The gator was only too eager to go away. It swam off, tired of tail and discouraged of spirit.
Chiun joined Remo, who was testing the trestle supports with his hands.
"They're solid. Let's go up."
They climbed because it was the easiest way up.
Up on the span, the tracks looked stable. They walked them to make sure. By this time night was upon the bayou. Below, the turbid waters muttered, dark and oily.
"Wonder why Smitty thinks this bridge will be hit?" Remo said.
"It only matters that he does," said Chiun.
"I don't like being way out in the boonies, out of touch, in case something happens somewhere else."
"What could happen? Smith's infallible oracles have whispered secrets to him, and we must all obey."
"Let's just hope we're on ground zero. It could be a long night."
HAROLD SMITH WAS TRYING to follow an audit trail through cyberspace.
The trouble was, trains kept crashing.
He had reasoned that the enemy was moving through the nation's telephone lines in order to attack its rail system. It was a logical deduction. Computerized airline-booking files showed no ticketed Japanese-surnamed passenger moving between the cities in question by air. Rail was too slow. As were cars.
Therefore, the Nishitsu ronin was traveling by fiber-optic cable, like a human fax. It had been the mystifying modus operandi of the Krahseevah before he had attempted to fax himself to Nishitsu headquarters in Osaka, Japan, in order to escape Remo and Chiun about three years before.
Nothing more had been heard of him since then. Smith had assumed that the Krahseevah-the name was Russian for "beautiful," which definitely did not fit the faceless white coverall garment he wore-had been unable to transmit himself via orbiting communications satellites as he did through fiber-optic cable. There was no reason to think otherwise. This new opponent's MO was different. He was engaged in acts of sabotage, not theft. And he displayed a callous disregard for human life, while the Krahseevah had never been known to harm anyone.
This was a different foe with a different agenda.
The audit trail assumed a telephone credit card was being used by the ronin to travel around. Smith was hunting for such a card.
As all over America new crashes, derailments and rail accidents were being reported, Smith input these new destinations into his exploding data base. Soon, he knew, something would bubble up. With luck only one or two phone cards were involved. The more they were used, the sooner the CURE system would make connections.
The trouble was, the longer it took, the more catastrophes the U.S. rail system suffered.
As he waited, the system beeped again.
This time it was in Boise, Idaho. Another Amtrak crash. The Pioneer had derailed in Boise on that exact same spot back in 1993. And Smith had a sudden flash of understanding.
The ronin was duplicating past accidents because time was running out, and it was easier to reengineer a successful derailment than create one anew.
Running out for what? Smith wondered.
REMO HEARD the strange sound long after darkness had fallen.
"What's that?"
"I do not know," said Chiun, head lifting.
As they listened, it became a monotonous metallic creaking, like slow gears going through a laborious cycle. An engine muttered.
Reaching in a back pocket, Remo pulled out an Amtrak schedule he had grabbed at the car-rental agency.
"According to this, the Sunset Limited isn't due for another hour."
Chiun cocked an ear. "It does not sound like a train, but a devil wagon."
"What's a devil wagon?"
"In the days of the renowned Kyong-Ji Line, a railroad man would ride before the locomotive on a wagon he propelled by pumping a seesaw handle. This was to examine the track to insure the way was secure. Also to lure lurking bandits to their doom."
"You had bandits on the Kyong-Ji?"
"Until the Master of that time, my father, ridded the countryside of these brigands-in return for a private coach."
"No gold?"
"The coach was filled with gold. Shame on you, Remo. It goes without saying."
"Let's see what it is."
BILLY REX DAUGHTERS WAS getting worried. Here it was after dark, and he had another ten miles of cable to lay.
The bulldozer creaked beside the rails at a sedate walking pace, its tracks grumbling as the giant spool paid out fiberoptic cable. It came out of the spool and followed the curve of the specialized frontmounted plow, falling flat into the trench as it was excavated. Later a work crew would tamp it down.
It was the damnedest thing, he thought, not for the first time. Laying the information highway of the twenty-first century on twentieth-century rail with a plow not much different from what men first used to till the soil back in the Stone Age.
But there it was.
And here he was. And if Billy Rex didn't get a move on, the Sunset Limited was going to catch him and his dozer on the Bayou Canot bridge and mash man and machine into the trackage like a discarded can of pop.
As he approached the great span, the mists rising from the sluggish waters below made him think of the spirits of the dead who had died in the diesel-soaked, alligator-infested waters below. Billy Rex slowed. There had been a heavy fog the night the Limited went into the bayou. It smothered the span so that the hapless engineer thought he was running over solid rail right up until the moment he rode his diesel into oblivion.
Trouble was, slowing down encouraged the damn mosquitoes. They began swarming.
THE TWO FIGURES materialized on either side of the right-of-way like ghosts from the Bayou Canot incident.
"Hold!" one said. He was a strange one, he was. Old as the hills and dressed for a Chinese square dance.
The other was a regular fellow. Lean as bamboo, with wrists like railroad ties. Neither exactly looked like track men. But they looked harmless enough.
Oddly enough, the mosquitoes didn't seem to have an appetite for them. They stayed off a ways, like careful moths shrinking from a flame.
"Can't stop," he called ahead in his friendliest voice as he approached the pair. "Got a schedule to make."