Rehan climbed to his feet, ran behind the helicopter, and raced down an alleyway to the west of the warehouse. A surviving member of his protection detail ran behind him.
Caruso and Ryan dropped from the coal container. Jack said, “You and the others go for the warehouse. I’m going after Rehan!” The two Americans ran off in separate directions.
82
Jack turned down three darkened alleyways before he caught sight of the fleeing general and his bodyguard. Rehan was in good condition, as evidenced by the way he ran, and the way he knocked others to the ground as he did so. Sporadic groups of civilians, laden with family possessions, rushed through all parts of the railway station, looking for conveyance out of the embattled city. Rehan and his younger goon pushed past them or barreled over them.
Jack dumped the big cumbersome rifle in favor of the Beretta pistol, and he sprinted with it, alternately finding and then losing and then finding Rehan in a warren of outbuildings and warehouses and disconnected rail cars across the tracks from the busy train station.
Jack turned back to the west; other than the light of a sliver of moon it was completely dark here, and he jogged between two sets of parked and dormant passenger trains. He’d made it no more than fifty feet between the trains when he sensed movement ahead. In the dark a lone man leaned out from between two cars.
Jack knew what was coming; he dove headfirst to the ground and rolled on his shoulder just as the crack of a pistol shot filled the air. Ryan continued his roll, came out of it on his knees, and he returned fire twice. He heard a grunt and a thud, and the darkened figure fell to the ground.
Jack shot the still man a third time before moving forward, warily, to check the body.
Only when he got close enough to roll the man over on his back was he able to tell that this was the bodyguard and not General Rehan.
“Shit,” Jack said. And then he ran on.
Ryan saw Rehan in the distance a moment later, then he lost him again as a long passenger train lumbered past, but when it continued on he saw the big general moving one hundred yards on, toward the crowded train station.
Jack stopped, raised the Beretta, and aimed it at the distant figure in the dark.
With his finger on the trigger, he stopped. A hundred-yard shot for a pistol was optimistic, especially now that Jack was breathing heavy from the run. And a miss could send a round right into a building chock-full of hundreds of civilians.
Ryan lowered the handgun and sprinted on as trains approached in both directions.
Dominic Caruso and the surviving ISI captain kicked in a boarded window on the south side of the warehouse. The boards crashed onto the floor, and immediately the two men dove out of the way of gunfire. The captain reached around with his rifle and fired several semiauto shots inside the building, but Dom gave up on this entry point and ran around the warehouse, finding a disused side door. He shouldered in the door, it broke at the hinges, and he fell to a dusty floor.
Immediately heavy gunfire from the center of the warehouse erupted, and sparks and dust kicked up all around Dom. He leapt to his feet and scrambled back out of the doorway, but not before a bullet fragment from a ricochet off the wall tore through his right butt cheek.
He stumbled to the concrete outside, grabbing onto his burning wound. “Motherfucker!”
He stood again slowly, and then looked around for some other way to get into this building.
Mohammed al Darkur grabbed a Kalashnikov dropped by a dead LeT militant near the front door to the warehouse. With it he fired a full magazine at a cluster of men crouched behind a large crane and a large wooden container near the center of the room. Several of his rounds tore into the box; splinters flew in all directions.
Al Darkur spun the dead man over and took a rifle magazine out of his pocket and reloaded, then leaned around and started firing more selectively. He thought it possible the box contained the nuclear device, and he did not feel great about shooting the contraption with an assault rifle.
He’d killed two of the Lashkar terrorists, but he saw at least three more close to the box. They returned fire on Mohammed’s position, but only sporadically because they were also taking fire from two other directions.
The major worried that they were all in for a protracted gunfight. He had no idea how much time he had until the bomb went off, but he figured that if he was going to be crouched here much longer he, and much of Lahore city, was going to be incinerated.
General Riaz Rehan climbed onto the first occupied platform of the Lahore Central Railway Station that he reached after his long run. Crowds of passengers were boarding an express train to Multan in the south of Pakistan. The general pulled his ISI credentials and pushed his way into the masses; as he gasped for breath, he shouted that he was on official business and everyone needed to get out of his way.
He knew he had only twenty minutes to get out of town and clear of the blast. He needed to be on this train when it moved, and when it moved, he needed to make sure the conductor kept the train going through Lahore without stopping at any other stations.
Whoever the hell had just attacked him was still fighting it out with the Lashkar-e-Taiba cell back at the warehouse; Rehan could hear the persistent gunfire. He’d seen only a couple of shooters, and they looked like local police. Even if they did overrun his cell, he was sure that no gang of street cops was going to disarm his bomb.
He made it onto the train, still pushing and wheezing, and he shoved his way through the phalanx of passengers standing in the aisles. He needed to get up to the front car, to wave his credentials or his fist or his gun in the conductor’s face to get the train out of here.
The train did begin to move, but it rolled painfully slow; Rehan himself moved faster than the wheels beneath him as he made it closer to the front. He punched a man who would not step aside and shoved the man’s wife back down into her chair when she tried to grab his arm.
In the passenger car nearest the locomotive, he found a little space to run, then he made his way forward to the vestibule with the door to the outside and the door to the next car. He passed the open door on his right and saw the platform pass by. Just as he looked a young white man in a police utility vest leapt onto the moving car, crashing his shoulder against the wall of the tiny hallway between the cars. He looked right at Rehan, and the Pakistani general swung his pistol toward the man, but the big white man grabbed the general and knocked him against the wall.
The pistol fell to the floor of the car.
Rehan recovered quickly, then launched himself at his attacker, and the two of them slammed their bodies hard against the surfaces in the small confines of the vestibule for thirty seconds before they fell back through the door, into the crowded coach car. Civilians scrambled out of the way as best they could. Many screamed, and some men shouted and shoved the fighting pair back toward the vestibule.
Here they continued to fight. Ryan was faster, fitter, and better trained in hand-to-hand combat, but Rehan had more brute strength, and the Pakistani used this, and the tight quarters, to render his opponent unable to get the upper hand.
Jack saw he wasn’t going to win anytime soon against the bigger man while pressed into the tiny tin can of the vestibule between the cars, and he did not want to leave the area, since he knew his friends were fighting to the death for control of the nuclear weapon, so he did the only thing he could think of. With a scream to muster all of his strength, he wrapped his arms around the big general, kicked his feet up on the wall of the vestibule, and pushed back with all his might.