Dark Zone (40 page)

Car eighteen had only dead bodies, some scattered luggage, and the large boxes blocking the aisle.

Dean took another step inside, trying to see around the boxes. They looked like the carts that the servers used as they brought refreshments to the first-class passengers; the carts had clearly been arranged like this on purpose, though Dean had no idea why. He tried to push one out of the way, but it wouldn’t budge; they were all linked together somehow. He had to hop over two sets of seats nearby to get around the boxes.

A man lay in a pool of blood near the end of the car. His skull had been battered so badly it looked as if it had been made of sawdust and blood.

Dean moved on. The doorway to the next car was around a bend; he dropped to his knees and looked around the corner.

The doorway was open. The next car was empty.

He went in, stopping every few feet to listen. If someone came, he would hide in the seats, preferably next to one of the dead people, and spring out as the person moved past.

He didn’t hear any more gunfire. They’d have finished their work and would be returning.

Dean moved through two more coaches. In coach fourteen he spotted a briefcase made of metal in the overhead rack. Thinking he could use it as a weapon, he stretched up to grab it. As he did, he realized he was exposed to the outside window and casting a shadow, just as the gunmen had. He took the briefcase down and dropped to the floor, crouching his way to the end.

So where were the gunmen?

Maybe they’d gone outside the coach and were checking along the sides or top of the train.

Or maybe they’d gone after Lia.

Dean heard voices approaching as he moved toward the end of the car. He slid into the last seat, hunkering against the window, the briefcase ready.

Two voices.

Another? Were there three?

He twisted his head, let his hand hang down, playing dead.

He saw the side of a man passing, submachine gun hanging lazily in front of him.

Wait for the second?

Yes. Here he was.

Was there a third? No, he’d seen two shadows. And he couldn’t afford to, not if there were only two—they’d be too far away.

Go!

Dean leaped up, aluminum briefcase held out before him like the battering ram at the prow of an ancient galley. The man closest to him began to turn. The edge of the briefcase caught him on the chin; the gun began to fire.

Dean threw himself forward and they were rolling and there was more gunfire.

Dean pushed and punched, barely able to aim his blows. He could taste blood and heard bullets rumbling, but he had no sense of the fight beyond what his fists and head felt. The terrorist slammed and kicked, tried to wrestle the gun from under his body, tried to writhe away. Dean gripped him and pushed down, slamming at his head, wrestling and finding his enemy’s head in his hands.

Finally, there was no more fight left in the other man. Dean had no sense of whether he’d killed him or merely stunned him. He threw himself forward toward the gun that had fallen. He scooped it up, aiming down the car, but the other terrorist had fled.

Just as well. The submachine gun, an H&K MP-5, was empty.

105

The woman kicked and bit and punched at him. Donohue struggled, but her ferocity had caught him off-guard; he tripped and fell backward, managing only to push her away. He leaped backward, took two, three steps, and set himself for her attack.

Fortunately, she didn’t follow.

“Who are you?” the woman hissed between breaths. The accent was American.

“Who are
you
?” he answered.

“Why did you blow up the train?”

“I didn’t,” he said, surprised. “You’re not one of the terrorists?”

She was silent.

“Were you a passenger?” he asked.

“Yes. Are you one of the policemen?” she asked.

He considered how to answer the question. A policeman would have more authority, certainly, and pretending to be one now was tempting. But it might be difficult to explain later.

If it mattered.

“No. I’m just a passenger. I jumped off the train,” he said. “Terrorists blew it apart.”

“I know,” said the woman. “Why did you attack me?”

“I thought you were one of them,” he said. He wasn’t lying. “I didn’t see you until you were just about on me—I didn’t think anyone could be alive.”

“We have to get to help,” she said.

“How?” Donohue asked.

“Maybe there’s something inside this tunnel. Through the passage. There’s a service tunnel in the middle of the two tubes.”

“What about the people who blew up the train?” he said.

