Ragnarok (5 page)

But when he turned back, he realized he never should have taken eyes off the subject. The man had stood, swept into the unlocked driver’s compartment at the front of the train and pulled an automatic pistol out of his pack.

That’s what I get for racial profiling
.

King lunged from his seat, already in motion along the length of the car when Sweaty had conked the driver—an older man of at least sixty-five—over the head with the butt of the weapon. He was squatting and affixing a magnetic bomb to the dash of the train when King had nearly reached the door of the driver’s compartment.

Passengers screamed, as King eyed the bomb.

Sweaty had turned at the last second and with no hesitation had fired a sweeping arc of eight bullets through the Plexiglas windows and back into the passenger area of the compartment. King instinctively threw himself backward as he saw the gun arm coming up, almost in slow motion. The Plexiglas shattered as he fell to the floor, fragmenting and spraying large shards over him and a row of screaming Mouseketeers. He rolled to a crouch against the bottom of the door leading into the front compartment, and one of the passengers made eye contact with him. She pointed at the front of the train.

King rose and peered through the shattered window, quickly taking in the unconscious old man, the bomb on the dash and the open side window through which he could just see the leg of the sweaty man rising out of view.

The roof
, he thought.
Why do they always go for the roof on a moving train?

King stepped into the driver’s area and checked for a pulse on the old man. He was alive—just out cold. The bomb was unfamiliar to King, but clearly not a homemade job. Either Sweaty was a professional bomb-maker or he had obtained the device from one. King didn’t know much about the monorail trains at Disney, or about how they worked, but he had read some things about the park on the flight from Europe. He knew that the trains had a system that prevented them from colliding and shut them down in case of an emergency. He remembered that the system was called MAPO, after
Mary Poppins
. There were lights on the dash that would indicate when the MAPO system was engaged. But a small black device with a blinking red light had been magnetically attached to the dash next to the MAPO system, and King was dismayed to see that no MAPO lights were lit. The black device was clearly interfering with the safety system of the train.

King stared at the bomb and the black box. He didn’t know what to do. He knew how to disarm some simple, improvised explosive devices, but not a bomb of this complexity. He didn’t know if he could just remove either the bomb or the electronic device interfering with the MAPO system. Either attempt might set the bomb off early. He glanced at the speedometer and saw the train was doing nearly 50 mph, and then looked out the front of the train at the monorail track ahead. Eventually they would hit something or the bomb would go off, assuming it had some kind of internal timer.

Gonna have to bring Sweaty back
, King thought, and climbed out the open window.

THE MAN RAN toward the back of the train. King chased after him, but made ready to hit the deck should the man turn and fire the 9 mm that he still clutched in one sweaty hand. But the man didn’t turn until King was nearly on top of him. Sweaty stopped on the roof of the last car and simply stood still. As King got up to him, the man turned and again brought the weapon up, but King was ready for him this time. He swatted the weapon from the man’s arm and it went flying into the air. King launched a right cross and hit the man on the chin. Sweaty staggered back and all the fight went out of him. Then the man brought his eyes up to look at King.

But his eyes didn’t stop on King’s face. He was looking over King’s right shoulder, up toward the front of the train, and King saw terror fill the man’s face. The man took a step back from King, turned and sprinted off the rear of the train, his torso slamming into the concrete edge of the raised rail and his body then flipping backward to plummet to the ground forty feet below.

King watched the sweaty man fall as if in slow motion, then he slowly turned around to see what the bomber had seen. He was expecting more men. Armed men. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his consciousness, he was even expecting some hideous creature from the unknown—King had certainly faced enough far-fetched exotic creatures as a part of his work, to make the possibility of a monstrous beast one he would consider.

What he wasn’t expecting was a Russian Mil Mi-24 helicopter gunship loaded with armaments on its wings and a Yak-B nose-mounted cannon pointed right at King. In fact, the massive Russian assault helicopter was probably further down on the list of things King’s subconscious could have imagined than the Loch Ness Monster.

