Corsair - Cussler Clive. Страница 58

It wasn’t his watch Juan thought he heard. It was the rhythmic whomp-whomp-whomp of an approaching helicopter. George Adams was still twenty minutes out. It had to be the terrorists’ Mi-8.

It didn’t matter that the train car was full anyway, and only one old woman was struggling to make it to the railhead from across the compound, while behind her tents and equipment burned, sending columns of smoke into the pinking sky.

Time had run out.

TWENTY-THREE

WHEN BULLETS PEPPERED THE GROUND IN THE OLD WOMAN’S wake, Cabrillo was slapping home a fresh magazine into the underside of his assault rifle. He hadn’t expended the first, so there was no need to cock the weapon.

To Juan, at this moment, the more than one hundred people crowded into the boxcar didn’t matter. Only the old woman.

It was perhaps a fault in his logic, a synapse that fired a little off. He made no distinction between the needs of the many versus the needs of the few. At that moment, her life meant as much to him as all the others.

He broke cover and fired from the hip, laying down a blistering barrage that silenced the terrorist’s gun. The woman had frozen in place. Deer caught in headlights, flashed through Juan’s mind.

He reached her in a dozen long strides, ducking as he approached so he could scoop her up over his left shoulder without pausing. She was a solid one hundred and eighty pounds, despite the starvation diet, and must have tipped the scales at two-fifty before her ordeal. Juan staggered under the weight, his wounded leg almost buckling. The woman gave a startled yelp but didn’t struggle, as Cabrillo started back for the building, running awkwardly, half turning to watch their rear, his rifle held one-handed.

The woman suddenly screamed. Juan twisted back. A guard had appeared out of nowhere. He was armed only with a club, a suicide charge, but Cabrillo’s rifle was still pointed in the wrong direction. As he spun, the old woman’s feet missed the guard’s head by inches, and when Juan came around to get his REC7 aimed the woman used his momentum to fire a solid punch to the guard’s chin an instant before the club crashed down on her exposed neck.

The terrorist staggered back and was starting forward again when a round from Linc in the loading tower drilled him to the ground.

“Lady,” Juan panted in Arabic, “you’ve got a right cross like Muhammad Ali.”

“I always thought George Foreman had a better punch,” she replied.

He almost dropped her when he started to laugh. He dumped her into the boxcar and nodded to Linda to slam the rolling door closed. “Murph, you set?” he called over the radio.

The sound of the approaching chopper grew by the second.

“I’m good to go.”

“Linc, get ready. We’re rolling in thirty seconds.”

On his way to the passenger’s seat, Mark Murphy flattened the Pig’s right-side tires. It took him two shots each despite the point-blank range. Linda had already helped Fodl into the rear cargo compartment, and Greg Chaffee stood with his head and torso thrust out of the open top hatch.

Juan threw himself into the driver’s seat. Ahead of them loomed a diesel-electric locomotive, a huge machine capable of hauling strings of ore cars up and down the mountain. He would have been concerned about it following them, but its engines were cold and would take at least a half hour to get running at temperature.

Max Hanley had designed the Pig with a twenty-four-gear transmission. Juan dropped it into low range and selected the lowest of the four reverse gears. Pressing his foot to the accelerator, he felt and heard the engine revs build while the twin turbos screamed. The railcar behind them weighed eighteen thousand pounds, according to the faded stencil on its side, and packed within was another five tons of humanity. From a dead stop, he had no idea if he could get such a load moving.

The truck shuddered as the deflated tires slipped against the slick steel rails.

Juan unclipped a safety device attached to the floor shifter and pushed down on a red knob. From the integrated NOS, nitrous oxide flowed into the engine’s cylinders, breaking down in the extreme heat and releasing additional oxygen for combustion.

The Pig didn’t have the torque, as Max had boasted, “to push the Oregon up Niagara Falls,” but the two-hundred-horsepower boost provided by the nitrous oxide was the kick Juan needed to overcome the train’s static inertia.

Starting out at barely a snail’s pace, the Pig started pushing the laden railcar along the track, and each foot gained increased their speed fractionally. The digital speedometer on the dash ticked to one mile per hour, and had reached three when the train began to pass under the skeletal support frame of the old coal-loading station where Linc had made his sniper’s nest.

When the Chairman had radioed they were ready to go, Linc had climbed down from the top of the rusted conveyor belt and stood poised over the open mouth of a coal chute straddling the tracks. The leading edge of the car rolled into view, and he dropped through space, landing and tumbling in one smooth motion. The coaling station had been designed for low-slung hopper cars, not the tall, boxy freight car, and as he pressed himself up to get to his feet he spotted the razor-sharp edge of another coal chute about to slice his head off.

He dropped flat, the chute passing an inch above his nose, and he remained perfectly still as they accelerated under a dozen more. Only when they had cleared the rusted bulk of the loading station did he dare draw a breath. “I’m aboard,” he radioed.

“Good,” Juan answered. “You’ve got more time behind the wheel of this thing. Get your butt down here and drive.”

For the first mile out of the mine, the ground was dead level, and the Pig was accelerating smoothly, so Juan hit the cruise control and unlimbered himself from his seat. In the cargo bed, he stuffed extra magazines for his Barrett REC7 into his pant pocket. “How are you two holding up?” he asked Alana and Fodl without looking at them.

“You have given me hope for the first time in six months,” the Libyan replied. “I have never felt better.”

“Alana?” he asked, finally able to give her his attention. He’d strapped a double holster around his waist for a pair of FN Five-seveNs.

“I haven’t done anything to deserve that fedora yet.”

“You’ve done plenty.”

“Ah, who’s driving the train?” Linc asked as he lowered himself past Greg Chaffee and spotted Juan.

“First corner isn’t for another half mile or more. We do this exactly like we talked about and we should make it. Oh, damn,” Cabrillo said, suddenly remembering something. He ducked his head back into the Pig’s cab. “Mark, the boxcar weighs nine tons. Throw in another five for the people. Math it.”

“I need its dimensions.”

“Guess.”

Mark looked at him, incredulous. “Guess? Are you kidding?”

“Nope.”

“ ‘Math it,’ he says,” Mark griped to Juan’s departing form. “ ‘Guess.’ Jeesh!”

Juan climbed out onto the Pig’s roof. He estimated they were up to fifteen miles per hour and continuing to accelerate. So far, so good, he thought briefly before looking up and seeing no sign of the helicopter.

He stepped aft and was bracing himself to leap up onto the boxcar’s roof when Greg Chaffee opened up with the M60. Cabrillo turned to see a camouflaged truck careen toward the stockyard. It was the first of the terrorists from the training camp. There were a dozen holding on to the rails of the truck’s open bed. Their gun barrels bristled.

The road they were on clung to the side of a hill running a little above and parallel to the rail line. Chaffee had been quick with the machine gun, firing at the truck’s tires before the driver had regained full control of the vehicle. Rounds peppered the area near the front tire until it exploded, shedding rubber like a Catherine wheel throws sparks.