Knockdown Page 3

Most importantly, he could raise the alarm, he thought as he finally stopped running and bent over to rest his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. Somebody had flown that drone in and blown up the tracks to cause the derailment.

  Why hadn’t they just planted a bomb on the tracks with, say, a pressure trigger? Surely it had to be trickier to attach explosives to a drone, fly it in to the right place, and then set them off, probably with a radio signal.

  The only reason Rudy could think of why anybody would do that would be just to show off. Which meant the guys in that van were arrogant sons of—

  He caught his breath. The van. He had forgotten all about spotting it just before all hell broke loose.

  The roar of a racing motor brought it all back to him.

  Rudy’s head jerked up. He saw the van speeding toward him, throwing up a cloud of dust behind it. Rudy sobbed and turned to run.

  Whoever had derailed the train probably didn’t want to leave any witnesses behind. They must have spotted him running away from the scene of the disaster. If they were smart enough to pull off an attack like this, they would probably figure out that they didn’t have much time before a response team from the containment facility arrived on the scene.

  He couldn’t outrun the van on open ground, but there were some sand dunes off to his left. If he could reach them, the van wouldn’t be able to follow him. It wasn’t a dune buggy. Its tires would bog down in the soft sand.

  Of course, the people in the vehicle could still chase him on foot, but he might have a chance of giving them the slip. That was the only way he would come out of this alive.

  So he was running for his life again, and he knew it.

  Unfortunately, he was gasping by the time he’d gone a hundred yards. A stitch in his side threatened to double him over. Maybe jumping off the train and then being tossed around by the explosion had injured him after all, because every time his weight came down on his left leg, it felt like somebody was carving into his knee with a dull knife.

  And with every step, the sound of the van closing in on him got louder.

  He couldn’t make it to the sand dunes. He stopped and bent over again, staying that way until the van went past him and slewed to a sideways stop.

  The passenger door opened. So did the sliding door on that side. Two men got out and walked toward Rudy. The man behind the wheel stayed where he was.

  He lifted his head to stare at the men approaching him at a deliberate, inexorable pace. Might as well get a good look at the ones who were going to end his life, he thought bleakly.

  With their dark skin and dark hair, they might be Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Rudy couldn’t tell. One of them had a mustache, but that didn’t help. He leaned toward thinking they were Middle Eastern, because this had all the trappings of a terrorist attack.

  Of course, it didn’t matter where the men came from or why they had derailed the train. Nothing mattered now.

  The one with the mustache held a pistol. The other man had a gun stuck behind his belt, but he didn’t take it out.

  Rudy was still breathing hard, but as he straightened, he had enough air to say, “You boys can just go to—”

  The gun in the man’s hand came up, spurted flame, and put an end to it for Rudy. He flung his arms out to the sides and went over backward, landing on his back. His eyes were wide open but unseeing.

  The bullet had made just a small hole in the center of his forehead as it went in. The much bigger hole in the back of his head where it came out leaked a lot of blood, but the thirsty ground soaked it up before it could spread.

  The smoke from the burning tank cars continued to rise and spread. The flames reached the cars that hadn’t ruptured, and within minutes, they exploded, too.

  The men in the van were long gone by then.

  CHAPTER 7

  “The two members of the train’s crew are the only known fatalities at this time. We’re also getting reports that a number of people in Antioch Crossing, a small town downwind of the derailment and fire, have sought medical help for respiratory difficulties after the smoke blew through the area where they live. It’s unknown at this time how serious these problems may be, or how widespread, but it’s one more indication that this is a serious disaster with the potential to get even worse.”

  The news anchor paused and put his best look of gravitas on his face, so the viewers would know that this was a serious situation and they had better sit up and pay attention, by golly, and most of all, they shouldn’t change the channel to something else.

  Jake Rivers picked up the TV remote to do just that, but his uncle Barry said, “Hold on a minute. I’m watching this.”

  Jake stretched his legs out on the motel room bed and adjusted the pillows he had propped behind him. “You think there’s something fishy about that train accident?”

  “I think there’s something fishy about everything, until I know better.”

  Barry was sitting on the other queen-size bed, eating a hamburger he had brought back to the motel in a to-go box from the café where they’d had lunch a few hours earlier. Barry ate more than anybody Jake had ever seen, especially considering that he stayed so lean. He had to have one heck of a metabolism to burn it all up.

  The news anchor went on, “A spokesman for the railroad has issued a statement saying that the rails in the area of the accident were inspected within the past month and found to be in good shape. The locomotive was in top working order, according to the railroad, and both members of the crew were experienced and considered fine employees. At this point, it’s impossible to rule out either human error or mechanical failure, but it’s safe to say that right now, we just don’t know what caused this tragedy.”

  “Or who,” Barry responded to the image on the screen.

  Jake frowned over at his uncle. “You think the derailment was deliberate?”

