The Last Bridge

Chapter Forty-seven 1050 Hours

The train reached its sliding halt with a sigh of brake shoes. Smoke chuffed from the engine stack, and Tyreen saw the inscription on one slat-sided boxcar: Hommes 52–56, Chevaux 12. The train curved away into the jungle; its rear end was out of sight. Faintly, over exhalations of steam, Tyreen heard Sergeant Khang on the far side of the train talking to the engineer. The engineer and the fireman and the armed guard all crowded over to the far side of the engine to talk to Khang. Tyreen made a brief hand signal and stepped out of the bamboo.

He crossed the five-yard distance with rapid strides and followed Saville up into the engine cab. Saville had his gun braced on his hip. The tone of Khang’s voice changed, and the engine guard stiffened. Saville spoke calmly in Vietnamese and reached around to relieve the guard of his weapon.

Hooker and McKuen climbed up. Sergeant Khang looked both ways along the track and swung up. He said, “Take on water and proceed. We are not here. You understand?” He was talking to the engine driver.

The engineer was a middle-aged man with watery eyes and sloping chin. He blinked rapidly. His face was whipped red by wind. Tyreen’s gun muzzle lifted to cover the crew. The fireman was a hard chunk of a man with a keen, violent temper mirrored in his face. George McKuen said, “I’m thinking we’ll be doing our own coal-shoveling before this ride’s over, Colonel.”

“Watch him,” Tyreen agreed.

J. D. Hooker crouched down to lay out his equipment. Tyreen braced himself on the tender platform, giving Hooker room to work. Tyreen said, “All right, Theodore.”

Saville dropped off the engine and trotted back alongside the train. Sergeant Khang tied the sentry with his own belt and bootlaces. The man spoke bitterly.

The fireman rammed his shovel into the tender’s coal with a blow that could sever a man’s body. Sergeant Khang spoke a mild command; the engineer reached for his throttle. His tongue licked out rapidly.

Air brakes wheezed, and the big wheels spun before they took a grip on the tracks. The engine ground forward. Back half the length of the train, Theodore Saville reached for a boxcar ladder and swung up as the car rolled past. Saville swarmed up to the top of the car and ran back along the swaying catwalks. Tyreen lost sight of him around the curve in the track.

McKuen said, “The good Captain’s one landmark I didn’t expect to raise again. What happens if he has to fight a duel with an antiaircraft gun?”

Hooker made a pattern of tamping jelly, explosive blocks, wires and fuses and caps. Sergeant Khang bent down and rolled the trussed guard off the train. The guard’s angry shouting followed them. Wheel-trucks chattered on the rails. A red blaze glared in the open firebox, shining on Hooker’s face. Like a young spider, he seemed to thrive on the oppressive heat. The roadbed traveled a soggy, uneven course through jungle corridors. The engineer clutched his throttle; his eyes drained, and he stared petulantly straight ahead past the boiler.

A demolition cap rolled with the motion of the engine, and Hooker made a grab for it. The fireman’s quick eyes did not miss that; his powerful grip tightened on the coal spade. Iron wheels drummed on rail-splices, gathering speed. Tyreen spoke to Nguyen Khang: “Tell him to keep his speed down.”

Khang yelled in the engineer’s ear. The engineer answered quickly, resentfully. Khang stepped back and bellowed above the noise: “He says we got to have speed to make it up the grade.”

“All right. Hooker?”

“I’ll get it done,” said Hooker without looking up.

“Shape your charge to direct the force straight down. We want to blow the bridge, not the roof of the engine.”

“By God, don’t you think I know that much?”

Hooker worked on his knees with professional deliberation. When the fireman’s full shovel of coal passed by his face, Hooker hardly blinked; his concentration was complete.

The train made a thirty-five-mile clip. Branches sprang off the cab. Tyreen could see the engine’s weight depressing the ties on their soft bedding. The shoulders of the lower gorge rolled toward them, and the tracks swung away from the river and started their turn into the upgrade. The heavy smell of the jungle developed a sting from the added bite of coal smoke and intense dry heat. There was one length of straight track, curving upward in a bow. When Tyreen searched the length of the train, he found no sign of Saville.

McKuen said, “I don’t see any antiaircraft car.”

“Maybe.”

“Could be the beggars haven’t got enough of them to go around. Anyhow, we can always hope.”

Tyreen’s hope was that a low-hanging limb had not swept Saville off the train. The firebox guttered raw scarlet light across the cab. The train clicked along; the engine, fighting a stiffening grade, began to lose speed. Couplings crackled in brittle strain. Tyreen shifted his weary grip on the gun. “Four or five minutes, Hooker.”

