Train man 1999, p.2
Train Man (1999), page 2
Ignoring the black emptiness beneath his feet, he set the two coils of wire down, being careful not to let them touch each other. He then opened the second can and set the north-side powder stack’s trigger, once again discarding the dowel and the second can into the river. When he was finished, he took one of the bell-wire coils from the south-side stack and connected it to one of the wires coming from the blasting cap in the north-side stack. He reached into another vest pocket and removed what looked like a regular-size plastic flashlight, except that its light lens and back cap had been removed. There was a single wire sticking out from either end of the flashlight case. He placed the flashlight on top of the stack. He removed a small plastic box the size of a cigarette pack from his vest.
He knelt down and taped the truncated flashlight on top of the stack with some friction tape. He frowned as he realized that the plastic bags of black powder had already begun to accumulate dew, causing the tape to slip. He then connected the second wire from the blasting cap to the single wire coming out of one end of the flashlight case. He grasped the small plastic box in his left hand and pulled a thin springy wire out of the box to a length of six inches letting it hang down out of his hand. He pressed a button on the face of the box. A half-inch-wide lighted window appeared, much like the dial on an electronic watch. Digital lettering in the dial read PRESS ONCE FOR TEST. He pressed the button again. The box emitted a tiny beep. The lettering now read PRESS TWICE FOR SET. Still holding the light in his teeth, he attached the remaining wire from the flashlight case to a terminal on the end of the plastic box, then attached the box to the steel saddle mounting right next to the stack of powder bags. A magnet on the box case held it securely and also established a ground. He then connected the end of the second wire from the south-side stack to the second terminal on the box and taped the bare connections.
He leaned back and removed the flashlight from his teeth, exhaling forcefully, suddenly aware that he had been holding his breath. He looked at his watch again. Twenty minutes until train time. Now for the Detacord. He retrieved the backpack and extracted a coil of what looked like television coaxial cable, except that it was denser than coax and felt more like solidified putty. He taped off one end of the Detacord to a section of the truss and then walked west down the catwalk toward the center of the next inboard span, unreeling the cable and pressing it flat against the wood planks of the catwalk until he had sixty feet straightened out on the catwalk. Then he went back to the start point and pulled it back in toward him. When he had the end in his hands, he got down on his hands and knees and began stuffing the cable into a crack between the top of the massive side I beam and the steel frame of the deck, pushing it up and behind the nest of utility cables already there. When it was all in place, he taped off the far end and went back to the explosives stack. He inserted the end into the powder stack, slipping it between the black powder bags until he felt the end physically touch the quarter stick. Then he stood up.
Reflexively, he looked over his shoulder to the west, but there was still only the darkness, broken by a faint halo of lights on another distant signal tower. He thought about going up to the track bed and placing his ear against a steel rail to see if he could really hear a train coming from a long way off, then decided against it. He stretched, his knees cracking in the silence. The gentle breeze cooled the perspiration on his face. He took a deep breath; up here, the bridge smelled of old steel, rust, diesel engine grease, and sunbaked creosote. He almost thought he could hear the bridge creaking in the darkness as the river tugged relentlessly at its concrete feet.
He went back down to the truss pins, closed his eyes, and reviewed the connections in his mind. The circuit was correct. The placement was correct. Another image slid into his mind, that of a dismembered and burned-out car, mangled almost beyond recognition, surrounded by several yellow body sheets around it covering … He swallowed hard, opened his eyes quickly, and took another deep breath.
That’s why you’re here, he told himself. That’s what this is all about. So do it. Do it now.
He leaned into the pin-mounting cavity, felt for the box, and pressed the button. Once. Beep. Twice. Beep. The little box emitted three beeps in quick succession, and the words RECEIVER SET appeared in the window. He nodded, picked up the empty backpack, put the tape and the red penlight into it, and slipped it over his shoulders. Moving quickly, he retraced his climb back down the side of the pier tower to the boat. The motor was still idling quietly, burbling oily two-stroke smoke at the back of the boat. He looked over in the direction of where the fish camp should be, but all was still darkness there.
He dropped into the boat, settled himself on the seat, and advanced the throttle. When the tension came off the rope, he jerked the grapnel hook off the iron rung of the ladder. The boat’s head fell off immediately in the current, and he was swept diagonally across the center channel, moving out from under the bridge as the current carried him downriver. He pointed the boat directly back upstream and gave it more power, turning left slightly to hug the west bank again, keeping away from the darkened trailers three hundred yards across the river. A minute later, he passed back beneath the bridge and then headed upstream, opening the distance from the bridge slowly as the small motor fought the powerful current. The banks on either side remained completely dark except for the glow of streetlights up in the village of Thebes on the right-hand bluffs.
Once he had the boat steadied on course, he extracted the transmitter box from his inside vest pocket. It was warm in his hands. He pulled a spring-wire antenna out of its side and then held the box in one hand as he continued to steer the little boat upriver. He felt for the slide button on its face and pushed the slide up until it hit a detent. A tiny red light came on. He looked at his watch and then cut back out into the center of the river, keeping one eye on the bridge behind him.