  “More than twenty years ago, I started warning people that the railroads in this country were vulnerable to terrorism,” Barry said. “A few of them listened, but nobody really did much. The first bombing at the World Trade Center in ’93 and then the attack on the Cole in 2000 made people more aware of the threat of terrorism, but a lot of them still had the old it-can’t-happen-here attitude. Then 9/11 happened, and they damn well knew it could happen here, but the focus then was on air safety. Only a fraction of Homeland Security’s efforts . . . and more importantly, only a fraction of the budget—was directed at improving the security of the nation’s railroads.” Barry stopped, grunted, and shook his head. “I sound like a professor lecturing, don’t I?”

  “Well, you’ve gotta remember, I wasn’t even born in ’93, and I was too little to remember anything firsthand about the Cole. It wasn’t as big of news. I remember 9/11, though. Really well.” Jake shrugged. “It was all about the airplanes, all right.”

  The news broadcast had taken a break, but the anchor was back now and had two women and another man at the desk with him. When Jake started paying attention again, the anchor was in the middle of asking one of the men a question. “. . . too soon to start thinking about this as an act of terrorism, Charles?”

  “Oh, yes, it certainly is too soon,” the man replied. “We have no reason to believe that this incident was anything except a tragic accident, and yet another reminder that we should not be transporting these terrible toxic wastes or even continuing any industries that produce them. We’ve done so much damage to our poor planet . . . so much that by now it’s irreversible—”

  “It doesn’t matter what climate change and environmental damage are doing down the road if we’re dealing with a problem right now,” one woman at the desk broke in. “What we’re facing here may well be an attack on our country that left two men dead and who knows how many innocent people injured. In the long run, there’s no telling how high the death toll may rise—”

  The second woman interrupted her. “But that’s still no reason to go throwing around wild accusations of terrorism directed at people who probab
ly didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I didn’t accuse anybody,” the first woman said.

  The man said in a voice tinged with acid, “Yes, but we all know who you were about to blame for it, Helen. No matter what happens, you’re always quick to lay the blame at the feet of people who more often than not have been proven to be more peaceful and tolerant—”

  The anchor was holding a finger against his ear, obviously listening to someone on his earpiece. He leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry to break in here, Charles, but we’ve just received more information on this.”

  Jake smiled bitterly and said from the bed, “Annnnd . . . it’s Islamic terrorists.”

  Barry finished the last bite of his hamburger and wiped mustard from his lips with a napkin from the to-go box. “I hate to agree with anything those talking head morons say, but don’t jump to conclusions. There are some radical environmentalist groups crazy enough to believe that spilling a bunch of hazardous waste is an appropriate way to protest what they think is being done to the planet.”

  “Not white supremacists, you mean?”

  Barry looked disgusted and made a scoffing noise. “You could fit most of the true white supremacists in this country in a high school football stadium. The left just got used to throwing around that term, and other hot-button words, for anybody they disagree with.”

  “Terms like ‘literally Hitler,’” Jake said with a smile.

  “Yeah.”

  On the TV, the anchor said, “Apparently, a group calling themselves Lashkar-e-Islami is claiming responsibility for the train derailment in Nevada and warning that this will be the first of many such attacks. We have footage of a spokesman for this group making this claim, footage that was sent to news organizations across the country, but we’re not going to air it until we have more verification.”

  “Restraint on the part of TV news,” Jake said dryly. “Will the proverbial wonders never cease?” He grinned at his uncle. “And it was Islamic terrorists, see?”

  “This time,” Barry acknowledged.

  The news anchor continued, “I’m told that the name, Lashkar-e-Islami, translates as Army of Islam and that several terrorist organizations in Afghanistan and Pakistan have used similar names in the past. Helen, do you believe this group is an offshoot of those, or something totally new?”

  “There’s no way to tell, Ross, but I’m sure if we’re patient, they’ll tell us, since all these terrorists love to talk about themselves.”

  The man called Charles looked like he had just bitten into a lemon. “That’s a very unfair statement,” he declared. “So many of these people have been forced into taking extreme measures by the overpowering oppression they’ve been forced to live under for decades now. Of course they want the world to understand what they’ve endured.”

  “So you’re saying that you sympathize with terrorists?”

  “I’m saying that at the very least, we ought to try to understand why they do the things they do and adjust our own behavior so that in the future, they won’t feel like they have to strike back against us any way they can.”

  “That sounds to me an awful lot like sympathizing with terrorists.”

  Barry said, “You can turn it off now. They’re just going to bicker for a while.”

  Jake pressed the button on the remote. “What now?” “We wait,” Barry said. “We’ll give those feelers we put out a chance to turn up anything.”

  As if on cue, the burner phone lying on the bed beside him chimed with an incoming text message.

  In more than three decades of operating in a world of dangerous shadows as he battled evil and corruption wherever he found it, Barry “Dog” Rivers had made contacts with people in all walks of life, from the highest to the lowest. He was the worst enemy any criminal or crooked politician or terrorist could have, but when he was your friend, he was loyal to the end and would risk anything to help someone who deserved his help. Those he encountered knew that, and so whenever he needed a favor or just some information in return, there was usually someone out there, somewhere, who could provide it.

