The Hunt for Atlantis_A Novel

  Light flashed off metal ahead: something moving.

  The last set of points had changed!

  Chase snapped his head around to see two frightened faces staring out of the signal cabin’s window as he powered past. The driver must have told the signalman to try to stop him—and now his locomotive would end up on the track parallel to the other train.

  Which meant that if another train came the other way, he would plow headlong into it!

  But if they thought that would stop him, they were wrong.

  With a last crash of overstressed metal, Chase’s locomotive thundered through the points. He slammed the throttle forward as far as it would go. The needles jumped again, but the only one he cared about was the speedometer. Thirty kilometers per hour … forty …

  The tracks ahead curved back and forth as they wove through the mountains. He couldn’t see the other train yet. But it couldn’t be too far ahead.

  Catching up with it wasn’t his biggest problem.

  Getting onto it was.

  Castille and Hafez exchanged looks. Both men had long experience with soldiers, and they had been watching carefully for the telltale signs of boredom and inattentiveness that almost inevitably struck during guard duty.

  The soldiers watching them were showing the signs. They outnumbered their handcuffed prisoners two to one, and were armed, so they had an innate feeling of power and superiority that could easily slip into complacency. When the two men were first shoved into the compartment, the soldiers’ weapons had been raised and fixed on them.

  Now, they were lowered. It would only take a moment for them to be lifted again—but a moment was all Castille and Hafez needed.

  They just had to wait for the right one.

  The more Nina tried to ignore Mahjad, the more she became aware of his gaze. All she could do was turn away from him and lean closer to the window, watching the mountainous landscape roll past beyond the dirty glass.

  Mahjad shifted position. Nina glanced at him—and froze in horror when she saw that he was toying with Chase’s Wildey.

  “My life would be easier if you and your friends had been shot while trying to escape,” he said. “Less paperwork, fewer questions from my superiors. Maybe I should just kill you all before we arrive and save myself some work.” The gun slowly came around, its thick muzzle pointing at her. She cringed in her seat. “But… you could persuade me to change my mind. Save your friends.”

  “How?” Nina asked. But she already knew the answer.

  “You know how,” he answered, leaning back in his seat as a gloating smirk spread across his face.

  “You’re sick.”

  The smirk intensified. “I’m not an unreasonable man,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’ll give you a few minutes to consider it. If you choose not to accept my offer…” his face twisted into a malevolent grin, “I’ll kill your friends. And give you to my men. I’m afraid they’re not… what’s the word? As gentlemanly as me.”

  Paralyzed by the sick fear churning her stomach, Nina turned away from him again, utterly lost and alone.

  The locomotive was now doing over seventy kilometers per hour, still accelerating. Chase stared intently at the view ahead, searching for the first glimpse of the other train as he powered around a long curve.

  There!

  About half a mile ahead, but he was gaining.

  Two minutes to catch up. Maybe less.

  The gap between the tracks was around ten feet. But the distance between the sides of the two trains would be smaller, as little as five feet. An easy jump.

  At least, easy when the two vehicles weren’t doing close to fifty miles an hour.

  Chase adjusted the throttle, hanging his rifle from it by its strap to hold down the dead-man’s switch. If he eased it off just before he drew alongside, then the loco should match speeds and make his jump easier. He moved to the open door and leaned out to judge the force of the wind—

  And was hit from behind, his shoulder smashing agonizingly into the metal frame as the last Iranian soldier burst from the corridor connecting the front and rear cabs. Shit! How had he gotten on the train?

  The track bed blurred past below as the soldier tried to shove Chase out of the door. One arm numbed by the impact, the only thing he could reach for support was the handrail on the outside of the engine, which made him swing even farther out of the cab.

  From where he saw the headlights of another locomotive, charging straight at them!

  SEVEN

  The soldier’s hands clamped around Chase’s throat, squeezing tight and forcing him farther over the edge of the footplate.

  Chase fought for breath as the other man’s thumbs dug into his windpipe. It took all his strength just to hold on to the handrail, pain burning through his other arm as it hung stiffly beneath him.

  And in the corner of his eye he could see the headlights of the oncoming train growing brighter.

  The Iranian loomed closer, his lips pulled back into a snarl. “Die, you American bastard!”

  “American?” Chase choked out. A resurgent energy pumped through his body, and his free hand shot up, smashing into the Iranian’s face like a hammer. Blood squirted from the man’s mashed nose as cartilage crackled under the blow. The pressure around his neck vanished immediately as the soldier jerked back, gasping in pain.

  He drove one knee into the soldier’s stomach. The man groaned and rolled off him, and Chase hauled himself upright. “I’m British, you twat!”

  A horn blared.

  Through the windscreen, he saw the other locomotive barreling towards them, sparks spewing from its wheels as the driver slammed on the brakes. It was towing a long train of white tanker trucks, full of fuel or chemicals.

  The driver of the oncoming train flung himself from the cab. It rushed at Chase like a cannon shell, lights blazing.

  Nina’s train was almost alongside him. The rear car wasn’t quite level, but he was out of time—

  The soldier sat up—and screamed.

