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“You picked a bad choice for a shield. I don’t really care if you kill your own man.”
Su whirled Eddie to the side and his mouth gaped when he saw what appeared to be a phantom standing in front of him. Before Su could say anything, Eddie took advantage of the surprise and lashed out with his elbow, pushing the gun away from his face. With the immediate danger gone, he chopped Su in the throat. While the Ghost Dragon leader went down clutching his neck, Eddie kneed him in the side of the head, knocking him cold.
Eddie was about to pick up the gun when Zhong told him to freeze. He sensed the three guns trained on him and went like a statue.
“Back away,” Zhong ordered. Eddie did as he was told.
Eddie smirked at Su’s unconscious form. “Did you see the look on his face? He thought he had me killed and yet here I am. I think this proves I’m on your side.”
“Do you think I’m an idiot? You’re on your own side.” He nodded to one of his men. “Search him.”
“Which one?”
“Both of them.”
The MSS agent did a thorough pat-down on Eddie, then frisked Su’s inert form.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Then the Americans must have the flash drive,” Zhong said. “If we don’t find it on them after they’re dead, we’ll tear this train apart until we do.”
“What about Su? Should I kill him now?”
“No. We may need him later to help us find the drive. Bind him.”
The agent took out some zip ties and cuffed Su’s hands and feet and tethered him to a metal grab bar so he couldn’t crawl away.
When Su was secure, they moved toward the sixth car. Seeing that it was empty, the first agent walked in and promptly set off the flashbang trip bomb that was waiting.
While the agent writhed on the floor, Eddie said, “We must not have finished off Su’s men.” He knew full well that bombs were set by Juan.
Zhong leaned over and checked out the cylindrical grenade, still intact because this type of flashbang didn’t destroy its casing.
He held it up and said, “Have you ever used anything this sophisticated in the Ghost Dragons?”
Eddie shook his head.
“This is made by the United States,” Zhong said. “Military-grade. Laser trip sensor. The Americans must have put it here.”
“Then there might be more of them ahead,” Eddie said.
Zhong stood up and rolled the spent grenade down the center aisle of the car. It didn’t set any more trip bombs off, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any there.
“We’ll have to proceed slowly, which will give them an opportunity to escape.” Zhong looked at Eddie. “If they do, you die.”
Eddie nodded hastily. “Have your men coming from the other direction made contact with the Americans yet?”
Zhong radioed his men and asked the question.
“No, sir,” came the reply. “We’re in the eighth car.”
“They’re in the eighth car?” Eddie repeated for the benefit of Juan. He knew he had to buy time not only for the Chairman but also for the team out on the Oregon. “Then I have an idea how to attack the Americans.”
9
On the deck of the Oregon, near the tramp freighter’s superstructure, Mark Murphy paced, impatiently waiting for the drone carrying the flash drive to arrive. He squinted into the sun as he watched the locomotive enter another tunnel and wished he’d brought some sunglasses with him. He hated not being able to see what was going on in the train. Before coming outside, he’d been down in the ship’s darkened operations center listening to both Juan’s and Eddie’s conversations. He’d heard the threat that the Chairman had given the Ghost Dragon leader about the Predator drone and its Hellfire missile ready to blow up the train. While there was no attack drone circling above, his threat wasn’t a bluff. The Oregon had more than enough firepower to destroy the entire train from its position a mile offshore.
Murph would be the best one to know since he served as the ship’s weapons officer. As the only crew member without a military or intelligence background, he had joined the Corporation after getting his first Ph.D. by the time he was twenty and then working in the defense industry as a weapons designer. One of the reasons he loved his current job was because the crew accepted him for who he was. The Chairman didn’t make him change his punk rock style, even letting Murph convert the deck of the Oregon into a skateboard park during R & R and putting him in a cabin far away from the others so he could blast his music at full volume and play video games with Eric Stone late into the night.
