“Don’t you dare slow down now!” Juan said. Below him he could hear their passengers’ screams of panic. As bad as it was riding on top of the car, he couldn’t imagine what they were experiencing in the pitch-darkness inside.
Twice more, they hit the rock, before the turn started to lose its tight radius and the wheels stayed firmly planted on the hot iron rails. That was the last curve before they hit the bridge. Before them was a straight shot down a gentle defile, then across the trestle. A flash of light blazed off the binoculars of an observer in the valley below the bridge. Juan could almost sense the man’s thoughts despite the distance. Seconds later, an order had to have been given, because the men rigging the bridge with explosives started swarming down the trestle, ignoring the blistering fire from Gomez Adams in the MD-540.
Cabrillo moved to the leading edge next to where Linda and Alana crouched behind the M60.
“I know I’m dating myself,” Linda said, her face a little pale under its dusting of freckles, “but that’s what I call an E-ticket ride. Makes the Matterhorn feel tame.”
She no longer had an angle to fire at the men, but Adams was making their retreat hell.
“There’s nothing more we can do,” Juan shouted over the roar of wind filling his ears. They were pushing sixty miles per hour, and the rush of wind over the carriage threatened to blow them off if they rose above a crouch. “Let’s get back to the Pig.”
He hefted the big gun, with its necklace of shining brass shells dangling from the receiver, so Linda and Alana could crawl back to the rear of the car together. They lowered themselves down onto the Pig’s cab and then vanished through the open hatch. Cabrillo paused for a moment, forcing his eyes to slits to look up the tracks. Adams ducked and weaved in the chopper, dancing away from enemy fire, while his door gunner—Cabrillo thought he recognized the beefy form of Jerry Pulaski—peppered the bridge supports whenever the helo was steady enough to shoot.
The tone of wheel against rail suddenly changed. They were on the first section of the bridge. A quick glance over the side of the car confirmed that the ground was beginning to recede from under them.
The explosion came farther along the bridge’s length, on the valley floor near one of the trestle supports. Smoke and flame climbed the wooden members, mushrooming outward and upward like a deadly bloom. Cabrillo threw himself flat as the train barreled through the pulsing surge of fire and emerged on the other side with no more damage than some singed paint.
Behind them the blast had weakened the bridge’s lattice framework, but Linda’s and then Adams’s sniping had prevented the terrorists from properly rigging the structure. The supports stood firm for a solid ten seconds after the train had rushed past, allowing them to get nearly to the end of the long span before the structure started to collapse. The great timbers fell in on themselves, the valley choking with dust thick enough to obscure the waiting Mi-8 helicopter and the tiny figures of running terrorists.
The bridge fell like dominoes, the steel rails sagging as though they had no more strength than piano wire. Linc had to have seen what was happening behind the Pig in the wing mirrors, because the engine beat changed when he flooded the cylinders with nitrous oxide.
Wood and iron tumbled in a rolling avalanche that chased after the fleeing boxcar. Cabrillo watched awestruck as the bridge vanished in their wake. He should have felt fear, but his fate wasn’t in his hands, so he saw the spectacle with almost clinical detachment. And even as the Pig gained more speed, so, too, did the structure’s incredible failure. A hundred feet behind their rear bumper, the rails quivered and then vanished into the boiling maelstrom of dust.
He didn’t dare look ahead to see how much farther they had to travel. It was better, he thought fleetingly, not to know.
Just as the rails started to dip under them, the hollow sound of air rushing below the carriage changed once again and thick wooden ties appeared under the line. They had made it just as the last of the bridge crumpled into the valley, rending itself apart so that nothing showed above the billowing debris.
Cabrillo pumped his fist, shouting at the top of his lungs, and nearly lost his footing in his excitement. “That was a hell of a piece of driving,” he called to Linc. “Is everyone okay?”
“We’re all good,” Lincoln replied.
There was something his voice, something Cabrillo didn’t like. “What is it, big man?”
“I tore the guts out of the transmission the last time I hit the nitro. I’m looking down the tracks in the mirror and see we’re laying one hell of an oil slick.”
It was only after it was reported that Juan noticed he couldn’t hear the motor’s aggressive growl. Without gears, there was no reason to leave the engine running.
“Mark says the rest of the line is pretty gentle, but . . .” He let his voice trail off.
“And let me guess,” Juan added, “our brakes are shot, too.”
“I’ve got my foot pressed to the floorboards, for whatever good it’ll do us.”
Juan looked in the direction they were heading. The ocean was a slag-gray shimmer in the distance. The train tracks’ terminus was hidden in a fold of land, though he estimated they had only a few more miles to go. He also agreed with Mark Murphy’s assertion that the rest of the way was a gentle glide down to the sea. He could only hope that whatever reception Max had planned would work because when he clamped on the boxcar’s brakes he could tell they, like the Pig’s, were worn down to nothing.
“Max, do you read me?” he said into his mic.
“Loud and clear.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re in position and ready to pick you up.”
“Any word on the choppers of the Libyan strike team?”
“No. I suspect they’ll come in from the south, so we’ll never see them. And more important, they’ll never see us.”
“As soon as you have us with the magnet, I want Eric to make best possible speed into international waters.”
“Relax, Juan. Everything’s ready. Doc Huxley and her people have set up the forward hold with cots, blankets, and plenty of IV drips. The cooking staff ’s been whipping up enough food to feed the people you’ve found, and I’ve got every weapons system on the ship locked and loaded in case someone wants to take them back.”
“Okay. Okay, I get it. We’ll be there in about three minutes.”
The last section of the rail line came out of the mountains through a valley that ran right to the sea. The Corporation people, along with Alana, Greg Chaffee, and their new Libyan charge, Fodl, were strapped into the Pig, while the rest of the refugees in the boxcar had been given a shouted warning to brace themselves.
The old coaling station was a run-down ruin, little more than the metal framework of a couple of buildings with bits of wood still somehow clinging to their sides. The cranes that once filled freighters with coal were long gone, and the desert had hidden where the anthracite had once been mounded in the lee of a cliff.
The Oregonloomed over the newly installed floating dock. Her main cargo derrick was swung over into position, and the large electromagnet dangled less than twenty feet over the pier.
Juan’s pride usually swelled a bit whenever he saw his creation, but this time his mind was on the speed the train was making as it raced for the station. He fought the urge to glance at the speedometer but guessed they were pushing seventy. He’d expected Max would have laid down some sort of barrier foam to slow the train, but he saw nothing on the tracks. Then he realized the dock was much lower in the water than he’d first thought. In fact, the far end of it was completely submerged.
He laughed aloud when the hurtling train left its old railbed and started along the pier. Max had holed the large interlocked plastic pods that made up the dock, most likely with the Oregon’s Gatling gun. The pier’s own weight started it sinking, and as the boxcar pressed down the pier dipped deeper.