The two men exchanged glances. The train rattled across a bridge. Kuznetsky lit the cigarette he’d been wanting for two hours.
“Where are you heading, bud?”
“Down the line. Shut up.”
Behind him, as if in pursuit, the half-moon was rising.
Fifty feet farther back, and considerably closer to the ground rushing by, Bob Crosby was tightening the strap that held him to the girders beneath the boxcar. He’d run away from home that evening and was already beginning to regret it. The noise was unbearable, his mouth seemed choked with dust, and he felt as if his bones were all being wrenched loose from their sockets.
He’d boarded the train at Chattanooga, more from desperation than choice. He’d expected a long train of boxcars with straw-filled interiors and sliding doors, not this strange short train with one car and a cargo that seemed to consist solely of policemen. But he’d had to get away before his father alerted the local cops, and at least he’d done that.
There were probably better places to travel; he’d learn as he went, he supposed. God knew where that guy at the last stop had ended up. He’d watched him crawling, then running toward the locomotive. There must be places to hide there too. He’d have to find out. There was lots of time: he was only fourteen. He’d go back home in a few years, when he was big enough, and show his father what a beating was really like. The bastard. He couldn’t understand why his mother stayed with him.
The train approached Scottsboro. “We stop here,” the engineer shouted over his shoulder.
Not according to Melville’s information, Kuznetsky thought, and there’d been no other way of checking. If the driver was telling the truth, and they went straight through, then the wires would start humming, to the north at least. If they stopped, and the driver was bluffing, the guard and the troopers would get suspicious. He had to trust Melville.
“We go straight through,” he shouted over the noise of the engine.
The engineer turned to protest, but Kuznetsky could see the bluff in his eyes. “Straight through,” he repeated. It was the correct decision: Scottsboro station was dark and deserted.
The driver spat over the side, an empty gesture of defiance. “Huntsville, then,” he shouted.
“Okay. Huntsville.” The train climbed away from the valley floor, bellowing smoke across the stars. Another ten miles. The road on their left was devoid of traffic, the houses dark. Kuznetsky felt a sense of rising exhilaration, swaying with the passage of the train, feeling the warm gusts of air from the firebox whipping past his face.
At the spur turnoff Amy stood by the car, straining her ears for the sound of the approaching train. Her eyes had grown used to the darkness since their arrival an hour before, but even so she could barely make out the line of the main road two hundred yards away. Paul and Gerd had taken the camper up the valley. The switch had been thrown.
She gripped the tommy gun in one hand, hoping she wouldn’t have to use it. If Kuznetsky had failed, if the train failed to slow down, there was every chance that it would come off the rails at the turnoff, and she alone would have to take on the occupants, at least until Paul and Gerd arrived. And it would all be in full view of the main road. Only one car had passed in the last hour, but it needed only one at the wrong time. That car had swept past only seconds after Paul had finished cutting the wires above the road.
An orange glow could be seen in the distance, climbing the valley toward her. For a moment it disappeared, sheltered from sight by the invisible buildings of Lim Rock, and there it was again, growing larger and brighter. Now she could see the long, moving shadow that was the train, now she could hear it above the natural sounds of the night.
“Slow down,” Kuznetsky said.
“On this grade — you’re crazy!”
Kuznetsky moved forward, immediately behind the engineer, jamming the Walther into the back of his neck. “We’re taking the spur. Slow down.”
“We’ll have to throw the switch.”
“It’s already thrown.”
At least he hoped it was. There was a sudden movement behind him; he ducked by instinct, glimpsed the shovel flash past his head. Straightening up, he put a bullet through the fireman’s face, reached out too late to catch his body as it tumbled from the cab, and turned the gun quickly enough to stop the engineer in his tracks.
“Slow it down,” he screamed, and the driver, his mouth hanging open, turned to obey.
It was almost too late. The locomotive’s wheels screeched as they hit the points and the whole train swayed alarmingly. Beneath them the trestles of the river bridge creaked and snapped, but they were across, moving up the narrow valley.
Amy watched the train rock its way through the points and the bridge, saw a silhouetted guard emerge from his lighted sanctum and apply himself energetically to the hand brake on the rear platform. Blue-white sparks flashed across the valley as the braked wheels ground against the rails, but the train kept moving away as the engineer overrode the hand brake. The noise seemed deafening. She looked up and down the road — nothing.
Half a mile ahead Paul and Gerd heard the train, stamped out their cigarettes, exchanged grim smiles, and moved to their positions. Soon they could see it rounding the bend in the valley, first the glow from the locomotive, then the sparks from the wheels at the rear. The train’s shape slowly swam into focus, and two figures were visible in the engineer’s compartment. And one on the roof of the boxcar! Someone was going forward to see what had gone wrong.
Suddenly the boxcar door slid open, throwing light across the road and the valley. The train pulled to a halt, and as the engine subsided into relative silence, the noise of the man running along the car roof mingled with shouts from the men hanging out of the boxcar door.
The first rattle of Paul’s tommy gun blew the man off the roof and out of sight; simultaneously Gerd sprayed the open door, knocking at least two troopers back across the car.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the engineer kneeling as if in prayer, Kuznetsky standing above him, holding the gun to his head and pulling the trigger.
Paul and Gerd reached their positions on either side of the open door. They could hear talking inside, frightened, bewildered talking, then the rasp of the other door being pulled back. At a signal from Gerd they moved forward in unison, firing as they went. Two bodies plummeted out through the far door, thumping into the gravel. Kuznetsky stepped past them, pulled himself up into the car. Inside, one man was dead, another whimpering from wounds in his thigh and chest. Kuznetsky walked behind him, placed the gun to the back of his head, and fired. The man slumped forward across the makeshift table of crates, scattering cards and quarters.
His face blank, Kuznetsky turned to look down at the Germans. “Check the others,” he said.
Paul walked around the train muttering “Ja, mein führer” under his breath. The two other troopers were dead, and so was the guard, lying face down in the stream, the rippling waters pulling his hair above his head. Murder or an act of war? Paul was damned if he knew.
Amy pulled the car up by the camper, walked across to the scene of carnage. Kuznetsky and Gerd were already moving the crates to the door, easing them down to the ground.
“Thrown the switch?” Kuznetsky asked her.
“Of course,” she replied coldly.
“Open the camper doors,” he ordered.
She walked across, passing Paul, who smiled bitterly at her. She slammed the doors open, the sound echoing from the valley sides. Gerd staggered across with the first of the crates, and she helped him load it.