MATTHEWS HAD been watching for signs of Newton to see where they would be sidelined. When they blew through the town at fifty miles an hour, Matthews understood why Mehle had elected to ride in the engine. The track telephone line began ringing about one second after they rumbled over the KCS cross-tracks that came down from the north. The comms operator picked it up, listened for a moment, winced, and handed it over to Matthews without a word. Matthews identified himself and then listened to an extremely angry traffic controller ordering them to stop at once. Matthews acknowledged the order and said he would communicate it to the engineer.
“I already called the engineer,” the man protested. “What the hell is going on with that train?”
“I have no idea,” Matthews said. “I’m at the back of the train. I’ll try the intercom.”
“You better do more than that, mister. I’ve got two heavy freights comin’ right at you; one’s just west of Forest. Stop that son of a bitch right now and back her down to the Newton siding, you hear me?”
“I hear,” Matthews said, knowing full well that it wasn’t going to happen. The comms operator was asking what was going on, but Matthews ignored him and got on the intercom circuit to the engine. As he expected, it was Mehle who answered.
“We got problems?” he asked in a deceptively calm voice. It seemed to Matthews that the train was going faster now, plunging into the darkness of the Mississippi countryside.
“Yes, sir. We were supposed to stop and sideline at Newton. Traffic control is going apeshit. There are two eastbound trains coming at us; one’s only about ten miles ahead.”
“Very well. Call them back; tell them they better stop that pogue. We’re keeping on.”
“Colonel, what the hell are you doing?!”
“Mind your mouth, Major. We’re not stopping anymore until we’re across that goddamn bridge. Tell them whatever you’d like to; tell ’em we’re carrying eight thousand tons of nerve gas on this son of a bitch and we’re taking it through. That’s all.”
Mehle hung up. Matthews stared incredulously at the humming intercom. “Get the traffic center back on the horn.”
The comms operator dialed frantically, screwed it up, and tried again. The train was definitely accelerating; Matthews was sure of it. He tried to calculate relative velocities as he waited for the operator. Ten minutes, maybe less. The operator handed him the phone.
“Control?” Matthews said. “We are unable to stop this train.”
“Throw the goddamn emergency brakes, then. I’ve got the lead freight stopping now, but there’s another one behind him.”
“Sir, I’m telling you one last time: We cannot stop this train. Be advised, this is a U.S. Army train. We are carrying eight thousand tons of toxic munitions and we intend to keep going until we’re across the bridge at Vicksburg. I cannot stop this train. Do you hear me? I cannot stop this train!”
“Goddamn it, you can’t do that! You—”
“Listen to me,” Matthews shouted into the phone. “You better back all your traffic off this line, Control. And don’t even think about trying to divert-switch us—we’re going fifty miles an hour. You copy? I cannot stop this train!”
He reached forward and hung up the phone, silencing the controller’s continuing protests. Then he reached for the intercom, thought better of it, and headed through the command car’s bunk room to the forward door. He checked to make sure he still had his side arm, then let himself through the door. A blast of air hit him in the face. The back platform of the MPs’ car was just across the coupling from him. He waited for the swaying cars to line up and then jumped across the space between them, trying to ignore the roar of the wheels below. He was dimly aware of some white buildings flying by in the moonlight as he climbed over the railing and let himself into the dayroom.
The sergeant, dressed in only his uniform trousers and skivvies shirt, was playing cards with three of the MPs while a television droned on at the other end of the room. Most of the troops were in their racks. The smell of popcorn and cigarette smoke filled the room. The sergeant stood up when he saw the expression on Matthews’s face.
“Get your people up and dressed out in full gear,” Matthews ordered. “Mehle’s going to try to run this thing through the system all the way to Louisiana, and we’ve got at least two trains coming at us right now.”
The sergeant didn’t stop for questions. He began shouting orders, and one instant later it was assholes and elbows flying everywhere. Matthews waited for some semblance of order to form while he considered his options. Mehle probably had the two warrants at gunpoint. He was just nuts enough to ram the damn train west until he hit something or got across that bridge. The rush of the train’s slipstream through the open back door was audible above the confusion in the crew car. He saw an intercom connection at the back wall of the car. He called up to the engines again.
“What now?” Mehle answered.
“Colonel, I think they’re going to try to clear the line. I told them we couldn’t stop until we were across the bridge at Vicksburg. If you slow her down a little, they’ll have more time to get the other trains clear.”
“Nice try, Major Matthews, but no dice. I slow down and they’ll throw a switch somewhere and take their chances. You tell ’em what I told you to?”
“I told them we had toxic munitions on board, not nerve gas. They know we originated in Anniston.
“You should have obeyed my orders, Major Matthews. But either way, I’m not slowing. You better alert your guard force.”
“I already have,” Matthews said as the sergeant and his squad leaders gathered around him. “I told them to prepare for a crash.”
“Good thinking. But assuming we don’t crash, have them prepared to deploy the entire force, at my command. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Matthews replied. “But Colonel—”
Mehle had already hung up. Matthews did the same. The sergeant raised his eyebrows at him.
“We’re screwed, I think,” Matthews said. “Just be glad we’re all the way at the back.”
“Yeah, right,” said the sergeant. “With a hundred and sixty tons of leaking mustard ordnance next door. Shee-it. You were right the first time, Major.”
Keeler crouched on the ledge and positioned the black tarp half under and half over his body, with the open end pointed at the back of the ledge cavity like a black plastic taco. There was about a foot of clearance between his head and the ties above when he was in a sitting position, but to anyone glancing up at the ledge from the fishing area below, there would only be a black shadow in a black hole where the bridge met the abutment. Or so he hoped. More importantly, there were two feet of clearance between the ties, which, without the normal gravel ballast, lay open to the air. If he stood up on the ledge, his head, arms, and shoulders would be poking out right next to or even directly under the tracks, with more than enough room to allow him to handstand his way through the ties and onto a car. He had already checked to make sure there was enough room between the channel walls of the trestle and the tracks to allow a man to crouch next to a passing train. Not a lot of room, he told himself, but enough that he would not be struck by the edges of a boxcar. His plan was to wait for a slow-enough train, then pitch the backpack with the Detacord up through the ties, hoist himself up to the track-bed level alongside the tracks, and hop aboard. Once on the train, he would have to find a hiding place in case they were giving the trains a visual inspection before letting them out on the Mississippi bridge.
He tried to relax as he waited. The concrete around him stank of pigeon droppings and railroad grease; he was grateful for the tarp. He could see pretty well out either end of the loosely wrapped tarp now that his eyes were fully night-adapted. The Big Black was as still as glass to the north, although he could hear some water noises as the current meandered around the fallen bridge columns just below the bridge. There was no wind; somewhere in the distance, a yapping dog was worrying the night. He patted the backpack to make sure he hadn’t left it behind.
Endgame, he thought again. If he got away tonight, he would end up on foot over on the Louisiana side, with no vehicle or boat. Hell, if he managed this right, he might just ride the front end of the train on out west like any hobo and see what homelessness was all about. Or he might just get off and walk back down the tracks and introduce himself to the cops. A trial might be pretty interesting; give him a chance to tell his side of this thing, to show how heartless the railroad had been after his family had been immolated at that crossing. If it ever came to a trial, that is. He recalled what that pig-faced railroad security officer had said up in St. Louis: We find them before you do, they’re gonna get dead. Then the ties above his head began to vibrate.
Hush finally raised Powers by going back through the state police operations center in Jefferson City and asking them to contact Little Hill. Carolyn sat nervously on the bed as he explained to Powers his theory that Keeler wasn’t going directly to the river.
“But what if he is?” Powers asked.
“So keep your people looking,” Hush said. “But I strongly recommend you stop and carefully inspect every westbound train before you let it out on that bridge.”
“Don’t think we can get that,” Powers said. “We already tried to get them to stop all the trains after we found that van. It wasn’t five minutes later and we were being overruled by the goddamn Secretary of Transportation back in your hometown. There’s a real panic on, Hush.”
Hush looked over at Carolyn, trying to think. “Okay, so try this: Tell ’em you have to stop and inspect all westbound trains—say somewhere between that Big Black trestle and Jackson, wherever the sidings are. In the meantime, let the east bound trains run; clear out that backlog entirely. That way, they don’t lose everything.”
“I can try, I guess, but I don’t know. These railroad people have some serious political muscle.”
“I don’t know anything about the ground between here and Jackson,” Hush said. “Would it be worth it to send some people down that rail line on foot or on some kind of work vehicle? Like if he’s waiting to jump a train, maybe flush his ass out?”
“Yeah, we can maybe get the railroad cops to help with that, although most of our people are down here in the bayous right now. It’s all pretty much boonies out there, from what the state guys say.”
“Well, then, concentrate: Send some teams to crossing points, and maybe one down to that bridge over the Big Black. Work back toward Vicksburg.”
“What I need is some more people,” Powers said. “How about Bureau assets?”
“If we were still in the game, we could turn on lots of people.” Then he remembered LeBourgoise. He told Powers, who said he would call the CP. That suited Hush: Powers would get some more people, and LeBourgoise would have something to do besides hunt for them.
“What are you guys going to do?” Powers asked.
