could find people and supplies. And motor vehicles ready and waiting to be bought, hired or stolen. There was always a way.

He turned to Kirby. ‘We’re moving on.’