  Chase jumped to the other track, and just caught the guardrail on the back of the open platform. All he could do was cling to the weathered metal with his finger tips as—

  The locomotives collided.

  Chase’s engine plowed through the other, forced upwards by the impact. The bodywork of the oncoming locomotive shattered in a blizzard of metal.

  Then the chassis hit the unyielding metal block of the second loco’s huge diesel engine. Chase’s locomotive weighed almost a hundred tons, but against the momentum of a train weighing several thousand tons moving at almost fifty miles an hour, it was like running into an iron wall.

  The locomotive flipped, its back end flying up from the tracks. For one instant, it was airborne, inverted—then it crashed down on to the other loco. Both engines disintegrated under the impact. Hundreds of gallons of diesel spewed free, igniting.

  The first tanker truck, filled with highly flammable fuel oil, derailed and impaled itself on mangled metal, its contents gushing out…

  “Your time is up,” said Mahjad. He leaned towards Nina, his malevolent smile deepening as he reached for her leg. Repulsed, she tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. “So, what is your—”

  Another train rushed past on the other line. Mahjad glanced at it, then looked back at Nina. He opened his mouth to speak—

  An explosion shook the carriage.

  In his SAS career Chase had been on the ground uncomfortably close to the targets of NATO precision air strikes—but the earthshaking blast of a thousand-pound laser-guided bomb was a mere firework compared to the colossal explosion as the first tanker blew up. The train to which he was now desperately clinging was whisking him away from it at over fifty miles per hour, but the detonation was still deafening, and the heat as the expanding fireball chased after him was enough to singe the hairs on the backs of his hands.

  There was another noise, a horrific groaning as the other tankers piled into each other just a few feet from his side
. They were derailing, the concertina effect of the collision wrenching them from the track.

  Another explosion! The second tanker in the train went up like the first, followed a moment later by the third.

  Shit!

  The entire tanker train was going to blow in a chain reaction—and the explosions were rippling down the line faster than his train was moving!

  If Chase didn’t find cover inside in the next ten seconds, he would be completely vaporized.

  Arms straining, tendons tight as steel cables, he pulled himself up with a yell that was completely drowned out by the ear-splitting booms of more tankers exploding. Forget singed hairs, he could feel his skin stinging as he rolled over the top of the railing and thumped onto the wooden platform. He jumped up and tugged at the handle of the door.

  Locked!

  The chain of explosions raced towards him, a burning wind sweeping ahead of the expanding fireballs. Chase flattened himself against the door, nowhere to go—

  Suddenly he fell, landing on his stomach inside the carriage and staring straight up at the soldier who had just opened the door.

  Chase rolled away from him. Caught by surprise, the soldier gawped stupidly—then looked up to see a wall of liquid fire rushing towards the back of the train.

  He didn’t even have time to scream as the blaze from the last tanker burst through the door, a rectangular jet of flame fanning out and swirling around the interior. Completely engulfed in fire, the soldier let out a terrible shriek of pure agony before stumbling towards Chase, arms flailing.

  Chase rolled again as the inferno roiled over him, just in time to dodge the burning fuel showering from the soldier. He jumped to his feet, ignoring the Iranian as he collapsed, writhing pitifully. Now that he was on the train, he had a job to do.

  Mahjad was stunned by the first explosion, then positively terrified as the following string of detonations got louder and closer. Nina was forgotten as he jumped up and threw the compartment door open, bellowing orders down the corridor.

  She had no idea what was going on, but it sounded almost as if the train was being bombed!

  Could it be Chase somehow coming after her? She couldn’t imagine how, but whatever was going on had Mahjad scared.

  Maybe this would give her a chance to escape.

  Castille and Hafez exchanged another look as one of their startled guards opened the door, Mahjad’s screaming commands reaching them from the other end of the car. This time the look was a signal, a confirmation that both were on the same wavelength.

  Get ready!

  Chase opened a heavy sliding door and found himself in the corridor of an old-style compartment car, a real Hogwarts Express job. To his relief, the compartments that he passed were empty. If they’d been full of soldiers, he would have been in real trouble—

  Boots thudded on the floor as men ran into the other end of the car, the connecting door thrown open with a bang. Real trouble after all.

  He whipped inside the nearest compartment, sliding the door almost shut. The running footsteps clattered past: five men. He peered through the window. A soldier stood barely two feet away, back to him.

  “Psst!”

  The soldier looked around with a quizzical expression, which changed to one of shock in the fraction of a second before a fist smashed into his face. Chase hauled him into the compartment, giving him another punch for good measure before taking his gun. In one swift movement he flicked the G3 to full auto and darted back out into the corridor, unleashing a blaze of fire at the other soldiers. They fell.

  He ejected the spent magazine, ducked back into the compartment to take the unconscious soldier’s spare mags, then slapped one into place and moved back out, gun raised. Castille, Hafez and—most important—Nina were somewhere on this train, and he was going to find them.

  One of their guards had already left the compartment, sent by Mahjad to find out what was happening farther down the train, and now Castille and Hafez’s captors looked around in surprise at the distant but unmistakable sound of automatic weapons fire.

