Текст книги "Corsair"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

A couple of them who were pressed against the building looked at Juan fearfully when they saw his weapon. Then Fodl appeared at his side.

“Come with us,” Fodl told them with an aura of command that didn’t surprise the Chairman. “These people are here to help.”

A few of the emaciated prisoners stared back at him uncertainly. “Go. That is an order.”

Like a breached levee, the few heading toward the railcar that Linda held open turned into a flood. Cabrillo stood at the corner, sweeping the compound for any interested guards. If any looked their way, he put them down, while next to him Fodl waved in more of his people. A group of women appeared from under the overturned serving tables and raced for the building, only to have someone open fire at them from their flank. One of the women went down before Juan could counterfire, hammering home a steady burst into a pyramid of crates from where the shots had originated.

The other women helped the injured girl to her feet, supporting her under her arms and making her almost hopscotch to safety.

“Bless you,” one of them said to Juan as they passed around the building and into protective cover.

Another prisoner paused at Juan’s side. He gave the man a passing glance and then returned to scanning the compound. The prisoner touched Juan’s sleeve, and he looked at him more carefully. He wasn’t an Arab like all the others. His hair and face were pale, although his skin was burned raw by the sun.

“You Chaffee?” Juan asked.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“You’ve got Alana Shepard to thank for your rescue.”

Chaffee sagged with relief. “Thank God. We were told last night she was shot for trying to escape.”

“Are you in any condition to fight?”

The CIA agent tried to pull himself erect. “Give me a gun and watch me.”

Juan pointed to where Mark Murphy was securing the old boxcar to the Pig’s rear tow hooks. From this distance, the train car looked massive and the chain as thin as a silver necklace, but there was nothing he could do about it. “Report to that guy over there. He’ll take care of you.”

“Thank you.”

Cabrillo looked at his watch. Eight minutes since the first shot fired. They had less than ten more before a horde of gunmen arrived from the training camp, and just an hour until the Libyan military arrived and opened fire on anything that moved.

Prisoners continued to stream toward the railcar, and no matter how Juan tried to urge them to hurry they just couldn’t. They were so far gone from their ordeal that even the offer of freedom couldn’t make their bodies move faster than a painful shuffle. He could almost hear his watch ticking.

Glancing over his shoulder, Juan watched them climb into the train, each one pausing when he or she was inside to help the next in line.

It wasn’t his watch Juan thought he heard. It was the rhythmic whomp-whomp-whompof 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 Oregonup 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.

The truck swerved when the mangled rim gouged into the soft gravel shoulder. The men in back started to scream as the vehicle tipped further. Still moving dangerously fast, the truck flipped onto its side, skidding down the hill. Some of the terrorists were thrown clear, others clutched the supports to keep themselves inside when it rolled onto its roof. The cab plowed a furrow into the earth before it flipped again, barrel-rolling violently, sheet metal and men peeling away in a cloud of dust.

A second desert-patrol vehicle appeared before the first had settled back on its ruined undercarriage. The driver of this one caught a break. Greg Chaffee had blown through the last of the ammunition in the belt and stood impotently as Linda showed him how to swap it out. The truck dashed down the hill and braked for cover behind the hulking shadow of the locomotive. The men in the bed opened fire at extreme range, and a few lucky hits were close enough to make Linda and Chaffee duck.

Cabrillo had lost precious seconds watching the spectacle and roused himself with an angry shudder. The boxcar’s roof was four feet above his head, and he needed a running start to launch himself so he hit the edge with his chest. Kicking at the smooth metal sides and straining with his arms, he hauled himself atop the car and looked forward. The first curve was a quarter mile away, and they had sped up to at least twenty miles an hour.

He knew from the map Eric had e-mailed from the Oregonthat this was a long, sweeping corner taking the tracks around the very top of this mountain and that the grade started to fall away as soon as they entered it. Twenty miles an hour was okay going in, but if they continued to accelerate eventually they would lose control of the boxcar.

