Okay, it might be more like thirty miles per hour, he decided, but didn’t voice this aloud. “We can do this,” he repeated. “It’s our best chance. We hop this train and get off a few miles down the line. They won’t have a clue where we are.”
Higgins glanced at his daughter, and then nodded with only the barest hint of reservation. Annie was a little more reticent with her assent, but Kismet was pleased and a little surprised at how quickly they accepted his crazy plan. He realized it was probably because they had no idea just how dangerous what they were about to do really was.
There wasn’t time to work out the finer points. They would have to run alongside the train, as fast as they could manage, pick out a good handhold as the cars passed by, grab on and pull themselves up. An Olympic sprinter, running all out, could easily reach twenty miles an hour and sustain that pace for a few hundred meters. None of them were in that kind of shape, but with adrenaline pumping, he didn’t doubt that they could come close, at least for a minute or so. The train would be moving at about five to ten miles an hour faster, so grabbing on would, in theory, be a little like reaching out from a standstill and snaring someone running by.
Higgins went first, with Annie only a few steps behind him. Kismet too started running along, giving the others a little bit of room. He paid scant attention to their progress, keeping his focus on the task at hand. Further complicating matters was the fact that in order to reach the train, they would have to dart up the sloping side of the rail bed at the last minute, effectively running right at the lumbering train as it moved by. A stumble or an error in judgment of even a few degrees, and they might very well be crushed to death or sliced in half beneath the clattering wheels.
He caught a glimpse of Higgins making his move. The old Gurkha found a previously untapped vein of energy and dashed up the rail bed to grasp the front edge of a flatcar as it rolled by. His grip was fierce enough that the train pulled him off his feet, and for a moment, he was dragged along, his boots bouncing off the gravel, but then with a superhuman heave, he hauled himself up onto the platform where he immediately rolled onto his belly and reached out with both hands to his daughter.
Annie made it look easy. Her lithe form and the vigor of her youth enabled her to almost match the pace of the train for a few seconds, long enough to catch her father’s hands. He lifted her onto the flatcar with the grace of a ballet dancer lifting a ballerina over his head, and then they were gone, whisked from Kismet’s line of sight as the train rolled on.
He quickened his pace, lowering his head as he broke into a full sprint along the base of the rail bed. A container car, with no easy handholds, passed him by, moving almost twice as fast as he. He kept running, biding his time. A second container car passed, and then another.
Not good.
He glanced over his shoulder, afraid that he might be running out of train, but positioned as he was, he just couldn’t tell. Then he saw his chance; a flatbed with some kind of vehicle or large machine was coming up next. As its front corner passed him, he charged up the gravel slope and reached out.
In that moment, the sheer lunacy of what he was doing hit him like a physical blow. He’d done some crazy things in his life, sometimes without any kind of safety net, but this time it felt different. Maybe it was because he was running, exerting himself to the physical limit at a time when he most needed his judgment to be pitch perfect. The exacting nature of what he was attempting filled him with uncertainty, a dread reminder of just how precise his timing would have to be, right at a moment when he most needed to be sure of himself. The thunderous passage of the train car right beside him didn’t help his focus any.
Then his outstretched hand felt something that wasn’t smooth unyielding metal. It was a heavy nylon web belt, one of the tension straps that held the flatbed’s cargo in place. He curled his fingers around it…
And was yanked off his feet.
For an instant, he panicked, struggling to gain his footing while at the same time trying to keep his legs from being swept under the car. In desperation, he flung his other hand up to grasp the strap, even as his feet started to drag and bounce along the gravel slope.
Damn it, he thought. Now I’m screwed.
He dared not let go, but how long could he endure the punishing assault of being dragged by the train. He had to pull himself up, but was he strong enough?
He flexed his biceps, pulling with all his might, but almost immediately, something like liquid fire began to burn in his muscles and he felt them start to fail. In desperation he kicked at the ground moving beneath his feet, trying to propel himself up, just a few inches…
It was enough. He pulled his torso up against the strap and felt the edge of the flatbed against his hips. The instantaneous respite from being dragged restored his confidence, and savoring his success for just a moment, he began working his hands up the length of the strap until he could haul himself the rest of the way up onto the flat bed, where he finally collapsed in exhaustion.
After a few relieved breaths, he rolled onto his side to get a look at his new surroundings. The first thing he saw was an enormous black donut shape more than three feet in diameter — a truck tire — and then he realized that there was another right beside it, and a few feet down, separated by an external fuel tank, there was another pair. As his eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, he made out more details of the strange looking vehicle. It had been a while since he’d seen one, but he recognized it right away. It was an M977 A2 Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, the ten-ton capacity, eight-wheel drive, diesel powered workhorse of the US Army.
The train was transporting military hardware, probably vehicles that had been shipped back to the States after seeing action in the Middle East or Afghanistan. It now occurred to him that the other flatbeds he had seen, including the one that Higgins and Annie had mounted, were likewise loaded with HEMTTs or possibly Humvees, all on their way to a motor pool somewhere halfway across the country. The details didn’t really matter much, but the vehicles would be a lot easier to negotiate around than container cars that now separated him from his companions.
He glanced in the direction the train was traveling. There were at least two container cars between him and his friends. Easy or not, it was time to get moving.
He rose and moved alongside the HEMMT, stepping over the tension straps and chains that held it secure to the flatbed, until he reached the front end of the flatbed. In the darkness, he could just make out the heavy steel knuckle that joined this car to the next a few feet below where he stood. About six feet away, across a gap bridged by that coupling, was the container car. He now saw that the container was secured to a flat car just like the truck. Although its massive bulk almost completely filled the moving platform, there was a narrow ledge — about six inches wide — around its perimeter. The ledge was tempting, but the sheet metal walls of the container afforded little in the way of handholds.
He stepped cautiously down onto the coupling, maintaining two-handed contact with the edge of the flatbed car until both feet were firmly planted. Then, with only a single quick step forward, he reached across to grasp hold of the shipping container. From there, it was an easy thing to pull himself up and onto the ledge.
Instead of attempting to traverse along the ledge, he instead used the vertical rods of the containers external door latch like a climbing ladder, and deftly pulled himself up onto the roof.
The wind of the train’s passage blasted him with surprising intensity, ripping at his jacket and stealing the moisture from his eyes. The train was probably only going about thirty miles an hour, but the rush of air was relentless. He stayed low, hugging the slick metal and crawling forward, even though the chance of being blown off his perch was effectively nil. After a few minutes of inching his way along, he reached the far end of the container and another long gap between cars.