The fireman rammed his shovel into the tender. His tongue licked a thin line across his soot-dark lips. Tyreen turned his attention momentarily to the engineer. That was when the fireman turned with a full shovel of coal and sprang catlike at J. D. Hooker. Hooker somehow felt the threat; he pulled up a shoulder and launched himself forward under the swing of the shovel. Before Tyreen could move, Hooker’s head butted the fireman’s belly and the fireman sailed back. The shovel dropped loosely across Hooker’s back. The fireman dropped out of the cab and kept himself on board only by the precarious grip of one hand against the handrail. Sergeant Khang whipped around; McKuen lifted his gun. Tyreen, who was closest, deliberately stepped in front of McKuen’s gun. For one moment he locked glances with the fireman. The fireman shouted at him. Tyreen slammed the side of his gun barrel savagely against the fireman’s knuckles. It broke the fireman’s hold. He fell away backwards. His cry was brief; he plunged down the embankment, striking on one shoulder. His head rolled loosely. He rolled to the bottom, and his shape receded along the train.

Cascading lumps of coal left a checkerboard of charcoal stains on the back of J. D. Hooker’s field jacket. Hooker scooped up the coal shovel and rammed it into Khang’s hands. “Work, damn you.” Hooker dropped back to his destructive tools as if there had been no interruption.

McKuen spoke weary relief. Tyreen beckoned him close and said, “Can you run this engine?”

McKuen considered it. “Looks easy enough. If I don’t have to turn loop-the-loops.”

Tyreen stepped past Hooker and shook the engineer’s shoulder. He said in Vietnamese, “Jump.”

The engineer jerked back. “Choi oi!”

“Di nhanh,” Tyreen said. “Di di.”

He gripped the engineer’s collar and propelled him to the open platform. The engineer gripped the handrails with both hands and bent his knees like a diver. “Da dao my,” he said with bravado, and leaped away.

Tyreen watched him tumble. McKuen grasped the throttle and looked back. “Is he all right?”

“I think so.”

“What was that last crack?”

“He said, ‘Down with America,’” Tyreen answered drily.

Sergeant Khang tossed coal into the firebox. The train howled up the long curving grade with a clang of steel and a banner of smoke. The slope tilted up, ever more steep, and the ten-wheel engine slugged laboriously along the line. McKuen said, “Maybe we’re supposed to give a whistle signal when we get up near the bridge.”

“When we get that close,” Tyreen yelled in reply, “it’ll be too late to stop us.”

He saw a shadow move, and he wheeled. A great bulk loomed atop the coal tender — Saville. Tyreen’s tired face broke into a grin. Saville dropped down on the swaying platform. His face was black from whipping smoke. Tyreen said, “Did you find a gun?”

“No gun,” Saville said, catching his breath. “There was a caboose full of troops. I cut it loose. It’s rolling back down the grade now. I hope they didn’t have a radio in there. David, from up top you can see the tunnel. Maybe a mile, no more. How near ready are we?”

Tyreen said, “Hooker!”

Hooker grunted and kept working. An instant later he threw both arms up like a cowboy in a steer-tying rodeo contest. “Do I fuse it now, Colonel?”

Rapid calculations ran through Tyreen’s head. “Fuse it and stand by to light up. Theodore, get ready to jump.”

Khang tossed his shovel aside and stood behind Saville on the edge of the platform. Tyreen stood at the front of the cab, peering forward, waiting for the tunnel to appear. Hooker was lighting a cigarette, shielding his flame from the wind. The firebox roared. Tyreen said, “Full throttle, Lieutenant.”

“I’m on it,” said McKuen.

The bridge was about a hundred yards long; Tyreen had to time the fuse within that limit. He studied the pitch of the track rolling underneath; he watched the rails curve past monuments of rock and then, suddenly, the tunnel mouth came around the bend a quarter mile ahead.

Hooker said, “Now?”

“Hold it.”

Saville swung back into the cab. Tyreen socked Khang on the arm; Khang made his jump. He was still in the air when Tyreen shouted to McKuen, and McKuen wheeled around the steel wall and leaped away.

Saville stood fast, rocking with the sway of the engine, and Tyreen bellowed furiously at him, “Get the hell out of the way!”

With a half-sheepish grin the big man put the slabs of his hands on the rails and swung down. He waited a moment longer, and jumped.

The tunnel grew large and black. Machine gun snouts started to turn in sealed bunkers. Tyreen held his hand up. Hooker had his burning cigarette in his hand, six inches from the fuse.

