Eddie and Zane watched the disintegration in horror. ‘Benzonah!’ exclaimed the Israeli.
‘That, and fuckery!’ Eddie added as they both hauled harder on the wheel. The piercing screech of the brakes grew even louder—
Then abruptly stopped at a crack of shearing metal. The wagon picked up speed again.
Zane gave the wheel a last useless spin. ‘We’ll have to jump!’
‘We’ll be killed!’ Nina protested. The ground was littered with rocks.
‘It’s our only chance!’
‘We’re going too fast,’ Eddie said. He looked back, but jumping from the van’s wrecked rear on to the track would make little difference—
The roof. The piece that had fallen into the cabin was curved metal, somewhat wider than the track and about five feet long…
He ran to it. ‘Give me a hand!’ he yelled as he strained to lift the roof section.
‘What are you doing?’ Zane demanded.
‘You ever been surfing?’ The steel plate shifted; Nina joined her husband to help turn it over, the concave underside now facing upwards. There was a chain with a hook at one end amongst the debris. Eddie made sure it was firmly attached to the chassis, then fixed it to the roof’s cross-brace.
The Mossad agent watched in disbelief. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘After six years with Eddie, this is normal!’ Nina assured him. She helped her husband to push the roof piece off the rear veranda. As it slammed down on the track, the chain jerked taut, and the steel plate lashed from side to side before stabilising, dragging along behind the runaway wagon with a nerve-shredding shrill.
‘Climb on to it,’ Eddie told his wife. He held her hand as she cautiously stepped down. The horrible noise worsened as she put her weight on the roof, the chain straining — but holding. ‘Jared, come on!’
Zane looked between the rapidly approaching bridge and the makeshift sled, then shrugged. ‘You’ve stayed alive this long, old man,’ he said. ‘I guess you know what you’re doing!’
‘Oh, fuck no,’ said Eddie as the Israeli clambered down beside Nina. ‘I’m still making this shit up as I go.’ A small grin as he readied his gun and followed Zane on to the roof, which shimmied under the extra load before straightening out. ‘It’s worked so far, but,’ he took aim at the chain, ‘there’s always a last time!’
He fired—
Sparks flew — but the bullet glanced off the chain without breaking it. ‘And this might be it,’ he added with considerably less humour. ‘Okay, and — now!’
The final shot — and the chain snapped.
Friction instantly snatched at the improvised sledge, almost pitching Eddie off before Zane caught him. The brake van raced away on to the bridge. The broken structure shook beneath it — then the wagon sailed off the end of the track, arcing down across the ravine to carve through the trestlework on the far side like a wrecking ball. What was left of the other half of the crossing came down on top of it.
‘We’re not stopping!’ Nina cried as the skidding roof section reached the bridge.
‘Jump!’ Eddie yelled. They all flung themselves off the back of the sled—
Even after losing most of their speed, the landing on unforgiving wood and steel was punishing. Nina, the lightest, was the first to roll to a halt, still clutching the bronze relic.
But Zane and Eddie tumbled onwards, the sledge flying into the void ahead of them as they reached the end of the line…
The Englishman splayed himself flat, the wooden sleepers scraping painfully against his back — but the extra drag stopped him. Zane bowled past, screaming as he went over the drop—
Eddie caught his leg. The Mossad agent’s wail was abruptly cut off as he swung back and hit the trestlework below the broken track. He hung upside down for a moment before the realisation sank in that he was not falling to his death, and twisted to take hold of the wooden beams. ‘You okay?’ Eddie gasped, straining to hold him.
‘Yeah,’ came the breathless reply, ‘but get me up, quick! This thing’s going to collapse!’ A sonorous creak as the bridge swayed queasily emphasised his point.
Bloodied and bruised, Nina nevertheless limped to aid them. They dragged Zane on to the bridge, then helped him up. ‘Come on!’ she cried, running back along the shuddering span. Sleepers dropped away in her wake, forcing Eddie and Zane to vault over the gaps.
A loud crack — then a sound like the clatter of giant dominoes falling. Eddie glanced back to see the entire track bed disappearing plank by plank into the ravine after them. ‘Shit! Leg it!’
Nina reached solid ground. The two men hurled themselves into dives to land beside her as the bridge cascaded into the canyon in a huge cloud of dust and flying debris.
Eddie stared at the destruction, then looked up at the now-distant train as it continued down the hill towards the dry lake — where he saw movement. ‘Over there!’ he said, pointing.
An aircraft, a large twin-prop cargo plane, was coming in to land on the desiccated lake bed. A second aircraft followed it a few miles distant. ‘Leitz’s transport,’ Zane muttered. He shakily pushed himself upright, then slammed a frustrated fist into his palm. ‘Damn it! We’ll never catch them now. They’ll be long gone by the time we get to the lake.’
‘We know where they’re going, though,’ said Nina as she helped Eddie up. ‘Northern Iran.’
‘That doesn’t help us! They’ll have a head start — and we don’t know exactly where they’re headed. But they’ve still got Banna, and he can take them to the spring.’
‘We can locate it too,’ Nina reminded him. She held up the relic. ‘I can make the same calculations that he did. But first we need to contact the Argentinian authorities, the IHA — and the Mossad, too. If we act fast enough, we might be able to catch them before they leave the country.’
Zane did not seem confident of success. ‘Maybe. But I think Leitz will have arranged something special for them.’
‘Leitz was the guy you went after in Italy, wasn’t he?’ Nina said. ‘What happened there?’
‘Long story,’ said Eddie. He looked towards the distant town. ‘I’ll tell you all about it on the way down.’
32
A day later, Nina was on the opposite side of the globe.
She thought it was a day later, at least. Exhaustion and emotion had screwed up her body clock even without factoring in the confusion of multiple time zones. But one thing she was sure of was that while it might help her physically, she had no desire to sleep. Every time her eyelids closed, she glimpsed the horrors she had witnessed in the Enklave. Macy’s murder, Zane’s torture, the burning building with terrified children trapped inside… and the crowd of frenzied Nazis baying for her death as the noose tightened around her throat—
Nina drew in a sharp breath. For a moment, she had felt the rope’s strands cutting into her skin. She touched her neck to reassure herself that there was nothing there.
She tried to force the jumble of memories following the escape from the Nazi compound into a coherent timeline. On arriving in Lago Amargo, Eddie had got a policeman named Miranda to call the Argentinian federal police, who arrived in force a few hours later. Not long after that, the survivors from the Enklave were secured, Roland and Julieta having a joyful reunion. Julieta’s father, the mayor, had turned himself in to the federales over some connection with Kroll and his people; two badly beaten local cops were taken into custody far less willingly.
By then, Nina had contacted Oswald Seretse in New York. That in turn led to a conference call with the FBI and Interpol in which Zane’s fears were confirmed: the surviving Nazis had indeed left Argentina undetected. ‘How the fucking hell do thirty Aryan shitheads with guns stroll through customs without being spotted?’ had been Eddie’s incredulous contribution to the discussion, and Nina’s own response had been scarcely less restrained.