“We’re going to go out and scout the rail line here in Vicksburg. I have this bad feeling he’s ahead of us.”
* * *
The train came much too fast, telegraphing its approach first with its incredibly bright headlight and then by a rumbling vibration that shook the abutment for a full minute before the huge diesels flashed overhead, four feet above him, showering the tarp with bits of dust and sand. A soon as the engines had passed, he sat up, pushed aside the tarp, and looked up. He had to close his eyes immediately to protect them from the rain of fine debris. Blinking furiously, he crouched and then stood up, hugging the edge of the concrete ledge. He cautiously raised his head and shoulders up through the ties. The thundering thirty-six-inch wheels flew by two feet away at eye level. He was conscious of a suction of sorts, a deadly invitation to lean under the flashing wheels. The heavily creosoted ties massaged his shoulders each time a wheel pair went over, sagging and then popping back up in tune with the five-ton wheel bogeys. An occasional hiss of compressed air washed over his face from leaking brake couplings. It took all his nerve to stand there as the eighty-ton cars whipped by, inches from his face. He backed away some more and then tried it: Hunching his shoulders, grasping the rough, splintery ties with gloved hands, he lifted himself off the ledge, through the space between the ties, and up onto the track bed to crouch, teetering for an instant in the slipstream and then flattening against the trestle’s side wall, the train’s wheels now four feet away. The suction effect was even more pronounced up here, and he had to hold on to the end of a railroad tie to keep himself from tipping forward. The train appeared to be accelerating now that it was getting across the bridge.
Much too fast, this one, and, of course, going the wrong way—east, toward Jackson. There was no clickety-clacking here, as this was all welded rail. Just the bumping noise of aging ties and a heavy jolting as each car came out on to the bridge structure, compressing the huge I beams supporting the track bed. He realized it was the truss pins that were making the jolting noise, not the train. He also realized he had not brought up the Detacord or the backpack. He looked to the left, but the edge of the abutment blocked his view of how close the end of the train was. The rush of air past his face made his eyes water.
Okay, he thought. I need to practice this. Should have brought goggles. He steeled himself to lean forward, his face coming uncomfortably closer to the rushing wheels, and then he wedged his lower body back down between the ties. He hung there like a tired gymnast for a moment, then settled through the ties onto his tarp. The rain of small particles continued as he rolled himself under the tarp and waited. After about two minutes, there was an abrupt silence as the end car came by, dragging the rumble and roar eastward across the bridge. The rails above his head ticked and hummed for about thirty seconds after the train had gone.
He slowly pushed away the tarp and shook the dust and sand out of his hair. He checked his watch. He had to do something soon. Once someone found his van and boat trailer at that campground, the police forces would know he’d gone down the Big Black, which, in turn, meant that someone might figure out he would be trying for a train. What he needed now was a slow westbound train. He would watch the next couple of trains; if they didn’t go slowly enough, he might force one of them to. He had seen the loom of yellow lights from a signal tower over on the other side of the bridge. If he had to, he would go over there, climb the tower, and force the signal disk to rotate into a diagonal position, meaning, Proceed, but slow down and be prepared to stop. He looked at his watch again and wondered what the FBI might be doing right now. He had meant to bring along his battery-powered police scanner, but the hasty departure from the river cabin had upset those plans. He sighed and sat back to wait some more. He wished he had some way to listen in on the railroad traffic-control circuits.
Matthews had the entire guard force hop the gap and crowd into the tail-end car with him, each man jumping the coupling while the man behind him held his chemical defense gear and M16 rifle. Once inside, he told them to stand easy, crap out in the bunk room if they wanted to, but to keep their gear handy. Separately, he told the sergeant that he thought the traffic people would probably clear the main line until they literally had nowhere to put the trains that had been coming east, at which point they would announce how far ahead the next immovable object waited. Hopefully, Mehle wouldn’t think they were bluffing.
He and the sergeant studied the route map. They had been running at pretty high speed for almost thirty minutes, so they ought to be coming into the Jackson junction pretty soon. The map showed a group seven Illinois Central line running north-south through Jackson, as well as a group five IC line coming up from Hattiesburg to the southeast. The bad news was that this meant lots of trains; the good news was that there should also be lots of sidings. The sergeant said he hoped the major was right. Matthews said he hoped the major was right, too.
Matthews toyed with the idea of coming up on the secure Army command circuit, and maybe calling the main Army Operation Center at the Pentagon. Tell them what Mehle was doing, and that they had a train full of dangerous ordnance roaring through the night, risking head-on collisions with every train strung out through Mississippi. But whom would he call, especially on a Sunday night? And maybe Mehle was operating under secret orders from the Pentagon to do what he was doing. Mehle was taking a terrible chance, which might mean he indeed had been told to do whatever it took to get over the Mississippi River. It was the age-old problem when a military subordinate questioned his superior’s orders: The superior officer might know something the subordinate didn’t. The intercom buzzer sounded. Matthews picked it up.
“Yes, sir?”
“Call the KCS traffic center. Tell them I am slowing to thirty miles an hour. I want a clear shot right through Jackson to Vicksburg.”
“No, no, you call them and tell ’em what I said. Tell them I’m going to take her back up to fifty as soon as I clear Jackson.”
“And if they have nowhere to sideline the rest of the traffic out there?”
“Then tell ’em we’re gonna play Casey Jones.” Mehle hung up.
Matthews told the sergeant what the colonel had said. Some of the troops who were waiting in the command room were shaking their heads. One suggested they go forward and uncouple the two end cars and let Colonel Goddamn go take his chances. The sergeant told the man to shut his yap while Matthews placed the call to the Kansas City Southern control center. Their reaction was predictable. First, the maximum safe speed through the Jackson junction was twenty miles per hour, and, second, they had six trains coming into Jackson from Vicksburg.
“How many can you sideline?” Matthews asked, bending down to look out the windows at the increasing number of streetlights he was seeing through the back window. “I think we’re coming into Jackson right now.”
“We know where you are, mister,” the dispatcher said. “And if he doesn’t slow that thing down, you’ll have a head-on in about four minutes.”
“He’s not going to slow her down because he thinks you’re going to try to switch him off the main line,” Matthews said. “Look, I’m not a part of this, okay? I don’t have a vote. I’m eighty cars back from the engines. I do know the guy in charge, and I’m telling you he’s going to drive on through. That’s all I can tell you, all right? Back those guys up if you have to, but fucking do something!”
He hung up the phone before the dispatcher could argue with him any more. He tried to think of what to do next. Matthews was almost positive that if Mehle saw a train coming at him, he would hit the brakes. He decided to try one more time; he called the front engine on the intercom.
“What?”
“Dispatch says there are six eastbound trains ahead coming into Jackson.”
Mehle laughed. “They’re just trying to bluff me into stopping, and I’m not stopping. Got it?”
“Yes, sir, that’s what I told them. But how do you know they’re bluffing?”
“Just look out the window, Major. Left side. Tell me what you see.”
“Lights—lots more lights.”
“Look down, Major,” Mehle said, and hung up.
Matthews went to the window and looked down. He saw tracks. Two sets of tracks, not one. Son of a bitch, he thought. And then he felt the train begin to accelerate again.
They crept down a secluded back street in Vicksburg in the unmarked car that Powers had commandeered from the Mississippi Highway Patrol. Carolyn drove while Hush consulted a map he had torn out of the hotel room’s chamber of commerce brochure. The railroad line was not shown, so they were reduced to hunting it street by street. The neighborhood that backed up to the rail cut consisted of mainly small cottages and ramshackle houses; what people they did see stared hard and long at the obvious police car until it had gone out of sight. They found few crossings: the at-grade crossing at Oak, a few blocks down from their inn; an overpass at Washington, another at Mulberry, and a final one at Confederate. For the most part, however, the north-south streets of the town simply ended at the cut, which was sunk down below the level of the surrounding streets and blanketed in a strangling carpet of kudzu vines.
Just about every time they made their way down a street that dead-ended at the cut, there was a train going through. They saw one going westbound, apparently committed before Powers had been able to get the word through to Jackson, but all the rest were coming eastbound from the Louisiana side.
“Looks like they’re going to play ball,” Hush said after they saw their third eastbound train.
“They will until they run out of eastbound trains,” she said. “Then they’re going to want to unload the backlog at Jackson.”
They drove back toward the river side of town, approaching their hotel from the casino district on Oak Street. They had to wait for an eastbound train made up entirely of tank cars to clear the crossing; then they drove across the bumpy tracks. The Corners was just visible up ahead on the left when Carolyn suddenly swung the car into a driveway of a darkened house and cut the lights.
“What?” Hush asked.
“Bu-cars,” she said. “At The Corners.”
