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.
Chapter Forty-eight
1115 Hours
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.
J. D. Hooker stepped into sight with his gun muzzle dipped. He was filthy; he moved with the slow stiffness of a badly punished body. His hostile eyes reflected the smoky daylight. Tyreen walked forward painfully, tramping his flickering shadow into the ground.
A feeling of cold struck definitely through him. He saw Hooker walking forward, frowning. When Hooker came closer, his lips moved and he spoke with suppressed urgency, but Tyreen did not make out the words. Hooker broke into a run across the intervening five yards; Hooker’s voice jumped at him:
“Down!” And Hooker’s solid body smashed into him, carrying him down flat.
His vision was filled with the pale clenching of Hooker’s jaws, the lift of Hooker’s ugly gun. Tyreen swiveled his head. Sergeant Khang was plowing forward, coming the same way Hooker had come, and back the other way a flat-helmeted figure weaved through the trees. Hooker’s gun opened up just above Tyreen’s face, blasting his eardrums intolerably. Khang shouted something and went past on the run.
Tyreen rolled over. “Wait, you fool!” He climbed to his feet and went after Khang.
Khang swung through the trees, and a single rifle shot boomed. Khang wheeled and started shooting. His face leered furiously. Hooker commenced fire, and a body crashed down among the trees somewhere nearby. The soldier in Tyreen’s view weaved in and out of sight, never giving him a clear shot. Tyreen heard the man fire. He saw Khang’s running body spill and crash into a tree.
Tyreen ducked aside and let go a coolly aimed hurst at the soldier. The soldier ducked back into thicker trees. Hooker was shouting steadily. Khang got up, hurt, and began to retreat. Tyreen gave him covering fire. Khang limped along and dropped flat beside Tyreen.
“What the hell was that for, Sergeant?”
Figures ran through the shadows. Khang said, “I want to get my licks in, too, Colonel. It’s my Goddamn country.”
“Where’s that bullet?”
“Hipbone, I guess. It don’t hurt.”
Sunlight flashed on a gun barrel, and Tyreen fired at it. The gun blew powdersmoke back in his face. He latched the gun open to feed in a new magazine; he cut his palm on the sharp bolt-handle. His hand started to bleed. Hooker was no longer in sight; he had backed away. Someone spoke a warning, and Theodore Saville ran into the district, firing three brief bursts. Saville’s right cheek was bruised an angry red. “The place is crawling with them.”
“Come on.” Tyreen got to his knees and looked down at Khang.
Khang’s expression, loose and faded and blind, was plain enough evidence that he was dead.
Unable to believe it, Tyreen turned him over. Two wounds bled in Khang’s side: the hip and the left ribs, high up. “He didn’t even feel that one.” The bleeding stopped as he watched.
“Let’s go, David,” Saville said gently.
The closeness of death laid a frost on Tyreen’s nerves. He stooped to swing Khang’s arm over his shoulder and started to lift Khang when gunfire erupted in the woods and he heard wood splintering and the audible whip of slugs going by.
“Leave him,” Saville snapped.
Tyreen got up and searched the woods. Rage engulfed him. He found a hostile gunner and put a burst in that direction, pinning the man down.
Fifty yards away, J. D. Hooker stood, his squat frame blocking an opening between trees. His braced gun talked in harsh signals. Echoes slammed back and forth against the slopes. Tyreen started to make his run, with Saville on his heels. Hooker kept shooting, covering their run; hostile bullets buzzed through the forest. Everything was sharp and clear; the unfriendly glare of the half-clouded sky beat against his eyes. Hooker stood with his shoulders jammed between trees, his face lifted violently and his chopper chugging out ammunition. His feet were spread the width of the opening; his hands were like vises on the gun.