Fateful Lightning Read online

  The throttle was carved in the image of a dragon, and the door to the firebox had the sign of Perm, the Rus divinity, cast into the iron. The Rus had taken to the Yankee machines, forced perhaps at first by their even greater dread of the hordes, but ever so gradually they were changing their appearance, altering them step by step into something fitting into their own folk beliefs and style of art. He found that to be comforting.

  The train lurched through another switch, moving slowly past a long line of Roum peasants, laden with shovels and picks, who were heading down into the valley south of town to work on fortifications. Still not quite used to the engine, they backed away as it approached, looking at it suspiciously.

  “Think they’ll ever get the fortifications ready along the river?” the engineer asked, looking at them with a superior disdain, a haughtiness that Ferguson knew all locomotive men had for the mere mortals who would never know the power of controlling the mysteries of steam.

  “They haven’t seen the war the way we have,” the fireman chimed in.

  “They know what’s at stake,” Ferguson said, trying to defend the Roum even though he knew the truth of what the fireman was saying. True desperation can be a wonderful spur to work, and he at times wondered if the Roum realized just how horrifying the Merki advance was.

  “If they get here to the Sangros,” the engineer said, “then it’s over.”

  “Do you think we’re going to lose?” Ferguson asked.

  The old engineer looked over at him.

  “I saw the way Saint Malady died.” He nodded toward the icon. “That’s how I plan to go when the time comes.”

  “Looking for a medal and sainthood?” Ferguson asked.

  “No, I just want to take some of the bastards with me the way he did, and I’ll be damned if they’ll ever get their hands on this engine.”

  Ferguson nodded approvingly, leaning back out of the cab to watch as the Roum workers drifted past. Can we even hold the Sangros? he wondered.

  Kal and many of the officers in the army had at first hesitated to put the final defense line here, along a front of nearly forty miles, from the ocean up into the forest, but Andrew had cinched the deal with the simple statement that if the Sangros line was lost the war was over anyhow. Roum was indefensible—Merki artillery on the hills above the town would batter its walls down in a day, though even now earthworks were going up in a great arc around the city. Besides, Roum held over one hundred and fifty thousand, and with the refugees swarming in it would most likely get closer to four hundred thousand by midsummer. Roum could never withstand a siege the way Suzdal had against the Tugars. But then the Tugars had had no artillery and the Merki did—even Suzdal would have been battered down with guns on the hills east of town. If the Sangros line fell, the Merki would hit Roum full-force and starve it out in a matter of days.

  Hispania was the place of the last stand. Beyond Hispania the land of the Roum opened out southward down the east shore of the inland sea into the great open steppes. The long, narrow corridor of Rus, bordered on the south by the sea and the north by the forest, was the only terrain where an infantry army, relying on a single railroad for mobility, could hope to present a secured front to the horse-mounted Merki horde. The simple fact of geography, an ocean to the south, the woods to the north, had given them the hope to stand. Beyond the Sangros the army would be outflanked wherever it attempted to fight. Though the rail line did go another fifty miles to Roum and twenty miles beyond toward the Brindusia oil field, Hispania was the end of the line for retreat.

  And with that thought in mind, Hispania was daily growing beyond imagining. In a fortnight, thirty thousand had settled in here. As the train continued on up the siding, Ferguson crossed the cab to the other side and looked back at the west and south. Along the low bluffs by the rail bridge the work crews were already laboring on the first line of entrenchments and earthen forts that would run along the forty-mile front from the ocean all the way into the forest. The first twenty miles were not much of a worry—the broad river delta was a tangle of wetlands and marshes—but strongpoints had to be constructed nevertheless.

  North of the city, just above a low series of rapids, the river on both sides was bordered by high steep banks all the way into the forest and beyond. Defending this stretch would be fairly easy, but still required strongpoints and manpower. To leave any stretch of the river unprotected would be to invite a breakthrough.

  The tactical problem started four miles south of Hispania, from where and on up to just south of the town the low sandy bluffs of the river were higher on the west side of the river. The riverbed was nearly five hundred feet across, and in the summer the Sangros could be crossed at nearly any point along this stretch without getting your knees wet except when a heavy rain triggered a flash flood.

  To the east of this point a broad semicircle of flat land stretched back from the river for several miles, bounded finally on three sides by a low ridgeline of limestone hills.

  The debate over defending this position had been a tough one. Merki artillery dug in on the west bank would make a killing zone of the east side, but defending the west bank was far too risky. A sudden storm could cut off the army, its back to the river and no place to run, and compounding the problem was the simple fact that a line of hills a half mile farther west was higher than the low ridge running along the river. It was decided to dig in on the east side, and the thought made Ferguson nervous. The riverbed would be a murder zone, they could kill the Merki by the tens of thousands, but this was the end of the line; if the Merki ever gained the east bank, it was open country beyond, and the last thing anyone wanted was an open-field engagement with the Merki—it would make the bloody day of Antietam pale in comparison. He somehow knew that it was here that the war would finally be decided, and the thought left him cold, as if he were gazing at his own place of burial.

