Train man 1999, p.38
Train Man (1999), page 38
“I told you there was history.”
“I’m curious, but if you don’t—”
“No, I want to tell you. Eleven years ago, I had an affair with another agent. He was pretty senior, and he was also married. The present director was the AD over the Inspection Division then, and he found out. He held off the Office of Professional Responsibility in return for my helping him help the previous director to force my lover into retirement.”
“Ah,” Hush said. “And after you did that, you got to do it some more.”
“That was the price of my not taking a hit for my part in the affair. After I had a chance to work with you, I went back to Heinrich and told him I didn’t want to go through with it,” she said. “He reminded me that I had been doing this for a long time, and I could always stop.”
“But if you did, he’d expose you to OPR.”
“He would indeed. That’s also when he first dangled the possibility of promotion. He said the director had the right to appoint his own SES people. That they’d tried to send you polite messages that it was time to go, but you weren’t listening. That this administration was really interested in promoting women.”
Hush found himself nodding.
“I’m ashamed to say that I went for it. Not that it took all that much. Like I said, I enjoyed being an insider. But you didn’t deserve what I did.”
“What exactly did you do, Carolyn?”
She sighed. “Agreed with Carswell. About the bridges being the work of a group and not an individual. That put you out on point with no support at headquarters. That also gave the director the fig leaf he needed. Given the internal consensus, he could legitimately cave to pressure from downtown and remove you.”
He nodded again. He wondered what he might have done in her situation. “The games we play,” he murmured. He looked at his watch.
She got out of the tub and began to towel off. He watched with pleasure: She was a sight to see. She saw him watching and smiled. “Don’t tell me,” she said.
“Well,” he began, peering down into the water, but then the phone rang. He reluctantly got out of the tub and walked, dripping, to the bathroom door, from which he could reach the phone. It was Powers.
“I’m inbound to Vicksburg,” Powers said. “ETA about forty minutes. We need to meet.”
“We’re at a B and B called The Corners, but we don’t have wheels,” Hush said. “Your call.”
“They have a bar?”
“Don’t think so. It’s a B and B. But Lang brought some scotch.”
“So she’s good for something,” Powers said. Hush put his hand over the mouthpiece and told Carolyn what Powers had just said. She laughed and resumed drying off.
“Okay,” Hush said. “We’re in the second building, second floor.”
“What’d he say?” she asked after he hung up the phone.
“He said we have forty minutes,” he said, reaching for her towel.
At 8:00 P.M., the train was still shut down on the siding. Colonel Mehle had slept for the last two hours, and everyone in the detachment, from Matthews down to the lowest private in the guard force, had made goddamn sure that none of them woke him. Matthews finally went into the bunk room to check on him. Mehle, who had just awakened, looked at his watch, asked for the report on the passing trains. Matthews and the warrants had constructed a profile that showed with some exception the frequency settling at one train every ten minutes, with an even division between east-and westbound traffic. The passing speed appeared to be about twenty miles per hour: the eastbound trains slowing as they came into the Meridian junction, and the westbound trains gaining speed as they left it.
Mehle and Matthews studied the route map for the segments between Meridian and Vicksburg. From Meridian to Jackson was about eighty miles. From Jackson to Vicksburg, it was an additional thirty-five. Under normal circumstances, they could have been at the bridge in about two and half hours, allowing for a slowdown at the Jackson junction. Mehle asked about the temperature readings on the special tank cars, and he wasn’t pleased with the answer. The temps had not come down now that it was dark. Matthews finally mustered courage to ask the colonel what he intended to do, but Mehle did not answer. He asked for some fresh coffee and went back to studying the route maps.