Four trains had gone overhead before Keeler finally thought he might get a shot. He had felt the by-now-familiar vibrations of a train thrumming in the bridge structure, but then they changed. When he could hear the approaching engine, he peeked out of the tarp. The headlight was starting to illuminate the far bank and the stunted trees that grew along the right-of-way. Definitely different—slowing down, he realized. Great, he thought, except the damn thing was going the wrong way. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of the train’s brakes clamping down with a strident shriek of steel on steel, and there was a sudden surge of power from the engines. The earth began to shake under the bridge’s foundations, and the tracks right over his head started jumping around in the tie plates and rail anchors. For a long moment, he wondered if he should bail out from under the tracks, but then it began to subside. The locomotives were close now. He could hear the difference between the two engines and a roar of compressed air from the tracks above. It sounded like the train was going to come to a halt about a hundred feet behind him. The headlight was right overhead, boring a blue-white column of light through the cloud of dust that was rolling out over the trestle.
He was starting to pull himself out from the tarp when he realized the rails were starting to thrum again. He froze, trying to figure out what the vibration meant, and then he understood. Another train was coming. From the other direction. On the single track.
The transit through Jackson had been a nightmare of frantic radio transmissions from the traffic-control centers of the Illinois Central and KCS lines, with Matthews trying desperately to broker between the irate controllers and the implacable Colonel Mehle. The train had never stopped moving throughout, even at the crucial switch junction between the east-west and north-south main lines, where there had been train headlights coming from both directions, police cars at crossings, and astonished yard dispatchers crowding the doorways in the control towers at the Jackson switchyards. As soon as they were through, Mehle had the engineers gunning 2713 back up to road speed. They ran through the western part of the city with the whistle going full blast, ripping the tranquillity of the normally sedate Sunday night to pieces. They had passed four trains on sidings as they left Jackson, which left, as Matthews remembered it, two unaccounted for. Ten minutes later, they roared through Clinton, where the fifth train was sidelined. Its last car, just barely clear of the main line, passed within an arm’s reach of the side of 2713.
Then the rushing night turned dark again and they were finally closing in on Vicksburg, now only thirty-five miles away. The KCS dispatcher had warned Matthews that the speed limit in the town of Vicksburg was five miles an hour due to rail-loading limitations and a very hard west-to-south curve down by the river. Matthews relayed that to Mehle, who said he would see about that. Fifteen minutes later, there came an emergency stop transmission from the KCS center. Before Matthews could relay it forward, the crew cars were jolted as the engineers hit the brakes hard, raising a cacophony of squealing metal from underneath the cars and filling the ventilators with the smell of smoking brake shoes.
Matthews ran outside to the back platform and looked ahead, but the train was going around a curve and he could see nothing but the loom of the headlight through the distant trees, until he realized he was seeing two lights. The intercom came on back inside, with Mehle yelling something about bracing themselves. The sergeant and his troops tried to brace themselves against the walls and desks, but the train was stopping too hard, so all they did was fall around. Matthews looked again and could now definitely see two lights, their own, plus another as the rear end of the snaking train straightened out and finally squealed to a stop.
“Deploy the guard force, on the double,” Mehle yelled over the intercom. The control center was also trying to call in, but Matthews couldn’t hear them over the pounding of boots as the sergeant and every MP aboard bolted out of the car and began running forward alongside the train, weapons at port arms. Matthews got on the circuit with the center and reported that they had stopped and that there had been no collision. Then, checking his side arm once more, he jumped off the platform and jogged forward along the train.
The night was humid and becoming overcast, with a million insects buzzing in the trees along the right-of-way. The smell of burned brake metal lay heavy on the ground. He jumped up onto the chiller platform to check the temperatures in the special weapons cars but then realized he had forgotten his flashlight. He swore and got back off, then headed for the front of the train. The guards were in position now, scanning the nearby woods, their weapons ready. Not knowing what was going on, their young faces reflected a mixture of fear and excitement, and Matthews made sure he said something to each of them as he trotted up the nearly five-thousand-foot length of the train.
The engines were running at high idle as he approached, and then he stopped short as he realized that he was about to trot out onto a trestle. The front engine of 2713 looked to be stopped a bare hundred feet in front of the other train, with the second engine’s rear wheels just beyond the other end of the bridge. As Matthews approached, he saw a tense group of figures standing between the locomotives. He stopped in the shadows about five cars back from the front. Mehle, gun in hand, had both warrant officers out on the tracks. The sergeant and two MPs were pointing rifles at what appeared to be the engineers from the other train. A nearby MP was watching, and when he saw Matthews, he came over, his boots crunching in the gravel.
“This shit’s getting pretty weird, Major,” he said.
“You’re telling me,” Matthews replied. Mehle was gesturing angrily with his pistol. The two warrant officers were standing with their backs to the engine, their facial expressions suitable to men facing a firing squad. The engineers from the other train were staring in amazement at the huge black armored engines and the red-faced colonel waving a gun at them. Matthews definitely did not want to go up there, for fear of startling Mehle into shooting someone. He could not hear what anyone up there was saying over the rumble of the multiple diesels. Then the other train’s engineers put their hands up defensively and started backing away from Mehle, walking backward toward their own train while trying not to trip over the railroad ties. Mehle nodded to the sergeant, who followed the other engineers to their engine with his two MPs. Then Mehle pointed the warrants back up onto the front engine of 2713 and followed them up the ladder.
Matthews waited for a moment at his end of the bridge, which appeared to cross a medium-size stream in the darkness below, and then, when he heard the other train’s engines spool up, he turned around and started jogging back down the train, shouting for the guards to reboard. The crazy bastard faced them down, he thought to himself. He’s going to make them back all the way across the damn river, just like he said. The troops were converging on the rear car at just about the time he heard the banging and clanging of 2713 starting forward, jerking the slack out of the train as it began to follow its subdued adversary back down the line toward Vicksburg at five miles an hour. Matthews finally stopped running and let the crew car come to him. He swung on board like an old railroad hand, then turned to pick up the sergeant and his two troops as they came off the other end of the bridge. To his surprise, they weren’t there, and then he remembered that Mehle had put them on board the other train like some kind of prize crew.
He went back into the command car and found the comms operator waving the phone at him. Matthews reluctantly sat down to talk to the KCS control center, which had apparently been calling nonstop ever since seeing what no doubt appeared to them like a head-on collision. A senior route supervisor came on the net and told Matthews that police authorities had been notified and that they were issuing orders to the other train to stop at once to prevent any further forward motion by 2713. Matthews, knowing that the other train was probably not to going to stop anytime soon, simply acknowledged the man’s angry message. Then he reminded the control center of 2713’s cargo and repeated his earlier observation that the best thing for everyone to do now was to let this train get across the river, after which it would conform to normal traffic rules. The supervisor began to fulminate again about the hundreds of road violations already ticketed against 2713. Matthews interrupted him, told him to shut up and listen.
“We’ve got about fifteen miles to go and then we’re no longer a problem, right? Think about that, and just get the goddamned road clear. That’s the best thing you can do right now. Do you personally want to be the reason we have a major derailment of chemical weapons in the middle of Vicksburg? Do you? Then stop talking, think for a minute, and do what you gotta do.”
He hung up the phone and told the comms operator not to answer the goddamned thing anymore. Then he went into the bathroom and washed his face. He stared at his hollow-eyed image in the mirror. Mehle was infecting his judgment. There was going to be unending hell to pay for what they’d done tonight, but right now, he saw his mission as being that of getting this train safely across the bridge while keeping Mehle from going totally around the bend, if that was still an option. He could just imagine the scene on the other train, with armed soldiers standing behind the engineers, and an armored monster following them down the tracks as they went backward, its headlight right in their frightened faces. The real fun, he thought, would begin once they got beyond the bridge.
Keeler held on for dear life underneath the sixth car from the end of the train. It was a covered gondola car, with two bulges on the bottom separated in the middle by an inverted V of space. Within the space was a heavy lattice of steel support members, and he was suspended in the lattice with the pack. When he had realized that the train was actually stopped right on top of his hiding place, he had stood up directly underneath the car, only to find himself staring right at a pair of what looked like Army combat boots. In the glare of the headlight from the other train, he was able to make out the legs of other figures standing out along the right-of-way. Army? National Guard troops, maybe? Obviously, something had gone wrong with traffic control out on this line, and there had nearly been a head-on collision. So now military security forces were—what?
He had crouched back down and waited, not knowing what was going to happen next. And then, to his surprise, he heard the rumble of multiple engines from up front, and the sound of men running back down the tracks. He heard an authoritative voice command everyone out there to re-board. He stood up again so he could see out. He got a quick glimpse of a white MP armband as a soldier ran by. Military police? Jesus, was this an Army train? At that moment, he heard a second set of engines increase rpm, and he only barely managed to drop below the tracks before the car above him jerked into motion.
He had waited for almost a mile’s worth of cars to pass overhead to make his move, lunging upward to get aboard the first car that presented a suitable hiding place. He was just in time, as the end of the train had been visible. The pyramidal space he now occupied was about five feet high and the width of the car. There were two steel plates on either side that prevented anyone at grade level from seeing him. He pulled the backpack over closer to where he was hiding, then extracted some light nylon line. He fashioned a crude harness, looped it around the steel beams, and tied himself in. He checked the Detacord and the initiator can, closed up the bag, and tied it by its straps to another beam.
Something didn’t make sense. He wanted to climb over to the side to see what kind of a train he’d jumped, but not if there were soldiers out there. All that mattered was that it was westbound. It would take him to his target. The Vicksburg bridge had a single track. All he had to do was get out there and onto the bridge itself. Drop off the train—they never went fast because the bridge was old and couldn’t stand the vibration loads—and get under the track bed. Once there, the bridge was his.
