On the High Road to Oblivion

Chapter 8—Oceans Apart

The explosion knocked them both flat and peppered them with debris. But the expected firestorm did not immediately materialize.

Dodge shook off the stunning effects of the blast and pushed up onto his elbows to look around. Anya was doing the same a few feet away. Behind them, the gondola had been demolished and was spilling black smoke, but even as he looked, Dodge’s view of the control car was eclipsed as the torn pieces of the blimp envelope settled over him like a shroud.

The air felt strange — it even tasted strange. Poisonous fumes from the explosion, perhaps? He held his breath and crawled toward where he had last seen Anya, aware that at any moment the heavy fabric might become a sheet of fire.

They found each other a few seconds later. Dodge covered his face with a hand, hoping that she would understand his warning gesture, and then pointed to what he hoped was the shortest path to escape. She nodded, evidently comprehending, and started crawling alongside him. After only a few seconds of moving in this fashion, they emerged from beneath the collapsed blimp. Dodge expected to see an inferno blossoming behind them, but there was only a dissipating cloud of smoke and dust above the center of the blimp.

He turned to Anya. “Are you all right?” His voice sounded strange, like the duck in the Disney cartoons, and he reflexively put a hand to his mouth.

“It’s the helium,” Anya explained, her own voice comically high-pitched. “Barron uses helium in his airships. It’s perfectly safe.”

Safe or not, Dodge wasn’t about to linger in the hangar, especially not with Uchida lurking somewhere nearby. Grabbing his arm, Anya guided him to a door in the rear of the hangar.

As soon as he stepped outside, Dodge immediately saw the answer to some of the questions that had begun swirling in his head from the moment Anya stepped back into his life. Sitting idly on the rails, a few paces away from the terminus, was the ghost train.

“Train” was probably the wrong word, since it consisted only of a single car, presumably self-propelled. Although solid and tangible, riding the steel tracks on wheels of metal instead rather than ectoplasm, the vehicle was no less mysterious. It was uniformly black, about the size of a box car, but streamlined, without any angles or protruding exhaust pipes, tapered like a bullet at either end. Anya hasted over to it and, utilizing a mechanism hidden from Dodge’s view, opened a sliding panel to permit entry.

The interior of the ghost train car was considerably more prosaic. It looked like nothing more than the cargo area of a truck, presently empty, with openings on either end. These, Dodge discovered, led to seating areas. At the far end, where the ceiling began to slope, a single chair was positioned in front of a control panel that looked like it might have come from an electric trolley. Dodge saw that that the slanting panel was actually a transparent windshield of darkened glass.

Anya gestured to one of the chairs, then took the driver’s seat. She twisted a wheel-shaped control and Dodge felt the gentle push of acceleration against his body. The movement was smooth and eerily silent, but through the windshield, the landscape was flashing rapidly by.

Dodge cleared his throat and was pleased to hear his normal voice again. “First off, thank you for saving me.”

She didn’t look at him. “You’re welcome.”

“As you can imagine, I’ve got a couple questions.”

She laughed.

“I guess the first would be, why? Why did you come back for me?”

She glanced back at him. “That is difficult to answer by itself.”

“I can fill in some of the blank spaces,” Dodge said. “You knew about this place, about this train. That’s why you wanted to be on the Broadway Limited. But Barron built it all, right?”

“Yes. We have a spy very close to Walter Barron. That is how we knew of the plot to abduct you and the scientist. He also told me that Barron had abandoned this facility, so I knew that I could use it to effect my escape from you.”

“Which brings me back to my question; why did you come back for me?”

Though they had only been riding for a few seconds, the train car had already ascended out of the depression where the hangar was located and was closing on the tunnel. Anya continued to stare straight ahead as she answered. “I have been in contact with our spy. Barron is moving ahead with his plan to acquire the materials necessary to complete his death ray, and it appears that he has the cooperation of your friend, the scientist.”

“Doc Newcombe is helping Barron? I find that hard to believe.”

“I do not know what sort of persuasive methods were employed. I know only that Barron requires a unique sort of metal, something that your friend, Dr. Newcombe, is familiar with. Barron is on his way to Persia, where he believes he can locate a source of this metal.”

As the train slipped into the tunnel, plunging the interior of the vehicle into darkness, Dodge figuratively saw the light. If there was a substance that could make the impossible possible, it was the strange metal that the ancients had used to create the devices and weapons he had found at the Outpost. It seemed the legacy of violence attached to that place continued to live on in spite of its destruction. “That still doesn’t explain why you helped me.”

