Breakheart Pass by Alistair MacLean

  He had removed no more than twenty baulks when he stopped work abruptly and brought the oil-lamp to examine the remaining pile of cordwood more closely. He set the oil-lamp to one side and threw the next dozen baulks to the left before reaching for the lamp again. He sank slowly to his knees, the normal lack of expression on his face replaced by a hard and bitter anger.

  The two men lying huddled together were unmistakably dead, literally frozen stiff. Deakin had removed sufficient cordwood to reveal their upper bodies and faces. Both men had ghastly head wounds, both men wore the uniforms of officers of the United States Cavalry, one a Captain, the other a Lieutenant. Beyond a doubt Claremont's two missing officers, Oakland and Newell.

  The anger had left Deakin's face: for a man who lived the life he did, anger, he had long discovered, was an emotion he couldn't afford. He stood and swiftly began to replace the cordwood, stacking it in the neat precise form in which he had found it until it had all been returned to its original position. Understandably, because of this necessity for precision and because of his rapidly increasing tiredness which was now but one stage removed from exhaustion, it took him twice as long to restack the pile as it had taken him to dismantle it.

  Finished, he again checked the steam-gauge to find that the needle had now fallen well below the blue line, then again opened the fire-box door to reveal a red glow inside which was now very dull indeed. Wearily, Deakin resumed the stoking and thrust into the box every last baulk of timber it would accommodate. Again he closed the door, again he did not examine the gauge. He pulled his collar high, his hat low and swung down on the track-side into the icy breath-catching driving whiteness of what was now a near-blizzard.

  Not bothering too much to conceal his presence – the visibility was now as close to zero as made no difference – Deakin walked back along the track-side, passing first the day-cum-dining coach, then the coach containing the galley and officers' night quarters. As he reached the end of this he stopped abruptly and cocked his head. He could distinctly hear a peculiar glug-glugging sound – peculiar in those circumstances but readily identifiable in more normal circumstances. Deakin eased forward in ghostlike silence and hitched a wary eye round the rear corner of the second coach.

  On the leading platform of the third coach – the supply wagon – a man was sitting on the rail, his head tilted back as he drank deeply from the neck of a bottle. Because of the now almost horizontally driving snow and the fart that it was blowing directly from the front to the back of the train, the man was sitting in an almost completely snow-sheltered oasis; Deakin had no difficulty at all in recognizing the man as Henry.

  Deakin pressed back against the coach, drew a deep breath of relief, pulled his sleeve across his forehead in another gesture of relief, silently retraced his steps for several paces, then moved directly out from the train and came curving back in a semicircle which took him to a point just to the rear of the supply wagon. This time his approach was a great deal more cautious. He dropped to his hands and knees, crawled cautiously forward and glanced upward. A second man was on guard at the rear of the supply wagon; there was no mistaking the black moonface of Carlos even although the gleaming smile was in noticeable and understandable abeyance.

  Deakin repeated the circling tactic and brought up at the rear end of the first horse wagon. He mounted the platform, effected a prudently stealthy entrance and closed the door behind him. As he moved towards the front of the wagon a horse whinnied nervously. Deakin immediately moved towards the horse, stroked its neck and murmured reassuring words; the horse nuzzled his face and fell quiet. If Carlos had heard the sound he paid no attention; apart from the fact that it was a sound that one would naturally expect to hear from a horse wagon, it wasn't much of a night for paying attention.

  Arrived at the front end of the wagon, Deakin peered through a crack in the door. Carlos, only a few feet away, appeared to be gloomily contemplating what must have been his very chilly feet indeed. Deakin turned away to the slatted haybox to his left. With great care and in complete silence he removed a few of the top bars and an armful of hay, recovered the telegraph transmitter, replaced the hay and the bars as he had found them, and moved off with the transmitter to the rear of the wagon where he descended the steps, looked quickly to the front and the rear – visibility was still almost nil – stepped down silently into the snow and made his way quickly towards the rear of the train.

