into tiny pieces. He ducked completely below the platform edge and hauled ass for the lead car of the little Buck Rogers train. He hoped Buck had left the keys in the ignition.
Christ. Okay, that really hurt.
One dog had raced ahead of his brethren and was nipping at Stoke’s heels. Got a piece of him, too. He stopped, pivoted, and swung the butt of the H&K at the salivating dog. He got lucky. A glancing blow to the head distracted the animal just long enough for him to haul himself up and into the lead car.
“You bite my ass again, I’m going to use the other end of this gun, verstehen Sie, Fido?”
He knew just enough German to know which was the “Go” button, a green one on the dash. He pushed it. There was an odd noise and a humming vibration as if a disc just beneath his feet was spooling up and spinning incredibly fast. Dogs were on either side of the car now, lunging and trying to get at him. He kicked out in both directions and sent two dogs flying back into the howling packs.
He felt a slug of hot lead whistle past his ear.
Distracted by the frenzied hounds, he’d let the storm troopers get too close. Rounds were sizzling over and around him. Ten or fifteen guys in black had leaped off the platform and were headed down the track toward him, filling the tunnel with lead. Funny thing was, bullets didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the shiny white train cars. They just ricocheted off! What the hell was this thing made of?
The closest bad guy was maybe fifteen yards from the rear car. Stoke took him out with the Schmeisser and heard the most dreaded sound in close combat, the dry fire. Empty. He raised both of the H&Ks, firing at his pursuers, putting one boot up on the bench seat and leaning back against the instrument panel to brace himself. He must have hit reverse, because suddenly he was moving backward in the direction of his onrushing attackers!
Damn! He twisted around and looked to see what he’d hit. A simple lever. He’d pushed it down farther. This might work! The train accelerated supernaturally fast. But there was no sensation of speed in the cab. No g-forces slamming him backward. Weird. He watched the SDI uniforms panic and scatter wildly. He hit a couple and that was enough. Those who didn’t take off back in the direction of the station flattened themselves against the walls or dove for either side of the track.
Now he pulled the lever up a bit and the A train seamlessly reversed directions. He pushed the lever forward and the train accelerated into the tunnel, whizzing by the men still flattened to the walls. He firewalled the throttle and the thing just flew. Hyperdrive, like that scene in Star Wars. Oddly enough, he still felt no jolt of speed.
Only explanation he could think of: If the machine created its own gravity field, then the normal rules of gravity didn’t apply. Whoa.
Goddamn Germans were onto something here, he thought, gliding on air, leaving all the howling hounds and shell-shocked storm troopers in his dust. Swoosh. Man who had the brains and the money to put these things under New York City could be looking at some seriously positive cash flow.
He proceeded out in a great gentle loop, a white blur of station platforms to his right every few seconds, until he felt the tunnel begin to bend toward the left. Calculating speed and distance, and what he recalled of the above-ground geography, he figured he was getting to the far end of the field. That hangar where they’d stowed the helo had to be coming up. He slowed the train by backing down the lever a few notches. It instantly reached a speed where he could read the platform signs flashing by. Udet, Voss, Richtofen…Lowenhardt…and, here it comes…Steinhoffer. Oh, yeah. He slowed to a crawl and stopped.
Home again, home again.
The platforms out here were much smaller. Maybe ten feet long, max. Only one car could access the platform at a time. But well-lit, and the white tile was brand-new. No escalator, just a simple iron stairway leading up to a closed door. Stoke took his bulging satchel and stepped off. He’d felt something familiar on his cheek, up his nose. A stale wind. Sweeping up from the dark tunnel ahead. Definitely funky. The kind of air forced ahead of a moving train.
He took one last look at his ride, the air-cushioned electra-glide Buck Rogers Special. Some damn train all right. Man. He took the stairs going up three at a time. A trainload of VDI troopers was on its way.
“What up, Arnold?” he asked the duct-taped prisoner inside Steinhoffer’s tool room. He located a small saw blade and went to work on Arnold’s feet first.
“Mmmpf.”
“Yeah, well, it took a little longer than I thought it would. Had us a big ass-kicking conference down in the Underworld subway station. I won, you’ll be glad to know. How much fuel left in the helo?”
“Mmmpf!”
“That much, huh? Is that enough to get to Zurich, you think? Or not?”
“Mmmpf-mmmpf!”
“Chill your ass out, Arnold, be cool. What’s your problem? You got control issues? I’m dancing as fast as I can here. Damn, you neo-Nazis are some seriously bossy individuals.”
Chapter Forty-eight
Gulf of Oman
AN HOUR BEFORE DAYBREAK, TWO DAYS AFTER HAWKE AND Brock had gone for their swim. The decks were varnished with rain. There were patches of fog appearing and disappearing on the gently rolling surface of the pearl-grey sea. The old supply vessel, Obaidallah, was anchored in fifty feet of water just off a small village on the coast of Oman. To the northwest lay the old port city of Ghalat. To the east, slouching like a slumbering cat on the horizon, lay Masara Island. The good ship Obaidallah, loaded to the gunwales for this run, would make her weekly supply trip to Masara tonight.
Stoke had arrived from Berlin two days earlier. He’d met up with Fitz McCoy and Charlie Rainwater at Muscat airport, along with their team of mercenaries just flown in from Martinique. The supplies that had been loaded for this particular run were all of the non-potable, nonedible variety. The stores now stacked in the hold were the exploding kind: satchel charges, limpet mines, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and nine-millimeter ammunition. The transfer of supplies from one boat to another was taking place in the dark and in secret.
At midnight, the trawler Cacique slipped up along Obaidallah’s port side and offloaded the weapons, ammunition, and other sundry equipment Brock and Ahmed had been accumulating in Muscat during the past week. The most prized item: Bruce, a minisubmarine developed by the U.S. Navy for the SEALs.
It resembled nothing so much as a huge squared-off torpedo with a wide shark’s smile painted on its nose. Now, the thirty-foot-long vessel remained on deck, covered with a heavy canvas tarp and lashed to the stern. This latest battery-powered vehicle was equipped with propulsion, navigation, communication, and auxiliary life support systems.
It was capable of delivering a squad of fully equipped combat swimmers and their cargo in fully flooded compartments to a mission site, loitering, and then retiring from the area while remaining completely submerged.
The Obaidallah, their new home at sea, had a brand-new captain and crew. The old team had been paid a month’s wages and sent home grinning like cats to their families. Ali al-Houri, captain of Cacique, had temporarily relieved the Obaidallah’s regular captain, a darkly handsome young man named Abu. He had agreed to stay on. He would serve as first mate for this run since he was well known to the French out on the island.
Ali was down in the engine room with his first mate working on the diesel now. There’d been some problem with the fuel pumps. Ali and Abu told Fitz they were pretty sure they could fix it. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. They had to go, and go tonight, one way or another.
Now, the sun was coming. And with it, the heat of day. Beneath the rolling purple ceiling of a low-hanging cloud bank, yellow light was leaking over the rim of the world. Hawke watched dawn’s arrival through the open porthole, blinking back tears of fatigue. Ah yes, Hawke said to himself. Here it comes. It’s morning again in Oman. Another crappy day just this side of paradise.
Hawke knew something his team did not.
Langley personnel on the ground in China had intercepted a red cell transmission out of Hong Kong. A communique from General Moon. The gist of it was, Kelly told Hawke, that the sultan was a dead man. If not already deceased, then soon. A courier had been dispatched from Hong Kong twelve hours ago with secret orders
