Binder - 02 (31 page)

“Loud and clear, Master Chief.”

“Okay, get ready. Sit your ass down as soon as we open the bay door and watch me for the jump signal.”

Then it was hand signals as the other men adjusted their helmets and gear.

Jumping from a helicopter onto a moving train in a hurricane was already a worst-case scenario. The helo pilot had to match speed with a train moving seventy miles an hour and maintain a straight and level course while gale-force winds buffeted the Blackhawk.

When we dropped down closer to the train, though, I spotted another problem. No coal cars. In fact, there was hardly a flat surface to be found. An open-top car would have at least ensured that I wasn’t going to fall off the speeding train. But this train was made up of just one thing: an endless procession of oil tankers. The tankers looked like grain silos tipped onto their sides with narrow, 30-inch walkways slapped on top. Low iron rails on either side of the walkways made jumping onto them in the wet impossible.

That just left the engines, which were situated butt-to-butt so the front engine faced forward and the second engine faced backwards. Each engine was about forty feet long. There was a dome over the engineer cabin. Behind it, a ten-foot stretch of flat grated decking was joined to several irregular sections with odd angles and protuberances. The helo pulled down over the flat section of the second engine.

I got the signal when the pilot was as close to the surface of the locomotive as he could manage—about seven feet between microbursts of turbulence. I gave the thumbs up to Gatto, focused on a spot near the center line of the second engine and jumped.

* * *

We’d been stumped at first, looking at the state map by the roadside in Pennsylvania. Greenwald could have let Harmon off anywhere along the route from the power plant to the roadblock and it may have just been to pick up another car. But none of us believed that. For one thing, the Shelby Mustang was registered to Harmon and a man like that doesn’t give up the keys to his ride without a good reason. It suggested that Harmon didn’t want his car anywhere near where he was heading.

Captain Lee, Nichols and I leaned over the map, shouting ourselves hoarse in the wind and the rain. The Blackhawk carrying Gatto and the rest of the Hostage Rescue team landed while we were still crouched over it with flashlights, two troopers holding ponchos over our heads to keep it from getting soaked. We all thought Harmon was up to something else, but nobody had any idea what it might be.

Nichols had the breakthrough. “Do you remember exactly what Heather’s e-mail to her mother said—the exact wording?” she asked me.

“Yes. It said, ‘Mommy I miss you. I’m going to run out of insulin and gas for my car on Monday and I wont be able to get more. Can you please help me? Sorry about things. Tell Dad I miss him. Love you. H.’”

“She said she’s going to run out of gas, not just insulin.”

“And we know she wasn’t going to run out of insulin.”

“And then she says she won’t be able to get more.”

“Gas or insulin?”

“Exactly!”

“There’s something else I just realized,” I said. “In the note she says ‘Dad’ but I was told she called her father ‘Papi.’”

“Why didn’t her parents notice that?”

“Maybe they did. Maybe that’s part of the reason they asked for help.”

“What do you think the part about gas means?”

“Maybe she’s saying there won’t be any more gas available after Monday?”

“It could be. Could the National Front sabotage a refinery?”

“There’s no way Harmon has been working at a power plant and a refinery for the last year,” I pointed out, “so it would have to be terrorism. If they blew up a refinery, it wouldn’t look like an accident.”

“Unless you ran a train into it,” Gatto said. We turned to him as he poked a finger toward New Jersey. “The oil that supplies East Coast refineries used to come in from overseas by tanker. Not anymore. Now it comes overland from Canadian tar sands. A lot of it travels by train. A train full of crude oil at full speed is a big goddamn bomb. And if it derails in a refinery, it could look like an accident because shit like this happens when engineers get drunk. There wouldn’t be any evidence left to find after the explosion, anyway.”

A call to D.C. revealed that an oil tanker train had passed through Harrisburg less than an hour earlier, on its way to a refinery in Greenwich Township in New Jersey, across the river, just south of Philadelphia International Airport. The FBI contacted the rail company, which confirmed they’d lost contact with the train after a massive network failure had disabled their control center. We sprinted for the helicopter. Alpha had already greased the skids with Hostage Rescue. The sensible thing would have been to board the train from a vehicle driving alongside it, but the terrain didn’t lend itself to that kind of solution, and we couldn’t get the right kind of truck into position quickly. Given the speed the train was running, it probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway.