The train came out of the western darkness when he had gone about a third of a mile upstream from the bridge. At first, he was able to see only the loom of its wobbling approach light in the mist above the high banks, then the main headlight as the big diesels rumbled into view, a three-pack multiple unit strung together. The lead engine appeared to be pursuing the long yellow beam of its main headlight as a powerful drumming noise slowly overcame all the river noises.
He throttled down to idle and let the boat take its own head while he twisted around on the seat, holding the transmitter box now in both hands. His mouth was dry and his heart was beating rapidly again. Twelve years he’d been planning for this night. Twelve lonely, painful years, made bearable only by his plan for revenge. He watched the train come pounding out onto the bridge, past the first pier, the second, the third, the steel latticework flaring into sharp relief as the engine set passed each tower. The train seemed to slow down the farther it went out onto the bridge, but he knew that was just an optical illusion. The three big engines passed the fourth, main channel pier on the Missouri side and drove out onto the center span.
Still he waited. The engines thundered powerfully across the center span, the clicking and clacking noise of the individual cars audible now above the rumble of the diesels. The engine set passed through the first channel pier tower on the Illinois side, and then the next pier. He mentally counted one more second and then pushed the slide button on the transmitter all the way up against its spring tension.
A bright red glare appeared below the track level on the western channel pier tower, followed by two nearly simultaneous and shockingly powerful thumps. A flash of what looked like yellow-red lightning shot back toward the Missouri side underneath the bridge deck, momentarily transfixing the underside of the train in a photoflash. For a microsecond, he could even make out some of the letters on the sides of the boxcars. Then, almost in slow motion, the western end of the center span sagged and collapsed into the river with a great roaring crash. The eastern end remained attached for several seconds before it, too, pulled away from its tower and crashed down under the weight of the train. The boxcars and flatcars that were still west of the center spilled off the edge of the span into the river in neat succession, one after another, like huge steel lemmings, never faltering in their speed, each succeeding car pulled over the edge by the one in front. He stared as the cars thundered down off the bridge into the maelstrom below, bouncing first off the canted remains of the center span and then disappearing into the thrashing black water. Some of the tank cars came boiling back up on the surface for an instant before rolling over and disappearing again, carried off into the darkness by the swift current.
After thirty seconds, a pile of wreckage began to emerge from the river. It took almost another minute for the remainder of the train to make the plunge, with the last cars smashing directly onto the pile, then slipping and banging sideways into the water on either side, some remaining intact while others ruptured and spilled their contents out into the black river. Three or four cars from the east span had also gone into the river, but by now the front end of the train had disappeared around a curve on the east bank side. A vast cloud of smoke and mist was enveloping what was left of the bridge as echoes of the crash reverberated off the high banks.
He watched in awe as the destruction piled up, the booming and crashing of the cars getting louder and louder, until he realized that he had been drifting rapidly back toward the unfolding calamity. He hit the throttle then, going wide open to avoid being swept down into the steaming pile of wreckage. A silvery tank car surfaced right behind him in a great boiling uproar like some enraged steel hippo, its relief valves noisily venting acrid chemical vapors until it rolled over and submerged again into the roiling water.
He jerked the boat’s head around and accelerated back upriver into the darkness, subconsciously aware that there were lights coming on now in the campers and trailers down at the fish camp. The noise of the wreck still seemed to be echoing along the high bluffs on the Illinois side, so he wasn’t worried about his engine noise now, only about getting away. There was a sustained roaring noise behind him as another tank car’s pressure-relief valve let go, assaulting the night air with a howl of venting product.
After rounding the first bend upstream, he could see all the way upriver to the old Cape Girardeau highway bridge six miles upstream, backlit by the lights of the barge port. He kept the boat going wide open, her bow aimed into the center of the channel. Now that he was around the bend, the only sound he could hear was the night wind whistling in his ears above the rattling buzz of the outboard. He glanced back over his shoulder, where an ominous glow was beginning to show through the tangled trees along the bend.
That’s one, he thought, squinting against the wind in his face. He had expected to feel some exhilaration, some sense of victory, but he felt nothing at all. He remained dead inside, all of his emotions ground to powder long ago. He had achieved his first objective, nothing more, nothing less. After twelve years, the planning was over. He was now simply a force of nature. One down, he thought. Five to go.
2
MAJ. TOM MATTHEWS scanned the inside of the refrigerator, looking for something besides a cold beer. He was the Anniston Army Weapons Depot’s command duty officer, which meant he had to refrain from his usual evening libation. He spied one can of Coke at the back and was reaching for it when the phone rang. His wife answered it in the other room and called him. She said it was Depot Operations. He looked at his watch. Dinnertime, he thought. Of course. He picked up on the kitchen phone.
“CDO,” he said.
“Major, this is base ops. We’ve got a weird one.”
“Is there any other kind, Sergeant?” Matthews said. “So—speak.”
“We got an emergency call from an Air Force C-one thirty. Pilot says they got smoke in the cockpit, possible electrical fire on board. They’re calling for clearance to make an emergency divert to our field.”
“The big strip has been closed for years, Sergeant,” Matthews said, glancing out the window. It was almost sundown. “The only operational part is the helipad. There aren’t any landing lights outside of the pad. I don’t think you can even see the lines anymore.”
