More sand spat into their faces, and Fisher was momentarily blinded, reaching out now for the Snow Maiden, wary that she might have another pistol or knife at the ready.
A short bang came from nearby, shaking the car; it was followed by a collision that must’ve broken open one of the containers because now the air reeked of oil. A guttural hiss pierced the wind, as though pressure were being released from something, and that racket lasted a second more before the car rolled up, onto its roof, burying Fisher and the Snow Maiden under the sand.
But then the car’s momentum kept it rolling and it smashed down onto its opposite side, the sand now drawing away from them, the explosions and near-human howls and shrieks of mangled metal still rising into the night.
It was all happening around them now, the car beginning to grow steady, the vibrations coming up through the ground, and yet there was nothing else striking them. The impacts were more distant now, like mortar fire half stifled by a mountainside.
Fisher coughed and clawed his way down toward the door, with the sand rising up to just below the first lock.
They’d stopped.
Shielding his face, he fired two rounds, the lock blowing off to reveal a hole.
He lifted the pistol to the higher lock.
That’s when an arm slipped under his neck and a hand forced away his pistol.
The Snow Maiden leaned in close and wrapped her teeth around the top of his ear.
“Sam, can you hear me?” cried Grim in his subdermal.
“Come on, Sam, give us a shout,” added Charlie.
He loved his team—but they usually had better timing. Fisher wrenched himself forward, freeing his ear as she was about to clamp down on it. He broke her grip on the pistol and whirled back to shove it into her head and pin her back down, onto the sand. “Nice try,” he muttered, pressing the muzzle deeper into her skin.
“Just do it. I got nothing now.”
“What do you mean you got nothing? You got me and my government as your new best friends. We’ll have some really enlightening conversations about all your operations—past, present, and future.”
He rolled his pistol back, striking her on the side of the head. The blow was enough to stun her and buy him time to fish out some zipper cuffs and bind her wrists in front.
Leaving her there, still groaning, he elbowed his way back toward the door and blew off the second lock. He turned around and walked crab-like to get in position. Then, resting on his rump, he lifted both legs in a powerful dropkick. As the door creaked open, he went sliding into the back of the car, riding the crest of falling sand.
At the bottom he rolled and stood, then tugged free an LED penlight from his tac-suit’s breast pocket and aimed it at the back of the car.
If you lacked a military background or hadn’t spent the bulk of your adult life shooting, evading, or destroying military weapons, you wouldn’t recognize it for what is was—
But Fisher did.
It weighed close to six tons and at nearly twelve feet long took up the space ordinarily reserved for both the locomotive diesel and its electrical generator. For Fisher, the giveaway was the Sa’ir KS-19 gun breech.
In layman’s terms he was staring at a stripped-down version of a 100mm antiaircraft gun. All the electronics and computer interfacing was gone—removed because the Iranians were fearful of an accident or premature detonation due to a crash, fire, or electrical short. The business end of the sawed-off barrel terminated into a larger cylinder roughly nine feet long and two feet in diameter, the whole contraption mounted to the AA gun’s original four-wheel base, now collapsed onto its side. The gun was part of the bomb, of course, and they were using it to trigger the nuclear reaction.
The Sa’ir, Fisher knew, could deliver a projectile with a muzzle velocity of about six hundred meters per second, much faster than the trigger speed used to detonate “Little Boy” over Hiroshima. If two pieces of subcritical material were not brought together fast enough, nuclear predetonation or “fizzle” could occur, with just a very small explosion, blowing the bulk of the material apart.
He couldn’t see the neutron generator yet. It was either on the other side or underneath, out of sight, but he felt certain it was there.
The triggerman himself, a fey-looking agent in his sixties whose eyes shone like sapphires in the penlight, was trapped under all six tons of the device, blood pouring from his mouth as he reached for the gun’s breech lanyard. It was clear the Iranian had already locked the breech on the 76.2mm discarding sabot projectile, allowing the three-inch projectile to be fired from a four-inch gun. All he had to do now was tug down on that black lanyard to manually trigger the bomb.
However, he couldn’t reach it, his fingertips barely brushing the nylon.
Fisher thought of shooting him, but with a hundred pounds of weaponized uranium within spitting distance, there were “safer” ways of neutralizing him. Fisher rushed to the bomb, swung the lanyard away, then crouched down.
“Praise be to Allah,” the man said in Farsi.
“You’re going to die here,” Fisher said, using the man’s native tongue. “Just tell me, who hired you?”
The man opened his mouth, but then his eyes grew vague and his head slumped.
Fisher checked his neck for a pulse and found none. He stood back and began taking a video of the bomb with his OPSAT. “Grim, you getting this?”
“Receiving now, Sam.”
“Is this thing stable?”
“They designed it to ensure that. If it survived a train wreck without going off . . .”
“All right. Have you heard from Briggs?”
“Nothing so far.”
“Damn, I’m going up for him. You notify the POTUS and coordinate with the prince. We’ll need a team in here to dismantle this thing.”
“We’re on it.”
Fisher sighed and bounded back up the pile of sand to where the Snow Maiden was still lying. As he began to lift her, Briggs appeared in the shattered door window above them, his face half obscured by the penlight he directed into the booth. “Sam?”
“I’m here. You okay? What the hell happened?”
“Those choppers launched Hellfires at the tracks. The engineer’s dead. I jumped off like a second before it all went to hell.” Briggs shifted his light. “Oh my God, is that—”
“Yeah,” said Fisher. “It’s her.”
“She tracked us?”
“No, they hired her.”
“Well, that’s some bad luck for her—and payback for us.”
“Yeah. Come around through the window. See if you can help me get her out of here.”
“On my way.”
As Fisher checked the Snow Maiden’s zipper cuffs to be sure they were still fastened, her eyes flickered open. “Kiss me,” she said.
“What?”
“You heard me. You’ll send me away. Who knows when I’ll ever feel a kiss again.”
“Sorry, honey, you’re not my type.”
“Oh, yes I am. And you owe me.”
“For what?”
“For like you said, not killing you back in Peru.”
Fisher rolled his eyes. “You really are a crazy bitch, aren’t you?”
She wriggled her brows. “Come here.”
He leaned toward her. She did smell magnificent. She was beautiful in a terribly sinister way. His lips did lock onto hers—
But then she grabbed his bottom lip with her teeth and bit down hard, just as Briggs caught them together.
Fisher cursed and pulled up, his lip beginning to bleed as he gaped at his teammate.
“Everything okay, boss?”
Fisher hesitated. His gaze averted to the Snow Maiden, who lay there, smiling daggers.
37
FISHER, Briggs, and the Snow Maiden were evacuated from the crash site by a squad of Shammari’s troops. They remained inside a Humvee parked about a quarter kilometer south of the train, waiting out the sandstorm. A medic came by and treated Briggs for some lacerations on his arm and neck. The prince himself drove up and climbed into the passenger’s seat of the Humvee, then sat with them a moment.