Adams stayed where he was as the other passengers continued to filter out. Pretty soon he would be the only person left in this compartment, and if Lynn had also seen the signal, which he hoped she had, she would also be left alone in hers, which would make them both stand out.
Ayita must have had his reasons, and Adams knew it couldn’t be anything good. He began to move, walking as calmly as he could for Lynn’s compartment just through the next door. If something was about to happen, he wanted to be with her.
He saw Lynn through the little porthole window and put his hand to the door handle, pushing down.
And then all hell broke loose.
5
Eldridge was tired of playing nicely. Too many times now he had tried to capture Adams and Edwards, or lie in wait for them, or try and catch them out in some sort of sophisticated trap. But no more. This time they were going down.
He and his dozen men, all top commandos in the Alpha Brigade, had left their cars running outside the train station and went through the doors at a sprint, cocking their assault rifles as they went. Eldridge had cleared their presence with the municipal transport police, but if they tried to stop him anyway, he would have no problem adding a few of them to his tally of corpses.
He led the surge on to Platform 5, an internal line with a train just in from Zurich, and ordered his men to spread out down the length of the stationary train, guns trained on the doors. He and his men ignored the screams of the throngs of passengers as they left the train, concentrating instead on their faces. Adams and Edwards were not among them. And then Eldridge scanned the windows, and a smile spread across his face as he saw both of his targets, in two separate carriages. Perfect.
The smile was wiped off his face instants later. The shock of the bullet hitting him in the shoulder spun his upper torso round while his feet remained rooted to the spot. Pain ripped through his hips and chest.
He hit the ground, gasping for breath, and saw his men turn and open fire at a man standing on the platform, a pistol in his hands. The man dived for cover behind a metal bench.
As Eldridge checked that his armoured vest had successfully stopped the round that hit him, two of his men were hit, by rounds coming from the opposite direction. Eldridge turned to look and saw a second man aiming a pistol and firing at his team, loosing off an entire magazine before dropping to the railway tracks, using the concrete platform itself for cover.
From inside the train, Adams and Lynn, now in the same carriage, watched in horror as the thirteen armed men stormed the platform, and then as Ayita and Stephenfield opened fire and were in turn fired upon.
Adams had seen enough. He took his own pistol out and shot through the glass of the opposite window. Then he turned to grab Lynn and pulled her to the other side of the train.
‘But the others!’ she cried. ‘We can’t leave them!’
‘We have to,’ he snapped, disgusted with having to make the decision. ‘If we stay, we’re dead. And then what happens if the wormhole opens?’
Lynn paused for a moment, then nodded her head and followed Adams to the shattered window, her thoughts still on Stephenfield and Ayita as she went.
John Ayita watched from behind the bench as Matt and Lynn escaped out of the other side of the train.
He saw Stephenfield was holding his own, hiding down behind the platform’s edge. His friend pulled up, fired three shots — two of which hit their targets — and then dropped low again. Ayita fired his own gun twice more, then stopped to change magazines. As he did so, Stephenfield popped up again, raised his gun, and then — and then…
Ayita couldn’t believe his eyes as he saw the top of his friend’s head explode, a 9mm round taking the skullcap straight off, the reddish grey mass of the brain quivering as Stephenfield staggered backwards, before he took twenty more shots to his centre mass, his entire body quivering under the massive shock of the bullets’ impact.
And then Ayita felt pain of his own, his ankle exploding in agony. He looked down and, saw the huge wound in his lower leg, blood staining the ground around him.
Ayita spat on the platform. He was wounded, his friend was dead, but he wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
Eldridge watched with satisfaction as his men took the first man down, and realized that the man behind the metal bench would probably be distracted.
From his position on the ground, Eldridge could just about see the man’s feet and ankles underneath the bench, and so aimed his submachine gun and loosed a single round. It hit the man’s ankle but didn’t make him drop to the ground as he had hoped it would. The man was tough, whoever he was.
And then the man appeared from behind the metal bench, a crazed look on his face, seemingly ignoring the gunshot wound to his leg. It was then that Eldridge realized it was John Ayita, the head of the Shadow Wolves whom he had failed to find when recently ordered to execute them. Which meant that the other man was probably Samuel ‘Two Horses’ Stephenfield, the unit’s intelligence chief and the only other member to have successfully evaded Eldridge’s death squad. Until now.
Ayita shot his pistol with unerring accuracy, taking one man down after another, but the result was inevitable; like Stephenfield before him, Ayita, too, was eventually shot by Eldridge’s expert team. The first rounds entered Ayita’s gut, doubling him over, making him drop the gun; the next four tore into his chest, ripping into his internal organs. But still he kept coming, the warrior in him not dead yet, and Eldridge was amazed as Ayita reached into his belt and pulled out a hunting knife, raising it above his head and charging the rest of the men on the platform, letting out a ferocious war cry as he did so.
But the cry was caught in his throat as another forty bullets entered his body almost simultaneously, hurling him backwards ten feet on the platform, his torso all but destroyed, his lifeless eyes staring up at the steel-girdered platform roof.
Eldridge got to one knee, and then to his feet. He looked through the train window.
Damn! Adams and Edwards had gone.
6
Trying to ignore the sounds of gunfire behind them, Adams sprinted across the tracks on the far side of the train, away from the platform. Ahead of them was another train, making ready to leave the platform. The doors on this side were closed, but Adams knew they had to make it if they were to stand any chance of getting out of there alive.
The gunfire was still continuing as they reached the train, and Adams grabbed Lynn and hauled her up into a locked doorway, pulling himself up after her just as the train pulled out from the platform.
Holding on to the exterior as they were, they were sitting ducks if one of the armed men on the far side decided to take a shot at them, and so he helped Lynn round to the small handholds to the side of the door, which acted as a ladder, and gestured for her to climb.
And climb she did, reaching the top and then helping him up.
He rolled on to the top of the train as it passed the end of the platform, mercifully leaving the station.
And then the sound of gunfire stopped.
Eldridge saw what Adams and Edwards were doing and immediately ordered some of his men back to the cars, to give chase if need be, and others to race around to the other platform.
Meanwhile, as his targets climbed the ladder to the top of the train, Eldridge went down on one knee to stabilize his position, put the stock of his assault rifle tight into his shoulder, took aim and squeezed the trigger, firing off one shot.
The round only narrowly missed, passing between their bodies, but it was enough to unbalance Lynn. She turned on the unstable top of the moving train and slipped, falling over the side.