internal leg of the journey. After all, there had never been an escape in the prison’s history. As such, no one was actually assigned to watch the train during the bridge crossing.
Once the two flying figures had reached the engine car, gliding low over it, West and Stretch retracted their wings and dropped to the roof of the engine, landing perfectly on their feet.
They had to move fast. The train had covered almost two-thirds of its short journey and the gates of the main facility rose large before them.
West drew his two Desert Eagle pistols and leaped down onto the nose of the engine car and proceeded to blow out its two drivers’ windows.
The windows shattered and he swung in through one, landing inside the driver’s compartment.
Both drivers—Chinese Army men—shouted and reached for their guns. They never got to them.
Stretch swung inside the driver’s compartment to find the drivers dead and West taking the controls of the train.
“Predator,” West called above the wind now screaming in through the shattered windshield.
Stretch loaded his antitank rocket launcher, then shouldered it, aiming it out the broken front windows.
“Ready!” he called.
Then, right on cue, the iron gates of Xintan One cracked open, ready to receive the transfer train.
At which point, West jammed forward on the throttle.
AS THE GATES rumbled open, the two platoons of Chinese Army troops waiting on the receiving platform of Xintan One turned, expecting to see the armored train engaging its brakes, disgorging steam, and generally slowing.
What they saw was the exact opposite.
The armored train burst in through the great gateway at full speed, accelerating through the tight confines of the archway and blasting past the siding.
Then a finger of smoke shoomed out from the shattered forward windshield of the engine car—the smoke trail of a Predator antitank missile, a missile that cut a beeline for…
…the other gate of Xintan One.
The outer gate.
The Predator missile slammed into the iron gate and exploded. Smoke and dust billowed out in every direction, engulfing the receiving platform, obscuring everything.
The huge iron outer doors buckled and groaned, their center sections twisted and loosened, which was all West needed, for a moment later his train thundered into them at phenomenal speed and crashed right through them, flinging them open, hurling them from their massive hinges, before the train itself rushed out into gray daylight, racing away from the mountaintop prison, running for all it was worth.
At first, the Chinese were just stunned, but their response when it came was fierce.
Within four minutes, two compact helicopters—fast-attack Russian-built Kamov Ka-50s, otherwise known as Werewolves—rose from within Xintan One and took off after the runaway train.
Another minute later, a much larger helicopter rose from within Xintan Two. It was also Russian-made, but of far highter quality. It was an Mi-24 Hind gunship, one of the most feared choppers in the world. Bristling with cannons, gun pods, chem-weapons dispensers, and rockets, it had a unique double-domed cockpit. It also possessed a troop hold, which today bore ten fully armed Chinese shock troops.
Once clear of the prison’s walls, the Hind lowered its nose and thundered off in pursuit of West’s fleeing train.
The final aspect of the Chinese response was electronic.
The Xintan complex possessed two outer guardhouses situated on the mountain railway a few miles north of the prison, guardhouses that the train would have to pass by.
Frantic phone calls were made to the guards posted at both guardhouses, but strangely no reply came back from either one.
At both outposts the scene was the same: all the guards lay on the floor, out cold, their hands bound with flex-cuffs.
West’s people had already been there.
THE ARMORED train whipped through the mountains at breakneck speed, a rain of snow rushing in through its shattered forward windows.
It roared past the first guardhouse, crashing through its boom gate as if it were a toothpick.
Stretch drove, eyeing the landscape around them—snow-covered mountainside to the left, a sheer thousand- foot drop to the right.
The train rounded a left-hand spur and suddenly the second guardhouse came into view, plus a long soaring iron bridge beyond it.
“Huntsman! I’ve got a visual on the outer bridge!” Stretch called.
West had been leaning up and out through the shattered windshield, setting up some kind of mortar-type device and peering behind them, back at the prison complex. He ducked back inside.
“We got choppers on our tail. Two attack birds and one big bastard Hind—”
“Three choppers?” Stretch turned. “I thought Astro said they only kept one chase copter at Xintan, the Hind?”
