Брайан Гарфилд - The Last Bridge

“When we get that close,” Tyreen yelled in reply, “it’ll be too late to stop us.”

He saw a shadow move, and he wheeled. A great bulk loomed atop the coal tender — Saville. Tyreen’s tired face broke into a grin. Saville dropped down on the swaying platform. His face was black from whipping smoke. Tyreen said, “Did you find a gun?”

“No gun,” Saville said, catching his breath. “There was a caboose full of troops. I cut it loose. It’s rolling back down the grade now. I hope they didn’t have a radio in there. David, from up top you can see the tunnel. Maybe a mile, no more. How near ready are we?”

Tyreen said, “Hooker!”

Hooker grunted and kept working. An instant later he threw both arms up like a cowboy in a steer-tying rodeo contest. “Do I fuse it now, Colonel?”

Rapid calculations ran through Tyreen’s head. “Fuse it and stand by to light up. Theodore, get ready to jump.”

Khang tossed his shovel aside and stood behind Saville on the edge of the platform. Tyreen stood at the front of the cab, peering forward, waiting for the tunnel to appear. Hooker was lighting a cigarette, shielding his flame from the wind. The firebox roared. Tyreen said, “Full throttle, Lieutenant.”

“I’m on it,” said McKuen.

The bridge was about a hundred yards long; Tyreen had to time the fuse within that limit. He studied the pitch of the track rolling underneath; he watched the rails curve past monuments of rock and then, suddenly, the tunnel mouth came around the bend a quarter mile ahead.

Hooker said, “Now?”

“Hold it.”

Saville swung back into the cab. Tyreen socked Khang on the arm; Khang made his jump. He was still in the air when Tyreen shouted to McKuen, and McKuen wheeled around the steel wall and leaped away.

Saville stood fast, rocking with the sway of the engine, and Tyreen bellowed furiously at him, “Get the hell out of the way!”

With a half-sheepish grin the big man put the slabs of his hands on the rails and swung down. He waited a moment longer, and jumped.

The tunnel grew large and black. Machine gun snouts started to turn in sealed bunkers. Tyreen held his hand up. Hooker had his burning cigarette in his hand, six inches from the fuse.

The hot black engine brawled up the rails, and Tyreen saw machine gun muzzles turning slowly, uncertainly, following the engine. One hundred yards, eighty yards, and Tyreen roared, “ Now! ”

The cigarette stabbed against the cable; fuse sputtered. Hooker held the cigarette against the fuse, calmly insuring that the spark was full. Sixty yards, fifty.

Tyreen bent down to yell. “Never mind. Jump. Go!” He swiveled back onto the platform. Hooker made a racing start, plunged past him through the opening, and was gone. Tyreen had a last glimpse of the sizzling fuse. The fierce glare of the firebox half blinded him. He dropped both feet to the outside steps and launched himself from the engine.

The ground sped forward under him. It tripped him, rolled him down; he sprawled and flipped over and banged his hip and rib cage and right arm. Agony exploded down the whole side of his body. He pedaled his legs and got a toehold on the embankment and sprinted toward the scrub jungle ten yards away from the roadbed. The sound of guns was swallowed in the racket and roar of the train, but a lacing of machine gun bullets kicked dirt against his running legs. The submachine gun slung across his shoulders had cut his collar open, but that was a small hurt in his racked body. He made a fiat dive into the bush and slid along a gravel surface, butting a tree. He crabbed deeper into the brush. Bullets clipped through. He made a sharp turn and crawled swiftly on his belly, dragging his right arm.

Thicker jungle swallowed him, and he stopped with breath hot as a furnace lashing in and out of him. His face lay in the damp red earth; spittle began to pool by his mouth. Blood flowed down his neck. Through the roots he could see one little patch of track with car-trucks rolling over it. The last car came grinding past and then the sound changed, the hollow echoes of the train banging through the tunnel. He closed his eyes.

The steam engine emerged from the tunnel mouth at twenty-five miles an hour. A telephone warning from the far end of the tunnel had brought a squad of soldiers out of the guard tower, and a sergeant was struggling with a rusty siding switch when the engine appeared. On the far side of the bridge, a tank rumbled forward in the slow attempt to block the engine. The tiny figures of men ran about on the battlements of the south slope. For some unclear purpose the barrel of a mountain howitzer began to swivel. The sergeant failed to throw the switch in time to divert the engine. In a hiss of steam it passed the switch. The switch, thrown over, derailed the fifth boxcar, broke a coupling and sent the after-length of the train — twenty-eight freight cars and nine tankers — plunging free into the gorge. The coal tender jumped the tracks just short of the bridge and piled into the concrete bridge pier with a crash that shook the mountain. Its three-car train whiplashed against the base of the guard tower, tearing out a six-ton concrete wall. Two antiaircraft gun emplacements tumbled into the undercut hole. Thirty-seven railroad cars full of cargo caromed off the gorge walls like a handful of dropped marbles. The engine, with its rear trucks off the rails, lurched down the track into the exact center of the bridge span, where its tight-packed charge of ultra-high-explosive ignited. The sound of the TNT cap was lost in greater noise. The engine, unbalanced on the rails, began to tip over on its left side, and then the demolition charge went off.

It ripped through the length of the engine, blasting downward. Shrieking half-ton chunks of steel rocketed through the wrought-iron bridge as if it were papier-maché. The roar was deafening. There was a flash of white light. The blast ripped a forty-five foot section from the midsection of the span. A three-thousand-pound lance of steel flew across the chasm with the speed of a racing car and imbedded itself in the granite wall. A cloud of debris and smoke foamed high above the gorge. The explosion of the engine boiler sent metal plates four hundred feet in the air. The brass engine bell fell all the way to the Sang Chu river, gonging the full while.

Without arc support, the severed halves of the bridge bent away from their piers. Like a divided trapdoor, the bridge hinged at either end, collapsing with roaring snaps of breaking iron and concrete. The northern half broke loose quickly and fell eighty feet to a ledge of granite, where it broke apart and fell to the river in pieces. The remaining section sagged slowly on its pylons. Cracks developed in the concrete pier as if an earthquake had shaken the mountain. Like a rubber band stretched beyond its limit, the bridge broke away, carrying the entire concrete pier with it.

The bodies of soldiers fell through the gorge. The sergeant at the switch was flattened, dead, against the ground. Three men lay pinned under the smashed coal tender. A body lay in the mouth of the tunnel, and two wounded men crawled blindly back into the darkness. The twisted ends of rails jutted into space.

For a reason unknown to the wounded garrison commander, the mountain howitzer fired a single round into the sky.

Tyreen’s ears rang angrily long after the last explosive racket died on the far side of the mountain. He had seen ragged bits of iron and steel careering through the sky above the peak. He spoke with bleak tonelessness:

“It’s done.”

His neck bled slowly. He was bruised from head to foot. He made his way downhill through the altitude-stunted jungle, moving roughly parallel to the railroad tracks.