A light flashed on, a handheld lantern similar to the one he had used in exploring the tunnel. In its ambient glow, he saw Anya release the speed-control wheel, allowing the train to coast. “I would have thought it was obvious. We must prevent Barron from getting this metal. I need you to help me find it before he does.”

The answer made sense, but Dodge wasn’t about to take anything the statuesque blonde told him at face value. It wasn’t too hard to imagine Anya and her revolutionaries secretly plotting to develop their own version of the death ray. But if that were true, then he’d have a better chance of stopping them — of stopping anyone intent on creating such a terrible device — by beating them all to the prize.

“Why Persia?”

“Barron believes that there are ancient documents and maps in an undiscovered repository in the ruins of the fortress of Alamut.”

Dodge attempted to digest this. He’d never heard of Alamut; even Persia was something exotic, the stuff of history, myth and legend. He knew Alexander the Great had conquered Persia. It was mentioned in the Bible, though he couldn’t off the top of his head remember any details. His knowledge of Persia in modern times was colored by fictional accounts — adventure stories by Robert Howard and Talbot Mundy — and while entertaining, those could hardly be considered a source of accurate information.

Dodge felt the g-forces of rapid deceleration as Anya applied the brake. When the car came to a complete stop, Anya pushed a button on the control panel. Outside, the clank and screech of machinery accompanied the movement of the concealed turnaround, and Dodge saw the false tunnel wall swinging out of the way. Anya advanced the car onto the revealed section, then pressed the button again. In a few minutes, they were once more in the Saddle Mountain tunnel, heading east.

“I have a question for you,” Anya said. “That man who tried to kill you back there; who was he?”

“He said his name was Uchida.”

“Japanese?”

“He’s actually American-born, but yes. He and another man followed us from New York, and jumped off the train when we did. The second man attacked me last night, but then something happened… I think you might have hit him.”

“I struck someone coming out of the tunnel. I feared it was you, at first. The body wasn’t recognizable, but the clothes were different. I buried the remains in the forest.”

Dodge was speechless for a moment. Anya’s manner was matter-of-fact, as if killing someone and concealing the crime was an everyday occurrence. Granted, she had probably unwittingly saved Dodge’s life on that occasion as well, but her indifference was disconcerting. He shook his head and resumed speaking. “Uchida was very interested in finding you. I’m not sure why, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he’s probably after the death ray, too.”

Anya’s eyes widened slightly, but that was the extent of her reaction, and its significance eluded Dodge. He decided not to pursue the matter. “How far can we go in this thing?”

“It is electrically powered,” Anya replied. “I do not know how long the batteries will last, but I believe it will get us as far as the nearest train station.”

Dodge smiled. One way or another, the secret of the ghost train would soon be revealed to the world.

Ryu Uchida was halfway up the hill leading out of the compound when he heard the satisfying thump of his explosive device detonating. He turned and looked back, expecting to see the hangar erupt in a blaze of hydrogen fueled fire, but saw only a plume of smoke and dust issuing from the open door.

A frown twisted his normally stony countenance. Something had gone wrong. Still, Dalton could not have survived the explosion. Surely not.

He continued to gaze down at the hangar, contemplating what to do next. He had not risen to prominence in the Kokuryu-kai—the Aum River Society — or risen to the rank of Chusa in the Kempeitai—the Imperial Japanese secret police — by ignoring the small details or leaving a task half-done. His decision already made, he turned on his heel and had just begun backtracking when he spied movement near the hangar.

Like a shadow evaporating on a cloudy day, Uchida — a skilled shinobi-no-mono—simply melted into the landscape. His mastery of the ancient stealth arts described in an esoteric manuscript known as the Togakure-ryu, was but one more example of his personal toleration of nothing less than excellence.

A few moments later, a black train car rolled out from behind the hangar and accelerated without a sound up the hill. Uchida followed it with his gaze, not moving a muscle until it crested the hill and moved out of his line of sight, but inwardly he was seething. Dalton had escaped. Worse, the writer knew of Uchida’s mission.

But what does he know, really?

The Nisei reviewed his memories of the interrogation. He should not have given his name, he realized, but by itself, that admission signified little. Dalton would have his suspicions, no doubt, but there was nothing to connect Uchida to the Japanese government — nothing that could be construed as espionage.

He rose from concealment and crept up to the top of the rise. The black train was gone. Dalton had slipped away.

Uchida stared at the distant black spot that was the tunnel leading out of the hidden valley, and considered what to do next. Without a means of transportation, he could not hope to pick up Dalton’s trail again, as he had over the past two days when he had shadowed the writer into town, and then back to the tunnel again. By the time Uchida reached the nearest train depot, Dalton could be anywhere in America, or even on his way overseas.

