Clive Cussler: The Chase

“If he gets across on the car ferry before we can stop him…” His voice trailed off.

Lofgren saw the apprehension in Bell’s eyes. “Don’t worry, Isaac,” he said confidently. “Cromwell can’t be more than ten miles up the track ahead of us. We’ll catch him.”

For a long moment, Bell said nothing. Then he slowly reached in a breast pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. Slowly, he unfolded it and handed it to Lofgren.

The engineer studied and then spoke without looking up. “It looks like a list of names.”

“It is.”

“Names of who?”

Bell dropped his voice until it was barely audible above the clangor of the charging locomotive. “The men, women, and children Cromwell murdered. I’ve been carrying it since I was put in charge of chasing him down.”

Lofgren’s eyes lifted and gazed through the front window of the track ahead. “The others should see this.”

Bell nodded. “I think now is an appropriate time.”

THREE HOURS LATER, with Lofgren back on the throttle, Adeline began to slow as she came into Missoula. He brought the locomotive to a halt fifty feet before a switch stand. Shea jumped from the cab, ran up the track, and switched the rails to those of the spur leading to Flathead Lake. He ignored the switchman, who came running out of a shack.

“Here, what are you doing?” demanded the switchman, who was bundled up against a cold wind.

“No time to explain,” said Shea as he waved to Lofgren, signaling that it was safe to roll onto the spur from the main track. He looked at the switchman as Adeline slowly rolled past and said, “Did another train pass onto the spur in the last hour?”

The switchman nodded. “They switched onto the spur without permission either.”

“How long ago?” Shea demanded.

“About twenty minutes.”

Without replying, Shea ran after Adeline and pulled himself up into the cabin. “According to the switchman,” he reported, “Cromwell’s train passed onto the spur twenty minutes ago.”

“Eighty miles to make up twenty minutes,” Jongewaard said thoughtfully. “It will be a near thing.” He pulled open the throttle to the last notch and, five minutes after leaving the junction, he had Adeline pounding over the rails at eighty-five miles an hour.

Flathead Lake came into view as they ran up the eastern shore. The largest freshwater lake in the western United States, it was twenty-eight miles long, sixteen miles wide, and covered one hundred eighty-eight square miles, with an average depth of one hundred sixty-four feet.

They were in the homestretch now of a long and grueling chase. Lofgren sat in the fireman’s seat and helped Jongewaard survey the track ahead. Bell, Shea, and Long formed a scoop brigade to feed the firebox. Not having leather gloves like the firemen, Bell wrapped his hands with rags the engineers used to wipe oil. The protection helped, but blisters were beginning to rise on his palms from the long hours of shoveling coal.

They soon reached a speed higher than the spur tracks were ever built to endure from a speeding train. There was no slowdown over bridges and trestles. Curves were taken on the outer edge. One double-reverse turn they whipped around in a violent arc rattled the bolts in the tender. Luckily, the tracks then became as straight as the crow flew. Jongewaard held the eighty-five-mile-an-hour pace for the next forty miles.

“Eureka!” Lofgren suddenly yelled, vigorously pointing ahead.

Everyone leaned from the cab, the icy wind bringing tears to their eyes. But there it was, four, maybe five, miles directly ahead, a faint puff of smoke.

MARGARET LOUNGED ON A SETTEE, WEARING AN embroidered silk robe, and stared at the champagne bubbles rising in her saucer-shaped coupe glass. “I wonder if it’s true,” she said softly.

Cromwell looked at her. “What’s true?”

“That this glass was modeled from the breast of Marie Antoinette.”

Cromwell laughed. “There is an element of truth in the legend, yes.”

Then Margaret gazed out the window Cromwell had raised in the back of the car—it was recessed into the rear wall and was inconspicuous when closed. The tracks that flashed under the wheels seemed to be stretching to infinity. She could see that they were traveling through a valley surrounded by forested mountains.

“Where are we?”

“The Flathead Valley in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.”

“How much farther to the border?”

“Another thirty minutes to the ferry landing at Flathead Lake,” said Cromwell, opening their second bottle of champagne for the day. “Half an hour to cross over onto the Great Northern tracks and we’ll be in Canada by sunset.”

She held up her glass. “To you, brother, and a brilliant flight from San Francisco. May our new endeavor be as successful as the last.”

Cromwell smiled smugly. “I’ll drink to that.”

AHEAD, in the cab of the locomotive, Abner was pressing the crew he had abducted at gunpoint from a small café beside the railyard in Brigham City, Utah: Leigh Hunt, a curly-red-haired engineer, and his fireman, Bob Carr, a husky individual who had worked as a brakeman before becoming a fireman, a step he hoped would eventually lead to his becoming an engineer. They had just come off a run and were having a cup of coffee before heading home when Abner held his gun to their heads and forced them into the cab of the engine pulling Cromwell’s fancy freight car.

As was the earlier crew, Wilbanks and Hall were thrown from the engine in the middle of nowhere at the same time Abner cut the telegraph wires.

Abner sat on the roof of the tender above the cab so he could prod Hunt and Carr to keep the Pacific locomotive hurtling over the rails to Flathead Lake. The black swirling clouds over the Rocky Mountains to the east caught his attention.

“Looks like a storm brewing,” he shouted to Carr.

“A chinook, by the look of it,” Carr yelled back over his shoulder as he scooped coal into the firebox.

“What’s a chinook?” asked Abner.

“It’s a windstorm that roars down out of the Rockies. Temperatures can drop as much as forty degrees in an hour and winds can blow over a hundred miles an hour, enough to blow railcars off the tracks.”

“How long before it strikes here?”

“Maybe an hour,” replied Carr. “About the time we’ll reach the train ferry dock at Woods Bay. Once we arrive, you’ll have to sit out the storm. The ferry won’t sail during a chinook.”

“Why not?” Abner demanded.

“With hundred-mile-an-hour winds, the lake turns into a frenzy. The wind whips the water into waves as high as twenty feet. The train ferry wasn’t built for rough water. No way the crew will take it out on the lake during a chinook.”

“We telegraphed ahead to have the ferry waiting for our arrival,” said Abner. “We’re going across, wind or no wind.”

BACK IN Cromwell’s rolling palace, Margaret had drifted into a light sleep from the champagne while her brother sat and relaxed with a newspaper he’d picked up when Abner abducted the train crew at Brigham City. Most of the news was about the San Francisco earthquake. He read that the fires had finally been put out and wondered if his mansion on Nob Hill and the bank building had survived.

He looked up, hearing a strange sound different from the clack of the steel wheels on steel rails. It came faint and far off. He stiffened as he recognized it as a train whistle. Cromwell was stunned, knowing now for certain that he was being pursued.

“Bell!” he exploded in anger.

Startled at his loud voice, Margaret sat up awake. “What are you shouting about?”

“Bell!” snapped Cromwell. “He’s chased us from San Francisco.”