It had been a long harrowing day. Aside from dealing with Stacy Richardson and Captain Cunningham, he had supervised the removal of thousands of gallons of deadly bio-weapons that had been sucked from old leaking drums and casks up into the White Train's specially designed toxic waste hopper cars. Once loaded, the deadly cargo would travel through Maryland, over the Appalachian Mountains, and across the South to Texas, where it would eventually be pumped into the earth's core and be lost forever.
Earlier in the day, as the storage room was slowly emptied, Zoll had brought in a team of Torn Victor HAZMAT volunteers wearing canvas suits and HEPA filters, who recapped the empty barrels, then covered them with industrial waste vacuum bags. The air was then sucked out of the bags until the heavy plastic clung to the empty barrels and casks like latex skin. The empty containers were loaded onto trucks, then were driven to the east side of the Fort and dumped into a deep hole that had been dug in preparation two days before.
From his upstairs bedroom window, he could hear the distant rumbling of the John Deere bulldozer a mile off as the hole with the old barrels was bladed over and the bio-containers buried forever.
The bell at the front door bonged, and he moved across the upstairs hallway and down the narrow, curved staircase. The old pine floors creaked under his heavy footsteps. He opened the front door and found Colonel Chittick standing there in a fresh uniform, a tired smile on his recently shaved face.
"I just got the call. Investigating subcommittee is going to be here at oh nine hundred tomorrow morning. Two Senators and some cowboys from C. D. C. in Atlanta."
"Not our people, I assume."
"No sir. We're pretty much out of the Atlanta C. D. C. operation. That unit now functions strictly according to its mission statement."
"Let's pour a stiff one," Admiral Zoll said. "This has been a tough day." Chittick nodded. Neither of them wanted to discuss the lab break-in, or the disposal of Mrs. Richardson and Captain Cunningham. It was a defining moment in their relationship. They were now even more dangerous to one another.
Chittick followed Zoll off the slanting porch into the old farmhouse with its framed oil paintings of American farm scenes. Zoll walked across the sloping floor, dropped some ice into two chunky glasses, then poured a shot of Scotch for each of them. He crossed back to his Chief Medical Officer and handed him the heavy crystal glass, and they touched rims. The two men stood a few feet apart and exchanged hooded looks as they sipped the blended twenty-five-year-old Macallan Scotch.
"Whatta you think of that mess up in Harrisburg?" Chittick said, looking for neutral ground. "Four F. T. R. A. S died, so it had to be connected to what happened here."
Zoll set down his heavy tub glass on an Early American spindle-base table. The weighty silence in the room was sliced evenly by a tick-tocking grandfather clock.
"Depends on what our guys up in Harrisburg find in those milk tanker cars. Whatever happens, we're gonna stonewall through it."
Chittick put down his empty glass and smiled at Zoll. "I think we dodged a bullet today," he said hopefully.
Zoll grunted. Then he moved to the door and opened it. Colonel Chittick stepped outside, but then turned to face Zoll on the front porch. "We're shut down at Vanishing Lake. Now, more or less, we're shut down here. That means the Devil's Workshop is out of business."
"Not for long, Colonel. The political climate is changing. God bless that crazy bastard Saddam. The more he threatens us with bio-weapons, the more likely it is our government will reopen the front door to its research again. In the meantime, I've got a few university labs who wanna play ball, and a marine research facility on an island in the South Pacific that I think might make a good base of operations. This is too important for our nation's survival. These are the only tactical strategic weapons that make sense in the new millennium. We've got to man this operation until the fucking Congress and the President come to their senses."
"Yes sir," Chittick said. "I'm with you on that." But he was thinking it was time to request a transfer. He had a strange feeling that Zoll had run out of political highway. "Good night, sir," he smiled.
"Yeah," the Crazy Ace growled in his unfriendly sandpaper voice, and then he shut the door directly in Colonel Laurence Chittick's face.
The hundred-car manifest train was on the CSXT track, heading through the Appalachian Pass. The track was a two-way narrow switchback that climbed up the side of the mountain and then, after cresting the summit, made its long downhill run into Georgia, Arkansas, and East Oklahoma, finally ending in Texas. The engine was a full-width, high-nosed Canadian Bombardier HR616, which was fronting a three-diesel unit. The engineer was an old-timer named Calvin Hickman who had been working the Appalachian run for almost two years. He knew every bend in the track, and had a tendency to push the forty-eight-cylinder, three-hundred-ton power package a little too fast.
The hundred cars he was pulling were mostly farm produce, some pipe fittings and building supplies; all of it was heading to Atlanta. He had just finished the last switchback, cresting the pass onto the west side of the mountain, and was now heading downhill. He had his right hand on the dynamic brake control handle, and one eye on the train line-pressure gauge. He was looking down and missed the first red warning flasher, which indicated that the switch up ahead had just been opened. He didn't hear it either, because the warning bells from the cab signal system had been disconnected. Even if he had seen it, he might have been going too fast to stop. He had way too much weight behind him, all of it hurtling downhill.
A mile farther on he was jolted by the sight of the second warning light. He immediately threw the lever on the automatic brake valve; exhausting air underneath each car instantly operated the pneumatic brakes. The brake levers activated. The shoes slammed hard against the metal wheel tread. Tortured metal screamed as the brakes engaged.
"Son-of-a-bitch," Calvin said, as he anticipated going off the tracks. Out of the right side of the cab, he could see several men running on the graded bank. At first he thought they were hobos inadvisedly still trying to board the doomed train. Then he realized they were running away, trying to get as far from the screeching train as possible. They knew the freight was about to derail.
The last man Calvin Hickman saw was a tall silver-haired hobo. He was standing on the grade beside the tracks. He was the only hobo who wasn't running, and it appeared as if he was reading aloud from an open Bible as the train cab flashed past.
Calvin knew that these men had thrown the switch open. The track supervisor had often warned that F. T. R. A. S would derail freights, then steal what they could from the wreckage before police or emergency crews arrived.
The cab passed by the last warning light, and Calvin could feel the wheels under the Bombardier jump the rails and begin rattling over open ties. Then the engine was completely off the tracks, still going fifty miles an hour. He felt the huge locomotive start to dig itself into the dirt. It slammed abruptly to a stop and Calvin was thrown out of his seat into the front of the comfort cab, smashing his head violently on the metal dash.
The cars behind began to slam into each other, piling up, breaking off the tracks, snapping couplers, and being flung off into the trees that lined the rails. The sounds of crashing cars and tortured metal filled the air. The fifty-foot sections of continuous welded rail snapped and speared upward, right through the floors of the first cars. The wrecked cars were immediately overrun by the cars behind, and as the energy dissipated from the in-train collisions, the cars jackknifed, spilling lading everywhere.