Havoc - v4 (31 page)

In the microsecond of shock, Mercer saw he was Middle Eastern, hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and had perfectly capped teeth. He put a bullet through the man’s skull and swung out of the way as his body fell onto the tracks and vanished.

The gunman still on the ladder heard the shot and looked down just as Mercer swung back, extending the pistol over his head. He fired as fast as he could, absorbing the recoil with a stiff elbow to keep the barrel pointed at the assassin. He had to give the man marks for courage, because even as a wall of lead flew around him he tried to bring his gun to bear. He had the barrel pointed downward when he ran out of time. One of the nine-millimeter rounds entered his stomach just below the diaphragm and shredded his left lung before emerging out the top of his shoulder, nearly severing the arm. The next two hit him in the upper chest as he lost his grip on the railing and started to fall. Another punched through his head as the Yarygin locked back empty.

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.

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.

The lights of Poli’s vehicle showed the sign for his turnoff. He exited the deserted highway and drove slowly through the fishing town. The smell of the sea, which tinged the air, was overwhelmed by the stench of rotted fish and diesel fuel. North of the town a road ran parallel to the sea. He could see the bright lights of Novorossiysk across the bay. There were several supertankers lined up to load oil transported on the new pipeline from Kazakhstan. And out on the still waters of the Black Sea, more ships could be seen headed into or out of the port. The laden tankers would need to transit the full length of the Black Sea and pass through the Bosporus Strait at Istanbul, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, where on average there is an accident every three days. Before reaching the Mediterranean, they also faced the navigational nightmare of crossing the Aegean Sea.

The headlights revealed a small fish processing plant built on pilings over the water. The parking lot was deserted but for two cars, a luxurious Audi A8 W12 and a limousine. The lights were on in the office trailer at the edge of the parking lot. Alongside the plant was a long wooden jetty where an eighty-foot commercial fishing boat was moored. Poli could see the glow of navigation equipment through the broad bridge windscreen.

He parked the UAZ jeep next to the black Audi. He reached over his shoulder to touch one of the barrels. It was warm but not yet hot. The heat was a by-product of the exchange of subatomic particles from one barrel to the next. By themselves there wasn’t enough ore in any one of the containers to start such a chain reaction, but two in close proximity created a critical mass. In the mine the barrels had been stored well away from one another, but in the confines of the truck it was almost as if they were calling to one another in a deadly siren song. Left unchecked, the plutonium would eventually explode in a shower of deadly dust that would contaminate several city blocks or more, depending on the wind.

Two men emerged from the office trailer and he sensed movement on the fishing boat.

The older of the two walked up to Feines and hugged him while the other held back at a distance. Poli didn’t return the embrace. The man released him. He was of average height, with thick salt-and-pepper hair. His mustache was tell tended, and below his arched brows were arresting blue eyes that even in the dim light of the parking lot possessed a devilish charm. “First of all,” he said in Russian, “are you okay?”

“I’m fine. But I think all the Arabs sent to help me were killed.”

“What happened, Poli?”

“You didn’t give me enough time,” Feines snapped.

“I couldn’t stall the Americans any longer,” Grigori Popov said. “Ira Lasko was about to go over my head. If that happened there would have been an investigation and it would have been my ass on the line. As it is I’ll have a lot of explaining to do. I can only hope to convince my superiors and the Americans that the timing was a coincidence or perhaps there is a leak within Lasko’s office. Tell me what happened.”

“We were loading the last barrels when the chopper appeared. We were ready for it but somehow the stupid raghead missed. It was a MI-8, for Christ’s sake, as big as a barn, and the damn fool only managed a glancing shot with an RPG. From the amount of fire we got after it crashed, I estimated most of the soldiers survived, so rather than get into a pitched battle I ordered us out.”

“But you decided not to go with the train?” Popov asked slyly.

Poli remained grim. “As was my plan all along, just in case something happened to the train. I wanted to make sure I got some of the plutonium here. I heard the train wreck as I drove out of the valley, and saw the fire. Even if I went back, there’s no way we’re going to recover those barrels.”

“How many did you manage to bring with you?”

“Two.”

Popov nodded. “More than enough for their current operation.”

“Good, because I am done with this operation,” Feines remarked.

“You’re not going after the alembic?”

“This operation has been a lot more than I anticipated,” Poli admitted. “I thought I’d find what I needed in Africa, only to learn your army beat me to it by a half century. Then I thought I had it from the samples the American recovered and shipped home on the
Wetherby
. I have the pictures I took of the stele, which might reveal the alembic’s location, but your information about the old depot led me to complete the project. I’m out of it now.”

“I don’t blame you,” Popov said. “I’m glad my only part in this thing was giving you information about the cache in Samarsskaya.”

“You mean selling me that information.”

Popov shot him an oily smile. “We’ve known each other for a lot of years, Poli, but business is business and helping you smuggle nuclear matériel out of Russia, well let’s just say my conscience needed a little help accepting it. In truth I wouldn’t have given that information to anyone but you, because I know you couldn’t let these crazy bastards do anything to us.”