The gunman hit the coupling and rolled off to follow his partner as so much litter on the tracks.
Mercer heaved himself up and climbed the ladder. He waited while Cali fired off a three-round burst and then he shouted, “Cali. All clear.”
“What?”
He thought to himself that if he was calling out to her she should realize it meant he’d made it and it was clear to come forward. “It’s clear. I got them. Bring the RPG.”
He looked up as she scrambled onto the roof of the boxcar and he too climbed up. “Hurry,” he urged and she broke into a run.
“God, you’re filthy,” Cali said when she reached him. She gave him back his half-empty assault rifle.
“Yeah, but you should see the other guy.”
She made a face. “I’ll pass, thanks.”
On the last car before the locomotive, Mercer stopped and set his AK onto the roof. Hot exhaust spewing from the locomotive stung their eyes and made the air difficult to breathe.
“This is close enough,” Mercer said. Ahead of them they could see the tracks running down the valley. The rail spur was so straight that it looked like they could see forever.
He checked over the RPG, making sure he knew how to use it. “I think the train’s clear so why don’t you start back.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Blow the tracks a couple hundred yards ahead of the train and derail the whole thing. We can jump off the back.”
She looked him in the eye. “We go together.”
Mercer made to argue, but every second saw the train going faster and faster. A leap off the back of the train was dangerous enough. It would be suicide if it was traveling much faster. In fact just to be safe he would need to give the engineer time to slow down to avoid hitting the destroyed section of track.
Without a word he hoisted the rocket launcher onto his shoulder, aimed at a spot three hundred yards ahead of the train, and pulled the trigger. The eighty-five-millimeter missile shot from the tube and an instant later the motor ignited, blasting Mercer and Cali with a wave of hot gasses. The fins deployed as the missle rocketed ahead of the train, zeroing in exactly on the spot Mercer had aimed for. He had already dropped the tube and was turned to start the mad race to the end of the train when he saw the rocket motor cut out and the missile drop like a stone. It hit the tracks and exploded less than two hundred yards in front of the speeding train, sending up a shower of loose ballast stones and tearing one of the rails off the ties.
He and Cali started to run, lurching slightly as the engineer slammed on the brakes, creating a keening screech like nails across a blackboard amplified a thousandfold.
Mercer ignored the pain in his knee, sprinting on his toes, his lungs pumping in time with his pounding heart. Next to him Cali ran with the grace of a natural athlete, her head high, her lips only slightly parted. He knew she could have run even faster but she was determined to keep pace. They took the leap onto the next car like a pair of Olympic hurdlers, with barely a check in their speed.
Behind them, the locomotive barreled on toward the ruined track, her antiquated brakes fighting her massive inertia. It was a losing battle. The one-hundred-and-eight-ton TEM16 diesel-electric hit the broken rail doing twenty-seven miles per hour. When the right side wheels hit the ground, they dug into the hard earth, plowing a deep furrow for thirty feet before the entire locomotive tipped onto its side. The coupling to the first car in the train was wrenched to one side and the car jackknifed, splitting in half as it slammed into the back of the engine.
Cali and Mercer leapt onto the next car, feeling the vibrations of the destruction behind them through their feet. Neither dared look back.
The second car came loose and rode up and over the first, tumbling it like a log as the locomotive’s belly tank ruptured and the four thousand gallons of diesel fuel she carried spread out in a small lake.
They continued even faster, running beyond what either thought they were capable of, the sound of the awful destruction behind them never seeming to recede as they ran from it.
Even with the train slowing, they jumped to the second car from the end an instant before the one they left slammed into the pileup. That car had a structural flaw of some kind because when it hit, the front of it accordioned, metal shearing and tearing as though it was paper.
The gaps between the trains were only about four feet but as Cali and Mercer neared the rear of the car Mercer shouted jump with five feet to go.
Cali did as he ordered, and as they launched themselves from the car, it hit the one before it. The coupling to the last car broke free as the second boxcar was pulled off the tracks and onto its side, falling as if in slow motion, spreading ballast stones in an arc as it tore into the ground.
They landed hard on the last car, both of them knocked off their feet by the impact. Mercer looked back. With the preceding car pulled bodily from the tracks, the last of the rolling stock had a clear path to the tangle of destroyed train cars. It had slowed enough so he threw an arm over Cali and together they held on as it hit. Most of the energy of the collision was absorbed by the squashed cars in front, so it felt like nothing more than a mild bump.
Cali and Mercer shared a surprised look, then burst out laughing.
“I think this is our stop,” Mercer quipped and Cali laughed even harder.
But their laughter was cut short when both smelled burning fuel at the same time. They scrambled to their feet and ran to the rear of the car. Cali descended the ladder first, with Mercer right behind, hooking his feet outside the rungs so he could slide down the ladder like a submariner. They ran for a couple hundred yards before turning back.
The railcars were piled three high in places. Two of them were flipped over on their roofs, and as Mercer and Cali watched, the spreading pool of diesel consumed the wreckage in a wall of flame that grew to a hundred feet.
Mercer put his arm around Cali’s slender waist and she snuggled into him as they watched the inferno mutely, confident that Poli was dead.
Southern Russia
Poli Feines had been behind the wheel of the Russian jeep for twenty straight hours, yet the predatory gleam in his single eye hadn’t faded. His drive from the mine to the Black Sea had been over tortuous back roads and old smuggling routes, and it was only when he reached the M-27 motorway near the port city of Novorossiysk that he encountered asphalt.
While this part of the Black Sea was famous for its resort beaches, his destination was a small working-class fishing village on the other side of the Bay of Zemess called Kabardinka.
Blind rage had erased any memory of the first part of his journey. First Africa, then New Jersey, and Niagara Falls, and now this. Though he hadn’t seen him, Feines was positive that Philip Mercer was behind the attack at the mine, just as the helicopter pilot had described him as the man on the barge in upstate New York. Even after twenty hours of thinking about his losses, acid jetted from his stomach and scalded the back of his throat. He’d served with Gavrail Skoda for more than a decade in the Bulgarian Army and had partnered with him numerous times when he’d gone freelance. Feines had five brothers, one of them an identical twin, but he’d loved none more than Gavrail and now Skoda was dead, killed by Philip Mercer on a barge on the Niagara River.
Feines admitted that they hadn’t had enough time to plan that mission properly, but he and Skoda had pulled off far more elaborate capers with less time than they’d had. And the men with him were combat-hardened veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. That they were willing to martyr themselves for the cause only made success more certain.
And now Mercer shows up again. Poli’s hands tightened on the wheel until his knuckles went white and the bones threatened to erupt from the skin. He welcomed the pain, for it reminded him what he would do with Mercer when their paths crossed again. Feines was a professional. He never let his contracts affect his personal life. But this was different. When he’d discharged his obligation to his client, he would hunt Mercer down, kill everyone close to him, then torture Mercer so slowly that he’d beg for death.