  A convenient fifty yards from the rear of the train Deakin located a telegraph pole. He unwound the trailing lead from the transmitter and secured one end to his belt. Then he began to climb the telegraph pole.

  'Began' was the operative word. He managed to get about three feet off the ground, then helplessly remained there, unable to make another inch. The effects of snow, high winds and freezing temperatures had combined to encase the pole in an impenetrable sheath of ice which offered a zero friction coefficient, an entire lack of grip which rendered further progress quite impossible. Deakin returned to earth, stood there for a moment in thought, then tore a quantity of material from his shirt and ripped it into two pieces.

  He made for the nearest angled guy wire, wrapped his legs around it, and, using them and the two improvised gloves from his shirt to afford a friction grip, started to climb again. It was a fairly difficult climb and, in the light of what he had recently been through, a most exhausting one, but by no means impossible; by the time he'd reached the top and straddled the crossbar the matter that concerned him most was that his frozen hands felt as if they no longer belonged to him. At that moment frostbite was the very last thing he wanted.

  Two minutes of rubbing and kneading his hands and the pain that steadily accompanied this as the circulation returned convinced him that this misfortune had not indeed befallen him. He detached the end of the trailing lead from his belt, secured it firmly to a telegraph wire and returned to earth the way he had come and so swiftly that by the time he arrived there the hands that had so lately felt frozen now felt as if they had been badly burned. He uncovered the transmitter set and bent over it, shielding it as best he could from the snow, and began to transmit.

  At Fort Humboldt, where the weather was no better and no worse than it was where Deakin was crouched, Sepp Calhoun, White Hand and two other white men were sitting in the Commandant's office. Calhoun, as usual, was using his boots to make free of Colonel Fairchild's desk, while both hands were occupied in similarly making free of the Colonel's whisky and cigars. White Hand was sitting erect in a hard-backed chair, carefully not touching the glass before him. The door opened and a man entered, his face conveying as high a degree of urgency as is possible for one whose bewhiskered and bearded face is liberally covered in snow.

  Calhoun and White Hand looked at each other, then moved swiftly towards the door. Even as they reached the telegraph office Carter was transcribing a message. Calhoun glanced briefly at him and Simpson, the other captive telegraph operator. nodded briefly at the two guards and took up his customary position behind the desk. White Hand remained standing. Carter ceased writing and handed a slip of paper to Calhoun, whose face immediately assumed a thunderous expression of frustrated anger.

  'Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!'

  White Hand said in a quiet voice: 'Trouble, Sepp Calhoun? Trouble for White Hand?'

  'Trouble for White Hand. Listen. “Attempt on troop wagons failed. Heavy armed guard on all coaches. Advise.” How in God's name did the damned idiots not–'

  'Such talk will not help, Calhoun.' Calhoun looked at him without expression. 'My men and I will help.'

  'It's a bad night.' Calhoun went to the door, opened it and passed outside. White Hand followed, closing the door behind him. Within moments the figures of the two men whitened in the heavy driving snow.

  Calhoun said: 'A very bad night, White Hand.'

  'The rewards are great. Your words, Sepp Calhoun.'

  'You can do it? Even on a night like this?' White Hand nodded. 'Very well. The entrance to Breakheart Pass. A cliff
on one side, steep slope with plenty of rock cover for you and your men on the other. You can leave your horses half a mile–'

  'White Hand knows what to do.'

  'Sorry. Come on. Let's tell them to instruct Banlon to stop the train there. You'll never have an easier job. White Hand.'

  'I know, I do not like it. I am a warrior and I live to fight. But massacre I do not like.'

  'The rewards are great.'

  White Hand nodded in silence. Both men reentered the telegraph room where Carter was tapping out a message. Calhoun waved him into stillness, sat at his purloined desk, wrote a brief message, handed it to one of the guards to give to Carter and said to Simpson: 'Listen good, friend.'

  Carter sent out the communication while Simpson wrote. At the end of the transmission Calhoun said: 'Well, Simpson?'