* * *

I hit the top of the engine and immediately lost my footing. I sprawled with my arms and legs wide and managed to get a gloved hand into the metallic grate I’d landed on before my whole body went over the side. For a few seconds the outcome was uncertain as the rain and wind beat at me and my legs slid off the train and started to pull the rest of me with them. Then I got another hand around and latched it onto the grate. I pulled myself back onto the train and clipped a carabineer into the decking. The other end was attached to my belt by a six-foot nylon strap. Then I looked up to the Blackhawk and waved the next man down.

Things started to go south the moment he released from the helicopter. A burst of wind knocked the Blackhawk toward him and the side of the bird hit him in the back of the head. His Kevlar helmet kept him from being killed instantly, but he pitched forward, nearly missing the train altogether. As he flew past I managed to get a hand through the harness of his assault rifle, an M4. His momentum would have carried me off the train but for the carabineer rigged to my belt. He was dangling off the train from a gun strap as I heaved him back. We both collapsed onto the deck of the engine. I pulled a glove off and checked his pulse. He was alive and breathing, but unconscious.

Gatto was yelling in my ear, but I didn’t hear him until I had the operator secured to the deck with two more straps crisscrossed across his torso to the grating.

“Orion, Copperhead, what is your status?” he said for the third time.

“Read you, Dogpatch. Copperhead is down but alive and secure.”

Gatto said something unintelligible through the comm, perhaps cursing in a language we didn’t share.

Then I heard gunfire.

The Blackhawk veered off immediately, disappearing into the storm that pressed against the train. I leaned over the right edge of the engine and saw the muzzle flash of a rifle from the open door of the lead locomotive. A few seconds later, the Blackhawk pulled back into view. It was ahead of the train and off to the starboard side. A fusillade of small arms fire streamed toward the train. It was smart positioning, because the doors to the engineer’s cabin faced back toward the rear of the train. The HRT snipers were trying to avoid hitting the train controls while forcing Harmon to step out of the cabin to return fire.

I unhooked myself and gained my feet, then sprinted forward as fast as I dared. While the Blackhawk continued to engage Harmon, I reached the end of the second engine and took the four-foot leap to the first train. That’s when the steel trestle bridge appeared in front of me.

A yardarm of some kind swung loose from a girder on the bridge, skimming just feet above the top of the locomotive. I landed on the front engine and immediately hopped back into the air, just before the steel beam hit me in the knees. I landed again and narrowly kept my balance. I dropped to my knees and scrambled forward, keeping a careful eye on the bridge as it whizzed by.

The Blackhawk peeled off as I got to within a few feet of the crew cab of the lead locomotive. There was a walkway on either side of the engine and both of them led to identical doors to the cabin. I attached another strap with carabineers to the top of the engine and slid down over the left side, unhooking myself when I’d gained the walkway with a hand on the railing.

I crept forward along the gangway. I stopped a few feet short of the door and tapped my comm.

“Dogpatch this is Orion. Go on three.”

“Roger, Orion. Three, two, one...go.”

A burst of gunfire erupted from the Blackhawk. I climbed two stairs and stepped up to the door to the cabin. I peeked through its glass window.

The first thing I saw was a body, slumped back in a seat. For an instant I thought Gatto’s shooters had hit Harmon. But it was one of the train crew, probably the conductor. He was a slight man with large ears and a neat little bullet hole through the side of his head.

Peering around, I spotted the train engineer. The cabin was divided into two compartments that gave each crewmember a parallel but separate view of the track ahead. There were fewer controls on my side, so the engineer’s station had to be on the other side. It looked like the engineer was secured to his chair with duct tape, although at least one of his arms was free.

Then Harmon leaned forward and I caught a glimpse of him. He had his back to me and was peering out the other train door, holding a short-barreled M4 carbine out in front of him. He was searching the sky for the Blackhawk. This time he’d be gunning for the tail rotor or the rotor housing. At close range he could bring the helo down and kill the entire crew if he hit it.