The bottom of the car was covered in a film of dust and grease. He checked his harness, then fished a small bottle of water out of the backpack. He wondered what an Army train was doing out here. He wished he had brought a coat or at least something to cover his face. But then he forced himself to relax in his steel lair. The night was still young. This might actually work out. He lifted the water bottle in a mock salud to the memory of his family. The Army was taking him to his target. Perfect. And then he had another thought. There was only one commodity carried on an Army train: ammunition. He thumped his fist on the indifferent steel: perfect squared. This time, he wouldn’t blow up the bridge. This time, he’d blow up the goddamned train.
Hush leaned back and tried to see out the left-rear window, but there were bushes in the way. “Damn,” he said. “The goon squad.”
Carolyn placed a call to Jefferson City. Little Hill called her back in one minute.
“Where’s Captain Powers?” she asked.
“We’re back at the bridge,” the trooper said. “He’s in the CP. Some problem with a runaway train east of here.”
“Terrific,” Carolyn said. “Do you know if he’s asked for Bureau help in scouting the rail line coming from Jackson?”
I’ll find out; you need to talk to him?”
No. Just pass to him that now would be nice.”
The trooper said he would get Powers that message, and Carolyn hung up. She looked over toward the hotel. A figure was walking up the street in their direction, looking into driveways.
“What kind of plates does this car have?” she asked.
“Mississippi government, I’d guess. Why?”
“One of those inspectors is coming this way. Checking driveways. What do you want to do?”
“How far away?”
“Four houses. No, three. I think it’s a woman, actually. She’s being casual about it, but she’s checking.”
“No time to rabbit, then, right?”
“We could, but she’d make us. Tough to outrun a radio.”
“Well,” Hush said with a grin, moving closer, “we’re a man and woman in the front seat of a car. Let’s see just how nosy she is.”
He reached for her face with both hands and kissed her once, then again. She drew back for a moment, and then she kissed him and he forgot all about the nosy agent. When they came up for air, the woman was nowhere to be seen, nor were the bureau cars.
“Magic all around,” Hush murmured. She smiled and he momentarily lost interest in trains and Keeler. Then her expression changed. She was looking over his shoulder in the direction of the tracks they had just crossed. Hush turned around. The last eastbound train that had come through was visible again at the crossing—going backward.
Carolyn started up the car and backed it out onto the street, the lights still off. She confirmed that the Bureau cars were gone from in front of The Corners, then turned down the block toward the Oak Street railroad crossing. The gates were down and the lights flashing, and there was no doubt about it: The train they’d seen was definitely going backward. Through the trees to their left they could see a brakeman with a large hand-held light perched on the rear coupling of the last tank car, looking anxiously down the tracks.
“What the hell, over?” Hush muttered.
“Must be a traffic problem,” Carolyn said. “There must be a westbound train out there that’s been given priority, and they’re making this train go back across the bridge.”
“I hope someone’s inspecting them before they let them out onto that bridge,” Hush said. “Maybe we better check in with Powers.”
Carolyn pulled the car over to one side of the secluded street, parked and fished for the phone. The pulsing red lights from the crossing painted their faces with alternating bands of red and shadow. The huge tank cars bumped through the crossing, their wheels banging on some discontinuity on the river side of the street pavement. She raised Little Hill, who went to find Powers.
“Where are you guys?” Powers asked.
Carolyn told him, then mentioned that there had been Bureau cars at The Corners. She held the phone so that Hush could hear.
“Yeah, well, they’re all gainfully employed right now,” Powers said. “We’ve got feds checking that whole rail line between here and Jackson. Actually, there should be a car at that crossing.”
Hush looked through the windshield but could not see any cars. Unless they are on the other side of the train, he thought. He took the phone.
“Mike, they going to inspect all westbound trains?”
“Well, we’ve got something of a problem in that department right now. Seems the Army is running some kind of ammunition train on the KCS line out of Jackson. The control people said there was a near head-on with it out by the Big Black River trestle. They’re saying some Army colonel on the train is threatening people at gunpoint and making a train back up all the way into Louisiana to make room for his train. It’s kinda crazy out there.”
“Is the train that’s backing up a tank-car train? We’ve got one right here.”
“No idea. Probably not, though. The tank-car train’s probably making room for the other one. The KCS control people are freaking out, want us to arrest everyone on the Army train. Problem is that they’re traveling with a platoon of military police.”
“How the hell did an ammo train get out on the main lines at a time like this?”
“Guy just jumped a siding somewhere and started trucking. Says he’ll be good once he gets it across the big river. They’re going to Utah or Idaho somewhere. I asked some more questions and one of the National Guard people said this thing came out of Anniston, sort of implying there were things about this train I didn’t want to know.”
“Anniston, Alabama?”
“I guess. Why?”
“The Army’s got a big chemical weapons dump at Anniston. Your Guard friend might be right.”
“Yeah, well, we’re going to try to stop it just outside of Vicksburg and take a quick look. By the way, LeBourgoise really wants to know where you are; says there’s a team of inspectors here from headquarters.”
“Wonderful. Okay, we’ll lay low for a while. Call us if anything develops.”
“Rent-a-goons,” Hush said as he handed Carolyn the phone. “Carswell and the director must be really spun up.”
The engine set on the tank-car train came backing through the crossing, slowing down perceptibly. As the crossing cleared, Hush suddenly saw two sedans on the other side, parked next to a city police car. There were FBI agents standing around the cars, one of whom pointed at their unmarked car through the gates.
“Rock and roll,” Hush said, and Carolyn started up. Because the big diesels had stopped right next to the crossing, the gates remained down. Carolyn turned their car around and drove south down Oak Street. Hush could see headlights coming on behind them, but the gates mercifully stayed down. The train let go a long blast on its air horn, then started to edge out of their sight toward the distant bridge.
“Pedal to the metal,” Hush said.
Carolyn complied immediately as they both reached for seat belts. She turned left onto Klein Street, which bounded the other side of The Corners, then climbed the steep hill and went right on Washington. While Hush checked the mirror for signs of pursuit, she took the next left and the one after that, heading back north now through the older part of Vicksburg. They crossed over the rail cut, and Hush automatically looked down to the right to see if there was anything coming.
“Can you find your way back to that crossing?” he asked. “They’ll never expect us to go right back there.”
“I can try; we’re over the tracks.”
Hush fished out the map and then looked for a street sign. They came up on Clay Street, and he had Carolyn go left, back toward the river. As they came down a hill near the casino and convention center area, they cut across Oak Mulberry Street.
“That should take us back to the crossing,” Hush said. “But right now, let’s park in the casino lot. See if we have a tail.”
She drove straight down into the crowded parking lot. Even on Sundays, Hush concluded, the games must go on. She swung the car around and parked it among the pickup trucks facing up the hill, so that they could watch the main streets. They waited. There was little traffic along the streets of downtown Vicksburg, which appeared to be a collection of three- and four-story buildings, many with false fronts.
“We can’t avoid our own people forever,” Hush said, fidgeting in the darkened car. Carolyn’s face was a white blur in the shadow.
“What about Keeler?” she said, rolling down the front window. The parking lot was infused with the smell of popcorn.
“Well, what about Keeler? We’re on the sidelines. Powers has people inspecting the westbound trains, which should complete the cordon. I think we’re done.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I think we ought to stop this hide-and-seek shit and drive on down to the CP and find LeBourgoise or the Jackson people. We’re going to have to do that sooner or later.”
There was still very little traffic visible on the streets above them. An occasional pickup truck came into or left the casino lot, but the streets remained empty. Hush thought he heard a rumble of distant thunder out over the river behind them. A slight breeze was stirring up the hamburger wrappers in the parking lot.
“That’d be one sure way of leaving Vicksburg,” she said. “Personally, I’d like to wait, see what the hell happens. I still think he’s going to make his play. Tonight. This is the South. Come daylight, all those good ole boys’ll find him.”
Hush nodded in the darkness. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” he said. “But the longer we stay out of sight, the more we become fugitives ourselves, as opposed to two agents working a problem from a different angle.”
“If I have to leave the Bureau, then so be it,” she replied. “But for right now, I want to see how this comes out tonight, and that won’t happen if we’re in a car going back to Jackson.”
“Now I know why you never got married,” he said with a smile.
“What?”
“Because this is too much fun, isn’t it?”
She laughed, but then they both heard a sound they had not expected: the urgent wail of a westbound train, coming from the east side of town. Carolyn started up the car.
As the Army train entered the outskirts of Vicksburg, it slowed down to a crawl to permit the eastbound train to back down into a siding. Matthews came out on the rear platform in time to see the sergeant and his two MPs trotting across the tracks toward the command car. They jumped aboard, grinning like a trio of teenagers who had just outrun the local cops. Before Matthews could question the sergeant, the comms operator was calling for him through the doorway.
“Colonel wants the guard force deployed,” he announced. “Out on the cars. He isn’t going to stop. Says to get ’em out there, spread ’em out along the train, and shoot anyone who tries to mess with us.”
