Chavez lifted a dirty steak knife off the table and hid it under the cuff of his suit coat.
Caruso gave Chavez a look. “You’re going to engage a dozen armed dudes with a steak knife?”
“No. I’m going to engage one armed dude with a steak knife, and then I’m going to engage eleven armed dudes with a gun.”
Dom grabbed his own knife, wiped some sauce from it with his napkin, and hid it in the cuff of his jacket.
7
Domingo Chavez knew he wasn’t breaching his cover by staring at the men in black storming up through the dining car toward the police. It would have looked completely inauthentic to continue drinking his coffee with his eyes on his empty lunch plate while a dozen men with intense faces marched by in single file, every one of them holding something hidden inside a gym bag. So he stared, tried to ID who they were and how far they were willing to go with this. Quick eye contact with Dom, then an almost imperceptible nod, passed on the message that these men were the real deal; they looked willing to kill some police to keep this mystery woman out of the hands of German authorities, and Dom and Ding had to keep this from happening.
After the first ten men passed the table, then went through the vestibule door, the last two turned around in the dining car by the door, drew black automatic pistols from their bags, and covered the dining car and second-class car beyond. This put their eyes right on Dom and Ding, a dozen feet ahead of them on their right. They held their guns low in front of their bodies.
Chavez instantly realized these men were well trained, otherwise all dozen would have just attacked the known threat, and they wouldn’t have set up a rear guard for any other potential threats.
Still, both Caruso and Chavez saw that they were within a dozen feet of the pair of armed men, close enough to engage. They just needed to act with speed, surprise, and violence of action, and they could even the odds of this one-sided contest.
As the door to the vestibule between the dining car and the first-class car closed, Dom raised his hands and began to stand in the aisle, drawing the attention of both men.
“Don’t shoot! Just tell us what is going—”
Ding Chavez spun low out of the chair with his coffee cup in his hand and flicked the steaming liquid out and up toward the faces of the men. He took one step to square his body with the gunmen standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the door, and he launched himself forward. Both pistols rose toward the motion, but the hot coffee in their eyes caused them to flinch and recoil before they could aim. Chavez slammed into the midsections of both men, sending them back hard onto the floor. One man banged his head against the door and dropped his pistol, and the other man’s gun hand was pushed high to his right by Chavez’s left shoulder. A shot rang out in his first-class cabin just as Caruso arrived, leaping through the air over Chavez’s prostrate form, then landing, his knees slamming onto the chests of both men. One man drew a folding knife from the pocket of his tracksuit and clicked it open, but Ding stabbed him through the heart with his steak knife, ending him instantly. The second man still had his pistol in his hand, but a hailstorm of punches from Dom onto the man’s nose and jaw rendered him senseless quickly.
By then, sustained gunfire from first class shattered the glass window of the vestibule door just over both Americans’ heads.
Chavez and Caruso both scooped up the weapons of the two gunmen. They were GSh-18s, Russian military-issue nine-millimeter pistols. They entered the vestibule, crawling low, listening to the booming gunfire just past the next door. The gunfire grew heavier by the second, but Chavez chanced a look through the broken window. He saw the female dog handler lying still in the hallway of first class, the big Belgian Malinois tearing into the arm of a flailing man in a black tracksuit, and more police taking cover in the first compartment and down at the end of the hall near the exits to the train. More men in black leaned out of Morozov’s compartment and two more closer to the dining car, all firing pistols.
Chavez aimed quickly at the back of a gunman’s head and fired, dropping the man to the hallway floor, but immediately the German police began firing at Chavez, thinking him to be just one more attacker shooting at them. He hit the floor, turned to Dom, and said, “The shooters are in the nearest three compartments in first class.”
Dom said, “I’ll go outside, engage through the windows.”
Chavez said, “The hell you will. This isn’t Mission Impossible. They don’t put handrails on the outside of trains.”
Just then, the train began to slow again. Its brakes wailed and squealed. Dom and Ding were thrown to the ground in the vestibule.
Dom looked outside. “Shit, we’re in a forest.”
The conductor was just stopping the train so people could get off, but Caruso and Chavez knew this would help Morozov and his team escape.
Even before the locomotive came to a complete stop, the Americans could hear glass shattering in the first-class compartments. Dom opened the door to the outside, leapt to the ground, and saw men dropping to the tracks, weapons in hand. He started to aim at the closest gunman, but the cracks of a pistol from one of the windows sent him back inside the train.
He found Chavez involved in a firefight through the vestibule window. “They are escaping out the windows!” Dom shouted over the gunfire.
“Good! Let them go, just don’t let them flank us!”
Dom aimed back through the door just as a gunman spun around, trying to get a shot off on the unknown shooters behind the gunmen in first class. Dom fired twice, hitting the man in the left clavicle and spinning him to the train tracks.
A second shooter had made it to a row of trees beyond the train tracks, and with his pistol he took careful aim at the men in gray suits in the vestibule between the dining car and first class. His first shot went high over Ding’s head, but his second grazed Dom in the back, sending him diving into the bathroom.
The door to first class slid open without warning, and Chavez spun his gun toward the movement. A man dressed in black slammed into him, knocking him to the floor.
The German police continued firing up the length of their carriage, and bullet holes tore through the metal door as it closed again, the rounds going just a few feet over Chavez’s head.
Dom aimed at the man on top of Chavez from his position on the floor of the bathroom, and he pressed his trigger, but the attacker lowered his head quickly and the round went high. The slide of Dom’s GSh-18 locked open, letting him know he was out of ammo.
The man on top of Chavez delivered a powerful right cross into the American’s face.
Dom leapt from the bathroom and onto the man, ripping him off Chavez and throwing him against the wall of the vestibule. The man launched himself back toward Dom, eyes red with fury.
The attacker in the black tracksuit landed on top of Caruso now, but not before Dom got his steak knife out and up. It buried into the man’s throat, sent him rolling off, grabbing at his mortal wound.
More gunfire from the outside of the train forced the Americans to crawl out of the vestibule and back into the dining car, where they took cover with a terrified porter behind the counter. They weren’t sure what had happened to the German police, Morozov, or the woman, but they’d done what they could to minimize the slaughter, and now it was all about survival.
The entire gunfight, from when Chavez and Caruso took down the two rear sentries to the last sound of men running off into the trees, lasted only three minutes.
Chavez’s mouth was bleeding and his lip swollen from the punch to the face, but he was most concerned about the wound to Dom’s back. Dom pulled his jacket off, and when he did so Chavez saw blood on his white shirt.