  The previous night, after returning to the motel following the brawl at the cantina, Barry had put the word out on his own personal grapevine, stretching all along the border from Texas to California, that he was interested in any “special” shipments about to be made by the Zaragosa cartel.

  Now, both Barry and Jake hoped that effort was about to bear fruit.

  “This is from a friend of mine in New Mexico, over in the bootheel,” Barry said as he read the message. “He runs a guide service for hunting and hiking in the Big Hatchet Mountains. It’s about as isolated an area as you can find along the border, and the drug and illegal immigrant traffic is pretty high there at times. Chet says he’s seen an unusual level of activity in the past few weeks, though. More suspicious characters than normal moving around the mountains, as if somebody’s checking everything out . . . which the cartel might do if they were planning to move something even more important across there.”

  “Think it’s worth checking out?” Jake asked.

  Barry was thumbing a reply on the burner. He sent it and said, “I told him we’d be there tomorrow. It’s a long drive. We’ll make it as far as El Paso today.”

  “I guess I’d better let the office know I’ll be taking some more time off.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Barry said. “I’ve got a hunch this could turn into something bigger than either of us have considered so far.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Barry had been a long-haul trucker in his younger days, working for his father’s company out of New Orleans. That was before he had gotten involved in the arms business—and a long time before a series of violent tragedies had forged him into the man known as Dog.

  After that, he had driven secure delivery runs for the government, and those assignments had led to him becoming an unofficial agent for those high in the halls of power, as long as they deserved his allegiance.

  And despite all the decades that had passed, he still felt most comfortable behind the wheel of a big rig as it rolled along the highway. The road was his home.

  He was well-equipped to live there in the truck that now moved across the vast, mostly empty landscape of southern New Mexico.

  The rig was a top-of-the-line Kenworth long-hood conventional, a model designated Z1000 that wasn’t for sale to the public yet. This was a prototype that Barry’s influential contacts had allowed him to get his hands on, and once he had, he’d made even more modifications to it.

  Armor plating all around that would withstand even an RPG blast. Bulletproof glass for the windshield and all the windows. The average trucker didn’t need those additions, but they were vital in Barry’s line of work.

  Under that hood was one of the most powerful truck engines ever built: a PACCAR MX-15, an 8-cylinder, 14.7-liter monster, also a prototype. Barry could have hauled just about anything with an engine like that at his command, but for his purposes, the MX-15 and the armored front end of the big rig turned it into a very effective battering ram.

  Inside, the cab was as comfortable and full of bells and whistles as any top-of-the-line Kenworth. The navigation system was state of the art, paired with a powerful computer and satellite phone linked to a pop-up dish antenna that kept Barry in constant communication with the rest of the world no matter where he was or what the conditions might be. The air conditioner would freeze a guy out in the summer; the heater would keep him warm in the worst blizzard. The sound system could make him feel like he was in the front row of a rocking country concert or in a smoky midnight jazz club, depending on what kind of mood he was in.

  The truck was also equipped with radar, sonar, and infrared sensors, and with the flick of a switch on the console, Barry could lower a filter over the windshield that effectively transformed it into a giant night-vision scope so that he could drive in almost total darkness if he needed to.

  Behind the cab, the normal Kenworth sleeper wo
uld have been comfortable enough for most people, but Barry needed more storage space, so he had opted for an enlarged sleeper that included a small kitchen and bathroom, queen-size bed, flatscreen TV, second computer workstation, and closet. One of the walls swung out, though, to reveal the sleeper’s most important feature.

  The weapons locker.

  Inside were four semi-automatic rifles with 30-round magazines; two semi-auto shotguns; two sniper rifles with high-powered scopes; a vintage Winchester lever-action in .44-40; more than a dozen handguns in various calibers ranging from .22 to .45, including a couple of vintage 1911s in perfect working order, a Browning Hi-Power, an S&W MP Shield in 9mm, and a Colt Single Action Army revolver; and, in a drawer underneath the gun racks, thousands of rounds of ammunition. In a rack attached to the inside of the door hung an assortment of knives, all the way from a small switchblade to a heavy bowie with a beautiful bone handle that had a brass ball on the end. Weaponry, like everything else, had made enormous technological advances over the years—but sometimes the old ways of killing were just as good . . . or better.

  For all the improvements Barry had made to an already impressive piece of machinery when he got his hands on it, the Z1000 wasn’t flashy on the outside. It was painted a deep, rich red with plenty of chrome, including its twin stacks, but despite being a very nice-looking truck, it didn’t stand out that much from hundreds of other trucks on the road. A lot of them had fancier paint jobs and more chrome.

  When Barry had shown it to Jake during one of his visits after Barry had finished modifying the truck, the younger man had said, “You know what you really ought to do? You ought to have flames painted on it. Or maybe a mural on the sides with, like, mountains and an American eagle—”

  “So what you’re saying is that I should make it stand out so much that anybody who sees it will have a hard time forgetting it,” Barry had interrupted his nephew.

  Jake had stood there frowning for a long moment before saying, “Yeah, I guess that’s probably not the best idea, is it? In our line of work, you don’t want to draw a lot of extra attention to yourself.”