Matthews looked at the sergeant, who laughed out loud. “Shee-it, this is getting interesting,” he said.
“You clear it with me before anybody starts shooting at civilians or cops. You got that?” Matthews said, handing him a portable radio.
“Hell, I know that, Major. We’ll get ’em out there, make it look good. Man! What a ride!”
He stuck his head into the command car and told the troops to stand by to debark, and that they would then re-board every fifth car. He told them to keep their weapons handy, not to let anyone on the train, warning shots authorized, but not deadly force unless he said so. There were some questions, but the sergeant ignored them and started yelling for them to move it, move it, move it, and out they came, flying down the steps even before most of them realized the train was still moving. Matthews watched as they jogged up the sides of the train in the semidarkness, their rifles at port arms, their white MP armbands bobbing up and down. The sergeant, carrying a riot gun and the portable radio, followed as tail-end Charlie to make sure they went where they were supposed to. Matthews waited until he thought the farthest forward car had been reached and then called the sergeant on his radio. The sergeant confirmed that everyone was in position, and Matthews informed the front engine. To his surprise, Colonel Mehle came up on the portable radio circuit and declared he was taking direct command of the guard force. Immediately, the train increased speed to a steady five miles an hour, and Matthews went to get some coffee and await developments He hoped and prayed the traffic-control people were not planning any fun and games—he was pretty sure Mehle would have no compunctions about shooting.
Carolyn gunned the sedan straight up through the parking lot, evoking a protest of horns from some pickup trucks as she cut across lanes and rows. Reaching Oak Street, she turned right and accelerated back toward the at-grade crossing, which was only six blocks away. They skidded to a stop next to a city police car as the crossing lights began to flash and the gates started down. There was no sign of the Bureau cars. They heard the train’s whistle again as they got out. The train was definitely coming from the east side of town, but they couldn’t see it yet.
“Call Powers,” Hush said. “Find out if this is that Army train.”
As Carolyn tried to reach Powers, Hush went over to the cop car and showed his credentials to the elderly policeman sitting inside.
“We’re working the bridge operation,” he said. “We were told all westbound trains were being stopped for inspection. Do you know why this train is coming through?”
The cop shook his head. “They don’t tell me jackshit,” he said. “Just to stay here for my shift and check out any vehicles for this old boy.” He held up a fax picture of Keeler.
The train’s whistle sounded again, closer now. Hush watched intently, anxious to know if this was yet another train backing down or a real westbound. Carolyn was walking over, the phone at her ear. She switched it off. “Little Hill says Powers was off on another possible sighting south of town but is on his way back now. This train is that Army deal they were talking about. It’s apparently been cleared through town and over the bridge.”
“Has it been inspected?”
“Hill didn’t think so. He said there are military police on the train and, apparently it won’t stop. He said there’s some kind of problem with the engineers, but the word the CP has now is to get it across the river. I didn’t know the Army had trains.”
Hush could see the train’s headlight now, still about a half mile away, but clearly a westbound train was making its way through the cut. The engineer was leaning hard on the whistle.
“Do you have a direct phone number for the CP?”
Carolyn shook her head. Hush asked the cop if he could use his radio. In about thirty seconds, he had a patch through to the command post. He identified himself and asked to speak to someone from the KCS. A voice came on the net. Hush identified himself again and asked if the train now coming down into Vicksburg had been stopped and inspected. The KCS man said no, it had not, but that the National Guard had orders from the Pentagon to let it through, over the objections of the KCS traffic center.
“Did that train cross the Big Black River?” Hush asked. The whistle was louder now, the headlight steadier.
“Those dumb sons a bitches damn near caused a head-on collision right on that bridge. Some crazy Army bastard is running that train, but the military people here are gonna let it through. Right now, this bridge is theirs, not ours.”
Hush thanked the man and handed the mike back to the cop. “We’ve got to stop this train,” he said. “It stopped on the bridge. I’ll bet my ass Keeler’s on it.”
“Hush—” she began, but he cut her off.
“Give me the car keys,” he ordered. She handed them over to him and he ran for their car. The train sounded its whistle again; it was about two blocks from the crossing, but its headlight was still pointed off to one side as it entered the west-to-south curve. The whistle was loud enough to drown out the clanging crossing bells. The cop had gotten out of his car, obviously wondering what Hush was up to.
Hush jumped into the car, started it up, and drove it past the cop car and between the gates, knocking the tip off of one of them. He stopped when the car was parked directly across the single track, then got out, leaving the headlights on. He pulled the keys and closed the door, hurrying back through the gates. The train’s powerful headlight was swinging slowly toward them now as it approached the crossing. The cop started yelling at Hush that he couldn’t do that, but Hush pushed past the cop and got into the police car, which he started up, backed up, and pointed directly at the crossing. He put the car’s headlights on high beam, then pointed the big chromed spotlight into the crossing area and switched it on, too. The cop was literally jumping up and down, but Hush ignored him, getting out of the car and locking the keys in it.
As he came back toward her, Carolyn grabbed his arm and pointed across the crossing. There were three cars coming fast from the other side. The lead locomotive’s whistle blared again. The rumble of the big engines engulfed the crossing area, making speech impossible. The cop was beside himself, shouting into his shoulder mike, but the noise from the train was overwhelming. The black armored engines were now only about fifty yards from the crossing, and the driver was laying hard on the whistle to see if he could move that car parked on the tracks. Hush realized then that the engines were not slowing down.
“He’s not going to stop!” Hush shouted into Carolyn’s ear. “I know Keeler’s on this thing. We need to get alongside, see if we can spot him!”
The three cars on the other side screeched to a stop at the gates, and their doors flew open. About a dozen FBI agents swarmed out of the cars, holding up their hands against the blaze of light coming from the two cars and the spotlight pointed at them. Almost simultaneously, the huge black engines, air horns on full blast, pushed into the crossing and slammed into the car in a slow-motion crash, overturning it and then rolling it across the crossing in a cloud of dust and shattering glass.
Hush ran up through the gates, drew his weapon, and squatted down, with Carolyn right behind him, looking to see if anyone was hiding underneath the train. He had gotten a quick glimpse of some white faces in the windows of the front engine, but he then concentrated on the first of the covered gondolas, whose undercarriage was fully illuminated in the headlights of the cop car. He never saw the MPs perched on the backs of the cars as the train continued to grind through the curve, shoving the battered car off to one side, upside down, its headlights still on, pointing off into the trees. After a few minutes of looking, Hush realized that he could not really see underneath the train, but the shape of the gondola cars definitely made it possible for someone to hide under there. Then he noticed that there was a slight depression at the right side of the crossing—where the concrete edge of the road ended and the gravel track bed resumed. He yelled for Carolyn to cover him, and then he ran up to the side of a gondola car, grabbed a steel ledge in the middle of the car, and threw himself underneath the car and into the depression, ignoring Carolyn’s scream of protest.
He landed on his back, his feet toward the end of the train. Sharp points of gravel dug into the back of his head. There was just under two feet of clearance beneath the train, whose massive bulk was thumping across the rail joint at the crossing and dropping dirt and dust on him every time a wheel hit. The blaze of white light from his left was partially blinding him, but now he could see up into the steel concavities under the car. Carolyn was bending down beside the track, screaming between the wheels for him to get out of there. On the other side, there were some more people yelling at him. He ignored them all and waited, gun pointed up, steeling himself to disregard the awesome mass of metal that was rolling over his head, and adjusting his position closer to the center when a coil of air-brake hose threatened to take his face off. Carolyn was down on her hands and knees alongside the track now, her own gun out, her face a mask of fright at what he was doing.
After five more harrowing minutes of huge glistening wheels banging across the joint, showering his face with dust and dirt repeatedly, the end cars approached. He tried to scrunch deeper into the gravel, but the rocks were the size of plums, all hard-edged and immovable. Suddenly, there was a roar of compressed air rushing through a big pipe inches from his face, followed by a frightful squeal of brakes. The train slowed perceptibly as the back wheels of a car came across his position, followed by the front wheels of the next car. Shit! Hush thought. Someone had told the engineer there was a man under the train. Well, at least they’d get it stopped, and then he’d order the Jackson office people to make a thorough search. And then, just as the train stopped, he found himself looking into the stunned face of Morgan Keeler.
When Matthews got word that there was a man down under the train, he immediately thought it had to be one of his MPs. He ordered the sergeant to get off and investigate, then jumped down off the train himself and ran forward, telling each man that he passed to stand fast. He ran awkwardly because of the gravel and the ties, but the obstacles just made him run harder. The farther up the train he went, the more confused he became, because all of his MPs appeared to be right where they were supposed to be. Because of the curve, he couldn’t really see up the front of the train. Then came the sudden squeal of brakes under the cars, and then the sergeant reported that all his people were accounted for, but he said the train had hit a car.
Oh, Jesus, Matthews thought, and ran faster.
Keeler overcame his astonishment about one instant before the FBI man lying down there on the track bed did. He shifted sideways to put the shoulder of the steel bulge between Hanson’s rising gun and most of his own body, then swung his own .45 down to point at Hanson’s head. At that instant, the whistle sounded, and both Carolyn and the agents on the other side of the train, who could not see Keeler, began yelling at Hanson to get out of there, shouting that the train was going to move again. Carolyn stuck her head under the car, reaching for Hanson, who yelled that Keeler was right there and that she had to back out.
