“Not in here,” Young Mr. Balim said.
“Outside, then.”
Outside, beside the shed, there were still a few unused rails, but they were all sixteen-footers. No good. While the others scuffed through the trash beside the building Lew, not knowing what he was looking for, wandered alone down the spur line to the turntable, paused there to look around and see nothing of use, and walked on. The last of the added rails stopped less than five feet from the lip of the gorge. Far below, the water of Thruston Bay could be heard beating against the coastal rocks.
What could they use? Turning back, Lew was starting to retrace his steps when he saw the old buffer that had been removed from the end of the track now lying off to the right in the weeds. A trapezoid around a large thick rusty spring with a black rubber knob on the front, the frame of the buffer was made of lengths of rail!
“Jesus Christ,” Lew said for his own benefit, then yelled, “Bathar! Bring ’em down here!”
There were gaps at both ends of the inserted piece, but neither was more than an inch long. Extra log supports were under the insert, which had been fixed in place with so many spikes it looked as though it had acne.
“All right,” Frank said as he threw away the measure stick. “Now we’ve finally got the welcome mat, let’s go steal the fucking train.”
45
The train ran west from Tororo at fifty-five miles an hour. The heavy-laden cars roared and rumbled on their way, the wheels banging into the joints, the metal couplers gnashing together, the bodies swaying and jouncing left and right on their old springs. The locomotive strained forward as though representing steam engines everywhere, hurling defiance at the world of diesel. The big steel wheels ran so fast the connecting bars were a blur. Smoke and steam fled out the stacks, and the engineer wailed the whistle for the level crossings, where people stared as the huge snarling shrieking metal snake, a third of a mile long, went thundering by.
Back when they’d been picking their path through the Tororo yards, they’d had to slow to such a crawl that the fireman had hopped out, run to the station, bought two sandwiches and four beers, and was back aboard before the transfer was completed to the east-west line. But now, as they ate the sandwiches and drank the beer, there was nothing ahead but fine weather and clear track.
The little stations shot by: Nagongera, where the sleeping station-master leaped out of his chair on the shaded platform as though the devil himself were rushing by; Budumba, just before the clattering trestle bridge over the swampy southern toe of Lake Kyoga; Busembatia, where the train quivered and clanged over the switches that led to the northbound Mbulamuti branch loop; Iganga, where a school soccer game faltered to a stop as the white-shirted boys in dark-blue short pants turned to stare and the black-and-white soccer ball went bounding away on the green grass. The engineer laughed and sounded the banshee whistle one extra time for luck.
“Flag ahead!”
The engineer turned and frowned, and the fireman pointed dead ahead, where a very sloppy soldier beside the track waved a red flag vigorously over his head.
Automatically, the engineer released the throttle bar and applied the brakes, and they shot by the grinning flag-waving soldier. What did it mean? The next station was Magamaga, just before Jinja. Was there trouble there? Trouble on the track?
Down the line another soldier waved a red flag, and beyond him an Army truck straddled the rails, blocking the train.
“It’s Army,” the fireman said. He sounded frightened.
“We have to stop.” The engineer sounded frightened, too. The Army. Who knew whose side the Army was on these days?
But stopping a train this big, this long, this heavy, was easier said than done. The brakes slammed on all the way down the line of cars, the impulse running back through the hydraulic hoses, the wheels under the cars shuddering to a halt, skidding and scraping along the rails, throwing sparks. The locomotive hurled up a great whoosh of steam, neighing like a fractious horse, not wanting to stop, fighting the brakes. The wide-eyed driver of the truck (an Asian, he looked like, what was an Asian doing in Uganda?) hurriedly drove off the track, but the train did finally grind down to a loud, steam-hissing, metal-banging, infinitely prolonged halt, forward motion ceasing just before it reached the spot where the truck had been.
The second soldier was an officer. The engineer, torn between worry and irritation, watched him trot this way along the gravel beside the track, still carrying his red flag. Far back, well beyond the last car, the other soldier had thrown his own flag away and could faintly be seen running in this direction.
The officer was out of shape; a desk man, probably. He was winded when he reached the locomotive, where the engineer yelled down to him over the continuing hiss of steam, “What’s the matter?”
The officer gasped and blew for a minute, increasing the engineer’s impatience, before he managed to say, “Trouble.”
“Trouble? I guessed there was trouble. What sort of trouble?”
“You’re being hijacked,” the officer said.
The engineer didn’t at all understand. “What’s that?”
A voice behind him said, in English, “We’re taking over the train.”
The engineer and fireman were both fairly proficient in English, and they understood that sentence well enough. They spun around and stared in absolute amazement at two white men who had climbed up into the cab on the other side—while the Army officer had distracted them—and who were now standing there with guns in their hands.
“You—” The engineer couldn’t figure out how to put his astonishment and disbelief into words in any language. “You—You can’t—This is a train!”
The bigger older one said, “We know it’s a fucking train, fella, and we’re taking it over.”
The Army officer had now climbed up into the cab, and the fireman said to him, “The Army? What does the Army want with our train?”
“They’re not Army,” the engineer told him. He’d at least worked out that much.
“Talk English,” said the older white man.
The younger one stepped closer to the engineer. “You’ll drive now,” he said. “But slowly.”
“It would have been a record!” wailed the fireman, the enormity of it coming home to him.
“Talk English, goddammit!”
The younger one gestured with his gun at the engineer. “Start now.”
“Wait for Charlie,” said the officer.
The older one said, “Fuck Charlie.”
“No,” said the younger one. “Where is he, Isaac?”
The officer leaned out the cab window. “He’s climbing on the last car. Give him just a second… okay.”
“Start.”
The engineer started. Once again, smoke balls puffed upward; the wheels spun on the track; they caught; the locomotive surged forward. Clang, clang, clang, the couplers crashed all the way down the line as the slack was taken up, and the entire giant snake lunged forward.
They passed the truck, stopped now on the dirt road beside the track. The driver—he was an Asian—waved and drove away as the train slowly gathered speed.
The younger one was carefully watching the engineer’s moves. He means to run it himself, the engineer thought. Aloud, he said, “This is foolish, you know. What are you going to do with a train? When we don’t arrive in Jinja, they’ll come looking for us.”
“Stop now,” the younger one said. “We’re here.”
They’d traveled perhaps half a mile. “Here?”