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

He had carried the tie for a mile when he saw a creamy glow in the sky up ahead. It brightened quickly. A locomotive headlamp, he realized, coming fast. Already he could hear it over the sound of his labored breathing. He had to get off the tracks. There were trees close by. Feeling his way in the dark, he descended the slope of the roadbed and careened through them. The headlamp threw crazy beams and shadows. He pushed in deeper, then knelt down carefully, tipping the massive crosstie down until its end rested on the ground.

The relief of having the weight off him was an almost overwhelming pleasure. He leaned the other end of the tie against a tree. Then he sagged to the ground and stretched out on the pine needles to rest. The locomotive grew louder and roared past, drawing a train that rattled with the peculiar higher pitch of empty cars. It passed too quickly. Too soon, he had to stand up, tip the crushing weight onto his shoulder, and struggle up the slope to the rails.

The heel of his boot caught on the head of the rail as he tried to step between the tracks. He felt himself pitching forward, falling face-first. He fought to regain his balance. But before he could get his feet under him in the headlong rush, the weight pushed him down. He twisted frantically to get out from under the tie. But the weight was too massive to escape entirely. A sledgehammer blow crushed his arm, and he cried out in pain.

Facedown on the roadbed, he wrenched his arm out from under the tie, knelt as if in prayer, heaved it onto his aching shoulder, stood up, and pressed on. He tried to count his steps but kept losing track. He had five miles to go. But he had no idea how far he had staggered. He started counting ties. His heart sank. There were almost three thousand ties for every mile of track. After a hundred, he thought he would die. After five hundred, he was almost destroyed by the realization that five hundred ties was no more than a fifth of a mile.

His mind began to scatter. He imagined carrying the tie all the way to Tunnel 13. Through the stone mountain all the way to the Cascade Canyon Bridge.

I’m the “Hero Engineer”!

Giddy-headed laughter dissolved into a sob of pain. He felt himself drifting out of control. He had to shift his thoughts away from the pain and the fear that he could not continue.

He drove his mind toward his early rote training in mathematics and engineering. Structure—the physics that made a bridge stand or fall. Struts. Ties. Foundation piers. Cantilever arms. Anchor arms. Live loads. Dead loads.

The laws of physics ruled how to distribute weight. The laws of physics said he could not carry the crosstie another foot. He drove that madness from his mind and concentrated instead on fencing moves, the light, airy motion of a sword. “Attack,” he said aloud. “Beat. Lunge. Parry. Riposte. Feint. Double feint.” On he plodded, the weight pounding his bones to jelly. Attack. Beat. Lunge. Parry. German intruded. Suddenly, he was mumbling the engineering terms from his student days. Then shouting the language of Heidelberg when he learned to kill. “Angriff. Battutaangriff. Ausfall, Parade. Doppelfinte.” He imagined someone humming in his ear. Attack: Angriff. Beat: Battutaangriff. Lunge: Ausfall. Parry: Parade. Double feint: Doppelfinte. Someone he could not see was humming a tuneless ditty. It grew shrill. Now he heard it right behind him. He whirled around, the weight of the crosstie nearly spinning him off his feet. Harsh acetylene light blazed on the tracks. It was a police patrol pumping along on an almost silent handcar.

A sheer rock wall pressed against the right-of-way on his left. To his right, the mountain dropped sharply. He sensed more than saw a steep drop. The feathery tops of small trees piercing the dark indicated it could be as much as twenty feet down. He had no choice. The handcar was almost on top of him. He dropped the tie over the edge and jumped after it.

He heard the tie hit a tree and snap the trunk. Then he smashed into a springy tree, knocking the wind out of him.

The humming dropped in tone. The handcar was slowing down. To his horror, they stopped. He could hear men talking fifteen feet above his head and saw beams of flashlights and lanterns. They dismounted. He could hear their boots crunching on the ballast as they strode the rail bed, shining their lights. A man shouted. Abruptly as they had appeared, they left. The handcar creaked into motion and hummed away, leaving him fifteen feet down the steep embankment in the dark.

Moving cautiously, hunched over on the slope, digging his boots in, he felt in the dark for the crosstie. He smelled pine pitch and traced the odor to the broken tree. Several feet down, he bumped into the square end of the tie. He felt for his tools. Still tied on. He looked up the slope. The rim of the rail bed towered above him.

How would he climb up it carrying the tie?

He tipped it on one end, worked his shoulder under it, and struggled to stand.

Every mile he had come so far, every escape, meant nothing. This was the real test: to climb back up the embankment. It was only twenty feet, but each foot could have been a mile. The combination of the weight he was carrying and the distance he had come and the steepness of the embankment seemed insurmountable.

As his strength failed, he saw his dreams of wealth and power fading before his eyes. He slipped and fell, then struggled to his feet again. If only he had killed Isaac Bell. He began to realize that he was battling Bell more than the tie, more than the cutoff, more than the Southern