The Day After Tomorrow

75

The Smooth click of the wheels over the rails beneath was soothing, and Osborn sat back drowsing. If he’d slept at all during the two hours they’d spent huddled under Austerlitz Bridge, he didn’t remember. All he knew was that he was very tired and felt grubby and unclean. Across from him, McVey leaned against the window, dozing lightly, and he marveled that McVey seemed to be able to sleep anywhere.

They’d climbed from their perch over the Seine at five o’clock and gone back to the station, where they’d discovered that trains for Meaux left from the Gare de l’Est, fifteen minutes by cab across Paris. With time pressing, they’d chanced a taxi ride across the city, hoping the randomly chosen taxi driver was no more than he appeared.

Reaching the station, they’d entered separately and through different doors, each man all too aware of the early editions jamming the front racks of every news kiosk inside, bold black headlines hawking the shooting at La Coupole with their photos printed starkly and graphically underneath.

Moments later, nervous hands had reached for tickets at separate windows, but neither clerk had done more than exchange a ticket for money and serve the next customer in line.

Then they’d waited, apart, but within view of each other, for twenty minutes. Their only jolt came when five uniformed gendarmes had suddenly appeared leading four rough-looking, handcuffed and chained convicts toward a waiting train. It looked as if they were about to board the train to Meaux, but at the last minute they’d veered off and loaded their sullen cargo onto another.

At 6:25, they crossed the platform with a group of others and took separate seats in the same car of the train that left the Gare de l’Est at 6:30 and would arrive in Meaux at 7:10. Ample time for them to get from the station to the airfield by the time Noble’s pilot touched down in his Cessna ST95.

The train had eight cars and was a local, part of the EuroCity line. Two dozen people, mostly early commuters, rode in the same Second Class compartment as theirs. The First Class section was empty and had been avoided. Two men alone were easily remembered and described even if they sat seats apart in an empty compartment. The same two men sitting alone among other travelers were less likely to be recalled.

Pulling back a sleeve, Osborn looked at his watch. Six fifty-nine. Eleven minutes until they reached the station at Meaux. Outside, he could see the sun rising on a gray day that made the French farmland seem softer and greener than it already was.

The contrast between it and the dry, sun-scorched brush of Southern California was disquieting. For no particular reason, it conjured up visions of who McVey was and the tall man and the death that surrounded them both. Death had no place here. This train ride, this green land, this birthing of a new day was something that should have been enshrouded in love and wonder. Suddenly Osborn Was swept by an almost unbearable longing for Vera. He wanted to feel her. Touch her. Breathe in the scent of her. posing his eyes, he could see the texture of her hair and the smoothness of her skin. And he smiled as he remembered the almost imperceptible fuzz of hair on her ear-lobes. Vera was what mattered. This was her land he was passing through. It was her morning. Her day.

From somewhere off came a heavy, muffled thud. The train shuddered, and Osborn was suddenly being thrown violently sideways toward a young priest who, seconds before, had been reading a paper. Then the car they were in was turning over and they both fell. It kept rolling, like some horrendous carnival ride. Glass crashing and the wrenching of steel meshed with human screams. He glimpsed the ceiling just as an aluminum crutch glanced hard off his head. A split second later Osborn was upside down with a body on top of him. Then glass exploded above him and he was awash in blood. The car spun again and the person on top of him slid down his chest. It was a woman, and she had no upper torso at all. Then there was horrible grating as steel screamed over steel. It was followed by a tremendous bang. Osborn rocketed backward and everything stopped.

Seconds, minutes afterward, Osborn opened his eyes. He could see a gray sky through trees with a bird circling above them. For a time he lay there doing nothing more than breathe. Finally, he tried to move. First his left leg, then his right. Then his arm, until he could see his still-bandaged left hand. He moved his right arm and hand. Miraculously, he had survived.

Easing up, he saw the massive twist of steel. What remained of a railroad car was lying on its side halfway down an embankment. It was then he realized he had been thrown from the train.

Farther up the embankment, he could see the other cars, some driven, accordion-like, into each other. Others were piled, almost piggyback, one on top of another. Bodies were everywhere. Some were moving; most were not. At the top of the hill, a group of young boys came into view, staring down at the wreckage and pointing.

Slowly Osborn began to understand what had happened. “McVey!” he heard himself say out loud.

“McVey!” he said again, struggling to his feet. Then he saw the first rescuers push past the boys and start down the hill.

The act of standing made him dizzy. Closing his eyes, he grabbed onto a tree for balance and took a deep breath. Reaching up, he felt the pulse at his neck. It was strong and regular. Then somebody, a fireman, he thought, spoke to him in French. “I’m all right,” he said in English, and the man moved on.

Shrieks and cries of victims cleared his mind further, and he saw that everything around him was chaos. Rescue workers poured down the hillside. Climbed into cars. Began lifting people out through smashed windows, easing them out from beneath the wreckage. Blankets were tossed, in a rush, over the dead. The entire area became a frantic hill of activity.

And settling over everything—the shouts, the screams, the distant sirens, the cries for help—was the pungent, overwhelming, odor of hot brake fluid as it leaked from sheared lines.

The smell of it made Osborn cover his nose as he pushed through the tragedy around him.

“McVey!” he cried out again. “McVey! McVey!”

“Sabotage,” he heard someone say in passing. Turning, he found himself looking into a rescue worker’s face.

“American,” he said. “An older man. Have you seen him?” The man stared back as if he didn’t understand. Then a fireman came up and they ran back up the hill.

Stepping over broken glass, climbing over torn and ravaged steel, Osborn moved from one victim to another. Watching the doctors work on the living, lifting the blankets to stare at the faces of the dead. McVey was nowhere among them.

Once, lifting the blanket to look at the face of a dead man, he saw the man’s eyes flicker once, then close again. Reaching, he felt for a heartbeat and found it. Looking up, he saw a paramedic.

“Help!” he shouted. “This man is alive!”

The paramedic came with a rush and Osborn moved back. As he did, he began to feel cold and lightheaded. Shock, he knew, was beginning to set in. His first thought was to ask the paramedic where he could get a blanket and he started to, but suddenly had enough presence of mind to realize that if the train had been sabotaged, the act could well have been meant for McVey and himself. If he asked for a blanket, they would know he’d been a passenger. They would demand his name and he would be reported alive.

“No,” he thought and backed away. “Best to get out of sight and stay there.”

Looking around, he saw a thick stand of trees near the top of the grade not far from where he stood. The paramedic had his back to him and the other rescue workers were farther down the hill. It became a major physical effort for him to climb the few yards to the trees, and he was afraid it was taking too long and he would be seen. Finally he reached them and turned back. Still, no one looked his way. Satisfied, he melted into the thick under-growth. And there, away from the hysteria, he lay down in the damp leaves and, using his arm for a pillow, closed his eyes. Almost immediately deep sleep overtook him.