Matthews walked forward to have a little chat with the two Texans, who, he had discovered, were Army reservists. They were a phlegmatic pair, much given to western mannerisms and a natural circumspection. The older of the two, Taggart, had been a river tug skipper with the Corps of Engineers Southwestern Division before leaving active duty and switching over to railroading with the Southern Pacific. That was before all the big mergers, and now he worked for the Union Pacific. The other one, Jenks, had spent a long hitch in the Army as a tank mechanic in the Armor. Once out, he had worked his way up with the Burlington Northern Santa Fe to line engineer. For this trip, Taggart was the driver, who, in the absence of a conductor, was technically responsible for the operation of the train. Jenks was aboard as the engineer, responsible for the operation of the diesel locomotives of the three-engine multiple unit, as the railroad men called it. After the previous night’s run, both were getting concerned about Mehle. Matthews speculated that the colonel planned to jump the switch.
Their relaxed attitude vanished. “No way, José, “Taggart said, with Jenks nodding agreement. Taggart slitted some chaw out the window of the front engine’s cab and then explained. “This is a main-line track we’re talkin’ about,” he said. “Single track. Don’t use dual tracks anymore, most places. Which means they got centralized traffic control, the whole point of which is to push as much traffic up and down the line as the line can safely hold.”
That made sense to Matthews, although he had seen occasional segments of dual track.
“Key “word there is safety, comprende? Someone local throws that switch up there and there’ll be hell’s bells ringing at the control center, not to mention some seriously hostile communications coming over that phone right there.”
“I understand,” Matthews said. “But what would happen if you moved the train out onto the line and just headed west?”
Taggart shook his head and spat again. “If we was real unlucky, we’d come around the first bend and run head-on into an eastbound. Just plain unlucky, we’d run up the ass of some westbound that was stopped for traffic ahead.”
Matthews nodded. He did not know what to tell them.
“That old boy contemplatin’ anything like that,” Taggart declared, “he better come up here and get himself a lesson on how to drive an MU, ‘cause J-Bird’n me, we gonna be long gone. We gonna go get ourselves a video camera, follow your sorry asses up the line, and make us some money on that tape. You follow?”
Without being openly disloyal to the colonel, Matthews tried to convey that he felt the same way about the proposition; then he left the engine cab with as much dignity as he could muster. As he trudged back past the sentries, he wondered what he would do if the colonel attempted such a stunt. Order the MPs off the train and refuse to go along? What would the troops do? Would they understand what was happening? Then he remembered the colonel was packing a side arm. He touched his own hip and realized he’d left his holster rig on his bunk. Maybe being the only guy on the train without a weapon wasn’t such a good idea just now. And then he realized that the two warrants weren’t armed, either.
It was just after 9:00 P.M. when Keeler rounded the bend upstream of the Kansas City Southern Railroad bridge over the Big Black. For most of the run, he had had only fitful moonlight by which to navigate along the river. He thought that river was too grand a word for the Big Black: Big black ditch was more like it. So far, the river had been only about thirty feet across, with high, sloping muddy banks littered with snags and the exposed roots of trees. It was obvious that the river occasionally justified its name, based on the deep banks, but now it was not very deep and not very wide. He’d made good time coming down from the campground until he’d run the boat smack aground on a sandbar within distant sight of the I-20 highway bridge. He’d been going just fast enough that the boat slid entirely out of the water, and he only was barely able to tip up the outboard, shut it off before the prop grounded in the hard-packed sand, and keep himself upright at the same time. The sandbar rose nearly a foot out of the water. He had wondered how the hell he missed it.
It had taken him fifteen minutes of grunting effort to refloat the boat, interrupted by the sight of flashing blue lights up on the interstate highway bridge a third of a mile away. He froze when he saw the lights, watching to see if there were police up on the bridge, but then the lights had disappeared to the right of his line of sight. Once he had the boat refloated, he’d let it drift down toward the bridge with the engine off, just in case there were watchers. He didn’t think that anyone up on the flat highway bridge would be able to see much in the darkness below with all those headlights flashing by, but he had not wanted to take unnecessary chances. After that, he had slowed it down on his run south, which had saved him when he ran over a submerged tree about a mile below the highway bridge.