  '“Instruct Banlon halt train two hundred yards inside east entrance to Breakheart Pass.”

  Calhoun nodded approvingly towards Carter. 'You may yet live to be an old man.' As he finished speaking another message in Morse came in over the headphones. It was very brief and Carter read it out without waiting for the usual confirmation from Simpson.

  “Affirmative. Signing off.”

  Calhoun smiled in as benign a fashion as he was capable of and said: 'We have them. White Hand.'

  Judging from the barely perceptible expression on his face, Deakin was not quite of the same opinion. He removed his headphones, with a strong tug pulled the telegraph lead clear from overhead, then gave the telegraph set a shove which sent it tumbling down a steep slope to vanish in the darkness below. He walked away quickly, gave the train a wide berth, arrived at the cab's footplate, brushed the snow from his face, then peered at the steam-gauge.

  The needle had fallen dangerously below the blue line. Deakin opened the fire-box, looked at the very dully glowing embers and began to feed cordwood into the fire-box. This time, either through tiredness or concern, he seemed to be in no hurry to go. Instead, he watched the gauge in an almost proprietorial fashion and waited patiently until the needle had climbed up from below the blue line to fractionally above the red one. Banlon had intimated that this was the danger area, but Deakin didn't seem to care. He closed the door on the now fiercely-burning firebox, took an oil-can and two railroad spikes from Banlon's tool-box, turned up his sheepskin collar and dropped down to the track-side.

  He made his by now advisedly circuitous route towards the rear of the train and fetched up stealthily in the close proximity of the rear platform of the supply wagon. Carlos was there, a huddled and shivering Carlos, vainly endeavouring to combat the rigours of the night with the assistance of a bottle of bourbon. Deakin nodded to himself, as if in satisfaction, dropped silently to his hands and knees, crawled under the side of the coach and on to the middle of the track, lowered himself on to his elbows and made his stealthy and extremely slow way along the ties between the rear bogies of the coach. He finally stopped and twisted round with infinite care until he was looking upwards.

  Immediately above him was the screwed coupling attaching the rear of the supply wagon to the front of the first horse wagon. Above that again could be seen the rear platform of the supply wagon and the front platform of the horse wagon. On the former and no more than five feet away from Deakin was the clearly observable figure of Carlos.

  Very cautiously, so as to avoid any metallic clanking, Deakin gripped the two coupled central links and tried to unscrew them. He desisted almost at once, partly because the task was clearly impossible, partly because of the realization that if he persisted in his effort he was going to leave much of the skin of his palms attached to the frozen metal when the time came for removing his hands. He lifted his oil-can and squirted a generous amount of lubricant on to the screw threads. He heard a sound, lowered the can gently to the snow and turned round very very slowly indeed until he was once more looking upwards.

  The sound he had heard was clearly that of Carlos placing his bottle down, for he had just straightened and then started to clump to and fro on the metal platform, stamping his feet and beating his arms, in an attempt to restore circulation. After a few moments he opted for the certainty of internal warmth as opposed to the manifest uncertainty of external warmth and returned to his bottle of bourbon.

  Deakin returned to the task on hand. Again he seized the links, again he twisted and again the result was the same. Nothing. With delicate care he released his grip, fished inside his coat and brought out the two railroad spikes; compared to the coupling links, the metal he now held in his hands felt almost warm. Slowly and carefully he inserted the spikes into the links and twisted again. This time the extra leverage did what was required and the screw turned a fraction, making a slight squeaking noise. Deakin remained absolutely still, then looked slowly upwards. Carlos stirred, straightened from the rail, looked around unenthusiastically, then went back into a huddle with his bottle of bourbon.

  Once again Deakin resumed his assault on the bottle screw. Using alternately the oil-can and spikes, he reached, in very short order indeed, the stage where there were not more than two or three threads left. He withdrew the spikes and made the last couple of turns by hand. The two halves of the bottle screw came apart and he lowered them, slowly and in complete silence, until they were dangling vertically at the foot of their respective chains.

