“What happened?” I asked gently.
“Nothing.” Floyd wiped some dust from his eyes. He gave me another million-dollar smile. “I’ll tell you sometime when we’ve got nothing better to do. There’s plenty of work coming for both of us on that train.”
The Santa Fe Baldwin 4-8-4 oil-burner sat just past the platform, chuffing and wheezing. It was a big steam engine, fairly new, black as Tojo’s heart with white and gold lettering. Even though my life was about aircraft, I appreciated the design compromises and manufacturing know-how that had gone into that magnificent beast belonging to the previous century. This was the age of flight, and my heart always wanted to soar.
Odus Milliken the railway agent, a cadaverous veteran of the Spanish-American War who seemed likely to live forever, had told us that this route would be getting the new diesels soon, so we’d better say goodbye to the steam trains. As much as I admired the old machines, I could live without the noise.
Odus and Bertie the switchman had conspired to drop two flat cars off onto the depot’s freight siding. One was loaded with an enormous crate, the other had something bulky secured under a tarp. Floyd and some of the old guys from the Otasko Club strained with the swing-arm block and tackle on my Dad’s stakebed truck to shift the massive crate from the first flat car. With my bad leg and all I stayed out of the way. The crate was almost too big for the truck — easily large enough to contain a small omnibus. I couldn’t imagine what something so massive and heavy could actually be. Had he shipped home artillery? I wouldn’t put it past Floyd.
Odus stood with me, shaking his head and laughing in his creaky old-man voice. “Those boys are idiots,” he said. “They ought to trot over to the lumberyard and borrow a forklift. It’s gonna take them all day to get that crate off. Plus he’s got that other load, too.”
I hadn’t realized that both flat cars were for Floyd. Where had he gotten the money for the freight charges? “What else does he have?”
“Come on,” Odus said. “Let’s have look.”
Odus and I walked around the flat cars, staying out of the way of Floyd’s work party. Odus untied the lashing that held one corner of the tarp to the second flat car. We lifted the canvas and saw a massive rubber tire. I peered up. “It’s a truck.”
“Really?” asked Odus. “I never would have guessed.”
I eyed the four-foot drop off from the flat car to the rails below. “How are we going to get this onto the ground?”
“Well, if they’d listed this correctly on the manifest, I would have had it off already,” said Odus sharply. “I’ve got a ramp we can drop at the end of the car. You just drive it off. Why don’t you pull the tarp off it while I go set it up?” He trotted away.
I tugged and pulled to get the tarp off the truck. The tarp was huge, heavy and damp, and nearly smothered me when it finally slid off. That was when I discovered it wasn’t a truck. It was a halftrack. Definitely German — field gray with the big black cross on the doors. Floyd had shipped himself a German army vehicle complete with bumper numbers and swastika. But it was the weirdest halftrack I’d ever seen — nothing like those newsreels of troops riding in an armored box over muddy, cratered landscapes.
The front looked just like any truck built in the last fifteen years — I didn’t recognize the make, of course, but it had to be German. The tracks in back looked a whole lot like an old Caterpillar 60 with extra wheels in the middle to extend the tread length. But the body on top was planed and angled like it was meant to fly away. There wasn’t a vertical surface anywhere on the back of the halftrack. I cocked my head, studied the thing. It really did look streamlined, or perhaps as if it had been meant to deflect explosion.
“Oh, Floyd, what have you done?” I whispered to the halftrack.
It started raining as soon as we left the depot and headed out of town, and it poured all the way back to the farm. I kept praying that the creaky old Mack would make it without sputtering to a halt. I didn’t look forward to dragging the truck and Floyd’s monstrous crate down muddy dirt roads with Mr. Bellamy’s ancient Farm-All. Lucky for me the spirits that moved the old truck smiled, and it kept turning over in spite of the dampness.
Somehow we got the vehicles all the way to Floyd’s place without attracting attention from the Butler County Sheriff. We parked both Dad’s truck and the German halftrack in Mr. Bellamy’s ramshackle barn. All but a few of the cattle had been sold over the summer, because large animals had become too difficult for the Bellamys to manage. In addition to a whole gallery of rusted plows and spreaders, generations of rotting hay and Floyd’s recreational mattress, the barn now sheltered an inbred tribe of resentful cats, three blank-eyed heifers, a single goat, and some stray bantam hens with one nasty little rooster. That left plenty of space for us.
Floyd got out of that weird halftrack and leaned on the fender, flashing his million-dollar grin. He patted the Nazi vehicle. “What do you think, Vernon? Hometown boy makes good.”
“Smuggling back a Wehrmacht halftrack hardly counts as the crime of the century,” I snapped.
“Hey,” Floyd said. “It’s not just a halftrack. It’s a Feuerleitpanzerfahrzeug auf Zugkraftwagen.” He rattled off the German tongue-twister like he’d been speaking the language all his life. “Adapted from the Jerries’ V2 control post.”
That explained the shape. It really was a blast deflector.
“Cheer up,” Floyd continued. “The f-panzer’s just a souvenir. What’s inside it, and inside the crate — those are the real prizes.” He paused, mock serious. “And they may well be the crime of the century.”
“Really.” I couldn’t decide if he was crazy, stupid or pulling my leg in a very big way. Maybe all three. The war addled people.
“Come on, take a look.” He walked to the back of the halftrack and stepped up onto the ladder that hung from the hatch at the rear of the strangely-angled cargo box. A huge stainless steel padlock secured it, with an eagle engraved on the lock body. The bird was so large I could see it from ten feet away. Floyd took a key ring from his pocket and fit one in.
“That lock looks like it’s worth a fortune all by itself,” I said.
“Oh, probably.” Floyd shrugged. “Some kind of special SS lock. You want it?” He turned to face me, open lock in his hand.
“Nah, keep it. It’s yours.” His words about wartime stay-at-homes like me taking all the good jobs still stung, in part because there was a measure of truth to them. I figured Floyd was going to need all the valuables he could get in life. Unless the truck was full of diamonds. Or something worse.
Floyd pulled open the latch and swung the door wide. He stepped up inside, calling, “Get in here.”
I stepped up the ladder to peer in. There was a profusion of radio and electronic gear in the truck, much of it obviously installed in haste. Loose wires trailed everywhere, and a box of stray vacuum tubes was jammed under an operator’s console. A hooded glass screen was bolted to one side of the van, while racks of gear lined the other. It looked like a radio operator’s idea of heaven.
Or maybe hell. I wasn’t sure which.
“What does it all do?” I finally asked. He’d mentioned the halftrack was an adapted V2 launch controller, but as far as I knew they were ballistic rockets — nothing that would require all this radioelectronics.
“I got no idea,” said Floyd cheerfully. “That’s why you’re here.”
“Floyd, I am a materials science engineer specializing in aeronautics. I know how to refine aluminum, how to machine wires and struts. I can find my way along the parts list of a B-29 in the dark. I don’t know anything about electronics, past winding a radio crystal.” I waved my hands around the van. “This might be a television studio for all I can tell.”