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Brian stares and says, “I’m stopping the train. Something’s going on. And I know you won’t shoot me.”
His hands go to the control handles before him and there are two loud explosions. Then a tearing, hammering pain in his chest, and Brian falls back.
Before the blackness comes over him, he hears Alvi saying, “Stupid old man, I warned you…”
Chapter115
LISA BAILEYof NYPD Aviation 19’s hands are getting tired from gripping the collective lever and cyclic stick, and a sick feeling is growing in her stomach: this train isn’t slowing down, isn’t stopping, is still roaring its way south. She’s pulled in front of it three times now, and unlike its northbound brother, whoever’s operating the damn thing isn’t responding at all.
“Shit,” she mutters, and she heads down the track one more time.
Next to her Joe Woods says, “Lisa, lots of chatter from back home. Something’s going on at One World Trade Center. Center wants to know where the hell we are.”
“Shut up, Joe,” she says. “They’ll figure it out soon enough. Amy?”
“Yeah, Lisa,” comes her old Army friend’s voice through the earphones.
“It’s not stopping.”
“I see.”
“Gonna try something else,” Lisa says, staring at the train barreling down on her. “Joe, I’m going south another hundred yards. Then I want you to fire up the TrakkaBeam searchlight. Maybe we can blind the sons of bitches running that train, melt their goddamn eyeballs.”
From the rear Amy says, “Then what?”
Lisa says, “Had a cousin once who worked as a train engineer. There’s some sort of dead-man switch built into trains, called analerter.If it senses someone isn’t actually driving the train, it’ll automatically shut ’er down.”
Joe says, “Lisa, let’s do it.”
“Okay.”
She turns around her best girl and this time flies her head-on. The searchlight is built on a gyro-enabled gimbal, and Joe says, “Locked on to the front windows.”
“Burn ’em,” Lisa says. Even at this late-morning hour, Lisa sees the front of the train light up from the 22,500 lumens she’s glaring at them—enough power to signal the goddamn space station at night—and she waits.
Waits.
Waits.
Joe says, “Ah, Lisa…”
The train grows larger and larger in view, a storming and threatening colossus of a machine, and she swears and tugs fiercely at the controls, the Bell 429 pulling up, the twin engines whining, roaring, as their craft tilts back.
Thud, thud,as the landing skids scrape the roof of the train speeding beneath them.
“Shit,” someone whispers, and she can’t tell if it’s Joe or Amy.
She gains some altitude, flies south.
Lisa can make out the shapes and spires of Manhattan, quickly growing closer.
“Amy,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Out of options,” Lisa says.
“I figured as much.”