“Rifle out the door and hands behind your neck, fingers interlaced,” I shouted as I stepped inside the train compartment.

Without hesitating, Harmon ducked through the door he’d been holding open with surprising speed, and the shot I fired missed the back of his head by an inch or two.

I darted after him, just catching the engineer’s door with the edge of my foot before it slammed shut. I sprung through the door and juked left as the barrel of Harmon’s rifle turned toward me. I stepped on top of the railing, perilously close to the edge of the bridge, then pushed off and launched myself into Harmon, switching the Kimber into my left hand and bringing my gloved right hand down on the top of the receiver of the M4, where the scope would have been if he’d attached one. I pushed the rifle down and away from me as I slammed my elbow into the side of his throat.

Harmon dropped the rifle, then ducked and hit me in the chest with his shoulder. He followed up with an elbow shot to my ribcage. Then he slid a hand around my waist and tried to hip-toss me off the train. I stepped my right foot in front of Harmon’s left to block the throw and clung to him as he tried to shoulder me straight off the train instead. My head slipped back for a fraction of a second before I saw a steel beam whizzing by and pulled it back. I slammed my helmet into Harmon’s forehead and speared the tips of my gloved fingers toward his Adam’s apple when he pulled a knife with his left hand and slashed out, snagging it on one of the pouches on the front of the ammo vest I was wearing. I grabbed his wrist and stepped back while twisting, pulling him off balance by the knife arm. Then I torqued the wrist and slammed it to the ground. He dropped the knife as his wrist broke, and I jabbed the .45 into the soft spot between his collarbone and his Adam’s apple.

“Where’s Heather?” I asked him.

“Heather? Seriously? You’re on a train that’s about to derail and that’s what you’re focused on? They were right about you. You’re a goddamn pit bull.”

I didn’t answer him, just tightened my grip around his broken wrist.

“You’re never going to find her. You’ll never see her. She’s gone,” he said.

Then he lunged toward me, arcing his free right hand toward the elbow of my gun hand.

At point blank range, the Kimber bucked twice in rapid succession.

Epilogue
Five Days Later – Saturday

“That was beautiful. Sad but beautiful,” Nichols said as we walked toward our cars. It was a cold, gusty afternoon at the Donel Kinnard Memorial State Veterans Cemetery. They’d just buried Tim Quigley.

“It was. You’ve been to a few of these?”

“A few. You’ve probably been to a few more.”

“Yeah, I have.” Dozens.

“How’s your mom doing?” she asked.

“She’s recovering. They have her in physical therapy. They think she’ll be able to speak and function normally, but it will take a while. The left side of her body is weak right now.”

“You made it back home?”

I nodded. “I rented a car in Camden and drove straight through to Conestoga. I got there just before Sandy made landfall. My mom was still in the hospital so I stayed at the house with my sister Ginny. We lost a tree and a few shingles, and the sump pump failed so the basement flooded. We had our hands full for a couple of days...I appreciate the advice by the way. I’m not sure if I would have been as quick to go back if you hadn’t encouraged me.”

“I’m glad it worked out.”

“They’re all crazy. Ginny tries to please everybody, Jamie says whatever comes to her mind and Amelia hates me. But it’s a family.”

“Every family is dysfunctional in its own way.” Nichols smiled. “Are you sure you don’t want to stop for a late lunch before you head home?”

“I’ve got an appointment.”

“About the girl?”

I nodded.

“I heard about that,” she said.

“You free for dinner?” I asked.

“Sure. Gourmet pizza?”

I made a face. Nichols laughed.

“So where do things stand with the National Front?” I asked.

“It’ll take months to work our way through all the data. They tried to destroy all their computer records, but we miraculously found an intact copy of the entire dataset on one of their secondary systems.”

“It’s funny how those kinds of slipups happen.” She caught my eye; it was obvious she knew it was no accident at all.

“But they’re done regardless.”

“Too much bad publicity?”

Nichols stopped. “I thought you already heard this.”