The Wrecker (Isaac Bell 2)

The laws of physics ruled how to distribute weight. The laws of physics said he could not carry the crosstie another foot. He drove that madness from his mind and concentrated instead on fencing moves, the light, airy motion of a sword. “Attack,” he said aloud. “Beat. Lun

ge. Parry. Riposte. Feint. Double feint.” On he plodded, the weight pounding his bones to jelly. Attack. Beat. Lunge. Parry. German intruded. Suddenly, he was mumbling the engineering terms from his student days. Then shouting the language of Heidelberg when he learned to kill. “Angriff. Battutaangriff. Ausfall, Parade. Doppelfinte.” He imagined someone humming in his ear. Attack: Angriff. Beat: Battutaangriff. Lunge: Ausfall. Parry: Parade. Double feint: Doppelfinte. Someone he could not see was humming a tuneless ditty. It grew shrill. Now he heard it right behind him. He whirled around, the weight of the crosstie nearly spinning him off his feet. Harsh acetylene light blazed on the tracks. It was a police patrol pumping along on an almost silent handcar.

A sheer rock wall pressed against the right-of-way on his left. To his right, the mountain dropped sharply. He sensed more than saw a steep drop. The feathery tops of small trees piercing the dark indicated it could be as much as twenty feet down. He had no choice. The handcar was almost on top of him. He dropped the tie over the edge and jumped after it.

He heard the tie hit a tree and snap the trunk. Then he smashed into a springy tree, knocking the wind out of him.

The humming dropped in tone. The handcar was slowing down. To his horror, they stopped. He could hear men talking fifteen feet above his head and saw beams of flashlights and lanterns. They dismounted. He could hear their boots crunching on the ballast as they strode the rail bed, shining their lights. A man shouted. Abruptly as they had appeared, they left. The handcar creaked into motion and hummed away, leaving him fifteen feet down the steep embankment in the dark.

Moving cautiously, hunched over on the slope, digging his boots in, he felt in the dark for the crosstie. He smelled pine pitch and traced the odor to the broken tree. Several feet down, he bumped into the square end of the tie. He felt for his tools. Still tied on. He looked up the slope. The rim of the rail bed towered above him.

How would he climb up it carrying the tie?

He tipped it on one end, worked his shoulder under it, and struggled to stand.

Every mile he had come so far, every escape, meant nothing. This was the real test: to climb back up the embankment. It was only twenty feet, but each foot could have been a mile. The combination of the weight he was carrying and the distance he had come and the steepness of the embankment seemed insurmountable.

As his strength failed, he saw his dreams of wealth and power fading before his eyes. He slipped and fell, then struggled to his feet again. If only he had killed Isaac Bell. He began to realize that he was battling Bell more than the tie, more than the cutoff, more than the Southern Pacific.

The nightmare of Bell stopping him gave him the strength to rise. Inch by inch, foot by foot. Attack: Angriff. Beat: Battutaangriff. Lunge: Ausfall. Parry: Parade. Double feint: Doppelfinte. Twice he fell. Twice he got up. He reached to the top and staggered on. If he lived to be ninety, he would never forget that gut-wrenching climb.

The pounding of his heart was growing louder and louder, so loud that he eventually realized it couldn’t be his heart. A locomotive? He stopped dead in the middle of the tracks, stunned and dismayed. Not another patrol. Thunder? Lightning flickered. He was hearing the rumble of thunder. Cold rain began to fall. He had lost his hat. Rainwater streamed down his face.

The Wrecker laughed.

The rain would drench the patrols, chase them indoors. He laughed deliriously. Rain instead of snow. The rivers were rising, but the tracks would not blocked by snow. Osgood Hennessy must be delighted. So much for the experts predicting an early winter. The railroad president had given up on the meteorologists and had actually paid an Indian medicine man to predict the weather, and he told Hennessy that the snows would come late this year. Rain instead of snow meant more time to complete the cutoff.

The Wrecker steadied the tie on his shoulder, and spoke aloud.

“Never.”

A huge bolt of lightning lit everything stark white.

The tracks curved sharply, clinging to the narrow cut. Below was a dizzying view of a rampaging river at the bottom of a deep canyon. This was the spot. The Wrecker dropped the hemlock tie, loosened the ropes that held his tools, and pried up the spikes on both sides of an existing tie and set them carefully aside. Then he scrabbled at the crushed rock with the spike puller, loosening the sharp stones. He raked them out from under the tie and spread them carefully so they didn’t roll down the embankment.

When he had dug the ballast away, he used the puller as a lever to work the tie out from under the rails. Then he shoved his hemlock tie with the dynamite in it into the space and began scooping back the stone ballast, packing it under the tie. Last, he hammered in the eight spikes. With the tie securely under the rails and the ballast carefully spread, he attached the trigger, a nail wedged under the rail into a hole drilled in the tie.

The nail rested in the wood an inch above a fulminate-mercury detonator. He had calculated carefully, driving a hundred nails to measure the force, so that a patrol walking the ties or a handcar rolling on the rails would not press the nail deeply enough to detonate the explosive. Only the full weight of a locomotive could trigger the detonator.

One last brutal task remained. He tied his tools to the crosstie he had removed, tipped it onto his shoulder, and rose on shaking legs. He staggered a quarter mile from the trap he had laid and heaved tie and tools down the cliff where no patrol could see it.

He was reeling with exhaustion, but his heart set with icy resolve.

He had crippled the cutoff with dynamite, collision, and fire.

He had shaken the mighty Southern Pacific by derailing the Coast Line Limited.

So what if Bell had twisted his New York attack to Hennessy’s advantage?

The Wrecker raised his face to the storming sky and let the rain cleanse him. Thunder pealed.

“It is mine!” he roared back. “Tonight I earned it.”

He would win this final round.

Not one man on the work train would survive to finish Tunnel 13.

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