FIVE

Fenris Kystby, Norway

ROOK’S ONLY RECOURSE to the shotgun was to rush the man holding it. If he could get close enough, fast enough, he might divert the angle to the barrel on the weapon.

As it turned out though, he needn’t have worried. When he got up close to the man, he watched in horror as the man pulled on the trigger, only to have nothing happen. Either Peder only had the one round in the damn thing or this man Rook hadn’t met yet didn’t know to cock the weapon for another shot. Rook batted the long weapon away from the man with his stick and thrust his right fist directly into the man’s unprotected throat. The sound the man made was unpleasant but satisfying. The man’s glazed blue Nordic eyes widened as he slumped to his knees.

Rook wasted no time; he sprinted past the other man that had set the barn on fire, and knelt down next to his fallen friend, only to find the old man dead. The blow Rook had seen him take caved in his skull. Rook stood and raced into the flaming barn with dark thoughts filling his head. He flipped the latches on the horse gates. Those animals not already aflame stampeded out of the barn and into the morning air. Unfortunately, the stall where he had been sleeping, and where he had hidden his Desert Eagle, under a pile of straw, was so full of intense flame that he couldn’t get close.

Rook turned to see a few villagers had followed him into the blaze. He barreled into them, knocking them into stalls and the flaming walls. Burning to death was a horrible way to die and he didn’t wish it on anyone, even his enemies, save for a few genocidal maniacs, but his desire to live trumped his guilt over laying a few Nordic nutjobs on the barbeque. For weeks, his thoughts had been a jumbled mess after the failure of his mission and the murder of his support team in Siberia. Now, his thoughts were as sharp as the edge of shattered fine crystal, focused on finding out why a bunch of seemingly normal Scandinavian villagers suddenly turned into a zombie horde. And whoever was responsible for that, and for the death of his friend, was going to find out what it’s like to be a punching bag or a gun range target. Whatever got the job done. Rook wasn’t picky.

The barn was a total loss. Rook bolted for the rear doorway and hoped that he might outrun the remaining villagers. But when he burst out of the door and into the fresh morning air, he knew it wasn’t going to go down the easy way. The villagers had circled the barn and were waiting for him. There were still twenty-five of them and he could see another group coming across the field toward him.

No clever responses this time; he simply crashed into the first villager he saw and snatched his weapon—a scythe-like farm implement. The blade was shorter than that of a scythe and there was no handle halfway down the shaft. Still, it would do. These people had been innocent victims of something. Mind control? A virus? He couldn’t be sure of anything. But it didn’t matter. Now they had killed his friend. If he didn’t hit back hard, he’d be next.

The gloves were off.

Rook swung the bladed weapon through the low fog that had settled. He cut or impaled any villager that got too close. Blood sprayed, coating everyone near the barn.

The horde was unfazed, pressing the attack.

Rook grunted as something slammed into his forearm, knocking the scythe from his grip. His left leg took a blow from behind him and he went down to one knee.

The mob swarmed in close, reaching for him.

He swung out backward, connecting solidly with whoever had hit him, but it was no use. They had him surrounded. Fists pummeled him on all sides, striking with raging hatred, steel and wood.

Rook kept punching and elbowing until the sheer weight of human bodies on top of him crushed him down to the ground.

SIX

Mount Kadam, Uganda

WHEN KNIGHT FIRED the shot, Bishop felt the jolt on his shoulder where the barrel of the weapon rested. He watched as the front of the A-10’s canopy splintered apart, and the pilot’s head exploded.

There was just one problem. The plane was still coming at them; the dead pilot’s finger was still depressing the trigger on the 30 mm cannon. Bullets tore into the ground, chewing a speeding path right to where Bishop stood with his muscular legs parted.

“Move!” Bishop was shouting and flying through the air to the right as Knight was already leaping to their left. The small Korean rolled in the tall grass and disappeared from Bishop’s sight as the gunfire raced past them. Bishop checked the sky to see that the trouble had not passed. The gunfire from the cannon had ripped past them through the tall grasses of the field, but the plane was crashing down toward their location now, and they were taking fire from the locals, who had closed the distance while Bishop and Knight had been distracted by the arrival of the A-10.

