Clive Cussler - The Striker

Conductor Kux was not entirely displeased to imagine Bloom Jr. being relieved of his watch, cuff links, stickpin, and billfold. But from what he had seen of Bloom’s friend Isaac Bell, the robbery would likely turn into a bloody shoot-out, so he tried to dissuade them.

“If you’re fixing to rob my passengers, there’s only two of ’em, you damned fools. You stopped a special.”

“We ain’t robbing your passengers. We’re robbing your train.”

“Kenny?” asked Isaac Bell as the train started rolling again. “Do you know Thibodeau & Marzen in New York?”

“The brokers.”

“Right. What do you know about them?”

“I think Dad used them once or—”

The train jerked, and he spilled whiskey over his shirt. “Dammit to hell. I will fire that engineer.”

“He’s displayed a fine smooth hand up to now,” said Bell. “I wonder what’s got into him?”

Kenny Bloom dabbed his shirt with a napkin. “Overpaid son of a bitch has probably been drinking.” The train picked up speed.

“What do you know about Thibodeau & Marzen?” Bell asked again.

“Old-fashioned old codgers.”

“Are they honest?”

Kenny dabbed his shirt some more, then poured another glass. He gestured with the bottle. Bell shook his head.

“Are they honest?”

“Honest as the day is long. Frankly, I don’t know how they survive on Wall Street.”

Bell looked at their reflections in the night-blackened glass. Lights in a farmhouse raced by. Old and honest? Had Clay and his boss somehow tapped secretly into Thibodeau & Marzen’s private system?

“We’re making time at last,” said Kenny. “Running fast and hitting the curves hard. Maybe I won’t fire him after all.”

“What? Oh yes.”

The train was highballing through the night, although the rate of speed was not that apparent. Their car was coupled between a stateroom car, which rode directly behind the tender, and the diner car at the back of the train. Thus anchored, it did not sway much, while thick insulating felt between the paneling and the outer walls muffled wind and track noise. Bell was surprised, as they passed a small-town train depot, how fast its lights whipped by.

A sudden chatter broke the silence.

Kenny darted to the telegraph key. They had picked up a message by grasshopper telegraphy, the signal relayed to the speeding train from the telegraph wires that paralleled the tracks through an Edison-patented electrostatic induction system. Fluent since boyhood in the Morse alphabet, Kenny cocked his ear and wrote furiously, then carried what he had written to Bell, his expression grave. Bell, who had listened intently, knew why.

“For you,” said Kenny.

“I told the boys I’d be on your train.”

He read it, his brow furrowing.

“Looks bad,” said Kenny.

“Hellish,” said Isaac Bell.

REGRET TOWBOAT CAMILLA EXPLOSION. CAPTAIN DIED.

REGRET UNION HALL FIRE.

BODYGUARDS FRIED.

ENJOY YOUR RIDE.

TRIPLE PLAY.

“Enjoy your ride?’” asked Kenny Bloom. “What the hell kind of joke is that supposed to be?”

“A vicious joke,” said Bell, mourning Captain Jennings, murdered for helping the marchers, and Mike Flannery and Terry Fein, whom he had sent into action over their heads.

“And what does ‘triple play’ mean?”

The floor shook and the windows reverberated as the train thundered across an iron trestle bridge. “Where’s the conductor?”

“I don’t know. Back in the diner.”

“Are you sure?”

Bell strode quickly to the back of the car and threw open the door into the enclosed vestibule. The wheels were thundering on the track, and the wind was roaring past the canvas diaphragm. Bell opened the diner door and stepped into the car. It was swaying violently.

“Kux! Conductor Kux! Are you there?”

The cook stuck his head out of the kitchen. “We’re going mighty fast, Mr. Bell. In fact, we’re going faster than I’ve ever seen this train go.”

“Where’s Mr. Kux?”

“I haven’t see him since we stopped for water.”

Bell ran forward. Kenny was pouring a fresh drink. “We’re bouncing around like a yawl in a storm. What the hell is going on?”

“First thing I’m going to ask your engineer.” Bell pushed into the front vestibule, heading for the locomotive. The door to the stateroom car was bolted shut. It was a steel express car door. There was no budging it short of dynamite.

“Locked,” he told Kenny.

“Something’s nuts,” said Kenny Bloom. “We’re doing ninety miles an hour.”

The train hit a curve hard. Wheel flanges screeched on the rails.

“‘Triple play,’” said Isaac Bell, “means we’re next. He shanghaied our crew and tied down the throttle.”

“I’m stopping us!” Kenny lunged for the red handle of the emergency brake on the wall at the front of the car.

Bell beat him to it and blocked his hand. “If we slam on the air brakes at this speed we’ll derail her.”

“We’ve got to stop her. Feel that? She’s still accelerating.” Kenny, who had carried his glass with him, put it down. “Isaac, we’re heading for Pittsburgh at a hundred miles an hour.”

“How drunk are you?” Bell asked.

“I’m too scared to be drunk.”

“Good. Help me out the window.”

“Where you going?”

“Locomotive.”

Bell dropped the sash. A hundred-mile-an-hour wind blasted through the opening and sent everything not nailed down flying about the car in a tornado of cloth and paper. Bell tugged off his coat and thrust his head out the window. The rushing air hit him like a river in a flood. He wormed his torso out, sat on the sash, and attempted to stand. The wind nearly knocked him off the train.

“I’ll block,” yelled Kenny. He yanked down the next window and squirmed his bulky chest and belly out the opening. Bell tried again. With Kenny blocking the wind with his body, he managed to plant his feet on the windowsill. But when he stood up, it took all his strength to hold on. If he let go either hand to pull himself onto the roof of the car, he would be blown away. Kenny Bloom, hanging on for dear life, saw that and shouted, “Wait!” Then he struggled to stand on his windowsill to shield Bell’s upper body so he could reach for the roof.

“Don’t!” shouted Bell. “You’ll fall.”

“I was just as good an acrobat as you,” Kenny yelled back. “Almost.”

With a herculean effort that made his eyes roll into the back of his head, the rotund Bloom stood up. “Go!”

Isaac Bell wasted no time pulling himself onto the roof. Kenny had been a pretty good acrobat in the circus, but that was back when they were kids and since then he had lifted nothing heavier than a glass to build his strength. The wind was even stronger on the roof. Bell slithered flat on his belly to the front of the car, over the canvas-covered frame of the vestibules and onto the stateroom car, and crawled forward into a blizzard of smoke, steam, and hot cinders spewing from the engine. Reaching the front of the car at last, he found a six-foot space between its roof and the tender. Coal was heaped in the front of the tender. The back, the steel water tank, was flat, and lower than the roof of the stateroom.

The wind of their passage at one hundred miles per hour made it impossible to jump the space. Bell put his hands together and extended his arms, narrowing his body as if diving off a high board, and plunged. He cleared the back of the tender, and when his hands hit the steel tank, he tried to curl into a tight ball. He tumbled forward, skidded on the slick surface, and reached frantically for a handhold.

He found one wrapping the edge, dragged himself forward, dropped onto the coal pile, scrambled across it, and found himself peering into an empty locomotive cab lit by the roaring flames of the firebox that gleamed through a crack in the door. He climbed down a ladder on the front of the tender and jumped into the cab, a hot, dark labyrinth of levers, valves, gauges, and piping.