Chapter 36 - The Shadow on the Wire
The twin turbochargers of Engine 101 screamed like wounded beasts as four thousand horsepower of diesel fury surged through the six massive traction motors.
The heavy hunter-green locomotive shuddered against the locked rails of Trinidad yard, coughing dense black exhaust plumes toward the starless dawn sky. Behind her, clamped into her heavy knuckle-coupler, Car 49 and our reinforced caboose sat ready, carrying the sealed safe containing the dead man's ledger and Arthur Vance with his satchel of federal filings.
Jonah stood at the right-hand throttle stand, his left hand clamped onto the brass reverser lever, his eyes scanning the high-pressure steam and oil gauges. He looked entirely in his element—a rail master commanding an iron giant, commanding destiny itself.
I sat in the left-hand fireman’s seat, the radio handset pressed to my ear, listening to the crackling static of the old private dispatch frequency.
"Nina," Mateo’s voice came through the speaker, breathless and crackling with urgency. "The federal convoy has just crossed the Purgatoire River bridge! Twelve black Suburbans and four tactical armored transports! They’re three miles from the south gate!"
"Let them come," I spoke into the mic. "Mateo, trip the yard derailer the moment our caboose clears the throat switch. Seal the perimeter behind us."
"Understood, Chairwoman," Mateo answered with a grim chuckle. "Give 'em hell on the Front Range."
Jonah looked across the vibrating cab at me. "Ready?"
"Open the throttle, Jonah."
Jonah hauled the long notched throttle bar back into notch eight.
The steel wheels bit into the sand-coated rail heads with an ear-splitting shriek. The sixty-ton locomotive surged forward with bone-crushing momentum, hurling us back into our high-backed leather seats as twenty thousand tons of steel began to thunder down the outbound mainline toward the north.
The gates of Trinidad yard blurred past in a smear of snow, yellow floodlights, and cheering union workers raising their fists into the freezing air. Within two minutes, the speedometer needle climbed through forty, fifty, sixty-five miles per hour. The heavy engine slammed through the mountain drifts, throwing great white curtains of pulverized snow forty feet into the dark pine forests on either side.
Down in the caboose, Arthur Vance was wedged behind a steel desk, typing furiously on an encrypted satellite phone linked directly to the Chief Judge of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver.
"Nina!" Arthur’s voice yelled through the cab intercom. "I have Judge Holbrook’s clerk on the emergency line! She says Holbrook has agreed to convene an extraordinary chambers session at eight o'clock sharp—but Sterling’s legal team has just filed an ex-parte emergency injunction! They're claiming Car 49 is carrying an unexploded chemical hazard from the 1989 disaster!"
"They're trying to give the state police legal clearance to derail us!" Jonah shouted above the deafening roar of the diesel engine.
He slammed the sanders open as we rounded the treacherous high curve at Walsenburg. Ahead of us, the automated block signal on the signal gantry blazed a harsh, deadly ruby red.
*STOP AND STAY.*
"Signal is red!" I shouted, checking the track map. "The Omaha dispatchers have dropped the absolute stop block at Milepost Eighty! The switch into the coal siding is set against us!"
"Look ahead at the switch stand, Nina!" Jonah yelled back, leaning half his body out the cab window into the lashing sleet.
Through the blinding snow, illuminated by Engine 101’s single three-million-candlepower headlight, stood an old man in a frayed yellow railroad slicker. He was standing on the steel counter-weight bar of the manual switch, holding the massive cast-iron handle down with both boots and all his eighty years of weight, waving a kerosene lantern in wild, sweeping green arcs.
It was Old Man Higgins, who had run the Walsenburg roundhouse when my father was just an apprentice.
"Hold the throttle!" I screamed.
Engine 101 rocketed across the points with a terrifying, violent lurch that lifted the left-side wheels two inches off the iron before the flanges slammed back into the groove with a deafening *CLANG.* We blew past Higgins in a whirlwind of snow and thunder. The old railman tipped his grease-stained cap as we vanished into the dark northern cut.
"Switch cleared!" Jonah breathed, his knuckles white on the brake handle. "Ninety miles to Colorado Springs!"
Suddenly, the cab radio went completely dead.
Not with static. With the sudden, unnatural silence of a high-power military jamming signal.
High above the engine, through the reinforced glass of the cab roof, a blinding spotlight burned down through the swirling snow clouds. The rhythmic, thudding chop of heavy twin rotors shook the steel cab with violent acoustic pressure.
A black Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter swept out of the low storm clouds, hovering barely thirty feet above the roaring roof of Engine 101.
Through the open side door of the helicopter, harnessed to the frame, stood two figures. One held a high-powered loudspeaker. The other held a laser-designated anti-materiel rifle aimed directly through the cab windshield at Jonah’s chest.
The loudspeaker cut through the roar of the train with chilling, metallic precision:
*"Engine 101, this is United States Federal Transport Enforcement. By order of the United States Senate Committee on Domestic Security, your operating certificate has been revoked. You are classified as an armed hostile runaway.*
*"Kill the throttle and apply emergency air brakes immediately, or we will breach your cab and sever your traction lines.*
*"Chairwoman Taylor... look at the screen on your dashboard."*
The cab's emergency telemetric display—the one tied directly to the state rail grid—flickered violently to life through the jamming.
On the screen was not a map.
It was a live video feed from a high-security hospital suite in Denver.
Sitting in a wheelchair, surrounded by armed federal agents, was my mother, Martha Taylor, an oxygen mask over her face, her frail hands trembling against a signed transfer deed resting on her lap.
And standing directly behind her wheelchair, his hand resting possessively on her shoulder with a cold, triumphant smile, was Marcus Porter.
Marcus looked straight into the camera lens, his lips moving silently, forming three distinct words that froze the blood in my veins:
*Sign, or she dies.*
May you like
Beside me, Jonah’s hand reached out, catching my wrist as the laser sight from the helicopter centered squarely between his eyes.
Up ahead, through the swirling blizzard at Palmer Divide, the high bridge over the frozen canyon appeared through the dark—and the tracks across the center span were completely gone.