For a split second, Keeler looked right at Hanson, then he swung the .45 to point at the woman’s upper body. Carolyn saw where Hush was looking, looked up herself, and froze.
“Stalemate, Hanson,” Keeler yelled. “Back out, or I kill her.”
The FBI man was pointing a weapon right at his face. Keeler saw something flash in the man’s eyes, some decision, some sure knowledge that he could fire and hit him. He looked back at the woman. To his amazement, she was bringing up her own gun. He squeezed his own trigger. The blast from the .45 knocked the back of his hand up into the steel underbody of the car, stunning it, even as a tremendous shock clanged through the car as the train suddenly started forward again. He almost dropped the gun as he scrambled to hold on, feeling but not hearing the shot that Hanson had fired at him, wincing as the bullet ricocheted off the steel and flayed his face with shards of steel. But then the car was moving beyond Hanson, the train going ahead, faster than it had been, and he knew the bridge was next.
Hush rolled out as soon as he could, barely escaping the crushing wheels as the train accelerated, the cars swaying dangerously in the curve that led toward the bridge. Carolyn lay on her back on the gravel, her gun hand thrown out, fingers splayed, her eyes wide with shock. A massive red stain spread across the front of her blouse and jacket. As Hush dropped to his knees beside her, he saw her eyes roll back into their sockets, and then she coughed wetly and stopped breathing. The city cop was there by then, and Hush shouted at him to get an ambulance.
He pulled her inert form away from the track and put her on her side, wound side down. Tears in his eyes, he checked for a pulse and then began to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, tasting the salt of blood on her lips and hearing the dreadful sound of his own breath bubbling out of the hole high in her chest every time he pushed air into her lungs. He heard someone come running by but did not look up to see who it was. He worked frantically as the final cars went banging by on the tracks, their wheels shrieking with the strain of the curve. He wanted to do chest compression, but he could not bring himself to touch the blood-soaked blouse, for the fear of doing more damage. Then the cop was back, something green in his hands. He pushed Hush aside and got to work on Carolyn. Hush sat back on his haunches, overwhelmed by a feeling of utter helplessness.
Matthews was horrified to see the woman lying by the side of the tracks, her FBI jacket a sodden mass of blood. Had Mehle done this? Or, worse, one of his MPs? He slowed for just a second but kept going, determined to get up to that engine and end this madness, specials or no specials. He raced down the right-of-way as fast as he could go and finally caught up with the rear engine. A single MP who had seen him chasing the train was running behind him, trying to regain his post on the train. Matthews swung aboard, caught his breath, and then began to climb across the catwalk toward the front engine. The engine noise was stunning, the huge cylinders pounding his eardrums and giving him an instant headache, but he pressed on, jumping across the couplings and then going crabwise down the right side of the middle engine. He jumped again, and the noise became slightly more bearable as he got closer to the front cab. When he could see into the cab, he stopped and was immediately sucked up against the air intakes. Then he nearly fell off when the engine leaned away from the curve on some uneven track. When he recovered his balance, there was Mehle, standing in the cab’s rear doorway, pointing a 9-mm pistol at him.
“What the goddamned hell are you doing here?” Mehle screamed. “Get back to your post! On the goddamned double!”
Matthews put his right hand out, palm up, while holding on to the railing with his left, and began to creep forward slowly. He had to get closer to the purple-faced colonel.
“Colonel, you’ve got to stop this,” he shouted. “An FBI agent’s been shot. Something’s going on we don’t know about.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn about anything but getting this goddamned train across that goddamned bridge, understand?” Mehle yelled, and then whirled around as one of the warrant officers stood up behind him. The man quickly sat back down. Matthews used the moment to get closer to that steel door. Mehle whipped back around and pointed the pistol right at Matthews’s face. They were now only about four feet apart.
“The specials temps are stable,” Matthews lied. “There aren’t any other trains in front of us.” He inched forward again, but then Mehle fired two warning shots. Matthews felt the heat of both bullets passing his face and recoiled against the steel side of the engine. At that instant, one of the warrants came flying low through the door, tackling Mehle from behind. They fought viciously on the catwalk and then the other warrant came through the door and grabbed Mehle around the neck. Matthews stepped quickly past the struggling men to give the warrants some working room, but then there was a shot, followed by another, and all three men rolled off the catwalk and down onto the embankment, disappearing into a stand of tall weeds alongside the track. Matthews stared into the engine cab at all the controls as the train continued to rumble toward the great black bridge. He realized he had not the first idea of how to stop Mehle’s goddamned train.
Hush stood up, knees shaking, unwilling to look down at Carolyn. Something evil in his brain rephrased that: Carolyn’s body. He patted his holster; his gun was gone. But hers was right there. He scooped it up and saw the train disappearing down the bridge line. When he saw several FBI agents starting across the tracks in his direction, he took off after the train, his vision locking down to the tail-lights up ahead. Keeler was at the back end of the train, about six or seven cars from the end. He ran faster, tripping awkwardly over the gravel ballast, trying to stay on the ties. He was vaguely aware of people shouting behind him, but he didn’t care. The train was going faster than it had been, but he would catch it. His lungs started to burn and his heart pounded as he loped along the tracks, intent on the huge black cars with all their gobbledygook military nomenclature stenciled on the sides. His injured leg sent a stab of pain up into his thigh each time his right foot hit the ground, but he squeezed the pain right out of his head. Then he remembered what all the Army nomenclature was about: This train was from the chemical weapons depot at Anniston. Great God, he thought, Keeler is going to drop a load of chemical weapons into the Mississippi River.
He ran faster, finally overtaking the command car, the bunk-room car, and then an oversized gondola car. The huge wheels crept by as if in a nightmare. His feet and legs, especially the right one, were now beyond feeling. There were percussive whimpering sounds coming out of his throat in time with each stride as he raced forward, gaining on his target, the sixth or seventh car from the end—not sure which, but he swore he’d find the right one, by Christ
His brain remained totally connected to his gun hand, which was alive and communicating eagerly, knurled steel reassuring straining flesh, his fingers sentient as they gripped the Sig like steel coils. A gun-sight image of Keeler’s face superimposed itself like some ghostly hologram in his vision against the backdrop of Carolyn’s eyes rolling back, and then he was there. No, too far, he thought. In his rage, he had run right past the sixth car, so he slowed and dropped back, staggering as he fought for breath. It was much darker here without the headlights, and it had begun to rain.
It took him a moment to comprehend that there was a young soldier in battle gear standing on the back platform of the seventh car from the end, his M16 held awkwardly across his chest, gawking at Hush. The soldier yelled something, pointing back toward the other end of the train, but Hush ignored him. He grabbed a handrail along the round-down of the car and swung aboard, then immediately lowered himself down to almost wheel level, looking under the car. The soldier was still yelling, and now the guy was pointing his rifle at him. Hush pointed to the FBI initials emblazoned on his windbreaker, and the kid lowered his weapon fractionally, unsure of what to do. The train was straightening out now, going faster down the last straightaway before the big right turn out onto the bridge.
Then Hush had an idea. He climbed back along the car toward the front platform of the sixth car and motioned for the soldier to come close enough for Hush to tell him something. The kid complied, leaning down, allowing Hush to snatch the M16 out of the MP’s hands. The soldier tried to grab for it, but he lost his balance, his arms windmilling as he attempted to stay upright. By then, Hush was pointing for him to get back, to go back to the other end of the car. The soldier complied, a sick look on his face, which changed to wild alarm when he saw what Hush was going to do. Hush had wedged his legs under the lower rung of the platform ladder and was now leaning way over to one side, the M16 cradled almost upside down in his hands, and then he was firing down into the ballasted railroad ties in short bursts of full automatic, firing lengthwise under the sixth car and then the seventh, sending a stream of ricocheting rounds up into the bottom. The noise was deafening, and the rifle was hard to hold on to, but most of the bullets were whacking and spanging against the bottom plates of the gondola cars. When the magazine was empty, he simply dropped the weapon under the wheels, which promptly sliced it into two pieces. Then he was in motion again, jumping the coupling and crawling along the side of the sixth car until he came to the start of the inverted-V plates in the middle. Making sure the Sig was ready for business, he jammed it in his shoulder holster and swung under, crawling across steel ridges, using the underbody’s support girders as handholds, looking for Keeler. From underneath the car, he thought he caught a glimpse of the big searchlights at the Welcome Center.
Matthews sat down in what he figured to be the engineer’s seat on the right side and stared at all the controls. The huge headlight was boring a conical white hole into a blowing mist of rain, but the windows were obscured. He felt absolutely helpless, unable even to find the controls for the windshield wipers. There was no throttle like in the movies, and certainly no brake pedal. There was a pedestal-mounted control stand next to the seat on the left-hand side, which is when he realized he was on the wrong side. He shifted over into the other seat. He looked behind and was able to see the train behind him through a slanted window. Looking back at the control stand, he saw a couple of interlocked levers, one over the other, one of which had eight positions notched into the handle. There were instrument dials recording main engine amps, pressure in the air-brake system, ground speed, as well as warning lights marked WHEEL SLIP and REMOTE BRAKING AIR. There was an auxiliary panel on the right-hand side, where he finally found the wiper controls. He turned the switch, and the big wipers first smeared and then cleared the windows, allowing him to see that a turn was coming. Beyond that was the big bridge. He was desperately looking around for a control that would apply the brakes when he heard an M16 stuttering in automatic fire somewhere behind him.