Before either man could move, one of the planes wing’s sheared off in a shower of sparks created by a barrage of bullets raining down from a second aircraft high above. Lacking lift provided by the wing, the plane nose-dived and spun to Earth, the freed wing crashing nearby, and each portion of the ruined vehicle exploding on impact.

Silhouetted by the rising plume of burning airplane fuel, Knight picked off the last few targets downfield as their rescuer, the curved-wing transport ship known as the
Crescent
, swept past directly overhead.

The Chess Team transport plane arced gracefully and came back toward Bishop’s position as he stood and watched. It kicked in its vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) thrusters, and slowed to a hover near Bishop. The craft then began to set down in the tall grass. The noise from its engines sounded low, like a hum, and the thrust of air was no stronger than a rough breeze.

The
Crescent
was Chess Team’s stealth troop transport. Its half-moon shape could hold several tons of equipment, but the team more frequently used the vehicle for fast and quiet troop transport. It had recently been retrofitted for the VTOL engines, because no airports near the team’s headquarters in New Hampshire had a long enough runway for it. The interior was fitted with quarters for 60 men on bunks, as well as the latest in tactical weaponry. Radar-absorbent black and gray material coated the entire vehicle, and the surface of the flying wing consisted of odd, lumpy rectangular shapes. The plane had top-notch electronic countermeasures and held a wide array of armaments for any occasion—including its own heavy rotary cannon, which had just dispatched the falling Warthog.

Bishop turned back to see a few figures fleeing in the distance and Knight casually strolling toward him, carrying his massive sniper rifle over a shoulder.

“I guess there’s not much left for me to do.” Bishop told him.

“Something tells me there’ll be plenty for you to do in Cairo.” Knight walked up to the lowered entrance ramp leading inside the stealth vehicle and Bishop followed, lugging the olive drab XM312-B.

Inside they greeted the pilots, former
Nightstalkers
men they knew only by their callsigns: Black One and Black Two. They strapped into chairs, waiting for the landing ramp to close, and the interior of the plane to pressurize, before contacting Deep Blue.

“We’re on board the
Crescent
,” Knight spoke into a microphone. “What’s going on in Cairo?”

Deep Blue’s face appeared on a monitor in front of Bish- op’s chair. His rugged good looks, crow’s feet, and balding hair reminded Bishop of Bruce Willis. “Forget Cairo. I’m sending you to the Asian theater now. It’s bad this time, gentlemen. It is very, very bad. Sending you some files right now. Read up. And if you aren’t strapped in tightly, do so. I’m ordering Black One to get you to China at the
Crescent
’s top speed. Deep Blue out.”

Knight looked at Bishop with a raised eyebrow. Then Bishop felt the thrust when the vehicle sped up and broke the sound barrier. The computer terminal beeped in front of them, and the screen came to life with satellite imagery and video files in separate windows. The scenes of destruction and devastation were nearly incomprehensible.

The worst part was that each window was labeled with a different city name: Karachi, Philadelphia, Seoul, São Paulo, Cairo, Los Angeles, Brisbane, New Delhi and Buenos Aires. The world was on fire.

SEVEN

Fenris Kystby, Norway

ROOK PUSHED AGAINST the mound of bodies covering him, but he couldn’t budge.

Couldn’t breathe, either.

Fucking hell, if I go like this, it won’t matter if I go to Heaven or Hell. There isn’t an angel or demon that won’t mock me about this. God is probably getting a good chuckle out of this.

He pushed again, but without oxygen, his muscles continued to weaken.

Then he felt the weight of bodies begin to lift off him. He heard grunting noises and shouts of pain. Then more weight shifted off him. He was lying face down on the ground, battered and bloody, with several of the villagers still on top of him and punching, clawing and poking at him. Before he couldn’t move at all, but now, with the shift in weight above him, as the grunting and shouting continued, he was able to slide his arms under his broad chest. He pulled his knees up slowly to his chest and planted his toes down into the soil.