Free Commander-In-Chief by Tom Clancy, Mark Greaney Page A

his knees slamming onto the chests of both men. One man drew a folding knife from the pocket of his tracksuit and clicked it open, but Ding stabbed him through the heart with his steak knife, ending him instantly. The second man still had his pistol in his hand, but a hailstorm of punches from Dom onto the man’s nose and jaw rendered him senseless quickly.
    By then, sustained gunfire from first class shattered the glass window of the vestibule door just over both Americans’ heads.
    Chavez and Caruso both scooped up the weapons of the two gunmen. They were GSh-18s, Russian military-issue nine-millimeter pistols. They entered the vestibule, crawling low, listening to the booming gunfire just past the next door. The gunfire grew heavier by the second, but Chavez chanced a look through the broken window. He saw the female dog handler lying still in the hallway of first class, the big Belgian Malinois tearing into the arm of a flailing man in a black tracksuit, and more police taking cover in the first compartment and down at the end of the hall near the exits to the train. More men in black leaned out of Morozov’s compartment and two more closer to the dining car, all firing pistols.
    Chavez aimed quickly at the back of a gunman’s head and fired, dropping the man to the hallway floor, but immediately the German police began firing at Chavez, thinking him to be just one more attacker shooting at them. He hit the floor, turned to Dom, and said, “The shooters are in the nearest three compartments in first class.”
    Dom said, “I’ll go outside, engage through the windows.”
    Chavez said, “The hell you will. This isn’t
Mission Impossible
. They don’t put handrails on the outside of trains.”
    Just then, the train began to slow again. Its brakes wailed and squealed. Dom and Ding were thrown to the ground in the vestibule.
    Dom looked outside. “Shit, we’re in a forest.”
    The conductor was just stopping the train so people could get off, but Caruso and Chavez knew this would help Morozov and his team escape.
    Even before the locomotive came to a complete stop, the Americans could hear glass shattering in the first-class compartments. Dom opened the door to the outside, leapt to the ground, and saw men dropping to the tracks, weapons in hand. He started to aim atthe closest gunman, but the cracks of a pistol from one of the windows sent him back inside the train.
    He found Chavez involved in a firefight through the vestibule window. “They are escaping out the windows!” Dom shouted over the gunfire.
    “Good! Let them go, just don’t let them flank us!”
    Dom aimed back through the door just as a gunman spun around, trying to get a shot off on the unknown shooters behind the gunmen in first class. Dom fired twice, hitting the man in the left clavicle and spinning him to the train tracks.
    A second shooter had made it to a row of trees beyond the train tracks, and with his pistol he took careful aim at the men in gray suits in the vestibule between the dining car and first class. His first shot went high over Ding’s head, but his second grazed Dom in the back, sending him diving into the bathroom.
    The door to first class slid open without warning, and Chavez spun his gun toward the movement. A man dressed in black slammed into him, knocking him to the floor.
    The German police continued firing up the length of their carriage, and bullet holes tore through the metal door as it closed again, the rounds going just a few feet over Chavez’s head.
    Dom aimed at the man on top of Chavez from his position on the floor of the bathroom, and he pressed his trigger, but the attacker lowered his head quickly and the round went high. The slide of Dom’s GSh-18 locked open, letting him know he was out of ammo.
    The man on top of Chavez delivered a powerful right cross into the American’s face.
    Dom leapt from the bathroom and onto the man, ripping him off Chavez and throwing him against the wall of the vestibule.