They unchained the door at the head of the carriage. Amanda pulled the door wide. Two Republican Guard tumbled into the coach. Lucy shouldered her rifle and fired. Neat drill holes between the eyes. The back of their heads blew apart. She kicked the bodies aside.
Lucy jumped the knuckle-coupling and landed on the rear platform of the locomotive. Soldiers jostled, reached up for her.
A rotted infantryman gripped the guard rail and began to haul himself up onto the platform. Lucy delivered a vicious kick to his head. He toppled from the train.
More soldiers crowded round the coupling. Lucy delivered headshots.
‘Jump,’ she shouted.
Amanda jumped. She landed, screamed, and clutched her injured leg. Lucy helped Amanda limp along the narrow walkway.
Lucy knelt and capped the fuel tank.
A skeletal revenant sat on the locomotive roof above the slide door, crouched like a vulture. He leaned down. He leered and hissed. Lucy shot him through the mouth. A streak of red tracer. His jaw flew off. The back of his skull blew out in a shower of sparks. He hung dead.
Lucy grabbed the lifeless man by the collar and threw him from the train.
The cab slide door was open. A rotted infantryman inside, lurking in shadow. Amanda split his head with the machete. They dragged him from the cab and toppled him over the walkway guard rail.
Soldiers climbed up onto the walkway. Lucy delivered swift headshots. The rifle clicked dry.
‘I’m out.’
She tossed the weapon.
They sealed themselves inside the cab. More soldiers on the walkway. Lucy struggled to hold the slide door closed. Bloody hands slapped and pawed glass.
Lucy squinted through the blood-spattered window. Black smoke rose from the mangled, smoking chassis of the fuel truck. A distant dot approaching from the south, cresting the valley ridge. Something big. Something silver. An incoming plane. A heavy twin-prop cargo lifter.
She was overcome by a strength-sapping wave of failure. She led her guys into the desert. Promised them gold. They died, one by one, in this god-forsaken shithole. Couldn’t even get her boys home alive.
‘We’re fucked.’
Amanda stood at the engine’s console.
A cadaverous figure crouched on the hood of the locomotive. He stared through the windshield, spat and snarled. He punched plate glass until his hand was a bloody pulp.
Amanda tried to put the sound from her mind. The thump and smear of knuckles mashed against the windshield. The muffled mewing of Republican Guards out on the walkway, clawing at windows, hungry for flesh.
She struggled to clear her head and concentrate on the control panel in front of her. She tried to decipher the ignition sequence.
She checked the breaker panel. Every circuit switch set to On. Rows of green lights.
You’re going to die, said an insidious voice in her head. You are about to be consumed by searing fire. These are your last moments. Watching your hands flick switches and turn dials.
Fuck that shit, said a counter-voice. Don’t give into bullshit fatalism. Fight to live.
She felt drunk with exhaustion. She rubbed her eyes. She checked controls.
Brake released.
Reverser to Forward.
Throttle from Idle to Run 1.
Roar of turbocharged motive power. A jolt. The locomotive began to inch forward.
Throttle to Run 2.
Amp needles jumped. The engine began to accelerate. Gathering speed.
Amanda sagged and fell. She examined her leg. Fresh blood bubbled through the surgical dressing. She dug in her chest pouch for the last morphine syrette.
Lucy struggled to keep the cab door closed. Monstrously malformed soldiers massed on the walkway outside. She kicked open a tool box and used a wrench to jam the latch.
She looked out the window. She craned to see the sky.
She took the sat phone from her pocket.
‘Angel Flight. Incoming plane, do you copy? There are people on the ground. Do not drop the bomb. Please, do not drop the bomb. There are British and American personnel in need of rescue, do you copy, over?’
Amanda struggled to her feet. She limped across the cab and stood by Lucy’s side. They wiped dust from the glass, and watched the incoming plane reduce speed, reduce altitude. The cargo ramp was extended.
‘Angel Flight, do you copy? Can you hear me? Come on, guys.’
The plane climbed and banked.
‘Thank God,’ said Amanda. ‘They called off the drop.’
Something black fell from the tail of the plane. A cylinder, big as a van. Three candy-stripe drogue chutes unfurled and blossomed.
The bomb began a slow descent into the valley.
Lucy put her arm round Amanda.
‘Sorry, babe. I’m so sorry.’
Detonation
The Fairchild banked hard starboard. Turboprops laboured to carry the plane clear of the blast field.
The thermobaric device drifted for twenty-three seconds. The point of release calculated to bring the device over the citadel complex.
Soldiers lay among the ruins. Too decomposed, too far gone to move. Sprawled among the ancient rubble, struggling to look up at the strange object floating in the clear blue sky.
Nine hundred feet. The bomb directly above the high roof of the temple.
The altimeter fuse sent the detonation impulse.
Airburst.
The high explosive core of the device split the bomb case and triggered the main charge. Ten tons of H6. A potent mix of RDX plastic explosive and aluminium powder.
Blinding light. A cataclysmic sunburst over the temple complex. A radiant shock wave expanding at eight thousand feet per second.
Crushing blast pressure flattened the temple. The roof instantly pulverised. Slabs of granite tumbled into the vast hall. Pillars sheared and fell. The sinister altar-god smashed by a wave of fire.
The temple floor collapsed. Subterranean chambers flooded with flame. Boxes of gold liquefied by ten-thousand-degree heat. Catacombs buried beneath countless tons of rubble.
The temple facade crumbled in a cascade of tumbling blocks. Monstrous hieroglyphs instantly obliterated. Sardonic stone colossi imploding in an avalanche of granite rubble.
The blast spread through the citadel precincts. A tsunami of flame rushed down colonnades and processional avenues. Pillars and arches smashed and scattered like building blocks. Flagstones seared black. Walls and domes shattered to stone chips. Ramparts and gate towers punched flat.
The infernal energy wave washed across open ground. Sand melted to glass by the stellar heat of detonation.
The wrecked vehicles of the convoy tossed like toys, punctured by bullet-velocity rock shards. Tumbling chassis swept in a maelstrom of debris.
A horde of Republican Guard, caught on sun-blasted terrain halfway between the citadel and the locomotive, turned and snarled at the oncoming firestorm. They were enveloped in a supersonic wall of flame. Suppurating flesh seared from their bones in a moment of blow-torch heat.
The nova-blast of detonation sucked air like a hurricane. Gouts of sand drawn upward into the blast cloud. Republican Guard snatched skyward like they were raptured into heaven.
The concussive wave tore across the valley floor in a furious cyclone of fire.
The train entered the rail tunnel, just as the blast wave hit.
Departure
The tunnel. Sudden darkness and screaming engine noise. The cab lit by a single bulb.
An inspection hatch at the back of the cab hung ajar. Lucy and Amanda threw themselves inside the engine bay and slammed the door.
Impact.
Flame rushed down the tunnel like floodwater and engulfed the train. The pressure wave blew out the remaining windows and filled the cab with fire