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, the 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!”