Juan moved all the way to the front of the car where a rusted, four-spoked metal wheel gave him control over the car’s mechanical brakes. In the days before George Westinghouse invented his fail-safe pneumatic-braking system, teams of brakemen would ride atop trains and turn devices like this one to squeeze the pads against the wheels in an uncoordinated and often deadly ballet. Cabrillo prayed as he grasped the wheel that it wasn’t frozen solid by rust, and that after the decades the car had been used on the line there were any brake pads remaining.

Prepared to heave with all his strength, he cursed when the wheel spun freely in his hands. It felt like it wasn’t connected to anything, but then he heard the squeal of metal on metal as the old brakes clamped over the top of the car’s wheels. They worked after all and had been recently greased. Grinning at his luck, he cranked the wheel another half turn, and his elation turned to dismay. The added pressure should have tightened the brake pads further and changed the pitch of the screech coming from the wheels. It didn’t happen.

They had brakes, yes. But not much.

The Pig pushed the freight car into the turn, and Juan lost sight of the ore-loading superstructure as it vanished around the hilltop. To his right, he had a commanding view over another valley and, as if to remind him of their predicament, a string of ore cars that had left the tracks a hundred years before at its bottom, looking like discarded toys. If he had to guess, the steam engine that had gone over with them probably had five times the Pig’s horsepower.

“Linc, you there?” he radioed.

“Yes.”

“What’s our speed?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Okay, don’t let it go past thirty. We don’t have much braking left on the boxcar.”

“Is that bad?” Linda asked over the net.

“It ain’t good.”

There were ladder rungs welded to the front of the car, so Cabrillo climbed over and down. Next to him was the shaft that linked the wheel above to a worm gear that activated the brakes. Juan hooked his legs around the forward coupling and braced one hand on a stanchion so he could peer under the edge of the car. Creosote-blackened railroad ties zipped by inches from where he dangled. A stone was lodged between the turning rod and the worm gear. When he twisted the wheel, the stone had kicked the gear’s teeth out of alignment so it turned without activating the brakes. Redoubling his grip, he stretched until his chest was under the car. Weeds growing in the old railbed whipped his cheek and face.

His fingers sank into the grease that coated the gear, but no matter how he tried he couldn’t get a grip on the tightly wedged stone chip.

“Screw this,” he muttered, and reached behind his back for one of his automatic pistols.

His body swayed as he drew it, and for a moment he was looking up the tracks. A metal jerry can had fallen from an earlier train or been left between the rails by one of the work crews. Juan was hurtling toward it at more than thirty miles per hour and didn’t have the time or leverage to pull himself clear. Hanging practically upside down, he aimed at the can and opened fire as fast as the gun would cycle. The high-velocity bullets from the FN Five-seveN punched through the can’s thin sides without moving it. He was ten feet from having his face smashed into the container when a round caught on one of its corner seams and sent the can skittering harmlessly away.

He twisted back and fired the last round at the worm gear. The rock popped free and fell away.

“Now, that’s what I’m talking about,” he crowed, high on accomplishment and adrenaline.

“Repeat that, Chairman,” Linc asked.

“Nothing. I think I’ve fixed the brakes.” He straightened himself up and reached for the ladder. “What’s our speed?”

“Thirty-four. I’m using the Pig’s brakes, so that carbon-fiber dust is blowing off the pads something fierce.”

“No problem. This is why we started in reverse. Throw her into first gear and start slowing us using the engine. I’ll get on the brake up here, and between the two we should be okay.”

Juan reached the top of the boxcar. They had dropped a hundred feet or so from the mountain’s summit as they curled around its flank. Above them, the hillside was sparse scrub. Then he saw that there was a road that ran parallel to and slightly higher than the railbed. He only noticed it because of the dun-colored truck that emerged from around a bend and started pacing the train as it glided down the tracks.

A man with his head wrapped in a ubiquitous kaffiyeh stood bracing himself in the back of the truck. Cabrillo had left his REC7 on the boxcar’s roof when he’d crawled down to fix the brakes. He lunged up and over the front of the car at the same instant the fanatic leapt from the speeding truck.

