rocket-propelled grenade into it.
When he returned to the controls, he found himself staring at the huge Chinese gunship, the Hind, hovering off to the side of the long swooping bridge, flying parallel to his engine car.
“Oh shit,” Stretch breathed.
The Hind loosed a single rocket from one of its side-mounted pods—a missile aimed not at the train, but rather at thebridge; a missile that would stop West from snatching Wizard and Tank. That a few guards would also be lost was clearly of no concern to the Chinese generals who had ordered the missile launch.
“Fuck me…” Stretch keyed his radio: “Huntsman! They’re going to take out the bridge…”
“Then drive faster,”came the reply.
“Right!” Stretch hit the gas, pushing the train’s throttle as far forward as it would go.
The missile from the Hind struck the bridge right in its middle, in the latticework of struts that formed the apex of its arch, a bare second after the speeding train had shot over that point.
The detonation of the missile sent a shower of iron girders and beams raining down into the ravine.
But the bridge held…for the moment.
The train sped across it, a hundred yards from the other side and the shelter of a tunnel there.
There came an almighty groan. The distinctive groan of iron girders bending.
Then, in almost glorious slow motion, the great bridge began to sway, and rock, and from the middle outward, it began to drop in pieces into the ravine.
IT WAS an incredible sight.
The slowly collapsing bridge, falling away in its center, while the armored train—still on it—sped off its eastern end, chased by the disintegrating bridge.
But the train was just a fraction too fast.
It shot off the end of the bridge and disappeared into the waiting tunnel a bare second before the rails behind its final carriage—the rear-facing second engine—dropped away into the ravine, disappearing forever.
Inside the train, Jack came to the third carriage, the prisoner car, just as all the lights abruptly went off.
The guards here weren’t going to give up without a fight and now in the darkness of the tunnel, the interior of the prison train was enveloped in near-total blackness.
Snapping the night-vision goggles on his helmet into place, Jack entered the prisoner car, seeing the world in phosphorescent green, and he beheld…
…two burly Chinese guards holding both Wizard and Tank in front of their bodies with guns held to each of the blindfolded professors’ heads. Neither of the guards wore night-vision goggles and they stared wildly into the darkness—they didn’t need NVGs to kill their hostages.
When they heard the heavy interconnecting door open, one of them yelled, “Drop your weapon or we blow their—”
Ba-blam!Two shots.
Both guards dropped. Matching holes in their faces.
Jack never even broke his stride.
The other two guards in the carriage weren’t so bold and Jack quickly herded them into a spare cell before sealing the rear door of the carriage with an axe—he didn’t want any more enemies bothering him.
Then he slid to Wizard’s side, snatched away the blindfold, and gazed in horror at his battered friend. “Wizard, it’s me. Jesus, what did they do to you…”
The old man’s face was a mess of cuts and peeled skin. His arms and chest bore the distinctive scars of electric shock equipment. His long white beard was matted with dried blood.
“Jack!” he sobbed. “Oh, Jack. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry to have brought this on you! I thought I’d die here! I never thought you would come for me!”
“You’d do the same for me,” Jack said, glancing at the thick ringbolts holding Wizard’s and Tank’s leg irons to the floor. “Don’t celebrate too soon. We’re not out of this yet.”
Jack then extracted a hand held blowtorch from his utility belt, fired it up, and went to work.
THE TRAIN zoomed through the tunnel.
As it did so, the remaining chase copter flew ahead, gunning for the tunnel’s exit farther round the mountain.
It beat the train there, steadying itself in a deadly hover just out from the tunnel’s mouth, cannons ready and aimed at the oncoming engine car.
But before the train emerged from the tunnel, something else did.
A Predator missile.
It lanced out from the tunnel’s mouth, a dead-straight tail of smoke issuing out behind it, before it plowed into the hovering copter, blasting it to a million pieces, blowing it out of the sky.
Then the train roared out of the tunnel and swung hard left, following the mountain railway on its course.
But the meanest pursuer of all still remained.
