He cocked his head and stared one-eyed at the ceiling again—but this time it was not long before he spoke. He said:
“Get this. We’ll use the Palitos Viaduct. It’s under three hours’ drive if you’re fast. It’s in lonely country, and there’s a hell of a drop into the Arroyo Diablo. If she goes off there, there’ll be nothing left of Tipping or Coley—or anything! We’ll use Jannings, Derkel, Beckstein, Carson and four mechanics. Carson’ll take the station wagon and three of the mechanics. Beckstein takes the Matson truck and some stuff he’ll pick up from the warehouse. The others take their own cars. I’ll meet them out there to-night and get the work started: I’m looking for a country site for Blum. I’ll lay out the scheme and get as much work done as I can—but to-morrow you’ll have to be in charge: I’ve a meeting with Rossin—and I can’t take a chance on messing up the schedule for Plan Five. Now let’s work out some details. . . .
He went on, smoothly and decisively, for five minutes. There had been nothing—and now there was a dove-tailed, workable scheme.
But, as Altinger had said, it was perforce a hurried, hit-or-miss job, with no time for the usual Altinger precision in minutiæ: so hurried that a mistake of such dimensions was made as to bring Otto first to the edge of death and then to a complete change in his whole way of life.
On the Wednesday night, when Altinger chose the exact location and oversaw the initial work and covered up all trace of it, and then again on the night of Thursday, when Otto was in charge, it was bright moonlight, with a great yellowish moon which lit up every detail of the landscape and made the task doubly dangerous and necessitated the posting of warning guards. The pale-gold light poured relentlessly down over the mountain-side and the deep, naked canyon at its foot with the black shallow water rolling sluggishly along its bottom; over the white, graceful span of the viaduct which carried the shining tracks over the canyon from the tunnel-mouth in the side of the mountain, to the sharply curving, gleaming causeway along the top of the rolling foothills; over the serried tops of the trees which covered both flanks of the foothills with a dark, lovely cloak and left the causeway and the bright riband of the tracks it carried naked and utilitarian and yet with a harsh strength of its own which redeemed it from sheer ugliness.
The train was to pass at about one-thirty. Otto and his men should have finished their work and been dispersed and away, miles from here, by midnight. But at some minutes after eleven came an unexpected and dawdling freight train; at twelve a small railworkers’ trolley. And both times, warned by the look-outs, they had not only to scurry down three hundred yards to the cover of the trees and lie in hiding while the danger passed, but also first to cover all traces of their work, which meant more wasted time in the uncovering when they could safely start again.
Altinger had planted the charge under the ties on the viaduct, towards the far or mountain side. He knew how long the train would be and this should ensure that at least the greater part of its component coaches and cars crashed through the low wall of the viaduct and hurtled to the muddy bed of the arroyo, a hundred and eighty feet below. As the engine passed over a certain tie at the beginning or foothill side of the viaduct, it would release a contact to explode the tremendously powerful charge of explosive when this was crossed at the far end—all this necessarily controlled by the setting of a switch concealed at the edge of the causeway, well upon the foothill side of the viaduct.
It was one-twenty-six. The work was over and in less than five minutes the train would be roaring by towards the viaduct and destruction, and Otto and his men must get smoothly and quietly, swiftly and separately, away from here. They were in the safe shelter of the trees on the westward foothills, and everyone had reported his presence to Otto and checked his tools and started towards his particular car, with his route and emergency story well memorized.
Otto stood and watched their receding backs. He was just inside the shade of the trees and behind him the grassy slope stretched up to the causeway. He looked at his watch. It said twenty-eight minutes past the hour—and already he could hear a far-off rumbling which must be the train.
He closed his eyes and ran over in his mind all the orders which Altinger had given him—and the most pressing of these had been: “See they leave nothing behind. Not even the tag off a shoe lace! This can’t be camouflaged—and the F.B.I.’ll be around like ants. Don’t forget that—anything—anything might give those s.o.b.’s a clue!” . . .
Well, he had checked all the men and all the took and . . . His thought broke off as, his eyes opened, he stared through the moon-dappled shadow, at the departing backs.
The nearest of these was perhaps twenty yards away—and belonged to the most able of the four mechanics. He stared idly after the men—and a danger signal rang suddenly in his head.
The man was in shirt sleeves—and the man had originally climbed up from the trees to his work in a coat.
The roaring rumble of the train was closer now. There was no time to shout and bring the man back—and shouting was dangerous. There was no time to do anything—except, as he did, dart back to the outermost edge of the trees and search with his gaze the moonlit stretch of upward sloping grass.
Despite the distance, he saw the coat almost at once. It lay, right at the junction of the slope and the causeway, a black blot upon the scene and his duty.
He broke out from the trees and, doubled up, began to climb the two hundred yards of grass-covered hill. Behind him he could hear the car engines of his men and above their sound, drowning it to anyone who did not expect it to be there, the roaring of the nearing train and a high-pitched, nerve-tearing whistle as she began upon the wide, ever-sharpening curve towards the viaduct.
He ran and slipped on the rough, dry grasses and fell and picked himself up again and clambered up. He doubled himself up as much as he dared without sacrificing speed but he felt naked and alone and startlingly visible in the flooding moonlight. The rattling roar of the train was close and swelling closer and out of the corner of his eye he was aware of its black bulk onrushing.
He was flat on his belly now, at the top of the rise and the edge of the causeway. He flung out an arm and just missed touching the coat. The train roared above him with a whirling, shattering maelstrom of a noise, the lights from its myriad windows flashing over him darker and brighter gold than the moonlight. He gripped the grass and dragged himself upwards another foot and reached for the coat again and found it with his fingers. The train was not past him yet, and it was travelling fast. It must be longer than they had reckoned.
He pulled the coat towards him and let himself slide down the steepest part of the rise. When he came to a halt, he raised a cautious head and saw the engine curving around on to the viaduct. He was bound there, where he lay. He could not move. All of him was in watching eyes and waiting ears.
And then, came the sight and sound which told him Altinger had succeeded again. The sight was unreal and fantastic and like a bad piece of miniature effect in a cheap cinematograph film—and the sound was even more different from his subconscious anticipation. It went on so long. It was made up of so many different, intermingling sounds—and they went on and on and on. First the dull and tremendous and stomach-thumping roar of the explosion and then a tortured screaming of steel as pieces of the engine and first car—great monolithic inanimate chunks—separated ridiculously in air and hurtled through the stone parapet and plunged downwards out of his sight with a roaring, whistling sound which merged into the crashing and crumbling of stone and an incredible, squeaking bellow which followed as the next cars, whole and unbroken, lurched and rocked sideways and left the tracks and ploughed through more sections of the parapet and fell, shockingly twisting end over end, into the blackness.