  The labor crew continued on heading southward. It was only a small beginning, a thousand men, Roum laborers under the direction of a dozen Suzdalian fortification engineers commanded by a former corporal of the 35th Maine.

  The engineer pulled down on the cord, the high whistle shrieking sharp and clear, and he tapped out the beginning of a Rus folk song, obscene to be sure, which told of a boyar’s daughter and the peasants of his estate, who to a man were all quite happy and contented—until their wives finally found out. Chuck looked over at the engineer and smiled.

  “That song takes an hour to sing, for God’s sake— you’ll drain the steam lines dry if you play it all.”

  “You know, the song is true.” The engineer grinned. “That lass initiated me into the mysteries of love.”

  “Go on.”

  “No, really, two hundred verses would barely do her justice.”

  “Wish I’d met her,” Chuck said ruefully, shaking his head while the engineer laughed.

  “Well, from the way that Roum girl was looking at you, I daresay you might find out some mysteries of your own soon enough, and I say from the looks of you it’s about time.”

  “She barely knows me,” Chuck said, embarrassed that the engineer might possibly guess just how truly virginal he was.

  “Well, she obviously wants to know you a lot better, or I’m blind to such things.”

  “You’re half blind already, Andre. I don’t know why Mina allows you to run this engine.”

  The engineer gave Chuck a half-serious, half-playful poke to the shoulder, and then, leaning back out of the cab, he watched as the yardmaster motioned him to bring the engine to a stop. With a final blast of the whistle, he tapped out the end of the first verse of the song, and the train shuddered to a halt.

  Chuck, patting the engineer on the shoulder, stepped past him and started to climb out of the cab, and then, pausing, he looked back.

  “Stay with the engine. I’m cutting new route orders for you. You’ll be moving again within the hour.”

  “I still say that General Mina will have your head over this. The schedule is chaos as it
is without you going and changing it.”

  “Mina’s over three hundred miles to the west, and what he doesn’t know will never hurt him.”

  Chuck paused, as if suddenly remembering something, then reached into his tunic, pulled out a battered tin flask, and tossed it back to the engineer.

  “Now don’t go getting drunk on the job.”

  “Bribery, is it?”

  “What else?” Chuck said with a grin.

  The engineer, shaking his head, uncorked the flask and took a long pull, then handed the container over to his fireman.

  “And another quart of it when we’re done,” Chuck said.

  Andre, doing a quick calculation of just how much a quart of vodka was worth in these times, sighed.

  “You were the one that trained me on these steaming monsters. I guess I owe you that.”

  “You do,” Chuck said with a grin, and he jumped down from the cab and looked around.

  The boxcars behind him were already open, men from the rifle factory, along with their women and children, spilling out, shouting, groaning with the pleasure of at last being able to stretch, and most of them looking frantically for the nearest latrine. The officers were already out, shouting orders, getting the men to fall into formation, their families behind them. Roum yard workers, with their feeble attempts at Rus, were shouting out directions, pointing to where the soup kitchens and the latrines were. Officers were shouting out orders, and labor crews were preparing to start unloading the string of flatcars. Though all seemed chaos, the evacuation work was finally starting to show some semblance of an organized plan. A factory area had already been staked out for the rifle works, open sheds had been constructed, foundations had been set for the various tools, and several thousand Rus refugees with axes had thrown up cabins and barracks. Emil had sent a team in within days of the beginning of the evacuation and laid out the sanitation and a rough aqueduct of terracotta pipes snaking down from a spring northeast of town to provide pure drinking water for the cisterns and bathhouses. By evening the men of this factory and their families would be settled in, and the following morning they could start in on getting their factory up and running again. All, that is, except two companies of fifty, with a precious flatcar of lathes and their tools.

  Walking down the length of the train, Chuck approached the commander of the factory, who as a lieutenant colonel also commanded the same men, if they should be called into combat, as the 16th Suzdal of First Corps.

  The two exchanged salutes, and without ceremony Chuck handed him an order. The officer, a former peasant who had risen through the ranks, struggled with the writing.

  “It simply says that I’m detaching Companies A and B, along with one of the turning lathes, for other duty.”

  “But…”

  “The orders are secret, Petya, so please see that they’re done and let’s not discuss this.”

  The officer looked at him closely, and finally, with a weary nod, he turned away to give the orders. Chuck called over one of the yardmasters, told him which cars were to be detached, and then quickly explained that the engine was to be routed over to pick up a string of other cars which he had been quietly stealing.

  Leaving the perplexed yardmaster, he exhaled deeply. Finding an empty boxcar on an adjacent train, he climbed up through the open door and sat down in the shade. He wiped the perspiration from his face, even though the day was surprisingly cool. Subterfuge had never been one of his stronger suits. He had seen how Vincent Hawthorne had been changed by all of this, and he remembered, with a soft chuckle, how the general, who was three years younger than himself, had managed to blackmail him out of enough supplies for an entire division.

