Orphan's Triumph

FIFTY-SEVEN

IN THE NEXT MORNING’S SPARSE DAWN, Aud, Jude, Celline, and I stood together in the wind shadow cast by the train that had brought us, which had been reversed on a spur overnight, so that it pointed back toward the spiked black mountain range through which we had come, ten miles to the south. Smoke from the smoldering oil fire overhung the plain like dirty gauze in the pre-sunrise calm.

Around us by twos and threes, those of our companions who had been revived by a meal and a night in barracks bunks that their captors no longer needed already scoured the snows. They bent, gathered meteorites, then stuffed them into knapsacks and into the pockets of coats for which their captors also had no further need. Periodically, someone gasped as, beneath the snow, they touched the frozen corpse of an earlier and less fortunate arrival.

In the midst of the vast and unmarked graveyard, Aud knelt in the snow and pointed at his makeshift sand table map. A line of stones bisected the flat, swept area that represented the plains south and north of the mountains. A red string, laid south to north, represented the ice road line. The string snaked across the stone “mountain range” wedged into Aud’s paper-narrow “mountain pass” like dental floss.

He pointed at the north end of the red string. “We’re here. Without the refueling oil we planned on, this ice train can barely reach here.” His finger slid along the string, then stopped above the “pass” that ran north to south through the mountains.

He swung his arm around the plain at the stone gatherers. “We need to buy time to finish this work. The mountains are impassable. If we overturn this ice train in the pass, we’ll force Forty-fifth Division to dismount their train and advance toward the pass on foot. A small force using the sledges and engine as breastworks can hold the pass even against a division.”

I asked Celline and Jude, “Assuming volunteers, how many can you spare from gathering and still meet the deadline?”

They looked at each other. Jude shrugged. “We planned on a thousand pickers. Could you manage with two hundred?”

“There were three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae,” I said. But there were eighty thousand Persians on the other side.

Celline frowned. She knew Thermopylae like I knew how to stir trilobite bisque. But she said, “We’ll manage with a hundred less, then.”

I didn’t tell her that the three hundred had been the finest troops in their world, maybe in any world, not starved, frostbitten shopkeepers. I also didn’t tell her that the Spartans lost. Big.

There was another similarity to Thermopylae. I shaded my eyes with my hand as I pointed at the eastern shoulder of the distant mountain pass. “The Spooks mapped this. There’s a way around the canyon. A ledge a goat could walk, eight hundred feet above the canyon floor, along the east wall. It’s a long way ’round, but once the Persians outflanked the Spartans the battle was lost. If the Quicksilver Division can move a battalion over that goat track, it can swing in behind the bottleneck in a day.”

Aud shook his head. “I know the Forty-fifth. But I also know the commander who succeeded me. Folz is deliberate. Unimaginative. He’ll pound away at the pass frontally for days before he resorts to maneuver. But you’re right. Eventually…”

I pointed at the “shoulder” of the pass on Aud’s sand table map. “They widened the main route through the canyon with dynamite when they built the railroad. There’s still one case left in the machine shop, even after the GIs played with it. It’s not enough to close the main pass, but it might be enough to drop a narrow spot on that ledge, cut that path. Your old troops are good, Aud. But they can’t fly.”

Aud shook his head again. “We’ll just have to take our chances. I can’t spare a man. And none of these people can handle dynamite.”

I said, “I can.”