"Yeah, it has. But this guy isn't the Krahseevah."
"Do not speak that hateful name," said Chiun.
"We have twice before dealt with a foreign spy who was sent to this country to pilfer industrial and military secrets."
"Tell me about it. But that was a Russian kleptomaniac, tricked out in an electronic suit that gave him the power to walk through walls. He was a thief, but he never hurt anyone. Besides, he's dead as far as we know."
"What we know is very little. But the electronic garment he wore was designed by Nishitsu Osaka. And if they built one, they could duplicate it."
"The only time the Nishitsu name has come up in this was when the Southern Pacific train hit a Nishitsu Ninja," Remo pointed out.
Chiun smiled broadly. "It all now makes supreme sense."
"It does?" Remo and Smith said together.
"Yes. Emperor, your rails are under attack by the scheming Japanese. It is obviously part of a plot to humble your mighty nation."
Remo looked at Chiun with a vague, incredulous expression. "What happened to the finger-flicking ghost ronin?" he blurted.
Chiun composed his face into bland lines. "Do not be absurd, Remo. Whoever heard of a ghost whose sword required batteries?"
"I'll let that pass because I like clinging to my sanity. So answer me this-how does wrecking our railroads bring the U.S. to its knees?" Remo wanted to know.
"That is so obvious I will not deign to answer it," Chiun sniffed, presenting his back to Remo.
Remo and Smith exchanged glances.
"Actually it's as good a theory as we have right now," Remo admitted.
Chiun beamed. They were learning wisdom. It was almost enough to take his mind off his missing fingernail.
Smith was opening the first katana when his computer beeped.
He went to it. Remo came around when he saw the color of Smith's face go from light gray to ghost white.
"Another derailment?"
"Yes. A Conrail freight and an Amtrak passenger train. In Maryland."
"Anyone hurt?"
"Unknown at this time. Strange. This is very strange."
"What's strange?"
"This accident has happened before. Exactly this way." Smith swallowed. "And it was one of the worst in Amtrak history."
Chapter 21
Cora Lee Beall would never forget the sound as long as she lived.
That long scream of metal that preceded the dull crump of impact, followed by the booming cannonade of passenger coaches slamming into a suddenly stopped engine. Then an awful silence.
And after the silence, the horrible moans and screams of the injured rose up from the settling dust like fresh-made ghosts discovering their fates.
It had happened at her backyard right here in Essex, Maryland.
Cora Lee had been unloading her washing machine. The sound yanked her out of that household chore like a bluefin tuna pulled out of the Chesapeake Bay.
When she emerged from her house, she saw the coaches lying on their sides, piled and jammed together like foolish toys in her backyard. Big as they were, they reminded her of little toys.
One had skidded on its side, scalping the lawn and crushing her clothesline flat. The same clothesline she would have been standing at in another minute or two. Another coach lay open, as if an old-fashioned claw can opener had been taken to it, spilling its precious cargo.
It was a day and an experience Cora Lee would never forget and hoped never to witness again. The sound was what stayed with her. Not so much the blood and the torn of limb. After things got back to normal, in the first of the nights without sleep, Cora Lee heard those sounds again and again in her mind and ultimately came to the sorrowful conclusion they had cut her life exactly in half. After that first long, piercing scream of steel wheels on steel rail, her life was never again the same.
That was back in January 1987. Almost ten long years ago now. How the time had flown. Gradually the gouged earth softened, and the scars were healed over by the seasonal rains. New grass grew. Cora Lee got herself a brand-new washer-dryer stack, never again to air out her laundry in the backwash of the Colonial. She finally got to the point where she could look at the passing trains and not flinch.
True normalcy never did quite come back into her life, but the years took care of the worst of it.
So on a July day when Cora Lee was lounging on a redwood chair as the day's wash tumbled in the dryer, sipping a mint Julep and looking out over the rail bed, the last thing she expected on earth was to hear a long, familiar scream of steel under stress.
Cora Lee dropped her drink and sat frozen. Before, she had only heard the disaster. This time she saw it happen with her own eyes.
The Colonial came shrieking by, steel wheels spitting sparks. She knew what a hotbox was. When a moving wheel-set overheated, it would spark and begin to fly apart. This was no hotbox. Every wheel was in agony. The Colonial looked more like a groundskimming comet than a train. The wheels were locked, sliding not rolling. She knew enough about trains to know the air brakes had been applied. Hard and fast.
Her stricken gaze went to the engine, and her heart jumped and froze even as her body sat paralyzed.
Coming down the line on the same northbound track was a lone blue Conrail freight engine.
"This can't be happening," she said. Then she screamed it.
"This can't be happening. Oh, dear Lord!"
But it was. Exactly like 1987, when the Colonial slammed into a Conrail engine that shouldn't have been there, and sixteen had died.
The sounds that followed might have been played by the tape recorder of her memory and pumped out through a quadrophonic sound system.
The long scream of steel ended in a dull, ugly crump. Then like steel thunder the coaches slammed together and flung themselves about.
"Oh, Lord, this is the end of me," Cora Lee said just before the flying fragment of broken rail smashed her apart like a cotton sack filled with so much loose meat.
MELVIS CUPPER'S BEEPER went off within fifteen minutes of the derailment at Essex.
He was at the Omaha airport bar, knocking back frosty Coors, lamenting the wretched unfairness of life and improvising old railroad choruses as the spirit moved him.
Oh, her eyes were Conrail blue, She wore a Casey Jones cap. But she lusted after maglev speed. Which everyone knows is crap. So now I'm off my feeeeeed.