“They unhooked the engine. I think they left.”

“They left?” Donohue felt his anger flare, then drain away—Mussa had managed to escape.

Escape!

Better than he would do, unless he figured something out.

“Come on,” said the woman. “Let’s see if this entrance goes anywhere.”

“You’re hurt,” he said, noticing that she was limping.

“I’m all right.”

There were probably dozens of ways out of the service tunnel. If he lived, he would get Mussa. For that he would trade his life. He would strangle the bloody bastard with his bare hands. Oh, that would be delicious.

Who would blame him? He’d be a national hero. The Queen might even knight him ... before throwing him in prison for the rest of his life.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” he said.

“You almost killed me,” said the woman, moving ahead in the passage. “I have a penlight on my key chain. Come on.”

106

Dean found a magazine for the submachine gun in the terrorist’s belt.

The man was still breathing; a quick kiss of the trigger took care of that.

Dean stepped over the body, moving in the direction the other man had gone.

Had he fled in fear? Or was he out of bullets, without even a spare like his friend?

Dean stopped at the vestibule, listening. When he thought he heard a creak in the next car, he threw himself inside, firing a burst from the gun as something flicked at the edge of his peripheral vision. In the same motion he dove to the ground, rolled, ready, waiting.

But there was nothing.

Dean got to his hands and knees and moved forward slowly. He paused about midway, listening. When he started again the front of the car lit up with gunfire. Diving into the nearby seats, he could almost feel the bullets zipping overhead.

The burst was long; Dean suspected it was covering an advance and got ready. When it stopped he made a feint with the gun toward the aisle and drew more fire. This time the burst was much briefer. When it ended he held the gun up and fired a few rounds toward the back of the car, then burst out into the aisle, gun blazing, throwing himself across to the other side.

As he landed on the floor he realized the terrorist had retreated. Dean jumped up and ran to the end, breath shallow, blood spurting from his head. He spun himself around the bend to the floor, ready to fire but not shooting this time. He had to conserve his bullets.

He waited a breath, two breaths, then began moving forward again.

Maybe the other man was out of bullets.

Why was he still in the train? And what were the boxes there for?

Another bomb.

Maybe the man was running to set it off.

As Dean reached the end of the coach he threw himself around the passage, diving headfirst into the other car. Dean began to run, racing through the coach. But as he sprang into car seventeen the air around him exploded with ricochets and shrapnel. He fired down the aisle of the car, the MP-5 shaking and then stuttering as he dove straight down to the floor, rolling and crawling and pushing behind the seats.

He was out of bullets.

Dean waited. When the terrorist didn’t come, he slid toward the aisle, gun-first. A fresh fusillade drove him back.

Sure that the man would be coming for him, he pushed against the bottom of the seat cushion, coiling his body, ready to spring out.

He’d use the gun as a battering ram, hope that he’d be lucky, or lucky enough not to be killed.

When the man didn’t appear, Dean told himself to wait—then changed his mind and slid the gun forward.

More rounds spat through the car, ricocheting and slapping around him. The seats were thick and the gunman had no angle, but the fact that Dean hadn’t been shot yet was due largely to the gunman’s inexperience—if the terrorist had been trained better, he would have held his fire and closed the angle down patiently, relentlessly, seat by seat.

Dean glanced across the aisle at the acrylic shelving. He could see a reflection—the terrorist, lying at the end of the car, gun poised.

Why was he on the floor out in the middle of the aisle?

Dean slid his gun forward into the aisle. Another few rounds, poorly aimed.

There was only one reason he’d be on the floor—he’d been wounded so severely he couldn’t move.

But he had Dean pinned.

There were several bodies blocking anything but a shot from the aisle.

Dean climbed up into the seat, hunkering and gathering his breath. With a sudden heave he threw himself over the top of the chair, flying into the next row. The gunman didn’t catch on until Dean hit the cushion on the other side.

More gunfire—and then nothing, a click, the gun empty, a curse.

