Chapter 9 - THE TRESTLE BRIDGE AMBUSH
The boxcar shuddered under the downdraft of two massive attack gunships.
Searchlights blinded them through every crack in the wooden siding.
The aerial loudspeaker screamed again:
"TEN SECONDS, HAYES!"
"NINE!"
Hazel’s hand tightened around the grip of the silver revolver.
"They'll destroy the train," she whispered, her face pale in the searchlight beams.
"There are engineers in the locomotive."
"Civilians in the caboose."
Gideon walked to the sliding side door of the car.
He looked through the viewing slat.
Ahead lay the Great Blackwood Trestle Bridge.
A two-thousand-foot expanse of spindly timber and iron spans crossing a four-hundred-foot ravine over the frozen river.
If a missile struck the bridge while the train crossed, the entire convoy would plummet into the abyss.
"They won't fire until we reach the center span," Gideon said, his voice deadly calm.
"Why?"
"Because Kaelen wants your body intact," Gideon replied.
"He needs to harvest your marrow to replicate the healing serum."
"If he vaporizes you with a thermobaric warhead, he gets nothing."
Gideon turned back to her.
He stripped the dry burlap blankets from her shoulders and handed her a thick canvas flight suit he had pulled from an emergency supply locker on the wall.
"Put it on," he ordered.
"Zip it to the throat."
Hazel slipped into the heavy flight suit.
It was four sizes too large, but the thick insulation blocked the freezing draft.
She tucked her paring knife into the leg pocket and handed the silver revolver back to Gideon.
"What is the plan, Gideon?"
Gideon took the revolver, checking the six heavy rounds in the cylinder.
"We make them think they won!t have to fire."
"How?"
"We give them a target."
Gideon kicked the heavy sliding door release.
The door groaned and slid back three feet, letting in the deafening roar of the twin helicopters and the freezing mountain wind.
Directly outside the open door, hovering sixty feet above the rocky gorge, was a black Southern gunship.
A door gunner in full combat armor stood behind a mounted heavy machine gun, his face hidden behind a dark visor.
A steel winch cable swung from the open cabin of the helicopter.
At the end of the cable hung a titanium capture harness.
"THERE IS YOUR RIDE, LITTLE BIRD!" the door gunner screamed over the rotor wash.
"STEP INTO THE HARNESS OR WE BLOW THE TRESTLE!"
Gideon stepped to the edge of the doorway, his broad back blocking Hazel from the gunner's view.
He raised his hands slowly to chest height.
"Hold your fire!" Gideon roared across the wind.
"The girl is weak from blood loss!"
"She can't make the jump!"
The gunner sneered through his visor.
"Lower the winch closer!" the gunner shouted into his headset.
The black helicopter drifted lower, its rotor blades coming within twenty feet of the train roof.
The capture harness swung inside the boxcar doorway, bouncing against the wooden floorboards.
Gideon reached out and grabbed the steel cable with his left hand.
The gunner smiled, thinking the Alpha King was securing the harness for the girl.
He was wrong.
Gideon didn't put Hazel into the harness.
He wrapped the high-tensile steel cable three times around the massive cast-iron axle of a five-ton industrial printing press bolted to the boxcar floor.
He locked the heavy titanium carabiner into the iron frame with a sharp CLACK.
The gunner’s eyes widened behind his visor.
"WHAT ARE YOU—"
Gideon grabbed the emergency winch release lever on the exterior harness and jammed it into the locked position.
"PULL UP!" the gunner shrieked into his mic in sudden, blind panic.
"PULL UP! HE ANCHORED US!"
The helicopter pilot slammed the collective upward, trying to abort the hover.
The twin turbine engines screamed at maximum thrust, vomiting black smoke from the exhaust ports.
The steel cable went instantly guitar-string taut.
The five-ton printing press shifted two inches across the boxcar floor, sparks spraying from the mounting bolts.
Then, the laws of physics took over.
A thirty-thousand-pound freight train moving at sixty miles per hour versus an eight-thousand-pound helicopter.
The train didn't even slow down.
The cable yanked the tail of the helicopter downward with the force of an exploding shell.
The aircraft pitched forward violently, its main rotor blades striking the sheer granite cliff wall beside the tracks.
KER-BLAM!
The composite rotor blades shattered into thousands of deadly carbon-fiber shrapnel pieces.
The helicopter became a flaming fireball, dragged along the granite rock face like a tin can tied to the bumper of a runaway truck.
The second gunship swerved frantically to avoid the debris, banking hard into the snowstorm and clipping its tail rotor on a mountain pine.
It spun out of control, tumbling down the mountainside in a trail of burning jet fuel.
The flaming wreckage of the first helicopter finally sheared the steel cable, plunging four hundred feet off the trestle bridge into the black gorge below.
Silence returned to the mountain pass.
Only the rhythmic, steady clatter of the train wheels crossing the iron bridge remained:
Click-clack. Click-clack. Click-clack.
Gideon stood in the open doorway, his face illuminated by the distant orange flames burning down in the valley.
The wind whipped his dark hair across his eyes.
He looked like an ancient war god standing over a smoking altar.
Hazel stepped up beside him, holding onto the door frame with both hands.
Below them, the frozen river wound away into the western mountains like a silver snake.
"You're completely out of your mind," she breathed, half in terror, half in awe.
Gideon turned his head to look down at her.
The fierce, terrifying predator disappeared from his eyes, replaced by a warm, quiet amusement that made her pulse skip.
"My uncle always said I lacked subtlety," Gideon remarked.
He pointed through the clearing snow toward the western horizon.
Rising above the snowbound peaks, illuminated by the first pale rose light of dawn, were the towering granite towers of Fortress Ironcliff.
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The great iron gates were already swinging open.
And pouring down the winding mountain road to meet the train were three hundred heavy armored cavalry wolves, their silver lances gleaming in the morning sun.
