“Mark says the rest of the line is pretty gentle, but . . .” He let his voice trail off.
“And let me guess,” Juan added, “our brakes are shot, too.”
“I’ve got my foot pressed to the floorboards, for whatever good it’ll do us.”
Juan looked in the direction they were heading. The ocean was a slag-gray shimmer in the distance. The train tracks’ terminus was hidden in a fold of land, though he estimated they had only a few more miles to go. He also agreed with Mark Murphy’s assertion that the rest of the way was a gentle glide down to the sea. He could only hope that whatever reception Max had planned would work because when he clamped on the boxcar’s brakes he could tell they, like the Pig’s, were worn down to nothing.
“Max, do you read me?” he said into his mic.
“Loud and clear.”
“Where are you?”
“We’re in position and ready to pick you up.”
“Any word on the choppers of the Libyan strike team?”
“No. I suspect they’ll come in from the south, so we’ll never see them. And more important, they’ll never see us.”
“As soon as you have us with the magnet, I want Eric to make best possible speed into international waters.”
“Relax, Juan. Everything’s ready. Doc Huxley and her people have set up the forward hold with cots, blankets, and plenty of IV drips. The cooking staff ’s been whipping up enough food to feed the people you’ve found, and I’ve got every weapons system on the ship locked and loaded in case someone wants to take them back.”
“Okay. Okay, I get it. We’ll be there in about three minutes.”
The last section of the rail line came out of the mountains through a valley that ran right to the sea. The Corporation people, along with Alana, Greg Chaffee, and their new Libyan charge, Fodl, were strapped into the Pig, while the rest of the refugees in the boxcar had been given a shouted warning to brace themselves.
The old coaling station was a run-down ruin, little more than the metal framework of a couple of buildings with bits of wood still somehow clinging to their sides. The cranes that once filled freighters with coal were long gone, and the desert had hidden where the anthracite had once been mounded in the lee of a cliff.
The Oregon loomed over the newly installed floating dock. Her main cargo derrick was swung over into position, and the large electromagnet dangled less than twenty feet over the pier.
Juan’s pride usually swelled a bit whenever he saw his creation, but this time his mind was on the speed the train was making as it raced for the station. He fought the urge to glance at the speedometer but guessed they were pushing seventy. He’d expected Max would have laid down some sort of barrier foam to slow the train, but he saw nothing on the tracks. Then he realized the dock was much lower in the water than he’d first thought. In fact, the far end of it was completely submerged.
He laughed aloud when the hurtling train left its old railbed and started along the pier. Max had holed the large interlocked plastic pods that made up the dock, most likely with the Oregon’s Gatling gun. The pier’s own weight started it sinking, and as the boxcar pressed down the pier dipped deeper.
Two curling sheets of water peeled off the car’s leading edge, and the ocean absorbed the train’s momentum so smoothly that no one in the Pig felt their seat-belt tensioners react. Two-thirds the way down the pier, the Pig was down to twenty miles per hour, and the water was well above its lugged tires.
The boxcar was barely moving when it tipped off the edge of the pier, dragging the truck with it. The car bobbed in the water for only a few seconds before the magnet swooped over them, and when current was applied it stuck fast. Moments later, the old railcar, with the Pig dangling from its rear coupling, was pulled from the sea. Juan knew Max Hanley himself had to be at the controls because the operator had estimated the train’s center of gravity perfectly.
With water pouring from the car, they were swung over the Oregon ’s rail and set onto the deck. Juan threw open his door the instant the tires touched the deck plate. A crewman was standing by with an oxyacetylene cutting torch and was already slicing through the cables that bound the Pig to the boxcar. Juan rushed past him and nearly collided with Dr. Huxley in his haste to open the train’s sliding door. With her were several teams of orderlies with gurneys at the ready.
“Looks like you don’t think I’ve been earning my pay keeping your rogues patched up, eh?” she said. “You had to bring a train car full of patients for me.”
Deep below his feet, Juan could feel the magnetohydrodynamics ramping up. “What else do you give a doctor as a gift after a little relaxing shore leave?”
Juan pulled back on the sliding door and a fresh cascade of water poured onto the deck. Then from the gloomy interior emerged the first skeletal prisoner, owl-eyed and soaking wet.
“You’re safe now,” Juan said in Arabic. “You are all safe. But you must hurry, understand?”
Fodl joined him and Dr. Huxley an instant later, and together they cajoled the shell-shocked men and women out of the car. There were a few injuries, sprains mostly, but a couple of broken limbs as well. And one man who’d caught a bullet in the wrist from one of the terrorists Cabrillo had fought on the car’s roof. As was his custom, Juan would more regret hurting these people further than take satisfaction in saving their lives.
He spotted Mark Murphy. The lanky weapons expert had his kit bag slung over one shoulder and a waterproof laptop case in his hand. He was heading for a hatchway that would lead him to his cabin. “Forget it, Mr. Murphy. As of this second, you and Mr. Stone are on a priority research job.”
“Can’t it wait until after I shower?”
“No. Now. I want to know everything there is to know about something called the Jewel of Jerusalem. Alana Shepard mentioned it may be buried with Suleiman Al-Jama but isn’t really sure what it is.”
“Sounds like a legend out of a trashy novel.”
“It might just be. Find out. I want a report in an hour.”
“Yes, boss,” Mark said dejectedly, and shuffled away.
“Who are all these people?” Julia Huxley asked, passing a woman down to the waiting arms of an orderly.
“They were all in the upper levels of Libya’s Foreign Ministry,” Juan told her. “One of these poor souls should be the Minister himself.”
“I don’t understand. Why are they all prisoners?”
“Because unless I messed up my reasoning, the new Foreign Minister, the esteemed Ali Ghami, is Suleiman Al-Jama.”
TWENTY-SIX
THE HELICOPTERS PAINTED WITH LIBYAN MILITARY COLORS swarmed out of the empty wastes of the southern desert like enraged wasps. Four of the five Russian-made choppers were done in mottled earth-toned camouflage, while the other wore the drab gray of the Libyan Navy.
In his fifteen years with the CIA, Jim Kublicki never thought he would be an observer on a Libyan helo assault of a terrorist base camp. Ambassador Moon had arranged his presence on the attack with Minister Ghami personally. On the surface, the new level of cooperation out of Tripoli was amazing, but both Moon and Kublicki harbored their doubts. The chief among them was the result of the eyes-only report that had been delivered from Langley. Kublicki had no idea how operatives had penetrated Libyan airspace during the height of the search for the Secretary of State’s plane, but somehow they had. The evidence they found led to the only conclusion possible: Her plane had been forced down before the crash—presumably, to remove the Secretary herself. Then the Boeing was intentionally slammed into a mountaintop.
The report also documented how a team of men in a chopper had landed at the crash site and deliberately tampered with the scene. The exact words from the document were “they tore through the wreckage like a twister through a trailer park.”