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

Bell walked straight to the bulge and stepped onto it.

“Look out!”

“The Wrecker,” said Bell, “would make absolutely certain that nothing less than the weight of a locomotive would detonate a mine.”

“You seem mighty sure of that.”

“I am,” said Bell. “He’s too smart to waste his powder on a handcar.”

He knelt down on a tie and looked closely. He passed his hand over the crushed stone.

“But what I don’t see are any signs of recent digging. These stones have been sitting awhile. See the coal dust undisturbed?”

Malone stepped closer reluctantly. Then he knelt beside Bell, scratching his head. He ran his fingers over the coal dust crusting in the rain. He picked up some chunks of ballast and examined them. Abruptly, he rose.

“Shoddy work, not explosives,” he said. “I know exactly who was in charge of laying this section and he is going to hear from me. Sorry, Mr. Bell. False alarm.”

“Better safe than sorry.”

By then, the train crew had disembarked. Behind them, fifty workmen gawked, and others were piling off the cars.

“Everyone back on the train!” Malone roared.

Bell took the engineer aside.

“Why didn’t you stop?”

“You caught me by surprise. Took me a moment to act.”

“Stay alert!” Bell retorted coldly. “You’ve got men’s lives in your hands.”

They got everyone back on the train and rolling again.

The ties slid by. Squared timber after squared timber. Eight spikes, four on each rail. Fishplates securing the rails. Sharp-edged crushed ballast glistened in the wet. Bell watched for more bumps in the flat surface, disturbed stone, missing bolts, absent spikes, cracks in the rails. Tie after tie after tie.

For seventeen miles, the train trundled slowly. Bell began to hope against hope that his precautions had paid off. The patrols and constant inspections had ensured the line was safe. Only three miles to go and then the men could return to work, boring the vital Tunnel 13.

Suddenly, as they rounded a sharp curve that rimmed the deepest canyon on the route, something unusual caught Bell’s eye. He couldn’t pinpoint what it was at first. For an instant, it barely penetrated.

“Malone!” he said in a whipcrack voice, “Look! What’s wrong?”

The red-faced man beside him leaned forward, squinted, his face a mask of concentration.

“I don’t see nothing.”

Bell raked the tracks with his binoculars. Bracing his feet on the pilot, he held the glasses with one hand and drew his pistol with the other.

The ballast was smooth. No spikes were missing. The ties ...

In seventeen miles, the work train had crossed fifty thousand ties. Each of the fifty thousand was a chocolate-brown color, the wood darkened by preservatives absorbed in creosoting. Now, only a few yards ahead of the locomotive, Bell saw a wooden tie that was colored yellowish white—the shade of freshly milled mountain hemlock that had not been creosoted.

Bell fired his pistol again and again as fast as he could pull the trigger.

“Stop!”

The engineer slammed on the brakes. Wheels locked. Steel screeched on steel. The heavy locomotive slid along on the massive force of its momentum. The weight of twenty cars shoved behind it.

Bell and Malone leaped off the pilot and ran ahead of the skidding locomotive.

“What is it?” the track foreman shouted.

“That tie,” Bell pointed.

“God Almighty!” roared Malone.

The two men turned as one and raised powerful arms as if to stop the train with their bare hands.

33

THE ENGINEER THREW HIS JOHNSON BAR INTO REVERSE.

Eight ponderous drive wheels spun backward, showering sparks and slivers from the rails. For a moment, it looked as if two strong men were actually stopping a Consolidation locomotive. And when it did grind to a stop with a ground-shaking shudder, Isaac Bell looked down and saw his boots planted firmly on the suspect crosstie.

The tip of the pilot was hanging over it. The leading wheels of the engine truck had come within two yards of it.

“Back her up,” ordered Malone. “Softly!”

GENTLY SCRAPING AWAY THE ballast from either end, Bell discovered upon close inspection that the suspect tie had a round wooden plug like a whiskey barrel bung. It was the diameter of a silver dollar and almost indistinguishable from the timber’s end grain.

“Move everyone farther back,” he told Malone. “He packed the tie with dynamite.”

The triggering device was a nail positioned to set off a detonator. There was enough dynamite to blow rails out from under the locomotive, which would have tumbled off the cut and dragged the whole train down the side of the mountain. Instead, Bell was able to wire back to Osgood Hennessy that the Van Dorn Detective Agency had won another victory over the Wrecker.

Hennessy moved his special train to the head of the line, where the miners and trackmen who had arrived safely were hard at work boring through the last hundred feet of Tunnel 13.

EARLY NEXT MORNING, OSGOOD HENNESSY called Bell onto his private car. Lillian and Mrs. Comden offered coffee. Hennessy was grinning ear to ear. “We’re about to hole through. We always do a ceremony on the long tunnels where I clear the last stone. This time, the hands sent a delegation demanding that you take the last poke for what you did yesterday. It’s a big honor, I’d accept it if I were you.”

Bell walked into the tunnel with Hennessy, hugging the wall when they had to step off the tracks to let a locomotive pass with debris-filled dump cars. For hundreds of yards, the sides and arched ceiling were already finished with masonry shoring. Near the end, a temporary web of timbers shored up the ceiling. In the final yards, the miners worked under a shield of cast iron and timber that protected them from falling rock.

The chattering drills stopped as Bell and the railroad president approached. Miners cleared the crumbling stone with sledges and shovels, then stepped back from the wall that remained.

A towering hard-rock miner with long apish arms and a gap-toothed grin handed Bell a sixteen-pound sledgehammer.

“Ever swing one of these before?”

“Driving tent