Instead of continuing along the tracks to the tunnel, Uchida picked the nearest slope and began climbing its flank. When he reached the peak, he unlimbered his pack and produced a portable, battery operated short-wave radio receiver-transmitter. Snugging the headset in place, he switched it on and began adjusting the tuner until he found the desired frequency.

He took a book from his bag and used it to transform the message he intended to send, turning it into groups of five-digit numbers. He then keyed his own identification code, establishing two-way contact. The radio waves went up into the atmosphere and then bounced between earth and sky in all directions. Anyone monitoring that frequency, almost anywhere in the world, could have listened in, but unless they spoke Japanese and understood the code he was utilizing, they would be hard pressed to make any sense of what they heard. When the response came, he transmitted the coded message and waited.

A series of tones, some long, some short, came over the wire. Uchida was familiar enough with the code to skip the step of writing down the numbers in order to decipher them. The message was not encouraging. “Dragon two missed check in. Status not known.”

“Dragon two” was the second ranking man in his team, Tai’i Hiro Nakamura. Nakamura was presently shadowing Dalton’s companion, in hopes that he might lead them to the real target of their mission: the American industrialist, Walter Barron.

For nearly two years, Kempeitai spies had been trying to infiltrate American industries, in hopes of acquiring new technologies. It was a difficult task; despite her reputation as a “melting pot,” America was very xenophobic, particularly toward immigrants from the Far East. For their own part, Japanese immigrants and their children, the Nisei, made little effort to integrate with the ijin—the “different people,” Caucasian society — even though they themselves had become gaijin—foreigners. Thus, it was no simple thing for the spies of the Kempeitai, working in tandem with the ultra-nationalist Aum River Society, to gain access to the inner workings of companies like Boeing, Hughes Aircraft, or Royal Industries. However, it seemed the effort was about to pay off.

Walter Barron was building a death ray.

Scientists at Nohorito Laboratories had been struggling for years to create a weapon that could focus radar beams with lethal intensity, but thus far, a practical application had eluded them. If Barron had made some kind of breakthrough, it might be the key to developing a weapon that would make it possible for the Empire to achieve its long sought goal of total domination of the Pacific Rim.

He tapped in another message, detailing what little he knew about Barron’s movements. Although his Kempeitai agents were few and far between, there were other ways to pick up Barron’s scent.

He only hoped that he would also pick up Dalton’s trail. While it was evident that the writer knew nothing of consequence pertaining to the mission, his escape was a blemish on Uchida’s otherwise impeccable record of service. It was a blemish he intended to erase completely.

The electric motor became sluggish as the battery’s charge ran down, so at the next opportunity, they ditched the electric locomotive on a siding and continued on foot. Fortunately, the ghost train had brought them to within a few miles of a town with a train station. Dodge telephoned the Empire State Building, checking for messages from Hurricane — there were none — and then sent a telegram to Pan-American’s offices in Lisbon, to be delivered to Hurley as soon as the clipper ship arrived. The note, of necessity brief, outlined Dodge’s plan to reach Persia — the modern nation of Iran — ahead of Barron. Following that, there was nothing to do but await the arrival of the eastbound Broadway Limited.

As they sat in the depot, Anya returned to her state of almost cat-like stasis, leaving Dodge to wonder what sort of schemes and machinations she was formulating. Was she biding her time until she could elude him once again?

That didn’t make any sense. She had already escaped him once, and her decision to return — to save him from Uchida’s bomb — had been entirely voluntarily, albeit by her own admission, self-serving. Dodge didn’t know what to make of that. He wasn’t about to take her statements at face-value. Was Barron truly the villain in the drama? He had only her say so, and it was she, not Walter Barron, who had participated in the bombing of the Clarion Building and the abduction of Newcombe and Lafayette.

Still, it seemed evident that Barron was up to no good. The complex in the secret valley and his evident interest in Newcombe’s expertise lent credence to the idea that he was trying to develop some kind of terrible weapon, and perhaps more importantly, bore witness to a complete lack of moral or ethical concerns.

But was Anya any better?

When the train arrived, Dodge eschewed the comfort of a Pullman berth, and opted for steerage fares. He was tired and desperately needed rest, but if Anya secretly desired to do him harm, she would have less opportunity to do so in the crowded and public environs of the third class compartment. And if she wanted to escape again… well, that was fine with him.

Dodge wondered if his best course of action was not perhaps to turn the tables on her, give her the slip as soon as they arrived back in the city, or perhaps just turn her in to the authorities. But he kept recalling the old adage: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” Anya certainly hadn’t earned his friendship, but was she an enemy?

Until he saw irrefutable evidence otherwise, Dodge decided he was going to treat her as one.