The hot black engine brawled up the rails, and Tyreen saw machine gun muzzles turning slowly, uncertainly, following the engine. One hundred yards, eighty yards, and Tyreen roared, “Now!”

The cigarette stabbed against the cable; fuse sputtered. Hooker held the cigarette against the fuse, calmly insuring that the spark was full. Sixty yards, fifty.

Tyreen bent down to yell. “Never mind. Jump. Go!” He swiveled back onto the platform. Hooker made a racing start, plunged past him through the opening, and was gone. Tyreen had a last glimpse of the sizzling fuse. The fierce glare of the firebox half blinded him. He dropped both feet to the outside steps and launched himself from the engine.

The ground sped forward under him. It tripped him, rolled him down; he sprawled and flipped over and banged his hip and rib cage and right arm. Agony exploded down the whole side of his body. He pedaled his legs and got a toehold on the embankment and sprinted toward the scrub jungle ten yards away from the roadbed. The sound of guns was swallowed in the racket and roar of the train, but a lacing of machine gun bullets kicked dirt against his running legs. The submachine gun slung across his shoulders had cut his collar open, but that was a small hurt in his racked body. He made a fiat dive into the bush and slid along a gravel surface, butting a tree. He crabbed deeper into the brush. Bullets clipped through. He made a sharp turn and crawled swiftly on his belly, dragging his right arm.

Thicker jungle swallowed him, and he stopped with breath hot as a furnace lashing in and out of him. His face lay in the damp red earth; spittle began to pool by his mouth. Blood flowed down his neck. Through the roots he could see one little patch of track with car-trucks rolling over it. The last car came grinding past and then the sound changed, the hollow echoes of the train banging through the tunnel. He closed his eyes.

The steam engine emerged from the tunnel mouth at twenty-five miles an hour. A telephone warning from the far end of the tunnel had brought a squad of soldiers out of the guard tower, and a sergeant was struggling with a rusty siding switch when the engine appeared. On the far side of the bridge, a tank rumbled forward in the slow attempt to block the engine. The tiny figures of men ran about on the battlements of the south slope. For some unclear purpose the barrel of a mountain howitzer began to swivel. The sergeant failed to throw the switch in time to divert the engine. In a hiss of steam it passed the switch. The switch, thrown over, derailed the fifth boxcar, broke a coupling and sent the after-length of the train — twenty-eight freight cars and nine tankers — plunging free into the gorge. The coal tender jumped the tracks just short of the bridge and piled into the concrete bridge pier with a crash that shook the mountain. Its three-car train whiplashed against the base of the guard tower, tearing out a six-ton concrete wall. Two antiaircraft gun emplacements tumbled into the undercut hole. Thirty-seven railroad cars full of cargo caromed off the gorge walls like a handful of dropped marbles. The engine, with its rear trucks off the rails, lurched down the track into the exact center of the bridge span, where its tight-packed charge of ultra-high-explosive ignited. The sound of the TNT cap was lost in greater noise. The engine, unbalanced on the rails, began to tip over on its left side, and then the demolition charge went off.

It ripped through the length of the engine, blasting downward. Shrieking half-ton chunks of steel rocketed through the wrought-iron bridge as if it were papier-maché. The roar was deafening. There was a flash of white light. The blast ripped a forty-five foot section from the midsection of the span. A three-thousand-pound lance of steel flew across the chasm with the speed of a racing car and imbedded itself in the granite wall. A cloud of debris and smoke foamed high above the gorge. The explosion of the engine boiler sent metal plates four hundred feet in the air. The brass engine bell fell all the way to the Sang Chu river, gonging the full while.

Without arc support, the severed halves of the bridge bent away from their piers. Like a divided trapdoor, the bridge hinged at either end, collapsing with roaring snaps of breaking iron and concrete. The northern half broke loose quickly and fell eighty feet to a ledge of granite, where it broke apart and fell to the river in pieces. The remaining section sagged slowly on its pylons. Cracks developed in the concrete pier as if an earthquake had shaken the mountain. Like a rubber band stretched beyond its limit, the bridge broke away, carrying the entire concrete pier with it.

The bodies of soldiers fell through the gorge. The sergeant at the switch was flattened, dead, against the ground. Three men lay pinned under the smashed coal tender. A body lay in the mouth of the tunnel, and two wounded men crawled blindly back into the darkness. The twisted ends of rails jutted into space.

For a reason unknown to the wounded garrison commander, the mountain howitzer fired a single round into the sky.