  Castille’s eyes locked onto his friend’s. “Now!”

  He jumped from his seat and twisted, his cuffed hands sweeping the gun out of the grip of the soldier on his right as he drove the heel of one boot into the face of the man sitting opposite. Teeth snapped under the impact. Simultaneously, Hafez lunged forward and kicked the man on Castille’s other side, sending his gun spinning into the air.

  Castille straightened and twisted his upper body again, bringing up his elbow and slamming it into the throat of the man to his right. He felt something give with a horrible wet crunch.

  As he turned, Hafez brought his heel down onto the remaining soldier’s kneecap with an audible crack of splitting bone. The soldier howled in pain. Hafez jumped forward and grabbed his gun, clubbing him over the back of his skull. He collapsed face first onto the floor and lay there, unmoving.

  The other two soldiers were in no better state. “Nice work,” Hafez said, nodding at the unconscious figures.

  “You too.”

  “Of course I could have taken the other one as well if he’d been here.”

  “Of course you could, old man.” Castille jokingly rolled his eyes. “Now, I just hope that one of these fools has the keys to these handcuffs …”

  Chase ran into the second car, passing the closed door of the toilet and rounding the corner into the next corridor—only to find four more soldiers charging down it, rifles raised!

  He threw himself back around the corner, managing to get off a couple of shots. A scream told him he had found a target. The wooden paneling on the corridor wall blew apart, splinters flying everywhere as a storm of bullets ripped into it.

  “Jesus!” He shielded his eyes from the broken wood. The awkward length of the G3 meant he would have a hard time firing blind around the corner, while his adversaries could take cover in the compartments and use their superior firepower to hold him back until their reinforcements arrived.

  Or, he realized with horror, they could just do what they were about to do and toss a grenade down the corridor!

  One of the men yelled the Farsi equivalent of “Fire in the hole!,” the ching of the safety lever springing away from the body of the grenade perfectly audible as his companions stopped firing.

  It would take Chase several seconds to reach cover through the heavy connecting door, by which time the grenade would have exploded—

  He didn’t even try. Instead, he flipped his rifle over and grabbed it by the barrel, wielding it like a club as he whirled to see the dark green ovoid arcing at him—

  And hit it with the stock of the rifle, smacking it back up the corridor like a baseball player scoring a home run!

  He dived back around the corner as it exploded. Every window along the corridor burst apart, shards of flying glass adding to the lethality of the blast zone as thousands of ball bearings and fragments of the grenade’s steel casing tore through the carriage.

  Wind from the broken windows cleared the smoke almost immediately as Chase looked back down the passageway. He could see several dead men, or at least parts of them, but there was no sign of Mahjad—presumably he was in the front carriage with the prisoners.

  Turning his rifle back around, Chase hurried towards the front of the train.

  “Grenade?” asked Hafez.

  “Yes.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Definitely.” Castille unlocked the Iranian’s handcuffs. “Ready?”

  “Always.”

  “Then go!”

  Weapons raised, the two men ducked back-to-back out of the compartment. Castille faced the rear of the train, Hafez the front.

  Castille saw nothing but the wooden walls of the corridor. He said, “Clear—” when two shots cracked almost simultaneously behind him. One was from Hafez’s gun; the other was farther away.

  Hafez lurched backwards, stumbling into Castille as a bloody hole exploded in his left thigh. At the far end of the corridor, t
he soldier who had been stationed outside Nina and Mahjad’s compartment ducked back into its cover as Hafez’s bullet blew a chunk of wood out of the door frame.

  Castille grabbed his friend with his free arm and pulled him around the corner at the end of the corridor, lowering him carefully to the floor.

  Blood gushed from the wound. Hafez clamped his left hand over it. “Agh! That bastard son of a syphilitic whore shot me!”

  From experience, Castille knew Hafez would survive the injury—if he got first aid soon. That was assuming they got through the whole experience at all… “Can you still shoot?”

  Hafez hefted the rifle in one hand. “I’m not dead yet—and I refuse to die until I’ve blown that little bastard’s balls off! Go, help Eddie!”

  Castille clapped him on the shoulder and pulled open the heavy connecting doors.

  Chase heard movement ahead. Someone was approaching from the front of the train.

  He ducked into the nearest compartment. Holding his breath, he waited until he heard footsteps, then lunged out, pointing his gun.

  Castille was less than ten feet away, pointing a gun right back at him.

  “Edward!”

  “Hugo!” Chase let out a sigh of relief. “Typical, I go to all this bloody trouble to rescue you, and you’ve wasted my time!”

  “You know me, I got tired of waiting for your slow—”

  “Don’t move!” rasped a voice from behind Chase.

  Chase exchanged a look with Castille. The Belgian’s eyes flicked downwards. Chase gave him the tiniest nod in return.

  “Drop your g—”

  Chase dropped flat as Castille fired a single shot that whipped mere inches over the top of his head. From the far end of the corridor came a choked cry, followed by the thump of a body falling to the floor. Looking around, Chase saw another soldier slumped against the bullet-riddled rear wall, a gun clattering from his lifeless hand.