Not that it helped.

He was hanging directly above one of the railway lines. The tips of his toes were a good eighteen feet above the track, which even for an SAS man wasn’t a drop to be taken lightly, and there was absolutely nothing to soften the fall. About the only way his landing could be any nastier would be if he were over a bed of spikes.

But he had no choice. Shouts and a warning rattle of stones skittering down the slope told him he was about to have company.

So-drop!

Even though he was ready for the impact, bending his knees and rolling, pain still ripped through his legs as if they’d been hit with an iron bar. He fell heavily, gasping in agony as the unyielding metal of the railway track smashed against his chest. Fighting through the pain, he forced himself to crawl off the line.

Damage assessment. Both legs hurt like hell, and his left ankle had taken the brunt of the impact, but nothing was broken. He knew what that felt like.

He sat up, grimacing at another throb of pain from his ribs. On the plus side, it would have been a lot worse if he hadn’t been wearing his tough leather jacket. After a few deep breaths, focusing himself, Chase got to his feet-

And let out a roar of fury.

It wasn’t so much an expression of agony as a way to release it, to control it. Some of the SAS’s pain management techniques were rough and ready-but they worked.

“Oh, now I’m pissed off,” he rasped.

A noise from above attracted his attention. Not the soldiers coming after him, but Hajjar’s helicopter, disappearing over a ridge. The hook-handed bastard was taking Kari away, planning to force a ransom from her father.

What to do?

Kari Frost was his employer-and he doubted her father would be very understanding if he let anything happen to her. A failure like that would probably end his career on the spot. Nobody would ever hire him again.

On the other hand, as his employer she had given him a very specific order-the reason he’d been hired in the first place.

Protect Nina Wilde.

And if the soldiers had her, they probably had Castille and Hafez as well. The truck he’d seen could only go one way, back down the road past the train yard.

The train yard…

If he could get there in time, he might be able to find another vehicle, a way to follow them.

And rescue them.

Gritting his teeth as pain jabbed through his ankle, Chase ran along the railway line.

SIX

Don’t worry,” said Castille to Nina as the truck lurched down the dirt road, “we’ll be okay.”

“How?” she demanded, holding up her handcuffed wrists. “We’ve been arrested, Kari’s been kidnapped, and Chase is dead!”

She was taken aback when both Castille and Hafez made amused noises. “Eddie has survived worse,” Hafez told her.

“What could be worse than being shot at and then falling off a cliff?”

“Well, there was this time when we were in Guyana -” Castille began, before one of the soldiers shouted at him in Farsi, jabbing the gun into his stomach as a final punctuation. “Ai. It seems these idiots would prefer us not to talk.”

“These idiots,” snapped another soldier, “speak English too.”

“But I bet they don’t speak French,” Castille smoothly continued in one of his native languages.

“I bet they don’t!” Nina replied in kind. That earned her an angry shout from one of the soldiers, and Castille another jab in the gut.

The rest of the uncomfortable journey took place in silence. Nina kept her eyes fixed on Castille, rather than on the bodies lying on the floor.

Eventually the truck came to a stop with a squeal of brakes. Nina blinked in the harsh daylight as the troops pulled her out.

They were at the train yard she’d seen earlier, four long parallel tracks running alongside the main lines and feeding back into them at each end. There was a short train on the nearest siding, three passenger cars headed by an idling diesel locomotive. A much longer freight train waited on another track. She could hear the bleating of sheep or goats coming from the wagons.

Captain Mahjad stood before his prisoners, hands on his hips. “What are you going to do to us?” Nina asked.

“Take you to trial for the murder of my men,” he said. “You’ll be found guilty, and put to death.”

“What!” she shrieked. “But we didn’t even do anything!”

“Don’t argue,” said Castille. “He’s crooked, you won’t be able to talk him-” A soldier savagely swung his rifle and smashed it into Castille’s back, dropping him to the ground.

“You’re lucky I don’t just shoot you right now and say you were trying to escape,” snarled Mahjad. For a moment he seemed to be considering it, but then he issued more orders. The soldiers pulled Nina and Hafez to the train’s front car, another pair hauling Castille up by his arms and dragging him after them.

The car’s interior was of an old-fashioned design, a narrow corridor running down one side with a row of eight-seater compartments on the other. Castille and Hafez were shoved into the rearmost compartment, four soldiers going in with them. Nina’s guard started to push her in after them, but Mahjad said something to him. The guard suppressed a nasty smile, then brought her to the compartment at the far end of the corridor. It looked as though it had once been the first-class section, but those days were long gone, the seats threadbare and grubby.

“Sit down,” said Mahjad, following her in. Nina thought about refusing, but before she could open her mouth he forced her down onto the seat by the window, then sat facing her. The soldier took up station outside the door, visible through its narrow window.

She thought Mahjad was going to speak, but instead he simply sat there, his unreadable gaze slowly passing over her body. She touched her hair self-consciously; the movement instantly caught his attention, eyes locking onto her face.

Nina grew horribly aware that not only was she alone in the compartment with Mahjad, but also that the soldier outside would undoubtedly turn a blind eye to anything that happened.

Or worse still… take part.

She shuddered. Mahjad picked up on the tiny motion, one corner of his mouth creeping upwards malevolently as the train jolted, then started to move.

Long forced runs were nothing new to Chase. But doing one in this much pain was something else entirely.

Every fifty yards he looked back at his pursuers. By the time they reached the tunnel, he had built up a lead of about four hundred yards. But they were catching up: younger, fresher, unhurt.

He was still out of the effective range of their G3 rifles, and from what he knew about the training of the average Iranian soldier, he would be at low risk of being hit even once he entered it. But eventually they would get close enough to bring him down. Unless he reached the train yard first.

What he would do when he got there was still a mystery.

Wing it, he decided.

Waiting on the sidings were a freight train and a shorter passenger train. Parked next to the latter was a military truck.

Adrenaline pumped into his system, revitalizing him. It was the same truck he’d seen heading for the farmhouse! It must have brought the soldiers-and presumably their prisoners-back to the yard… which meant they were going to board the train.

Chase quickly looked back. The three Iranians were two hundred yards behind and still gaining. That wouldn’t give him much time when he reached the yard to-

Shit!

The passenger train was moving! The gravelly rasp of the diesel’s engine reached him, dirty exhaust fumes spewing into the mountain air.