“No, no, that’s all right.”
The minister shut the door and walked around the front of the truck while Chase reached down for one of the metal bars. It was too bad this Good Samaritan story had to end on such a sour note, but Chase had need of this truck and couldn’t afford the alarm to be raised.
It was no good trying to go back for the Mercedes; he had to cut his losses on that one. There was only one exit route left: back the other way, eastward, through Kampala and Jinja. He had to reach the coffee thieves before they emptied the train and started away across the lake.
The minister opened the driver’s door. “Lucky I came along,” he said.
55
Through the afternoon and into the night the transfer of the coffee went on. It took half an hour to load a group of four trucks, and nearly an hour for the trucks to drive down to the lake. With the work force at the lake half the size of that at the depot, it took another hour to unload each group of trucks onto the rafts, spread the tarpaulins on top, then moor each raft in the calm water just off-shore.
There was of course no way to hide these loaded rafts from the air, but the few planes and helicopters that passed overhead before nightfall paid them no attention. Those aircraft belonged to Uganda’s antismuggling patrol and had been called in from duty over the lake to help look for the missing train. They saw the tarpaulin-covered rafts in the bay but ignored them. They could be floating there for any of a hundred reasons, ranging from fishing to oil exploration to archaeology, and certainly could have nothing to do with a stolen train.
The first batch of trucks to reach the lake was no more than half unloaded when the second arrived, and as the first quartet finished and started back up the access road the third came into view. Frank returned to the depot with the first group, leaving Charlie and a crony of his to remount the rest of the outboard motors. Their trucks squeezed by the downward-traveling fourth group halfway back, and arrived at the depot, just before six o’clock, in time to help finish loading the fifth and final batch of trucks.
Twelve freight cars had been tossed into the gorge by now, in three clusters of four, and each jettisoning had been the occasion for another round of self-congratulation and beer. Frank found the work force, including Lew and Young Mr. Balim and Isaac—who had been replaced as sentry by a workman who’d fallen off the back of a truck with a sack in his arms and landed under it—all feeling very chipper and optimistic indeed. “Have a beer, Frank,” said Isaac. Isaac!
Frank took the beer, but gave them all a look of disapproval. “When we get drunk is afterward,” he said.
Lew came smiling over to say, “Take it easy, Frank. We’re moving the stuff. And there’s a kick here, you don’t know about it yet, there’s something… Just wait for it.”
Frank knew Lew Brady to be a solid reliable professional, if a trifle young. But now, peering into Lew’s eyes, he saw a glittering spark that surprised him, a rashness he hadn’t realized was there. He said, “Lew? What is it?”
“Just wait for that truck there.”
He meant the truck Isaac had borrowed from the Ugandan Army a few days ago. Lighter and smaller than the other trucks, it was being used now to take the last coffee from the four freight cars currently being unloaded; eight or ten tons in all.
Frank swigged his beer and watched the men work, and even though it seemed to him their attitude was somehow frivolous, he had to admit they were doing the job, moving quickly and smoothly. And when that lone truck was filled and starting on its way—the driver had been the loser in a brisk short-straw contest—Frank got to see what drug it was that had made them all so high.
It was danger. As an ex-railwayman uncoupled the four empty cars, the thirty workmen all clambered up their sides, some climbing onto the roofs, some hanging on the ladders, the rest going inside the big open doors, all yelling and hurrahing, laughing and waving their beer bottles around.
Frank looked for Lew, to ask him what this was all about, but Lew was scrambling up onto the roof of the lead car. Young Mr. Balim was grinning in the doorway of the third car, taking deep swigs from his beer bottle.
Frank found himself almost alone on the ground, with Isaac. “Isaac,” he said, “what the hell is this?”
“Boys will be boys,” Isaac said. “That was Lew’s explanation.”
“Sounds like one of Charlie’s.”
The grinning ex-railwayman between the cars yelled and waved his arms to indicate the coupler was unfastened. The grinning ex-railwayman atop the fifth car waved and nodded to indicate his car’s brake was securely on. And the grinning ex-railwayman on the first car drained his beer bottle and tossed it ahead of the car into the gorge. Then, with a grand gesture, he spun the wheel to release the brake. And nothing happened.
So why was everybody cheering? Frank looked, and the thirty men on and in and hanging from the cars were all whooping and cavorting and leaping and dancing around, stomping their feet like crazy people in the Middle Ages trying to frighten away plague.
“It’s been building from the start,” Isaac said, at Frank’s elbow. “It’s bigger and more ridiculous every time. God knows where it will lead.”
The vibration. Now Frank saw what those clowns were up to; the vibration of their dancing and carrying on was overcoming inertia, starting the empty cars forward on the slight slope, sliding every damn one of those idiots toward the cliff!
“Jesus H. Christ, Lew!”
The men on top of the lead car were running now, Lew among them, leaping across the space to the next car. The ones riding below jumped out the open doorways on both sides, while the ones hanging onto the ladders simply dropped off and fell to the ground or on top of one another, laughing and kicking their legs.
There was some sort of contest taking place up on the roofs. The idea seemed to be to wait until the car you were on was actually falling, its front wheels already in space, before leaping to the next car back. The first car had already gone into the gorge; the second was going; the whole mass was accelerating. There wasn’t room on the narrow roofs for everyone who wanted to play chicken; from the second car roof a half dozen men dove sideways at the last possible instant, rolling on the edge of the cliff, legs dangling, hands scrabbling for holds in the scrub.
“Holy leaping shit!”
And Lew was up there with those assholes; he was in the middle of it; he was a fucking ringleader. Always on the front car, he was never the first nor the last to jump back to the next, but invariably timed his move just before the last-second rush. Frank thought, I’m too old for this, by Christ. I am gonna retire.
“Frank!”
It was Young Mr. Balim calling. Frank watched in horror, thinking of what he would have to say to the old man, while Young Mr. Balim in the third car waved and grinned and waited until what had to be too long before pirouetting out of the car, beer bottle held high, and crumpling all in a heap next to the edge. Frank stopped breathing, and Young Mr. Balim uncurled and crawled quickly forward to look over the lip and watched his car fall.
Frank breathed. “Isaac,” he said. “Isaac, how can you let them do this?”
Isaac’s expression was doleful, but still good-humored. “How can you not?” he asked.
With a concerted cheer, and with bodies hurtling in all directions, the fourth car sailed out over the edge and into eternity. Amid the whooping and the hollering, Frank and Isaac stood unsmiling and alone, like a couple of preachers in a cowtown on a Saturday night.
Lew came over, grin and bottle both intact, bottle half-full, clothing spotted with dirt and twigs. “Whadaya say, Frank?”