Had he heard that? Or did he want to hear that?

Dean jumped to his feet.

107

The gangway of the power car was claustrophobic and smelled like a burnt transformer. Ahmed sat in the engineer’s plush velvet seat and pushed the levers. The transformers behind them began to hum.

It was theoretically possible to escape at least the blast—they had less than ten miles to go and just over ten minutes to do it. They’d have to clear the tunnel by a good margin to escape the blast, but it was possible.

Did he want to live?

Allah was offering him a choice. If he escaped he might have other triumphs.

Or he might be captured. More likely the latter.

The train stuttered forward.

God wasn’t offering him the choice; the devil was. Mussa reached toward the red brake switch on the left. As his fingers reached it, he threw his body against Ahmed’s head and arms, grabbing for the gun with his other hand.

108

Rubens jerked around as the voice came through the loudspeaker.

Lia, talking to the British authorities via the emergency phone system in the maintenance section of the Chunnel.

“They’ve split the train in half and separated the engine from the back half. There were at least two of them. Everyone in the back half of the train is dead. Cut the power. Stop them from getting away.”

“Can we talk to her?” Rubens asked.

“We should be able to cut right in,” said Telach. “Lia?”

A British operator asked who was interfering—then the line clicked and he was gone, his voice erased by the Art Room’s computers.

“Lia?” repeated Telach.

“Marie, are you on the line?” answered Lia, her voice fainter than it had been before.

Rubens punched his mike button. “Lia, this is Rubens. The terrorists have assembled a nuclear bomb on the train. I want you to talk to one of our experts on how to defuse it.”

“Are you serious?”

“I assure you I am very serious.”

109

Dean took three steps and then dove as the man brought up a pistol from his side. The gun went off close to Dean’s head. He grabbed for it, managing to push it to the side as it fired again. Something burned the right side of his thigh, the pain so intense Dean yelped.

He waited for the next shot. Paralyzed by pain.

It didn’t come. Dean hadn’t been hit by the bullet but rather fragments of the man’s skull, shattered as the 9mm shell entered his head.

Blood dripped down his pants as he stood. He bent back down and grabbed the pistol, then began making his way to the car where he’d seen the carts clustered together.

110

Lia listened as the weapons expert explained how he thought the bomb would work—a set of conventional explosives would force the nuclear material together, creating a critical mass and triggering the atomic chain reaction. It was essentially the way early nuclear bombs worked, or at least one type of them, ever since “Fat Man” had been detonated over Nagasaki.

“Depending on the design, the warhead may not be in the exact center of the assembly. From the formula I saw, they had to compensate for the lack of proximity to the plutonium by layering the explosions, probably because they couldn’t be sure of handling the material in a way—”

“Just tell me how to disarm it,” Lia told him.

“We won’t know until you can describe what the mechanism is like.”

“What am I supposed to do, run back and forth?” she snapped.

“If you could disrupt the explosive assembly around the core of the weapon,” said Johnny Bib, who was listening in on the line, “then it stands to reason that the explosion would not work as designed. The formula has a set of variables that I believe describe modules. Removing one module will alter the result exponentially.”

“In English!”

“Take one of the explosive modules away,” said Johnny Bib. “There’ll still be an explosion, a huge one, but it won’t compress the nuclear material. No boom.”

“Look, there’s someone with me. Have him talk to the British police or whoever I was talking to and describe what happened.” She turned and held the phone out for the man who’d surprised her in the tunnel. “Talk to them. I’m going back on the train.”

He grabbed at her arm. Lia jerked back out of the way. If her leg had been all right she would have tossed him over her shoulder.

“You can’t go back,” said the man, his Irish brogue thick now. “It’s suicide.”

“I have to go back. Just tell them what happened.” Lia hobbled toward the entrance. Her leg muscles loosened as she moved and she was able to walk more normally, making decent progress.

“Listen,” said the man, coming after her. “You have to get out of here. Come on.”