“Looks like his intelligence was two choppers short,” West said wryly. “I hope that’s not the only thing he got wrong. Too late to worry about it now. The rotor net is mounted and in your hands. Just get us to that bridge before somebody on that Hind figures out who we are and decides it’s worth blowing the bridge to stop us. Keep me posted. I’ve got work to do.”
West then grabbed a microphone from the dash, keyed the train’s internal intercom, and began speaking in Mandarin: “Attention all guards aboard this train! Attention! We are now in command of this vehicle. All we want are the prisoners—”
In the five regular carriages of the train, every one of the Chinese guards looked up at the voice coming in over the PA.
Among them, one other face snapped up and gasped, the only one to recognize the voice.
Wizard. He was bloody, bruised, and beaten. But his eyes lit up at the sound of his friend’s voice. “Jack…” he rasped.
“—We mean you no harm. We understand that many of you are just doing your job, that you are men with families, children. But if you get in our way, know this: harm will come to you. We will be coming through the train now, so we give you a choice: lay down your weapons, and you will be not be killed. Raise your weapons against us and you will die.”
The intercom clicked off.
Up in the driver’s compartment, West threw open the interconnecting door between the engine car and the first carriage.
Then, holding an MP7 submachine gun in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other, he entered the prison train.
The three guards in the first carriage had heeded his warning.
They stood backed up against the walls, their Type-56 rifles at their feet, their hands raised. West moved warily past them, his guns up, when suddenly one of the guards whipped out a pistol and—
Blam!
The guard was blown back against the wall of the carriage, nailed by West’s powerful Desert Eagle.
“I told you not to raise your weapons,” he said to the others in a low voice. He jerked his chin at a nearby cell: “Into the cage, now.”
The four guards in the second carriage were smarter. They’d set a trap. First, they’d cut the lights, darkening the carriage; and second, they’d concealed one of their men in the ceiling above the interconnecting doorway while the others feigned surrender to West.
West entered the carriage, rocking with the motion of the train, to see three of them holding up their hands and crying “Mercy! Mercy! Don’t shoot us!” diverting his attention from the man hidden in the shadows above the door.
Then, completely unseen by West, the concealed man extended his arm, aiming his gun at West’s head from directly above—
—and suddenly West looked up, too late—
—just as the entire carriage rocked wildly, pummeled from the outside by a ferocious burst of supermachine gun fire.
The chase copters had arrived, and had started firing on the speeding train!
The guard above him was thrown from his perch above the door and, missing West by inches, hit the floor with a clumsy thud.
Then the other three guards drew their weapons and the darkened carriage erupted in strobelike flashes of gunfire, with Jack West Jr. in the middle of it all, firing in every direction with both of his guns—sidestepping to one side then firing left, right, and down—until at the end of it all when darkness had returned and the smoke had cleared, he was the only one left standing.
He moved grimly onward: next carriage.
The prisoner carriage.
At the same time, outside, the two chase helicopters from Xintan had caught up with the runaway train and were assaulting it with a hail of bulletfire from their strut-mounted 30mm guns.
Stretch brought the train past the second guardhouse, smashing through its boom gate before racing out onto the long swooping bridge that led to the rest of the mountain railway.
Onto the bridge, totally exposed.
One chase chopper swooped low over the train’s engine car—just as Stretch triggered the mortarlike device on its hood.
The device went off with a muffled whump, propelling something into the air high above the speeding train.
It was a wide nylon net with heavy weighted bearings at every corner. It fanned out above the engine car like a giant lateral spiderweb—a spiderweb that was designed to bring down helicopters.
The net entered the rotor blades of the lead chopper and instantly got entangled.
The rotors caught horribly and with a jerk, stopped, and suddenly the banking helicopter became a forward- moving glider with the aerodynamics of a brick.
It sailed down into the ravine below the bridge, falling down and down and down before it hit the bottom with a tremendous explosion.
Stretch left the controls of the train for a moment to grab his Predator rocket launcher and insert a final