With the railroad bridge in sight, he killed the engine and let the boat coast quietly toward a clump of willows on the western bank near the top of a dogleg turn. He studied the trestle. It was a single-track affair, with solid steel sides crossing flat on large concrete pylons about fifty feet over the river. The west bank came down in a steep angle to the river, while the eastern bank stretched back two hundred yards in a gentle rise to the railroad grade. The banks of the river around the bridge appeared to be covered in a solid dark mass of greenery, which he finally recognized as the notorious kudzu plant. There appeared to be some big white rocks in the river under or just below the bridge, and there was a white patch of concrete indicating a parking and fishing area downstream of the bridge on the west bank.
He landed the boat about two hundred yards upstream of the bridge, its stubby bow thumping into the mud as willow branches squeaked down its metal sides. As he watched, a train came out of the east, going much faster than he had hoped they would be going tonight. It chased its headlight out onto the bridge and sundered the night with the roar of its locomotives. The clatter of the cars echoed along the banks of the river, drowning out all the night sounds until the train had passed. He got out of the boat, his boots squishing into stinking mud, and pulled it up on the bank. He walked out from under the branches and hunkered down to scout that fishing area under the western abutment. He wanted to make sure there were no late-night catfish hunters out there, or sex-crazed teenagers parking in the shadows, for that matter.
A whine of mosquitoes in his ears had him quickly fumbling for his cigarettes. He turned away from the bridge, bent over, cupped his hands, and fired one up. Then he squatted down at the margins of the bank, checked to make sure there wasn’t a dozing cottonmouth within striking range, and studied the trestle again in the dim moonlight. He exhaled a large cloud of fragrant smoke into the air around his head, grateful for the surge of nicotine that was helping to keep his eyes open. He knew he was very tired, and he had been hard-pressed to stay awake for the last few miles of his river trip. Underneath his weariness, though, he felt a strong current of elemental readiness, of final anticipation. This one was probably going to be the last one he could get Probably, hell. They knew who he was, and the Mississippi night was humming with cops. He knew what was waiting for him at the Vicksburg bridge, but he was counting on his unorthodox approach to get him physically out onto the bridge. After that, he’d have to play it by ear. You don’t have to drop it to wreck it, he kept telling himself. But you do have to get there.
A white light flared to the east, preceded by the long dissonance of a diesel whistle, its tone rising in obedience to Doppler’s principle. He checked his watch. Five minutes since the eastbound train had gone through, which meant there must be a siding east of here. He knew that was pretty much standard track layout for bridges, so that a train could be shunted off the main line to allow repair equipment to get to the bridge in case of a problem. This train was moving much slower. That was good. Probably still getting up to speed from the siding. He’d be willing to bet that every siding between here and Jackson had a train parked on it, and ditto for the other side of the river.
Some night creature lunged through the carpet of kudzu up the bank and he cocked an ear to track it. But then the train was on the bridge and its noise overcame all of his situational awareness until it had passed. The huge diesels had been straining as they came into view, with pulsing plumes of hot exhaust just visible in the penumbra of the headlights. The train appeared to be going only about twenty miles per hour, and the red-lighted windows of the control cabin gave the lead engine a malevolent aspect, as if it were some powerful beast, intent on prey. He took advantage of that big headlight to scan the upper works of the bridge for security forces, but there was no one visible. He would have to go check for cops guarding any crossings nearby, and then he needed to get up to grade level to examine the tracks. The trestle was perfect for what he had to do; the problem was going to be the train’s speed. He was going to need one that was just creeping. As the long line of boxcars clicked and clacked across the river, he stubbed out his cigarette, checked to make sure the boat was secure, and then began a careful climb through the kudzu to the trestle abutments.