His defiant scream was lost in the wind as he arced though the air. Juan’s fingers had closed around the rifle’s barrel when the man crashed onto the roof close enough to send the weapon skidding toward the side. Jacked up on even more adrenaline than Cabrillo, the man shouted a battle cry and kicked Juan full in the face.

Cabrillo’s world went dark in an instant, and only started returning in painfully slow increments. When Juan was somewhat conscious of what was happening, the terrorist had pulled his AK-47 from around his back and was just lining up. Juan rolled over and scissor-kicked his legs, twisting on the hot steel roof enough to catch the man in the shin. The AK stitched four holes into the roof next to Juan’s head, and inside the car someone screamed out in pain.

Goaded beyond fury, Cabrillo reached up and grasped the weapon by its forward grip. As he pulled down, the gunman reared back and actually helped pull the Chairman to his feet. Juan fired two punches into the gunman’s face. The Arab was so intent on keeping his weapon that he didn’t defend himself. Juan landed two more solid blows, and over the terrorist’s shoulder saw two more men preparing to leap for the train.

He rammed his elbow into his opponent’s stomach as he rolled into him, turning them both so that when he grabbed at the guy’s right hand and forced his finger onto the trigger the AK’s barrel was pointed back at the truck. The spray of tracers caught one of the men just as he gathered himself to jump. He fell out of the side of the truck and vanished under its rear wheels, his body making the vehicle bounce slightly on its suspension.

The second man flew like a bird and landed on the roof with the agility of a cat.

Cabrillo continued to spin the first terrorist, and when he let go the guy staggered back one pace, two, and then there was no more train roof. He went cartwheeling into space, his headscarf coming unwound and fluttering after him like a distracted butterfly.

Juan threw his empty pistol at his new opponent and charged him before the man could pull his assault rifle across his body on its canvas sling. Juan hit the guy low and reared up, lifting him nearly five feet into the air before letting go. The gunman crashed onto the roof, his breath exploding from his body in a rancid gush. If his back wasn’t broken, he was still out for the duration.

Unless Linda or Linc had noticed the first guy go over the side of the boxcar, they weren’t at the right angle to see what was happening behind them, and with Juan’s radio dislodged from his ear he had no way of warning them. The Pig was giving its all to slow the train, but without the addition of the car’s brakes they continued to accelerate. Juan guessed they were nearing forty-five miles an hour. The grade remained at a constant downward slope and the curve was still gentle, but if they got going much faster he feared that they wouldn’t be able to slow when they hit the first sharp corner.

Three more terrorists jumped for the boxcar. Two landed on the roof. A third smashed into its side, his fingers clawing at the edge of the roof to keep himself from falling off.

One of the gunmen caromed into Juan when he landed, grabbed him tight, and slammed a hardened fist deep into the Chairman’s kidney. Cabrillo’s grunt at the staggering pain drove the man into a frenzy. He fired two more punches, grinding his knuckles into Cabrillo’s flesh with each impact. Juan then felt his second FN Five-seveN being pulled from its holster. He shifted violently just as the man fired at his spine. The bullet singed the cloth of Cabrillo’s shirt and hit the second terrorist in the throat. Blood fountained from the wound in time to the man’s wildly beating heart.

The sight of his comrade’s life pumping from his body might have distracted the gunman, but it held no sway over Cabrillo. Juan yanked his pistol free from the man’s slack grip, stepped back a pace, and put two through his heart.

Both bodies hit the roof at the same instant.

“Juan? Juan? Come in.”

Cabrillo reset his earpiece and adjusted the mike so he could communicate. “Yeah.”

“We need brakes,” Linc was shouting. “Now.”

Juan looked forward. They were coming out of the turn, and the tracks dipped for a hundred yards before another sharper bend to the right. He ran for the brake wheel and was nearly there when the terrorist who he thought had a broken back threw out an arm and tripped him. Cabrillo went sprawling and didn’t have time to recover before the guy was on him, throwing punches with abandon. There was no power behind the shots, but all Juan could do was defend himself while the train hurtled for the corner.