  How the hell had he ever gotten himself into this? Over the last month and a half, he had been quietly pirating bits here, parts there, and hundreds of skilled men from the trains that had passed through. Never really enough to be missed from any one place, what with all the confusion of ripping up every factory in Rus and moving it five hundred miles east. But if anyone ever started to put the web together, it would quickly fall right back on top of him.

  Hell of a life, he thought as he leaned back, wiping his brow. I have to steal from the very system I helped to invent. What will they do to me, though, if I’m caught? That was hard to imagine. He held far too much respect for Andrew to want to face his wrath if he was hauled up before him to confess his sins. But could they fire him?

  Unlikely. It’d be like the war department back home firing Hermann Haupt or telling Ericsson or Spencer to go to hell. But then again they did tell all three of those men at one time or another to drop dead. If he was found out now, it might destroy everything. He tried not to think about it.

  “Would you like some soup?”

  Startled, he looked up, struggling for a moment to translate in his mind the Roum dialect, which bore only a passing resemblance to the Latin he had learned in school. Olivia stood before him, and struggle as he might, it was impossible not to stare at her as if she were an apparition. Her dress of white linen, wrapped about her in typical Roum fashion, was cinched tight at the waist, and though the day was cool, standing over the boiling caldrons of soup had soaked her in sweat, which caused the linen to cling provocatively to every delightful curve of her voluptuous body. The view was, for Ferguson, simply startling, as if the girl were somehow naked. He had a mental flash that underneath this flimsy garment she was indeed naked. The thought stirred him, and he felt embarrassed as he looked into her eyes, as if she could read his every thought.

  “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “Ah, yeah,” and he realized that he had been staring far too long, and far too obviously. His face reddening, he quickly jumped back down to the ground and nervously accepted the wooden bowl of soup and hunk of fresh bread that she was holding.

  “Sit down and eat.”

  Without waiting for an invitation to join him, Olivia pulled herself up into the open boxcar and motioned for him to join her. He handed her the bowl of soup and climbed up to sit by her side, then took the soup back. Tilting the bowl back, he sipped the broth, and instantly he felt his stomach tighten. It had been days since he had enjoyed a hot meal.

  “Go on. I know you must be starving,” she said, motioning for him to cast good manners aside.

  He let the near-scalding liquid run down his throat. With a sigh he lowered the bowl, dipped the bread in, and scooped up the small hunks of meat and potato like paste, pausing only to make appreciative sounds of delight, while all the time she looked at him smiling.

  “I was worried for you,” she finally said.

  Again he felt his heart thump over. They had met only the one time, and he had thought that she would have forgotten him by now.

  “You remembered me?” he asked, not sure of his Latin.

  “Of course, Chuck Urgesim.”

  “I remembered you.”

  A hint of color came to her cheeks.

  Damn languages, Chuck thought, unsure of what to say next. But when it came to talking with women he was always at a loss anyway. He’d never met one before who could understand the machines which were the source of his delight, let alone appear to have even a passing interest in them after five minutes of his trying to explain. After all, women with an interest in engineering were an unknown phenomena as far as he was concerned.

  “I like the things you build,” she said, this time in Rus, saying each word slowly. “They are wonderful. They help to free people like my father from labor. They fight the Tugar, the Merki. And you make them from your thoughts.”

  She looked at him, unsure if she had said the words correctly, but the childlike grin that lit his features gave her answer enough, and she laughed softly at his dumbfounded response.

  He let his eyes drop, unsure of himself, and he noticed that her nipples were straining through the sheer linen dress that clung to her sweat-streaked body.

  “Oh my God,” and he was startled and humiliated that he had actually spoken out loud,
knowing that she was aware of the reason for his exclamation.

  Quickly he slipped down from his perch in the open boxcar, stumbling slightly as he hit the ground. He looked back at her, and she was laughing softly, though he could see that she was somewhat embarrassed as well, crossing her arms over her breasts.

  “Let’s walk,” he said quietly.

  Smiling demurely, she nodded an agreement and slipped off her perch, falling in alongside him. He turned away from the railyard crossing over several lines of track. Everything about them was a sea of confusion. Refugees were wandering about, most of them aimlessly, having been dropped at Hispania and now waiting forlornly for the one worn-out train that ran back and forth to Roum to take them on the last leg of their journey to relative safety.

  A labor battalion of Roum came past, returning from the morning shift of digging entrenchments, the men covered in mud, weary, stumbling. Stepping over the track, Ferguson went up to a low knoll on the south side of the line. Stakes had been set, marking out where a heavily fortified blockhouse was to be constructed, the position providing flanking cover for the bastion going up near the bridge.

  He settled down, unslinging a blanket roll from his shoulder and spreading it out. Sitting down on the blanket, she looked up at him, and he nervously joined her.

  “How long do you have here?” she asked.

  He looked back at the rail yard and saw that his engine had already been detached and was moving forward, while a tiny yard engine was shuttling the cars onto the side tracks, putting together his little secret venture for the run up north into the woods. He pulled out his pocket watch to check the time.