They were both dressed for field work when Powers came up the steps in the semidarkness. Hush had turned on the porch lights on Carolyn’s side to attract the bugs, but he had left them off on his side to keep from being too visible from the street below. Another train was rumbling by through the trees down the hill, its whistle blaring away and its headlight silhouetting the trees. Powers arrived bearing a bag of grease burgers. Conversation was impossible with all the train noise, so they pitched into their takeout until the train and its noisy whistle went farther down the tracks.
“How’s the leg?” Powers asked. He was in uniform, with an enormous side arm bobbling on his hip. He accepted a small inch of scotch in his coffee.
“Wishing Keeler hadn’t done that,” Hush said. “Any word?”
“As a matter of fact, there is,” Powers said, crumpling up the hamburger bag. “We think, anyway. A county mountie reported a van with a boat trailer stuck back in the woods on some campground west of Jackson. It has access to the Big Black River. About twenty miles east of here.”
“And?”
“Well, the way the Mississippi state guys tell it, some old geezer in a van pulling a boat shows up at the campground and asks if he could have a spot for the night. The lady signs him up, he pays cash money, and then he asks how to get down to the Big Black from the campground.”
“Where was this?”
“Place called the Askew Landing Campground; it’s just north of Interstate Twenty. The campground lady thought it was a little peculiar, him wanting to drive back into the woods to get to the river that late in the day. But fishermen, you know? So anyhow, an hour or so later, a deputy comes around, checking for out-of-state vehicles. This is a pretty well-run place, so the lady mentions the guy. Seems they thought there was something not quite right with him. How he looked. That was enough for the deputy.”
“He went to see.”
“Right Found the van and trailer at a put-in, but no boat. Missouri plates on the vehicles. He calls them in. When the inquiry comes in over the Missouri computer net, our center picks it up because it’s a Mississippi inquiry, and we’d coded any tag queries coming from Mississippi for intercept. Seems the van and the trailer are registered to the farmer who rented one Morgan Keeler his cabin. Our guys call the farmer, but he knows squat about any van or boat trailer.”
“This has to be Keeler,” Carolyn said.
“Doesn’t have to be, but I’d be willing to make that assumption. And now he’s loose on the Big Black, which comes down out of middle Mississippi and eventually joins the big river, down below Vicksburg. It’s a feasible route to the bridge. Guy just won’t let go, will he?”
“You didn’t see those pictures,” Carolyn said, and Powers nodded over his coffee.
“He’s got something with him, too, it looks like,” Powers said. “They found the van’s spare tire out on the ground, dismounted off its hub. Like he’d had something stuffed in there. The tire’s on its way to the local state lab for a residue check.”
“Or he’s running to New Orleans,” Hush said.
Powers shook his head. “Why drive to within twenty miles of Vicksburg if you’re running for the Big Easy? Besides, you’re talking more’n two hundred miles downriver to New Orleans. No, I think he’s gonna try us on here.”
“So what happens next?” Carolyn asked.
“We’ve alerted the security people in and around the bridge, especially the Coast Guard and state marine safety patrols out on the river. The Navy has set up a coastal surveillance radar on the town-side bluff to look down on the river. The Guard and the local cops are all on high alert, and no vehicles are being allowed anywhere near that bridge, from either side. I guess now we all just wait.”
“And how much of this has leaked back out to the Bureau, or to Washington?” Hush asked.
“Well, the Jackson people know something’s up,” Powers said. “But funny you should ask.” He pulled out a Xerox copy of a Teletype from his jacket pocket and handed it to Hush, who unfolded it as if it were contagious. The message was from Herlihy in St. Louis to the deputy director in Washington, demanding to know the whereabouts and official status of Senior Agent Carolyn Lane. Hush handed it to Carolyn, who grimaced.
“It’s showing today’s date-time group,” Hush said. “Looks like Himself came in and read his mail after all.”
“Damn,” Carolyn said as she crumpled up the message. “Okay, but he still has a problem—what to tell Washington on a Sunday night.”
