Corsair

With its front suspension broken, the cab settled heavily into the ballast stones, and the oddball vehicle came to a complete stop in a haze of steam and dust.

Cabrillo whooped at the sight of their vanquished foe splayed across the tracks.

A deep blast echoed off the valley walls.

Air horn blaring, the diesel-electric locomotive that Juan was certain wouldn’t be able to follow them came over the small rise like a rampaging monster. It towered fifteen feet above the railbed and tipped the scales at over a hundred tons. The smoke blowing from its exhaust was a greasy black, testimony to its poor maintenance, but the engine was more than up to the challenge of chasing down the fleeing prisoners.

A couple of the luckier men in the back of the train-truck leapt free before the locomotive smashed into the rear of the disabled vehicle. It came apart as if it had been packed with explosives. Sheet metal, engine parts, and the chassis burst from the collision, winging away as though they weighed nothing. The ruptured gas tank splashed flaming fuel into the mix so it looked like the train was charging through an inferno.

And then it was clear. The truck had been reduced to scrap metal and contemptuously shoved aside.

Juan spat a four-letter expletive, and started easing off the brake, deadly corner or no deadly corner.

From the side of the Pig, an arrow lanced out riding a fiery tail. Mark had fired their last missile in a snap shot. Juan held his breath as it ate the distance to the locomotive. The rocket connected an instant later. The resulting explosion was many times that of the impact with the truck. The engine was wreathed in fire, and the blast shook the very air. The locomotive looked like a meteor hurtling down the tracks, with flame and smoke boiling off its hide.

But for all its fury, the missile made no difference on the two-hundred-thousand-pound behemoth. It shook off the blast like a battle tank hit with a pellet gun and kept charging after the Pig.

Their little caravan was once again picking up speed, yet it was no match for the diesel-electric engine. It was bearing down on them at twice their velocity. For a fleeting second, Cabrillo considered jumping clear. But the idea was dismissed before it had fully formed. He would never abandon his shipmates to save his own skin.

The locomotive was fifty yards from the Pig, the flames all but blown out. There was a smoldering crater low on the engine cover and some blackened paint. Other than that, there was no visible evidence the four-pound shaped charge from their surface-to-surface missile had done anything at all.

However, what Juan couldn’t see under the front of the locomotive, where the leading wheel truck was secured to the steel frame, was that the mounting pins had taken a direct hit from the jet of searing plasma produced by the warhead. The train hit one more jarring bump in the old rails and the pins failed entirely. The lead truck for the four front wheels derailed, the hardened wheels splintering the thick ties and peeling sections of track off their supports.

With its front end no longer held in by the rails, the locomotive broke free entirely, tipping in slow motion until it crashed onto its side. The added friction from plowing up ballast stones and yanking dozens of ties from the earth weren’t enough to check its awesome momentum. Even in its death throes, it was going to collide with the Pig.

It was twenty feet from them, coming on as strong as ever. Linc had to have had his foot to the floor in a last-ditch effort to set them free. The Pig and boxcar continued to sweep through the turn, barely clinging to the tracks as they curved around the mountain.

Without the tracks to guide it, the locomotive kept going straight, driven by its massive weight and the speed it had built chasing its quarry. It passed no more than a yard in front of the Pig as it careened toward the edge of the steep valley. There were no guardrails, nothing to keep it on the man-made rail line. Its nose tore a wedge out of the ground when it reached the lip of the precipice and sent a shower of gravel pattering down the hillside, and then it barrel-rolled over.

Low down in the Pig’s cab, Linc and Mark could no longer see it. But from his vantage high on the boxcar’s roof, where he was already tightening the brakes again, Cabrillo watched the locomotive tumble down the hill, gaining speed with each revolution. Its huge belly tank split open, and fuel ignited off the hot manifolds. The resulting explosion and pall of dust obscured its final moments before it crashed into the rocky valley floor.

The freight car went around the last of the corner on its outside wheels only, at such an angle that Juan thought it would never recover. But somehow the plucky old antique finished the curve and flopped back onto the rails. Juan sagged against the brake wheel, catching his breath for a moment before strapping his artificial limb back on his stump.