Keeler was terrified by the sudden barrage of gunfire and all the ricochets, but he had not been hit, not once. His right eyelid was bleeding from a stone fragment, and he was pretty sure the backpack had a tear or two in it, but he was otherwise unhurt. The only light coming under the car now was from passing streetlights and an occasional car’s headlights, but where he was wedged up in the V, it was in full darkness. He could not imagine who had turned loose the M16, and he had reflexively pulled the .45 before putting it back into the waistband of his pants.
There was no more time: The bridge was coming. He pressed his feet and his back against the sloping side of the gondola’s underbody to free his hands, then pulled the backpack toward him. Leaving the bulk of the coil in the pack, he pulled out one end. There were gusts of wind blowing under the car now, smelling like rain, and the end of the Detacord whipped back and forth like an anxious snake. He fished again in the pack for the initiator can, probing for it with his fingers, slipping the plastic cap off the bottom, and then the pack came off its attachment in the lattice. He lunged for it, barely grabbing it before it fell onto the tracks below, and then nearly slipped off his own perch. After a moment of scrambling, he got himself and the pack stabilized. He exhaled and tried again, going back into the pack with his fingers. Careful now, he told himself, can’t drop this. He fished the soup can-size initiator out, batting his eyelids to clear the blood from his right eye, and inserted the end of the Detacord firmly into the hole in the bottom of the initiator can—which was slippery with his own sweat—until it seated.
Almost there, he thought. The train seemed to be going a bit faster, the wind beginning to whip a dirty spray along under the car. He wouldn’t be able to see the bridge until the train and his car went out onto the structure, and then, even in the darkness, he wouldn’t be sure until he saw the river through the ties. His plan was simple: This was an Army ammunition train—he was certain of it now. Soldiers on board, an M16 letting go like that, unmistakable sound, probably by accident, some boot-camp recruit getting scared. Once they were on the bridge, he would unreel the Detacord along the track underneath the train, keeping the detonator can in his hands. When all three hundred feet were out, dragging along the track bed under the train, he would turn the timer dial to ten seconds, slip down the side of his steel cavity, and, as gently as he could, drop the can onto the top of the rear wheel bogies. The cord would be whipping up along the bottom of all those cars, those ammunition cars, when it went off. The cord was three hundred feet long; the cars averaged about seventy feet long, so he would cover the bottoms of the last three, maybe four cars. He had to get only one car to sustain a sympathetic detonation, and he’d wreck the bridge. His car should survive, since the cord would probably blow the coupling. Then he’d ride the remains of the train across the bridge. After that, well, he’d have to play that by ear.
The noise of the wheels began to change. He slid partially down the V and poked his head down, craning his neck to see forward. He realized that the train was making a right turn now. There was a fine mist blowing up from the wheels. It must have really started raining. Good. The ground on either side of the train was rising, which hopefully meant they were entering that cut that went under Washington Street, past the CP, and out onto the bridge. He crawled back up and began to undo the plastic ties that held the Detacord in a coil.
Hush was struggling underneath the front end of the car, his strength flagging after that long run. He locked his stomach muscles to hold his body up away from the rushing ties. He was spread-eagled upside down against the underbody, his hands gripping the center I beam, his feet wedged into the secondary beam ledges running parallel to the center beam. He held his belly tight up against the bottom of the car, with Carolyn’s Sig stuck hard into his shoulder rig. He was trying to crawl back along the bottom toward that dark cavity in the middle where he knew Keeler had to be lurking, some twenty feet back. The center beam’s flanges were plenty big enough, but they were greasy and his hands kept slipping.
As he inched back toward the center, he kept seeing Carolyn on the ground, the graceful way her hand had relaxed, almost casually letting go of the gun, her whole body seeming to puddle on the embankment. I will kill him, he thought. As soon as I see him, I will kill him. I’m not going to yell “FBI,” tell him to freeze, or to drop it, or to put his hands up. I will just shoot his goddamned eyes out. I can do it. I have done it before. I will do it. He ground his teeth with the effort of holding on.
He got within about eight feet of the center when the car began to lean into a right turn, and he had to change position to get a better grip. A flash of lightning outside startled him, but he concentrated on getting into a cavity right alongside the center beam. He rolled sideways and backed into it, spreading his legs wide to catch steel ledges and hunching his back up against the steel so that he faced across the width of the car’s bottom. It was a much more secure position, and he took a moment to catch his breath. The ties were becoming a blur underneath. Was it raining? There seemed to be a mist developing under the car. It was really dark now, as if they had entered a tunnel. No, not a tunnel, but that cut under Washington Street overpass. The toll plaza; then the bridge was next. What was Keeler planning? A suicide bombing, maybe? The train was going too fast for him to drop off onto the bridge. If he crawled out onto the side of the car, those soldiers would see him. He was probably no more than ten feet from Keeler, but there was that enormous void of steel between them. Filled with—what? Chemical weapons?
There was a flare of orange light from the left side of the car. The CP lights, Hush thought. They’d be on the bridge in a few seconds. Whatever Keeler was going to do, he’d be doing it now. He reached for a ledge and then brought his hand back: The metal had become very slippery. The wheel noise under him changed as the car rolled out onto the track bed of the bridge structure. A blast of cold, wet air rose through the ties from the river below, and Hush, suppressing a wave of vertigo, was suddenly glad it was dark. He took another deep breath and forced himself to move across the cavity, trying for hand- and footholds that would keep his right arm free. The lights had disappeared. He got to the bottom of the cavity, craned his neck down, and looked back under the train. There was something there. A rope? A wire? Something that was coming down from the cavity next to his. Being fed down from above, he realized.
Keeler. And that had to be Detacord. The wind was whipping it all over the place, dangerously close to the wheels. A coil of it blew back toward him and he reached for it but missed. His left hand slipped and he almost fell, catching himself at the last instant on the air brake’s pipe.
Matthews watched helplessly as the train ground out onto the bridge. This had been Mehle’s objective for the entire trip, and suddenly Matthews wondered if he ought to do nothing, let Mehle’s goddamned train get across the goddamned river. But there was simply no way: There had been gunfire behind him on the train, Mehle and the warrants had gone overboard along the tracks back in town, and that FBI agent had been shot at the crossing. Something was terribly wrong here, and he had no idea what it was. At that instant, the MP who had lost his Ml6 burst into the cab from behind him, yelling something about an FBI guy being under the train. Matthews stared at him for an instant, then realized he had no choice: He had to stop the train.
And then he saw it: a small red T-shaped handle down on the floor, almost under the control stand. There was a brass plate marked clear as day: EMERGENCY STOP. There were sloping steel trusses flitting past the windows now; the train was definitely out on the bridge. He looked again at the horizontal control lever and saw that it was set one notch past a setting marked IDLE. He grabbed the handle and moved it back to the idle position, and the big engines slowed immediately. “Sorry, Colonel,” he said as he reached down for the red handle.
Hush repositioned himself and bent back down. The spray was much stronger now, and he had trouble seeing, but then another hank of the cord blew practically into his face, and he caught it this time. He held it for an instant, felt it stop feeding, and then jerked it with all his strength. He thought he heard a cry from above, and then the remains of an entire reel of the Detacord with some kind of small can attached to it dropped out of the adjacent cavity. The can bounced once on the tracks and then went under one of the wheels. One microsecond later came a red flash and the ripping thunder of an explosion behind them, an explosion that seemed to propagate away from where Hush was scrambling to reposition himself. A second after that came a roar of compressed air in the pipe he was holding and the brakes locked down on the wheels with an incredible screech, jolting the car heavily. The pipe suddenly became intensely cold and his hand let go reflexively, forcing him to scramble again to recover some kind of handhold as the car shuddered to an emergency stop. He grabbed at ledges, angle irons, and even rivets, but everything was wet and greasy and he simply couldn’t hang on. He felt himself slipping down the sloping sides of the cavity, his efforts to grip defeated by the heavy shaking coming from the locked wheels, which were now showering sparks up under the car. He grabbed a tie-rod at the last moment, but his feet and lower legs were already bouncing along the ties, battering his heels and knocking one of his shoes right off. Just when he was about to lose his grip, the train finally lurched to a stop in one last jolt that actually kicked his car forward a few feet as a wave of coupling slack came out of the cars behind him. He dropped onto the ties on his back and looked up. There was Morgan Keeler, crouching like a spider up above him, an anguished look on his face even as his hand reached for a large automatic in his waistband.
Time slowed down, but Hush never missed a beat. His vision telescoped to frame Keeler’s face. It was just like the range. Draw and shoot. Smooth, unhurried motion: Reach, grip, pull, swing, point, merge, eyes wide, and squeeze. Six rounds this time. Done it a hundred times. A thousand times. It’s what I’m famous for. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. The blasts from the Sig echo painfully in his ears, but his concentration never waivers.
