Scimitar said, “But surely the Chinese can’t believe anyone would seriously consider storming Xintan.”
“Sky Monster!” West called to the ceiling. “ETA on Xintan?”
Sky Monster’s voice came back over the intercom:“It’ll be close, but I think I can get you there by noon.”
“Do it,” West called.
This was happening a lot faster than he’d anticipated. He’d expected to have more time to create a plan.
He stepped over to the central table, stared at Astro’s maps of the mountaintop Xintan complex. “The internal transfer is the weak point. The bridge between Xintan One and Xintan Two. That’s where we can get them.”
“The bridge?” Astro said, coming over. “Maybe you didn’t hear us right, Captain. That bridge is inside the complex. Wouldn’t it be better to try to grab Epper and Tanaka later, when they’re traveling on the train outside the prison perimeter?”
West was gazing at the maps, formulating a plan. “No. They’ll assign extra guards for the external leg, probably Army troops, but for the internal transfer, they’ll only use prison guards, regular prison guards.”
Jack bit his lip. “It won’t be pretty—in fact, it’ll be downright ugly if it works at all—but that’s our opening, that’s where we can snatch them.”
XINTAN HARD LABOR PENAL FACILITY
SICHUAN PROVINCE, SOUTHWESTERN CHINA
1159 HOURS
THE TWO GRAY concrete structures sat atop their adjoining mountain peaks like twin castles in a fantasy world, gazing out over the mountain wilderness, high above the cloud layer.
The larger structure, Xintan One, was five stories tall, bulky, and fat. It sat lazily on its peak, bulging over the precipices, as if some god had just dropped a slab of plasticine onto the summit from a great height. Built almost entirely of dirty gray concrete—Communism’s contribution to architecture—it possessed four high towers soaring into the sky.
The smaller structure, Xintan Two, lay to the south of its big brother. It was only three stories tall and had just one tower. But its compact size only seemed to make it harsher, more confident in its authority. It didn’t need to be big to be feared.
Connecting the two wings was a long arched railway bridge, about half a mile in length and spanning a jagged valley gorge hundreds of feet deep. Today, that gorge was obscured by a layer of low clouds that wound its way between the mountains like a river.
High and isolated, and silent save for the whistling of the mountain wind, the scene might have been beautiful if it weren’t for the stench of death and despair that surrounded the place.
At precisely twelve noon, the great iron gates of Xintan Two rumbled open to reveal the prison train.
With black iron flanks and reinforced grilles on every window except for those on the engine cars at either end of the five-carriage-long train, it looked like a ferocious armored beast. Held back at the threshold of the gate, it snorted like a bull, expelling steam, its forward engine growling.
The two prisoners were loaded into the middle car of the train.
They were dressed in rags and blindfolds, and they shuffled rather than walked, their arms and legs bound in chains. There were only the two of them—Wizard and Tank.
Stony-faced prison guards surrounded them, twelve in total, the standard number for an internal transfer. All the guards were aware that two entire platoons of Chinese Army troops were waiting at Xintan One to accompany the prisoners on their external journey.
Wizard and Tank were placed in the third carriage where their leg irons were padlocked to ringbolts in the floor.
Then the sliding door to their carriage clanged shut and a whistle blew and the armored train moved out, expelling more steam, so that as it emerged from the gates, it looked like a great evil thing emerging from the depths of Hell itself.
The train commenced its short journey across the long arched bridge, looking tiny against the wild mountains of China, just as two birdlike objects appeared in the sky above it, descending fast, objects that as they came closer lost their birdlike appearance and took on the appearance of men…two men dressed in black with wings on their backs.
Jack West Jr. shot down through the air at bullet speed, a high-altitude facemask covering his face, a pair of ultrahigh-tech carbon-fiber wings, called Gullwings, attached to his back.
The Gullwings were an FID—a fast-insertion device—developed by Wizard for the US Air Force many years ago. Fast, silent, and stealthy, they were essentially one-man gliders that also possessed small compressed-air thrusters to enable gliding for sustained periods. In the end, the USAF had decided against using them, but Wizard had retained several prototypes, which West kept on the Hali for situations like this.
Zooming down through the sky alongside West, similarly garbed, was Stretch.
Both men were armed to the teeth, with many holsters packed with pistols, submachine guns, and grenades and, in Stretch’s case, one compact Predator antitank rocket launcher.
The prison train thundered across the long, high bridge.
Half a mile away, the great behemoth of Xintan One loomed before it, the railway tracks ending at a solid hundred-foot-high concrete wall fitted with not a single aperture except for the imposing iron gate.
But as the train whipped across the long bridge, closing in on Xintan One, the two winged figures swooped in low over it, traveling horizontally above the five armored carriages, moving gradually forward till they flew only a few feet above the frontmost carriage, the engine car.
Their arrival went unseen by anyone, the guards at Xintan One having long grown complacent with the