He felt the sudden dip in the line and knew he had seconds. He tucked his legs to his chest, managing to plant his feet on the terrorist’s chest, and in a judo move threw him over his head. The guy crashed down onto the roof on his back. Juan spun and, using his right hand to power his left elbow, drove it into the man’s throat. The crushing of cartilage, sinew, and tissue was nauseating.

The instant Juan’s fingers grasped the metal wheel, he started spinning it with everything he had. They were doing fifty on a corner meant to be taken at thirty. The brakes screamed and threw off showers of sparks as they entered the turn. Too late, Juan knew. Way too late.

The centrifugal force made the boxcar light on its outside wheels, and despite its massive weight they started losing contact with the rails. Juan cranked the brake wheel until it was locked tight. Behind him, the Pig’s engine roared with the flood of nitrous oxide Linc had dumped into the cylinders, and rubber smeared off the deflated tires when they spun against the steel tracks. The freight car’s outside wheels bumped and lifted, bumped and lifted, gaining centimeters with each judder. He wished there was some way he could communicate to the men and women inside the car. Their weight could make all the difference.

Inspiration born of desperation made Juan snatch up one of the terrorist’s AK-47s and step to the outside edge of the car. The valley stretched below him seemingly forever. He aimed along the length of the train and loosened a full magazine. The bullets hit the steel flank at such an angle that they all ricocheted off into space, but the din inside was enough to frighten the prisoners over to the opposite side of the car above the bouncing wheels.

Their weight cemented the train back to the tracks.

The boxcar shot out of the turn and onto another gentle stretch of line. Juan shook his head to clear it and was about to sit down to give his body a rest when Mark’s panicked voice exploded in his ears. “Take off the brake! Hurry!”

Cabrillo started turning the wheel to take pressure off the pads and chanced a look behind them. The road was no longer visible, the truck loaded with flying terrorists out of the picture at least for now, but farther up the line, barreling down the tracks, was another truck that had been modified to run on the rails. Unburdened by thirteen tons of train car and people, it came toward them at breakneck speed. Over its cab, Juan could see more men eager for the fight, and even at this distance he could tell they were armed with rocket-propelled grenades.

The Pig’s windshield was so badly cracked, it wouldn’t hold up to autofire, so he had no illusions what an RPG would do.

Linc had the transmission back in reverse, forgoing the low-range gears for the higher ones in hopes that the truck’s power and the rolling stock’s momentum would be enough to buy them some time. So long as they continued to sway through the gentle bends, the terrorists couldn’t take a shot.

“When’s our next tight turn?” Juan asked. He knew Mark had a scrolling map going on his laptop slaved to the Pig’s GPS tracker.

“Two miles.”

“Missiles?”

“Only one.”

“Keep it. I’ve got an idea.”

Juan raced aft, leaping from the train car onto the Pig’s roof. Linda had replaced Greg Chaffee on the M60. Chaffee was sitting down in the cargo area with Alana and Fodl. He looked spent. “The instructors at the Farm would be proud, especially . . .” Juan mentioned the name of a legendary staffer at the CIA’s training center, a name known only to those who’d gone through it.

Chaffee’s eyes widened. “You’re . . . ?”

“Retired.”

Juan popped the hinge pins from one of the cabinets built into the inside wall of the Pig. The door was three feet square and weighed about sixty pounds. He passed it up through the hatch with Linda’s help and then crawled onto the Pig’s cab. His timing didn’t necessarily have to be that good, but his luck had to hold. The train-truck was a quarter mile distant, gaining fast. Someone on it spotted Cabrillo out in the open and fired with his AK. Juan hauled up the metal door, using it like a screen, and bullets pinged off it like lead rain, their kinetic energy like sledgehammer blows.

The Pig went into another shallow curve, just enough for their pursuers to lose sight of them. Juan slid the sheet steel down along the retreating truck’s nearly vertical windshield and let go.

The metal plate hit the outside track with a ringing crash and slid for several long seconds before its lip caught a tie and it spun to a stop. It came to rest across one of the rails.

Thirty seconds later, the truck showed itself from around the corner. It had to be doing sixty miles an hour. This time the Pig was too tempting a target for the men with the RPGs, and several made ready to let fly.