Some of the horsemen, dismounted, leapt aboard the train. At the end of each carriage, a pair of them faced opposite ways, covering the passengers with rifles. The man who landed facing Myra filled the partition doorway. “Barbarian” was not an epithet, applied to him; he was tall and broad, he had a beard and pony-tail gleaming with grease, and his jacket and chaps bore smooth-edged, irregularly shaped plates of metal attached to the leather with metal rings, a crude and partial armour.
“Hands on heads! Everybody outside! On to the track!”
Myra put her hands on top of her head and stood up and shuffled sideways into the aisle. The steward-punk who’d murdered the guard still had her covered, and was backing out past the big fellow, whom he obviously knew. The businessman, standing up, had a curiously intent look on his face. Myra guessed instantly that he was about to make himself a hero, and in a fortuitous moment of eye contact she shook her head. His shoulders slumped slighdy, even with his hands in the air; but he complied with the shouted command and the minutely gestured suggestion, jumping out to the right and landing on the permanent way on his feet and hands, then scrambling up and running across the adjacent track to the low bank with the fence by the flooded meadow.
Myra raised her hands and stepped over the guard’s buckled legs, edged past the barbarian and the steward and jumped out. She landed lightly, the impact jolting her pistol uncomfortably but reassuringly deeper down the side of her boot, and walked across the track and up the bank, then turned to face the train.
People were all doing as she had done, or helping kids—silent now—down to the broken stones. The Greens strode or stood or rode up and down, yip-peeing, all the time keeping their rifles trained on the passengers. There were at least a score of the attackers on each side of the train, probably more. About a hundred people, passengers and crew, had come off the train. Somebody was still on the train and still screaming.
Myra stood with her hands on her head and shivered. The sight of so many people with their hands up made her feel sick. The barbarians probably intended to loot the train—they must know that some at least of the passengers would be carrying concealed weapons, but they weren’t as yet even bothering to search for them. The hope that they would be spared would be enough to stop almost anyone from making an inevitably doomed attempt to fight. It might just stop them until it was too late. If the Greens intended a massacre they would do it, of that she was sure, just when least expected. The Greens would manoeuvre inconspicuously so that they were out of each other’s lines of fire, and the fusillade would come. Then a bit of rape and robbery, and a few final finishing shots to the head for the wounded if they were lucky.
One tall man in a fur cloak and leather-strapped cotton leggings was stalking around from one group of passengers to another, peering at and talking to every young or young-looking woman. When he reached Myra he stopped on the slope just below her, rested his hand on his knee and looked up, grinning. He was clean-shaven, with long sun-bleached red hair tied back with a thong around his brow. On another thong, around his neck, hung a whistle. Beneath his fur cloak he wore a faded green T-shirt printed with the old UN Special Forces motto: SORT ’EM OUT—LET GOD KILL ’EM ALL.
“Ah,” he said, “you must be Myra Godwin!”
He had a London accent and a general air of enjoying himself hugely. Myra stared at him, shaken at being thus singled out. He recognised her, and she had a disquieting feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before.
“Yes,” she said. “What’s it to you?”
“You got any proof of that?”
“Diplomatic passport, jacket pocket, above the seat I was in.”
“I’ll check,” he warned, eyes narrowing.
“Oh, and bring my fucking Glock as well. You are in deep shit, mister.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said. He turned around and yelled at the big man who’d emptied her carriage; he was still standing in the doorway, rifle pointed upward.
“Yo! Fix! Get this lady’s stuff out. From above her seat.”
He didn’t take his eyes off her as the big man passed him the folded jacket and he fingered through it. One quick glance down at the opened passport, and he put the whistle to his lips and blew a loud, trilling note, twice.
“Right, Fix, spread the word,” he said. “We got her. Tax them and leave. Let’s get outta here before the helicopters come.”
The other man jogged off, shouting orders. In a minute, out of the corner of her eye, Myra could see the tax being organised: the people from the train had all been herded into one group, and a man with a shotgun and a woman with a sack were going around, taking money and jewellery and small pieces of kit and personal weapons. People handed their stuff over with a sickeningly eager compliance.
“Want your jacket back?”
Myra nodded. He tossed it, still folded, to her; held on to the holstered automatic, the passport and the uplink phone.
“You’ll get these back later,” he said.
She put the jacket on. It was a thin suit jacket and didn’t do much to keep out the chill.
“What do you mean, ‘later’?” she asked.
He laughed at her.
Tou’re coining with us. Well let you go soon.”
The wind just got colder.
Myra gestured at her blood-spattered blouse and blood-soaked skirt.
“Excuse me if I don’t believe you.”
“War is hell, ink?” he agreed biighuy. He moved his hand as though tossing something light away. “The guard was a spy, anyway.”
Myra said nothing.
“OK, youse lot!” some guy on a horse was shouting. “Get back on the train and stay there. Don’t try chasing us, don’t anyone try shooting after us. “ ’Cause if you do, we’ll come back an’ kill youse all. And don’t leave the train after we’re gone, neither, or the choppers will pick you off in the fields.”
The group filed into the train through one of the doorways. Myra could see them dispersing along the carriages.
“That’s all you’re going to do?”
The red-haired man nodded. “This time.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I mean, I feel sorry for these people, but not sorry enough to kill them. And I’m not going to waste time searching the train for valuables. No point in being greedy, otherwise the trains would just stop coming through. Just enough tax to cover the op, you know.”
“What op?”
He stared at her. “Getting hold of you.”
Oh, shit. She’d thought that was what he’d been driving at. She blinked rapidly, recording his image, and triggering a search protocol on her eyeband, to see if this knowledgeable bandit was known himself.
“You did all this just to get me?” She smiled sourly, over chattering teeth. “How did you know I was on the train?”
The man looked at her scornfully. “That wasn’t difficult,” he said. He waved a hand expansively but evasively. “We’re everywhere.”
“Seems a bit excessive.”
“Some things you just can’t say in a phone call,” he said idly. Then he shifted his feet and straightened up, grinning. “Besides, raiding is such fun.” He drew in a long breath of fresh air as though inhaling a drug. “It’s a lifestyle thing.”
A slender, dark-skinned woman with curly, wavy blonde hair down to her waist rode up on a big black horse, leading a similar horse and a dun mare. She smiled at the tall man, and turned a colder smile to Myra.
“You know how to ride?”
In a moment everyone was mounted. Myra tugged up her bloody skirt as she settled in the saddle. The tall man waved and whistled three blasts. Suddenly the Greens were dispersing away from the train, diagonally up the scree-slope to the trees or, as those around Myra did, straight across the wet meadow. She found herself on a hell-for-leather gallop behind Fix, with the blonde-haired woman and the red-haired man on either flank. Over a hedge, down a path, into a narrow wooded dell.