“Uh, sir? This guy is kind of excited. He isn’t really asking for permission. Said they’re inbound, ETA about eight minutes.”
“Holy shit!” Matthews said, straightening up. “All right: Call the post fire department; tell them roll. On the double! I’ll go directly to the airfield. And alert the med response team.”
“Yes, sir!”
Matthews hung up and ran to get the duty truck’s keys, his portable radio, and his wallet. A minute later, he was wheeling out of the post housing area in the Army pickup truck assigned to the depot’s duty officer. He flipped on the radio and checked in with operations, which confirmed that the C-130 had declared an in-flight emergency and was headed directly into the Anniston field on a straight-in approach from the east. The base fire trucks were on their way to the landing strip. The chief was requesting instructions as to where to position.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Matthews said, running a stop sign and turning left onto the road that led back into the interior of the depot. “Which way is the plane coming in?”
“They say they’re east of here, Major. They report they have our TACAN locked up and will come straight in.” The sergeant was obviously getting excited.
Matthews turned onto the perimeter road that led past the weapons storage areas and accelerated. He was trying to remember how long the abandoned strip was. He was pretty sure it was oriented east-west, with the helipad area at the east end.
“Tell them to position the trucks down toward the western end of the field. If they crash, that’s where the wreckage will end up. You notified the CO?”
“We’ve paged him, but we haven’t had a callback yet.”
Matthews acknowledged as he made another turn, this time onto a gravel road that ran along the north security perimeter of the weapons storage areas. He accelerated, fishtailing the truck a little. High double barbed-wire fences stretched into the forest on his left, crowned with coils of razor wire that glinted in his headlights. Except for the helipad, the Anniston landing strip had no lights, no tower, no nothing, he thought. The last time he’d been out here, the concrete had been growing weeds. He called operations again. “Sergeant, page the CO again. And call these guys; make sure they know this is an abandoned field. As in no facilities and weeds on the runway.”
“Roger, sir.”
He put the radio down and pushed the truck up to fifty. A C-130 was a turboprop job, so they ought not to need miles and miles of concrete to get it down and stopped, even if they were Air Force. But any successful landing depended on the plane’s control systems working. Even a minor electrical fire could compromise everything. There was dust hanging above the road ahead, caused by the fire trucks, he hoped. Good. Then the sergeant came back to him.
“Major, pilot says they can’t divert anywhere else; it has to be a military field, and things are turning to shit up there. He’s estimating four minutes to touchdown, and he’s requesting a full security perimeter on the field, and a decon team.”
Matthews took his foot off the accelerator. “A decon team? What the hell’s with that?”
“Sir, don’t know. Guy’s not talking right now. I kinda think they got their hands full, you know what I mean?”
Matthews acknowledged. He saw the final turn up ahead. The airfield was to the right, behind a wall of pine trees. The dust cloud from the fire trucks was heavier in his headlights. He slowed some more while he tried to figure out what to do. The Anniston Army Weapons Depot was a chemical weapons storage facility. A call for a decontamination team raised very specific implications, none of which were good.
“Okay,” he replied with diminishing confidence. “Call away the CERT. And then get on to Fort McClellan and get an MP detachment over here. Emergency deployment, both units. And keep paging Colonel Anderson.”
The sergeant acknowledged as Matthews made the final turn through a corridor of pines. The road opened onto a concrete apron area that surrounded a control tower whose doors and windows had been boarded up long ago. A single base fire department Suburban was caught in his headlights. He could see flashing emergency lights congregated down at the western end of the field as he drove up. He slammed on the brakes, grabbed his portable radio, and got out to talk to the fire chief, who was dressed out in full gear and holding a portable radio in gloved hands.
“I’m Major Matthews, the CDO,” Matthews said. “They tell you what we got going here?”
“Just that we might have a possible plane crash,” the chief said. He was a civilian, heavyset, in his fifties, and looking worried. The word CHIEF was emblazoned in Day-Glo letters on his fire hat. “I’ve got one foam-capable unit and two pumpers down at the far end. I’ve called for two more pumpers from the county. Somebody better call the main gate so they can get in. Maybe escort ’em back here?”
“Right,” Matthews said. “I’ll take care of that. This is a C-one thirty. Medium-big transport. Can your people deal with a big plane crash?”
“No, sir,” the chief said bluntly. “But we’re all they’re gonna have.”
Matthews nodded and scanned the darkened eastern skies. There was no sign of the approaching plane. He called ops and told them about the additional firefighting units coming to the base. The dispatcher reported that the depot’s Chemical Emergency Response Team was on the way to the field and that McClellan had a dozen MP’s MOPPing up and on the way.
“MOPPing up?”
“Yes, sir. I told them we were deploying our CERT. I figured the guard force ought to be dressed out if the CERT was needed.”
Matthews swore to himself. He should have thought of that. The CERT was a specially configured detachment that came in to contain and decontaminate in the event of an accidental chemical weapons release. Of course the guards needed to have their chem suits and hoods with them. The sergeant was playing heads-up ball, and he told him so. He wondered what the hell was on this C-130.
