The Wrecker by Clive Cussler (book club reads .TXT) 📕

landslide of mud and tumbling boulders. Astonishingly, the sliding trees remained standing upright as the mass of ground they grew in bore down on the Van Dorn Express.

“Hit your throttle!”

The engineer panicked.

Instead of throttling the big Pacific to outrun the juggernaut of timber, mud, and rock, he tried to stop the train, hauling back his Johnson bar and slamming on his air brakes. With only one lightweight diner car behind the tender, the locomotive slowed abruptly. Bell, Dashwood, and the fireman were thrown against the firewall.

Bell scrambled to his feet and faced the rumbling mountain. “Ahead!” he shouted, wresting the throttle from the engineer. “Full ahead!”

The engineer recovered his nerve and jammed the Johnson bar forward. Bell shoved the throttle. The big engine leaped as if stampeding for its life. But the landslide picked up speed, the mass of towering trees still moving as one. Wider than the train was long, it tore down the mountain like an ocean liner launched sideways.

Bell felt a blast of wind so powerful it actually rocked the speeding locomotive. The airburst that the landslide pushed ahead of it was wet and cold. It chilled the hot cab as if the coal fire raging under its boiler had been extinguished.

Then the hurtling mass began to break apart. As it crumbled, it spread out wider.

The trees on the edges of the hurtling forest pitched forward, thrusting at the train like gigantic lances. Stones shoved ahead of the main mass bounced on the tracks and clattered against the locomotive. A boulder as big as an anvil burst through the cab’s side window and smashed the fireman and the engineer to the floor.

Dashwood jumped to help the bloodied men. Bell yanked him back. A second boulder tore like a cannon ball through the space his head had just occupied. Massive stones rocked the locomotive, thundered against the tender and shattered windows in the passenger car, showering detectives with broken glass.

The landslide split in two. Half tore ahead of the locomotive. Accelerating, it angled toward the tracks like a runaway train racing the Van Dorn Express to a junction where only one of them could pass. It was a race that Bell’s train could not win. A boiling torrent of rocks and mud buried the tracks ahead of the engine.

The larger half of the landslide impaled the passenger car with tree trunks. A boulder bigger than a barn crashed into the tender and swept it off the tracks. The heavy tender, which rode between the locomotive and the passenger car, started to drag both with it. Its coupler held tight to the locomotive, pulling its rear truck off the rails. The rails spread under the enormous forces, dumping the locomotive’s drive wheels onto the ties. The hundred-ton engine leaned toward the ravine and, still lurching ahead, began to tip over. Then her pilot wheels ran into the rocks heaped up by the landslide. She reared up onto them and stopped suddenly. The violent stop broke the coupling to the tender and the tender tumbled into the ravine.

Bell looked back, searching for the car carrying his detectives.

Shattered telegraph poles dangled from their wires. Two hundred yards of track were buried in mud, rock, and crushed timber. Had the coupling to the passenger car snapped, too? Or had the tender dragged it into the ravine with it? Where the detectives’ car had been was a jagged mound of trees. Bell rubbed the rain from his eyes and stared harder, hoping against hope. Then he saw it. It was still on the road, shattered wreckage held in place by fallen trees thrust through its windows like knitting needles in a hank of yarn.

Bell cupped his hands to shout across the debris-strewn gouge in the mountain that had been railroad tracks. “Eddie! Are you O.K.?”

Bell cocked his ears for an answer. All he could hear was a river tumbling through the ravine and steam hissing from the wrecked engine. He called again and again. Through the rain, he thought he saw a familiar flash of white hair. Eddie Edwards waved one arm. The other hung limp at this side.

“Busted up,” Eddie shouted back. “None dead!”

“I’m going ahead. I’ll send a doctor on the wreck train. James. Quick!”

The boy was white as a sheet. His eyes were round with shock.

“Handcar. Move. Now!”

Bell led the way out of the leaning cab to the front of the precariously balanced engine. The handcar was intact. They untied it from the pilot and carried it, slipping and stumbling over fifty feet of rock that had tumbled onto the rails. Minutes later, Bell was pumping the handles and pedals with all his strength.

Fifteen miles up the line, they came upon a freight train waiting on a siding. Bell ordered the locomotive unhitched, and they drove it backward the last ten miles to Tunnel 13. They thundered through the tunnel. The engineer slowed her as they emerged into the yard, which was crowded with material trains that had been barred from crossing the weakened bridge. Bell was surprised to see a heavy coal train parked on the bridge itself. The black cargo heaped on fifty hopper cars glistened in the rain.

“I thought the bridge can’t bear weight. Did they fix it already?”

“Lord, no,” replied the engineer. “They’ve got a thousand hands down at the piers, working round the clock, but it’s touch-and-go. A week’s more work, and the river’s rising.”

“What’s that coal train doing there?”

“The bridge started shaking. They’re trying to stabilize it with down pressure.”

Bell could see that the main staging yard on the far side of the bridge was also packed with trains. Empties, with no way back to the California shops and depots. Having all hands working at the piers explained the eerie sense of a deserted encampment.

“Where’s the dispatch office?”

“They set up a temporary one on this side. In that yellow caboose.”

Bell jumped down from the locomotive and ran to the caboose, Dashwood right behind him. The dispatcher was reading a week-old newspaper. The telegrapher