Stop.
He rolled to one side as Keeler’s body came sliding down the underside, accompanied by the clattering of the .45 he never got to shoot. A practically headless Keeler landed with a sodden thump on the ties, the cocked .45 landing behind him a split second later. Hush winced in anticipation of its going off, but it didn’t. He resisted an impulse to grab up the .45 and empty it into Keeler’s back. Instead, he lay back under the train and closed his eyes. He tried deep breathing. It was definitely raining outside. He could hear it. Outside. He laughed at himself, as if he were inside a warm, dry house somewhere, and not flat on his back underneath a goddamned ammunition train, with ninety feet of cold air blowing up on his back from the river below. He opened his eyes and caught a gust of smoky, wet air in the face. He shook his head and looked over at Keeler, at the Trainman. His body lay bent on the ties, his back to Hush. Then there was the sound of boots running along the train, and then more boots, accompanied by shouts. He tried to decide whether simply to lie there or to crawl out and face the music. In a perverse way, it was more comfortable right where he was than it was going to be, although suddenly he became aware that his right heel was really hurting.
“Die, Keeler,” he intoned to the body’s back. “Die for killing Carolyn Lang.”
Then he stuck the Sig back in its holster and crawled out on his back, emerging right in front of a startled MP. As the soldier instinctively began to raise his rifle, Hush calmly asked him to please help him up.
Hush was escorted back down the bridge roadway past the end of the stopped train by no fewer than six MPs, one of whom was helping him walk. They passed a small knot of Army people gathered around the third car from the end, examining the grayish blast marks on the bottom of the big gondola. Powers and several Highway Patrol cops ran to meet them at the Vicksburg end. The rain was coming down steadily, cascading in sheets off the high trusses of the bridge, and pelting the cars, but it could not remove the acrid chemical smell of high explosive all around the bridge. Powers took over and helped Hush the rest of the way off the bridge and into their favorite toll plaza, where the flickering blue light reflections of several emergency vehicles lit the place up like a disco. Hush finally had to rest, and they sat him down against the concrete wall of the toll plaza. The burned-out holes where the phone booths used to be were right above his head. Powers turned him over to some National Guard medics.
He returned ten minutes later. “Shot at and missed, shit at and hit,” he observed, squatting down beside Hush. The rain dripped off his big flat-brimmed hat.
“Was that Detacord?” Hush asked, wiping rain off his face. Powers nodded, took off his hat, and set it on Hush’s head to shield him from the rain.
“Yeah, but it was just hanging out in the air. Scared the shit out of everybody, but it didn’t do anything but cauterize the bottom of a couple cars. Apparently, they’re armored, although some of the Army guys were kind of white-knuckled about it.”
“You know what’s in those cars?”
“Army major back there said obsolete chemical weapons but that they aren’t explosive. Except he seemed real worried about those two big cars near the tail. He says that a crazy colonel and two other guys are somewhere back on the line. Guy’s pretty upset.”
At that moment, the train out on the bridge sounded its whistle and then banged into motion.
“That was the Army runaway,” Powers said. “They’ve got some KCS engineers on that mother now. They’re gonna get it off the bridge so they can inspect it and the bridge, make sure he didn’t damage anything. Then it’s going to some place called Pine Bluff.”
“I got the bastard,” Hush said.
“So we noticed,” Powers said, “They’re gonna need DNA to make an ID.”
Powers’s face sobered. “I know.”
“She was going to shoot him,” Hush said. “He had a forty-five pointed right at her and she drew down on him anyway.”
Hush was suddenly overcome by an emotion he couldn’t name, but his eyes filled at the thought of losing her. He tried to say something, but all he ended up doing was licking his parched lips like some kind of idiot.
“Hey, hey,” Powers said, leaning forward, shielding him from the others. “She’s not dead. They have her downtown. It’s serious, but the docs say she’s got a chance.”
Hush looked up at him, confused. “It was a forty-five auto; I saw her stop breathing.”
“Yeah, but there was a city cop there. The old guy? His mother’s even older, got emphysema. He always keeps an oxygen breather bottle in his squad car. Carolyn had a punctured lung, but he put her on the bottle. C’mon, let’s get you downtown to the hospital.”
Hush didn’t trust himself to say anything; he started to get up. But then he noticed the crowd of FBI agents standing ten feet away, apparently waiting for him. There was a loose cordon of state troopers standing between the agents and him. Powers saw what was shaping up, said something into a small radio he held, and then retrieved his hat from Hush’s head. A moment later, as Hush was getting steady on his feet, about a dozen reporters burst down into the toll plaza, and some television camera lights cast a sudden white glare. Hush shielded his eyes as the questions started, but Powers yelled for everybody to shut up.
“Roll tape when I say so,” he commanded, and then he waited for everyone to shut up and get ready. “All right? Roll it.” Then he turned to include Hush. “This is Assistant Director William Hanson from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who tonight single-handedly caught and killed the murdering bastard who has been bombing bridges up and down the Mississippi River. His success tonight represents the culmination of an intense five-state cooperative effort between the FBI and local law-enforcement agencies. As you can see, Mr. Hanson has been injured. We are taking him to the city hospital. I see Resident Special Agent LeBourgoise from Baton Rouge standing back there. Since he’s the next senior Bureau official here, he and I will be available to answer your questions about this case in fifteen minutes up in the Welcome Center. In the meantime, we need to get Mr. Hanson here out of the rain. That’s all.”
In Powers’s car five minutes later, Hush lay back against the seat and tried to keep his brain in neutral. The mob of reporters and television people had Powers and Le-Bourgoise surrounded as they walked out of the toll plaza and up the grassy slope to the Welcome Center. It was Little Hill who had taken him to Powers’s car, keeping other reporters at bay by simply glaring at them.
“He had that all wired, didn’t he?” Hush asked as Little Hill punched the siren impatiently to make some Army trucks get out of the way.
“Cap’n said if you got from under that train alive, the Bureau brass was gonna land on you, but not if you was a hero on the TV.”
Hush smiled in the darkness of the backseat. Powers knew his Bureau, and he had executed a preemptive public-relations strike. As far as the anxious public was concerned, the Bureau had gotten its man once again. What the director and his deputy pit bull would have to say in private might be extremely colorful, but in public he was now a hero on the TV. The last of the Untouchables. Mike Powers was a piece of work.
At the hospital, they treated his badly bruised heel and gave him a chance to wash all the undercarriage grime off. Some of the hospital people who had watched the breaking news story congratulated him on apprehending the bridge bomber. Then they gave him a wheelchair, and one of the state cops pushed him into an elevator so he could go upstairs to the surgical recovery area to see Carolyn. The attending physician in recovery actually told him he couldn’t see her, but he changed his mind when the gaunt-looking man with the battered face rose out of the chair and looked down at him in a manner that caused everyone else at the desk to stop talking.
There were four Bureau men outside of her room, two sitting and two standing. The two sitting got right up as soon as they saw Hush and the state cops approaching. One of them opened Carolyn’s door for him. No one spoke as he rolled in and pushed the door almost closed behind him.
Carolyn was almost lost in the mechanized hospital bed. Her hair was covered up in some kind of surgical cap, and she had two huge black rings under her eyes, which made her look like an underfed panda. Her bloodless lips glistened with Vaseline, and there was an oxygen tube taped under her nose. There were IVs going into both wrists, and another really ugly tube disappeared under the covers near her breastbone. The skin across the top of her chest was black-and-blue. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing was slow and labored. A monitoring system above her bed kept score of her heartbeat and other vital signs with attentive beeps. He could see the top straps of bandages looping up and over her right shoulder. Her face was the color of old ivory.
He pulled his wheelchair as close as he could to the side of her bed and leaned forward. He could hear the agents talking softly outside the door; he thought he heard the word eyes. He pushed the memory of what he had done to Keeler out of his mind and just sat there, looking at her, wanting to touch her, but not able to see her hands. Then she opened her eyes, blinked rapidly, focused, and recognized him. She mumbled a question; the only words he could recognize were “get him.”
“Yes. On the bridge.” He went on to tell her about the Detacord and what Powers had done with the reporters. She appeared to smile and then closed her eyes again. He really wanted to hold her hand, but he was afraid to disturb all those tubes. Suddenly, he was vastly weary. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought about everything that was to come, for both of them: endless debriefs, the mandatory post-shooting internal investigation, the recovery effort the railroads were facing, the political machinations that were sure to follow as the director danced his way out of the wreckage of his scheme. Powers, God love him, had done the one thing that would fireproof both of them until they could decide what they wanted to do. He put his head down on the edge of the bed.
The covers moved and he felt her finger tips against his left temple.
“I just slaughtered him,” he said. “I didn’t warn him. I didn’t arrest him. I didn’t give him any chance at all. I shot him six times in the face.” He took a deep breath. “I wanted to do it,” he whispered. “I enjoyed doing it. I’d do it again.”
Her hand patted his head gently. “It’s okay, Hush. It’s okay. It won’t ever happen again.”
He grasped her hand and held on while she said it again and again.