  Deakin looked up. Carlos hadn't moved. On elbows and knees again Deakin inched back the way he had come, crawled out on to the trackside and made his circumspect way back to the locomotive cab. The needle of the steam-gauge was, predictably, on the blue mark. Some little time later, after another stint of feeding the insatiable maw of the fire-box, an operation that Deakin clearly found to be increasingly distasteful, the needle stood on the red once more. Deakin sank wearily on to a bucket seat in the corner and closed his eyes.

  Whether he was asleep or not wds impossible to say, but if he were he must have set some sort of timing mechanism in his brain for at fairly regular intervals he started awake, fed some more fuel into the box, then returned to his seat. When Banlon and Rafferty, accompanied by O'Brien, returned to the footplate, they found him hunched on the bucket seat, his head bent, his chin sunk on his chest. He appeared to be asleep. Suddenly he started and looked upwards.

  'No more than I expected.' O'Brien's voice was coldly contemptuous. 'Sleeping on the job, eh, Deakin?'

  Deakin said nothing, merely pointed a thumb in the direction of the steam-gauge. Banlon crossed and examined it.

  'Pretty short sleep, I'd say, Major. Pressure's right up.' He turned round unconcernedly and glanced at the tender; the cordwood was neatly stacked with no signs of having been disarranged. 'And just the right amount of fuel gone, I'd say. A fair enough job. Of course, with all the experience he's had of fires, such as burning down Lake's Crossing–'

  'That'll do, Banlon.' O'Brien jerked his head. 'Come on, you.'

  Deakin rose stiffly and glanced at his watch. 'Midnight ! Seven hours I've been here. You said four.'

  'Banlon needed it. What do you want, Deakin? Sympathy?'

  'Food.'

  'Carlos has made supper.' Deakin privately wondered how Carlos had found time to make supper. 'In the galley. We've eaten.'

  'I'll bet you have.'

  O'Brien and Deakin descended to the trackside and made their way to the front platform of the leading coach. O'Brien leant far out and waved a hand. Banlon waved an acknowledging hand and disappeared inside the cab. O'Brien turned away and opened the door to the officers' day compartment.

  'Coming, then?'

  Deakin rubbed his brow. 'In a moment. Don't forget that when the train is stopped no fresh air gets into that cab. After seven hours there I've got a head like a pumpkin.'

  O'Brien regarded Deakin for a speculative moment, then obviously and rightly concluding that Deakin could do no mischief standing where he was, nodded and passed inside, closing the door behind him.

  Banlon opened up the throttle. The wheels spun on the icy rails, the laboured pu
ffing of the locomotive increased as clouds of smoke belched from the high stack, the puffing slowed abruptly as the wheels bit and the train slowly got under way. With his hand on the grab-rail Deakin leaned far outwards and looked backwards. It was difficult to be certain in the snow-filled darkness, it could have been as much imagination as anything else, but it seemed to him that there was a slight gap opening up between the supply wagon and the first of the horse wagons. A half-minute later, with the train now rounding a gentle curve and so making rearward observation that much easier, Deakin knew for sure that his imagination was not at work. Rapidly fading ghostly blurs in the darkness, the two horse wagons, now at two or three hundred yards' distance, were stationary on the track.

  Deakin straightened. Although his face might have appeared at first glance to be its normal, still, inscrutable self, it was perhaps just possible to detect a slight expression of satisfaction. He turned the handle of the door and passed inside. The Governor, Claremont, Pearce and O'Brien were sitting close to the stove, glasses in hand, while Marica, somewhat apart and glassless, sat with her hands demurely folded in her lap. They all looked up at the same moment. O'Brien jerked a thumb in the direction of the rear of the train.

  'Food's in the galley.'

  'Where do I sleep tonight?'

  'You could learn to say “thanks”.'

  'I can't recall anyone saying “thanks” to me for the seven hours I spent out in that damned cab. Where do I sleep tonight?'